http://a-r-c.gold.ac.uk/a-r-c_Five/texts/5_responsible01.html

a-r-c, issue 5, July 2001

Responsible Idiocy and Fluxus Ethics:

Robert Filliou and Emmanuel Levinas

Chris Thompson

And.. having the energy.. having the foolishness.. of enlarging the understanding of art from looking at the apple, to painting it.. like our friend Cezanne would have done.. to eating it.. to apple trees.. to cultivating apples.. to selling apples.. to making apple pie.. to throwing apple pies.. to making a world where there is fun, and there is justice.. and there is peace and harmony.. That's it.. And this has been done by women and men of all nationalities.. and all living very much in their own times.. not presenting themselves as different from others.. Not saying: ‘The people nowadays and ‘we’..’ No, saying: ‘When we say people we mean ‘us’ also..’ And: ‘When we say artists we mean ‘you’ also..’ That is the approach.. Perhaps, when people look back upon this period.. maybe all the names will have been forgotten.. all our works maybe will have been thrown out.. ha.. ha.. ha.. But, I think, a memory will linger.. and that is the memory of the contribution that modern art made to the spirit.. That's such a great period for art..(Filliou, in Wijers, 1996: 133)

Both the Fluxus artist Robert Filliou and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas were consumed with the question of peace. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that they both consumed this question, being nourished by it and by always asking it. The aim of this essay is to stage an exploration of the ways in which they did so, to ask whether their respective projects, the one ‘philosophical’, the other ‘artistic’, remain distinct and parallel, or whether they can be seen to come into confluence in ways that underline the radical nature of both, and perhaps help to move one other's work into new modes of relevance. It is difficult to know when to step back from pushing such comparisons between such different and complex bodies of work, and when it is precisely a push that is needed to bring their correspondences into resonance; at so many moments Filliou and Levinas seem almost to share the same breath.

Their mutual concern with peace owed not just to having lived through war, but to having actively participated in it. Both served in the French military during the Second World War, Filliou as a fighter in the French communist underground Resistance (Gintz, 1985: 132) and Levinas as an officer and interpreter of German and Russian (Peperzak, in Levinas, 1996: xiii). Despite the numerous connections between their lives' work, the war seems to be the only point at which their biographies touched each other. It is fitting that this war, and their subsequent determination to develop modes of resistance to it and its legacies, would be their single convergence. It might even be more difficult to map their relationship had they in fact known each other.

Levinas was born in Kovno, Lithuania in 1906. By 1923 he was studying philosophy in Strasbourg, and in the late 1920s went to Freiburg to work with Martin Heidegger. In 1930 he published his dissertation on Husserl, became a French citizen, did his military service, was married, and got a teaching job at the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris.1 He translated Husser's book Cartesian Meditations into French, and began a book on Heidegger which he later stopped working on when he became aware of Heidegger's involvement with the Nazi party. In 1939 he was drafted into the French army, and was taken as a prisoner of war in 1940. Though he was a Jew, his status as a French officer saw him interned in a military prison camp rather than a concentration camp - though he lost nearly all of his family in Lithuania to this fate (Peperzak, in Levinas, 1996: xii), except his wife and daughter, who survived the war in a Christian monastery (Levinas, in Rotzer, 1995: 63).

Filliou was born in Sauve, in the south of France, in 1926. After the war he left for California to find the father he never met, worked in a Coca-Cola plant for two years, and then, after studying economics at the University of California at Los Angeles, he was sent as part of a United Nations research mission to Korea and Japan. He spent years traveling thereafter, living in Egypt, Spain, and Denmark, and returned to France in 1959. In 1960 he met his lifelong friend Daniel Spoerri, through whom he came into contact with the artists with whom he was to concoct a range of Fluxus partnerships.

[1] The Alliance was, in Peperzak's words, ‘an important philanthropic and educational institution whose mission was to promote the ‘emancipation’ of Jews living in Mediterranean lands such as Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkey, and Syria.’ Peperzak, in Levinas, 1996: viii. |back|

Nonknowledge

Sometime in the late 1960s, Filliou was talking with his friend Billy Kluver, a research scientist at Bell Laboratories. The reason scientists make greater strides in their field than artists do in theirs, Kluver told him, is that scientists ‘don't know what science is.’ (Filliou, 1970: 87) The quote comes from a little-known book Filliou published in 1970, entitled Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts. Unique among publications in welcoming its readers to consider themselves its co-authors - an invitation Filliou upholds at more than just an egalitarian intertextual gesture by leaving room throughout the entire book for the readers to write down their own thoughts, and inviting them to send these back to him in order to stimulate further, yet-unimagined collaborative projects. Apart from the sections containing Filliou's interviews with artist friends like John Cage, Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow, the format of each of the book's pages is one-third Filliou's text in German, one-third in English, and one-third empty space reserved for the reader.

The book is in many ways Filliou's answer to Kluver's provocation. ‘It is true’, Filliou says, ‘that artists spend a powerful lot of time and energy trying to convince each other about what is art and what is not. They do not know that they don't know.’ (ibid) For Filliou this idea was more than something to muse about over drinks with his friends. Indeed for him there was something very serious at stake in his playful non-knowledge. ‘Every generation of young people’, he argued, ‘has to fight fascism. For mine, it was the overt fascism of the Nazis and their allies. For theirs, in relative peace time, it is the covert fascism of the square world. Usually this fight is lost, because young people fail to root out the seeds of fascism within themselves.’ (ibid) What he calls ‘relative peace time’ is peaceful only in that the covert fascism he describes now unfolds relatively discretely, and in a relatively bloodless manner. For Paul Virilio this managerial micro-violence characterizes our time, one of a passage to what he has called ‘Pure War’ - a society and an economy in a state of perpetual mobilization (Virilio and Lotringer, 1997).

Today many find the notion of a singular cause to rally behind not so much simplistic as fictive, even as the need for interconnected strategies of resistance become increasingly urgent. It is often the case that works from the 1960s and 1970s - like Filliou's book, like Yoko Ono and John Lennon's famous hotel room occupations enjoining the world to give peace a chance - and indeed even the utterance today of the word ‘peace’, are met with responses ranging from condescending smile to clinical annoyance. But the question that many of the artists involved with Fluxus were trying not simply to pose but actively to perform, as was Levinas in his own work, was how peace might be thought of not simply as the absence of war, nor a pause, even indefinitely protracted, between wars, but as something other than that, something dynamic that had necessarily to be continually re-imagined and re-translated.

Much of the recent interest in the work of artists involved with Fluxus, both as central and more orbital participants, is marked by a tendency to delight in these works' light-heartedness and playfulness. This is an important element of the Fluxus project, but it is not divorcible from the urgent and often biting politics that, despite differences between their agendas and ways of working, can be found at the heart of Fluxus. 2

In the context of a recent interview between Geoffrey and Bracken Hendricks, Hannah Higgins and Alison Knowles, moderated by Janet A. Kaplan, Knowles said of Fluxus that it ‘is a very loosely associated group of friends without a political direction who are nonjudgmental of one another.’ (Kaplan, 2000: 7-17). The refusal of most of Fluxus' participants to operate as a unified group with a cohesive politics indeed sets it apart from avant-garde projects, such as the Italian Futurists or the French Dadaists, whom Knowles names as connections to Fluxus performance that should nevertheless not be seen to be too closely linked. Part of Fluxus' politicality is its capacity to link individuals with differing notions of what counts as ‘political direction’, and differing views of whether or not Fluxus had one or many such political directions. In this same interview, Bracken Hendricks explained that within Fluxus, ‘you will find that different people mean very different things by the word politics.’ (ibid: 14). Unable, unwilling, or uninterested in hammering out a unified collectivism, their continued work together is itself, therefore, intensely political.

[2] For a closer study of the tensions between George Maciunas' desires for an organized political agenda and structure for Fluxus, and the aversion to this felt by many of his fellow Fluxists, see Smith, 1998.

In 1968 Yoko Ono released Film No.5 (Smile). A year earlier she had spoken of her desire to make a film that could include ‘a smiling face snap of every single human being in the world.’ 3 What starts off sounding like a whimsical utopianism quickly takes shape as something else; as her statement about Film No.5 continued, it revealed, underneath its seemingly simplistic feel-good aim - smiling faces from round the globe - a stinging political precision. She said: ‘We can arrange it with a television network so that whenever you want to see the faces of a particular location in the world, all you have to do is press a button and there it is. This way, if [Lyndon] Johnson wants to see what sort of people he killed in Vietnam that day, he only has to turn the channel.’

The statement, in a quick turn of phrase, articulates an issue that, far from disappearing into the fog of the 1960s and 1970s, has in fact intensified in the years that have followed. The smiling faces might come from around the global village, but the power to access them, to smile with them or to eliminate them with the push of a button, is hardly so evenly distributed. This is not to say that the politicality of every Fluxus work - and whether Ono's work fits squarely into this fluid category is another question - operates in this way, nor that contemporary forms of resistance ought to do so. Rather, this particular work stages a problematic that must be dealt with if the notion of peace is to be developed as something sufficiently dynamic to even begin to approach adequacy to the forms of violence that shape contemporary experience. This problematic concerns the relationship between ethics and politics. It is articulated in Levinas' insistence that any politics ‘must be able in fact always to be checked and criticized starting from the ethical.’ (Levinas, 1998b: 80) It is this condition that is met by Ono's project, and by the works of a number of artists whose practices, whether comfortably or not, can be thought under the Fluxus rubric. And it is in this respect that these works can be seen to have resonances for a contemporary notion of what it might mean to struggle for peace.

In this prophetic image that Ono conjures of the President of the United States having instant access to the flashing shift from the world's billions of smiling faces to close-up views of their strategically indiscriminant murder, we are brought up against the idea that peace, whatever that is, must always hang in precisely this balance. Peace is the face of each of these human others, every single human face on the planet, smiling or dying at the flick of a switch. It was precisely this question of the possibility of articulating a complex and dynamic peace that captured the attention of Emmanuel Levinas. In the book Totality and Infinity, considered by many to be his magnum opus, he began a lifelong project that sought to establish the primacy of ethics for philosophical thinking. In his work, the fundamental relationship is between the self in its interiority and the other in its exteriority. For Levinas, the encounter with the face of the other is an encounter with the infinite, with pure exteriority, with something that always overflows any idea that the ‘I’ can have of it. It is critical in Levinas' thinking that for the ‘I’ the other is not knowable, and equally important that, despite the self's inability to know the other, the self can nevertheless kill the other. (Levinas, 1998a).

Similarly, we recall from Filliou's conversation with Kluver the importance Filliou placed upon non-knowledge in articulating his ‘art of peace’. In this he keeps his beat with Levinas, who wrote in 1984, years on both from his own Totality and Infinity and from Filliou's Teaching and Learning, that ‘it is in the knowledge of the other (autrui) as a simple individual - individual of a genus, a class, or a race - that peace with the other (autrui) turns into hatred; it is the approach of the other as ‘such and such a type.’’ (ibid: 166).

Totality and Infinity had been published in 1961 - incidentally the year that Fluxus was founded. From this book through to the end of his life, Levinas was consumed with the question of whether the ‘egalitarian and just’ ideal European state was to be produced through Hobbes' ‘war of all against all - or from the irreducible responsibility of the one for the other’ (Levinas, 1996: 169). At the outset of the book he seems to dispense with politics, calling it the ‘art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means’ (ibid: 21), shelving it as a second order question. Politics is the name for the tactics by which wars are waged, whether messy or bloodless; peace is a condition that is entirely other than this, one that is only intelligible in terms of ethics.

[3] Text from a placard accompanying the display of Film No.5 (Smile) at the YES YOKO ONO exhibition, Japan Society, New York, October 18, 2000 - January 14, 2001.

Autrisme/Autrebiography 4

There are as many stories about how Fluxus got its name as there are Fluxus artists, 5 and Fluxus' histories have become an increasingly hot topic. Perhaps this owes in large part to Fluxus' transnational, or even non-national character; Geoff Hendricks has said that ‘Fluxus is about internationalism, the idea that in a certain way we're nomads. We travel and we connect up with people of similar minds and then things grow out from there.’ (G. Hendricks, in Kaplan et al, 2000: 12) Hannah Higgins has noted that what has enabled the success of this ‘nomadism’ has been Fluxus' inclusionary ethos, which she believes can teach us something ‘about an expanded sense of humanism.’ She speculates that ‘Fluxus is the first or maybe even the only major movement to have members who are black, white, Asian, Hispanic, male gay and straight, female gay and straight. It was truly open in a time before identity politics would again make that impossible.’ (Higgins, in ibid) This trans- or non-national humanism is inseparable from Fluxus' pragmatism, what Owen Smith has referred to the ‘small-scale opportunism’ (Smith, 1998: 6) that catalyzed Fluxus' avowedly interdisciplinary, or discipline-scrambling, activities.

All of these elements were an integral part of Fluxus well before categorizing one's work using words like ‘transnational’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ would help to procure grants and fellowships. When they did consent to categorization, Fluxus artists opted for neologisms like ‘intermedia’, a word coined by Dick Higgins in 1966. 6 But more often, they wished their activities to speak for them, as in Filliou's 1960s attempt at a project to persuade the cities of Liege, Maastricht, and Aachen to exchange their war memorials, and to encourage all countries who were considering war to exchange war memorials first - and hopefully instead. 7

It is only with caution that we should read words like ‘transnational’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ back onto the Fluxus experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. 8 The notions of fluidity and flow that are part of the aura of the contemporary applications and rhetorics of the ‘transnational’ and the ‘interdisciplinary’, notions which are of course conjured by the name and the word ‘Fluxus’, feed in some senses into the current fashion for speaking of oneself and one's work in the language of a kind of ‘nomadism’ that tends to have more in common with the relative uncertainties of seasonal fashion than with the kinds of uncertainties that might be seen to be part of a shared existential, ethical or epistemological condition as articulated by Geoff Hendricks. There is also today a fairly uncritical acceptance of the state of ‘fluidity’ - as though describing one's positionality as a ‘fluid’ one were unequivocally good, and pronouncing another's work ‘not sufficiently fluid’ were tantamount to condemnation.

Higgins notes that despite the obvious ‘fluid metaphors’ called to mind by the name Fluxus, the complexity of this fluidity is ‘lost on most writers who write about [Fluxus], who tend to want to understand fluidity only as against structure, and then the fluid form only exists as a kind of negation.’ (Higgins, in Kaplan et al, 2000: 7) To the extent that the time that we live in demands the creation of compasses specific to each situation's conflicts and exigencies, to our properly unknowable others, both Fluxus and the notion of a ‘fluidity’ that is other than the negation of structure or form offer ways of exploring the intersection of ‘transnational’ and ‘ethical’ approaches to visual culture.

This condition of translational fluidity entails an engaged uncertainty in the face of otherness that is readily comparable to the task facing the translator of Levinas. Throughout his writings, he uses four separate forms for what in English is rendered by the word ‘other’ - autre, Autre, autrui, Autrui - but he does so inconsistently. It is consequently impossible at times to distinguish whether his use of the word Autre, for example, refers to God or whether it refers to a human ‘other’. (Peperzak, in Levinas, 1996: xiv) The ‘other’ him/her/itself always remains impossible to articulate, foiling our habitual attempts to make this other(s) translate seamlessly into the terms of my own knowledge of him/her/it. For Levinas such reduction of the other to the terms of the ‘same’, of the infinity of the other to the totality of the I's horizon of intelligibility, is an act of violence. Consequently his surgically sloppy way of maintaining the blurriness of the other, of thus refusing the translatability of alterity, is part of the essential anarchy in Levinas' thinking. Filliou lovingly referred to life in this anarchic state as ‘the art of losing oneself without getting lost’ (Filliou, 1970: 24). This was his ‘art of peace’, the peace that Levinas described ‘as awakeness to the precariousness of the other.’ (Levinas, 1996: 167) This awakeness had to be the starting point for a notion of politics, not the other way around.

[4] The word ‘autrebiography’ comes from Sarat Maharaj, who uses it to speak about the writings of Eddie Chambers, Maharaj, 1999: 8, 4.

[5] Jon Hendricks has said that in 1961, when Maciunas was in the midst of ruminating over the international art movement he hoped to start and racking his brain for a name, he shared his hopes with Ono and wanted to know if she had any ideas about what to call it. The discussion took place during the time of Ono's exhibition at Maciunas' AG Gallery in July, 1961, which was to be the gallery's last. Ono was unable or not inclined to come up with a name, and told him furthermore that she did not have much interest in groups or working as part of one. But the very next day, Maciunas burst excitedly into the gallery; he had hit upon the name Fluxus (Hendricks, in Munroe, 2000: 40) It seems that Fluxus originally came into being through an attempt at founding a Lithuanian cultural club. Maciunas was among a few Lithuanian emigres in New York who on October 8, 1960 met at the home of their countryman, gallery owner Almus Salcius, who later became Maciunas' partner in the AG [Almus, George] Gallery. For more about this period, see the chapter entitled ‘An Immigrant Invents Fluxus’, in Williams and Noel, 1997: 29-48. For a rich and often productively contradictory collection of writings on Fluxus, see Friedman, 1998. The compilation of partial portraits of Maciunas offered in the book Mr. Fluxus (Williams and Noel, 1997) provides the most thorough story of Fluxus' early histories as told through its participants.

[6] See Higgins' essay ‘Intermedia’ (Higgins, 1966); for a discussion of intermedia, see Blom, 1998: 63-90, especially pp. 65-66.

[7] Filliou's ‘COMMEMOR‘ project aimed, among other things, ‘to make the future generations aware of the absurd and murderous obscenity of all nationalisms’, ‘to carry out the final fraternization of the towns and villages of Europe’, and ‘to change the pompous and revengeful style of history-writing into a new, generous expression of our destiny’. For more on the project, see Filliou, 1984: 50.

[8] There is in this country a tendency to forget that Fluxus still exists. ‘Collections make the mistake of terminating their collecting policy with the year Maciunas dies, which is absurd, because these people [involved with Fluxus] are still active. It's been twenty-five years since Maciunas died, and they still collaborate. It's not like they just get together for museum shows.’ (Higgins, Kaplan et al, 2000: 9) Indeed, the Fluxus network is still growing and doing Fluxus in increasingly innovative forms, taking advantage of the possibilities afforded by the internet, something that seems almost to have been invented for Fluxus. See, for example: http://www.fluxus.org/.

In her book Mourning Becomes the Law, Rose takes issue with what she thus characterizes as a disavowal of politics in Levinas' work, taking his concern for the primacy of the ethical to imply a kind of detachment, a detachment that she associates, as have many others, with Buddhism in referring to his work as ‘Buddhist Judaism’. The notion that Buddhism is entirely unconcerned with things political depends for its truth, like most things to do with Buddhism, upon which specific Buddhism we are talking about, where, and when. Surely it would be impossible to consider the Vietnamese Buddhist monks who were part of the resistance to the Vietnam War to be apolitical. 9 Rose's notion of Levinas' Buddhist Judaism overlooks the fact that his ethics is inherently political, but that, as in the case of Fluxus, its politics have a fluid and anarchic form, one that is inseparable from radical and absolute responsibility. His insistence that politics must always be able to be criticized from the basis of this responsibility for the other, permits him to maintain a place for politics, insofar as it can be put to the use of ethics. 10 Ethics is concerned with that peace that is understood ‘as awakeness to the precariousness of the other.’

This is also the peace with which, according to Ken Friedman, Fluxus was concerned. He writes that ‘Fluxus... proposes a world in which it is possible to create the greatest value for the greatest number of people’, and notes that this notion ‘finds its parallel in many of the central tenets of Buddhism.’ 11 Filliou, like many of his Fluxus friends, sampled and appropriated Buddhist ideas and practices in his work to varying degrees and purposes. But unlike most of them, at least most of the artists who grew up in European and American cultures, both Filliou and his wife Marianne actually took the vows that make one officially ‘Buddhist’. 12 He studied with Tibetan Nyingma master His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche, and with others as well, such as Lama Sogyal Rinpoche and Gendun Rinpoche. When Filliou died, in 1987, it was in the midst of a three-year meditation retreat. The bearing that his own spiritual practice ought to have upon a discussion of one's work is difficult to say. Certainly Filliou felt it to be very significant, and was happy to speak about it and its connections to his artistic practice (Wijers, 1996: 126-33). Filliou's case is an interesting one, however, in the way that it provides a kind of response to accusations like Rose's above, both about the necessarily politically irresponsible nature of Buddhism specifically, and about the way in which politics need not be one's explicit concern in order for one to be intensely political.

In the first of his appendices to Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, Filliou shared the secret of what he called ‘Relative Permanent Creation’. This was a variation of what he had elsewhere called ‘La Fete Permanente’ - the permanent party, a continuously playful anarchy in response to the ‘fascism of the square world’. It was also a partner to an action poem Filliou presented in 1965 called ‘Le Filliou Ideal’, which in his book he describes as the ‘secret of Absolute Permanent Creation’. The score of the poem reads:

not deciding

not choosing

not wanting

not owning

aware of self

wide awake

SITTING QUIETLY

DOING NOTHING

After speaking these words to the audience, Filliou sat for a while in meditation (Filliou, 1970: 95).

The notion of Permanent Creation emerged again later in a series of discussions between Filliou and Kaprow in 1967. The State University of New York had been considering opening an experimental university. Their then-president began to confer with a range of teachers, students, and interested non-academics about what the program might entail. One of these collaborators was Kaprow, who invited his friend Filliou to sit in on two of the meetings. Filliou proposed establishing an Institute of Permanent Creation. We can only speculate about how this might have shaped American higher education; unfortunately the Institute never made it past brainstorming stage (ibid: 41-43). But Permanent Creation remained central to Filliou's vision of peace. If the finding of inner peace characterized Absolute Permanent Creation, Filliou explained that the secret of Relative Permanent Creation was something he called ‘autrisme’. He wrote:

‘Autre’ means ‘other’ or ‘else’. I suppose that ‘autrisme’ could be translated by ‘otherism’ or ‘elsism’ - such horrible words. I prefer to leave it in French. I wrote l'autrisme in 1962. Both the title and subtitle were chosen tongue-in-cheek. I hate -isms. I hate manifestoes. L'autrisme is an action-poem. It illustrates the possibility of making a performance out of one's ideas, instead of turning them, through the writing of manifestoes, into theories. Thus, as in any performance, possibilities of spontaneous improvisations, even contradictions, remain. Clearly it is TEACHING AND LEARNING AS PERFORMING ARTS. (Filliou, 1970: 90)

The score for Filliou's ‘l'autrisme’ consists of conversations between four characters, named ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, and ‘E’, that revolve around their either deciding for themselves, or being requested by another, to do something other than what they are doing, or to be other than what they are. The action-poem nears its end with A, B, and C moving out into the audience. En route to the exit they question members of the audience at random: ‘what are you thinking about?’, ‘what are you doing?’, ‘who are you?’, ‘what are you?’. No matter what answer they are given, A, B, and C give such responses as: ‘think of something else’, ‘do something else’, ‘be somebody else’, ‘be something else’. Filliou's stage direction reads: ‘and in the midst of the general confusion thus created - spectators coming and going, shouting, fighting, kissing, rising, laughing, protesting, etc.... A, B, and C leave the room.’ (ibid: 91-92) Filliou ends the poem, not because some resulting dramatic action seems to demand it, but only in order that he as the author may himself be permitted to go forth and think, do, or be something else, to be other.

It is difficult to imagine a more faithful performative unfolding into ‘real time’ of Levinas' philosophy. Adriaan Peperzak characterized Levinas' work as ‘proposing an alternative phenomenology faithful to what [Levinas] calls the ‘unthought’ of the philosophical tradition, namely, ‘the search for the human or interhuman intrigue as the fabric of ultimate intelligibility.’’ (Peperzak and Levinas, in Levinas, 1996: 150) Interestingly Levinas' ‘search for the interhuman intrigue’ is almost exactly the way Gillian Rose, despite her critique of Levinas' apoliticality, was to describe her own personal politics in bringing her philosophical memoir Love's Work to a close. Its last sentences are: ‘I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk; learning, failing, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing - in this sin of language and lips.’ (Rose, 1997: 134-135)

[9] On the Vietnamese Buddhist resistance to the war, see Fitzgerald, 1972. On the tendency of critics to assume Buddhism's inherent apoliticality, see Batchelor, 1990: 122 especially.

[10] On the importance of the political dimension of Levinas' work, and its absence from discussions of his work, see Caygill, 2000.

[11] Among these is the tenet, common to the various forms of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, of the vow of the bodhisattva. The bodhisattva is a being who, having attained awakening, vows to forego final enlightenment in order to work for the enlightenment of all other beings.

[12] These are the vows of Refuge in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma (the teaching and the path), and the Sangha (the dharma community). Work on the relationships of Fluxus artists to Buddhist philosophy and religious practice is scarce. The most comprehensive introduction is Doris, 1998. Marianne Filliou responded with a chuckle to my question about whether she practiced Buddhism, saying: ‘Well, sure, but you know that the Buddha himself was not a Buddhist.’ Telephone conversation with Marianne Filliou, March, 1999.

An ethics of idiocy

In an interview given near the end of his life, Levinas borrowed Dostoyevsky's line from The Brothers Karamazov to outline his vision of responsibility, saying: ‘We're all guilty of everything in relation to the other, and I more than all others. This ending, ‘more than all others,’ is what is most important here, although in a certain sense it means to be an idiot.’ (Levinas, in Rotzer, 1995: 59) He was ever insistent that his ethical philosophy was not a practical prescription for the everyday. Though he maintained in an earlier interview that ‘I am responsible even for the Other’s responsibility’, he followed with a caution that his were ‘extreme formulations which must not be detached from their context’, explaining that ‘[i]n the concrete, many other considerations intervene.’ (Levinas, 1998b: 99)

The absolute character of Levinas' ethics makes it difficult to grapple with the unfolding of the practice of that ethics into, and as, the phenomenal world. The question of what precisely it would entail to act as ‘responsible idiot’, of how to undertake the translation from the notion of universal to highly particularized responsibility, was an existential inquisition that Levinas was not unhappy to leave to his others. It is here that Filliou's practice of everyday life, an everyday practice that was decidedly non-everyday, provides some cues for performing an ethics of responsible idiocy.

Page 73 of Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts (see image above) begins Filliou's list of three principles he came up with - no doubt thanks to years of conferring over jokes, drinks and smokes with the friends pictured - which were meant to bring the world, or maybe even just the world inhabited by him and his friends, towards an entirely new way of conceiving value. The ever-neologizing Filliou called this the ‘Poetical Economy’. The first of its principles entails ‘rehabilitating’ what he calls the ‘cafe-genius’. All of us who have spent time as teachers and learners will readily agree that our most important lessons have come not from being on the giving or receiving end of formal instruction, but from the hours sitting around and discussing ideas informally, moments far away from the one-way-street that leads from informer to informed. Filliou's cafe-genius was an attempt to encourage just this kind of laugher- and caffeine-enhanced brainstorming, alone or with friends, the anarchic autrisme of ‘losing oneself without getting lost’.

The second principle is the ‘Homage to Failures’. The failure is Filliou's anti-hero, or non-hero, the person who influences no one and thereby achieves the greatest success: helping to dismantle ‘the idea of admiration’ and ‘the deadweight of leadership’ (Filliou, 1970: 74). This idea was central to what could be called Filliou's Fluxus-pedagogy, which did in fact seek to treat teaching and learning as performing arts. Even for Levinas, the relationship between teaching and learning constituted one of the most poignant modes of the ethical relationship (Levinas, 1998a: 98-101, 180). For his part, Filliou also stressed the interdependent, nourishing relation between teaching and learning, one in which failure would be celebrated in advance for the fruit it could not help but bear one day.

Filliou's third and final point, which is in many ways the linchpin of the Poetical Economy and the key to Permanent Creation, is what he calls the ‘Celebration of the Spirit of the Staircase’. We have all had the experience of leaving a party and finding ourselves halfway down the staircase when we are struck full force by what we should have said but did not. This is the Spirit of the Staircase. Filliou wrote that he was sure that once Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts was published, what he had ‘left unsaid, or said but could have expressed better’, would be all too apparent to him. But rather than kick himself for not exploring all avenues, resolving all contradictions, bringing things to closure and his peers to their knees with his acumen, Filliou believed we should enjoy the anticipation of the revelation of the Spirit of the Staircase, and celebrate the phenomenon the experience of which shapes all of our lives to varying degrees. In fact, he proposed updating it by calling it the ‘Spirit of the Elevator’. This special kind of late-blooming ‘wit should make us smile, or laugh. Feeling too strongly that what we should have said is more important than what we actually did say, can only lead to guilt, or impotence, or both.’ (Filliou, 1970: 74)

On one level, these points constitute an amusing art historical footnote from an artist who, like many central and peripheral participants in Fluxus, can always be counted on to provide us with a laugh. But on another level, Filliou's work helps focus the pointedly ethical nature of the serious anarchic play that was at work in the divergent projects of so many of the artists working, talking, drinking and laughing together at this time. But the focus that his Fluxus-pedagogy provides is one that does not close down the differences between these individuals and their creative and critical practices. His approach to the performance of teaching and learning provides a useful orientation toward the current flood of reappraisals of Fluxus, in that it provokes us to think not only about the place of the rise of interest in Fluxus in the current production of new forms of cultural knowledge, but to ask once again about the ethics of such knowledge, and whether the practice of peace might require the production of something like Filliou's non-knowledge. It is tempting to wonder, for instance, what kind of critical theory might emerge if we were to fully open ourselves to the nondual thinking expressed in the provocation Filliou issued to all ethnographers in general when he asked: ‘Hey, instead of studying us, why not come over here and have a drink with us?’

Chris Thompson

Portland, Maine, USA, July 2001

Chris Thompson is completing his Ph.D., "Making Felt: Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama - un-organizing otherness", at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He lives in Portland, Maine, USA and teaches in the Art History Department at the Maine College of Art. He is assistant editor of a-r-c.

references

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