1.

Where is power? Does it reside in words or deeds? No doubt, doing politics has always been about influencing the course of affairs by persuading people and talking them into believing and doing exactly what you want them to believe and do. How many times have politicians quite literally talked things into being? Isn’t that very much how we get things done in the information age anyway? We ceaselessly communicate to conjure up concrete results. And it works. They materialise. So there must be power in words. At the same time, people get alienated by parliamentary politics precisely because they refuse to believe that, at the end of the day, all this talking could ever really be what power is about. Their suspicion that politicians may just be talking instead of doing anything grows, while the real decision-makers might in fact operate behind the scenes and never explain themselves to the public because they don’t need to. They quite simply have the power and money to make things happen without further fuss. From this point of view, the only power words might actually have is to dissimulate the true workings of power by cloaking them in layers and layers of phoney friendly discourse. It’s an old technique known to tricksters of all trades: if you know how to divert people’s attention through a bit of idle talk, you can sell or take anything to and from them, as their minds will be somewhere else and they simply will not realise that there never was a rabbit in the hat, that someone just took their watch, that the ring tone they downloaded comes with a two-year contract that forces them to purchase and pay more each month and is really hard to get out of, or that they just elected the wrong president.

Yet, admittedly, the capacity of words to conceal the workings of power makes them a very powerful tool in their own right—and is this power of dissimulation after all not the very same force that is also at play in the moment of persuasion? As words make you see things in a certain light and thus shape your perception, you cannot deny that they also must have the power to influence people’s actions. So how is it then with words and deeds? Power seems to reside in both. The problem of figuring out the nature of that power therefore lies less in the difficulty of understanding what power words and deeds each have in their own right, but more in the fundamental challenge of grasping exactly how the power of words is related to that of deeds, and how the specificity of that relation determines how power is structured in a particular culture and society.

It could be argued that this is the one central question that Michel Foucault tried to answer in his writing and that the success of his philosophical project lies in his failure actually to come up with any conclusive answer. In Les Mots et les Choses (1966), it seems like he still believed that he could provide a systematic historical account of the development of such overarching structures. But at the time when he wrote Surveiller et Punir (1975), his mind appears to have changed. In this book Foucault struggles with the realisation that, throughout the history of the development of the modern prison, clinic and school systems, the difference remained huge between what the people in power said and wrote about their political motives and goals and the way in which the institutions they built were in fact organised. Yet, without actually making much sense in relation to one another, the discourses and practices of power nevertheless remained intimately connected and constantly produced effects in the real world, both independently of and in conjunction which each other, boosting or blocking each other at different times. At this point Foucault must have decided simply to accept the absurd interplay between incongruous interlocking discourses and practices as a form of practical surrealism which, if you take it as it is, can actually give you the key to understanding how power is structured. At least in the books that followed, he moved away from attempting to construe general systematic accounts and rather studied cases of how specific discourses related to particular practices.

It is maybe no coincidence that he had studied the work of Belgian painter Renée Margritte shortly before. In the essay Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1973)[1] , Foucault argues that Margritte’s work shows how art could inhabit and expand the strange gap between discourses and practices where words, things, images and acts meet, clash, cross-fertilize and germinate in unpredictable ways. All it takes to open and explore that gap is to discard the assumption that a stable structure would underlie the relationship between words and facts (Foucault calls this ‘a prior isotopism’). He writes:

Margritte knits verbal signs and plastic elements together, but without referring them to a prior isotopism. He skirts the base of affirmative discourse on which resemblance calmly reposes, and he brings pure similitudes and nonaffirmative verbal statements into play within the instability of a disoriented volume and an unmapped space.[2]

The outcome of these explorations is not, however, the realisation that words would simply loose their meaning. On the contrary, Foucault argues that Margritte makes you see how forcefully words can perforate and shape reality on a much more basic level, one that has little to do with conventional notions of words making sense. He writes that Margritte’s famous painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1926) “exemplifies the penetration of discourse into the form of things; it reveals discourse’s ambiguous power to deny and to redouble.”[3] In a sense, the ‘ambiguous power to deny and redouble’ that Foucault is talking about here could be understood precisely as the power of persuasion that we experience words to have in everyday politics. Their ‘power to deny’ can make things, that you would otherwise see clearly, disappear before your eyes while their ‘power to redouble’ can make things that do not exist seem real or give another—discursive and theatrical—reality to things that might exist, but in fact look a bit different. In relation to the painting L’art de la conversation (1950) which depicts a bizarre formation of rocks that spell the word REVE (dream), TREVE (rest) or CREVE (death), Foucault elaborates that this works makes us feel “as if all these airy, fragile words had been given the power to organize the chaos of stones.”[4] This is probably a fairly accurate description of some of the aspects of practical surrealism that underpins the language of politics.

2.

You could say that it is also precisely this practical surrealism of power that Sven Augustijnen explores. In his films and text works, he shows how the friction between words and facts is incessantly generated in the discourses of everyday politics. Augustijnen makes you see how people ‘talk the talk’ and how, at the same time, things are happening. The precision and humour of his work, however, lies in the very fact that he manages to keep our understanding of exactly how what is said relates to what happens in a constant state of suspense. This is because, most often, it is only by giving you something to read between the lines or something to see out of the corner of your eye that Ausgustijnen makes you aware of the events that might be taking place all the time: a city grows, real estate is developed, minor crimes are committed and people are having sex in public places. Yet, the world in which all of this transpires is like a universe that exists parallel to the reality of discourse, a twilight zone and shadow economy that is hidden in plain sight by the power of words. The talking that never ends becomes a veil that hides all that happens, even though it is fully transparent and anyone can see through it. The practical surrealism of power that Augustijnen describes is the way in which people go about the daily business of getting things done in their city—the city of Brussels that is—by doing what they do under the condition that everybody agrees to continue talking and keep their eyes wide shut.

In his video films Augustijnen has developed a particular style of showing talking. You might be tempted to call his films documentaries because they record how a particular person or group of people talk about their work or obsessions, or actually do their work and act out their obsessions in a real life everyday situation. Still, the term ‘documentary’ is misleading here because it’s not so much that Augustijnen documents how people speak. It is more that he releases their discourse in his works. When the camera begins recording, it feels like a valve is opened and words start spilling out. This stream of words is so seductive that it swiftly absorbs your attention. Listening to what is being said you might not actually be really listening, but more going with the flow of the constant sound of words spinning around themselves. Yet, as in any state of absorption, you become highly perceptive to formal details and lateral events. You begin to observe the particularities of the sound of the words and the body language of the speaker and you cannot fail to notice all the small things that keep happening behind his back. Technically, both the editing and the camera work (which Augustijnen does himself) help to generate and heighten this peculiar state of distracted perceptiveness. Augustijnen has a way of attuning the rhythm of the cuts in the film to the rhythm of the way that the people whom he films talk. The talking sets the pace and the cuts keep that pace. The film is edited in a way so that the continuity of the flow never stops. Augustijnen films people talk in the same way that other people shoot road movies: it is all about making you feel that the talk, like the road, goes on and on and on.

And the pace is usually quite fast because people talk in French and they work themselves up quite easily when they speak in the particular way that the language seems to be well suited for—depending on how you look at it, you might call this a casual elegance or a routine frenzy. So in the same way in which the speakers seem to retain a certain appearance of composure as the words start spinning faster and faster, Augustijnen’s editing creates a steady flow of images. Single takes may in fact be quite long. It’s just that Augustijen knows when to cut and how to splice takes together so that the spinning of the words never stops. Similarly, the camera work has a quality of being dynamic and steady at the same time. Augustijnen follows people around when they talk to the camera so that he himself is also constantly on the move. Still, the camera perspective is not subjective in the same way that a moving or shaking camera would conventionally denote a personal and involved point of view. On the contrary, Augustijnen always keeps a certain measured distance to the person he films, a distance that seems measured by the amount of space which that person needs in orderto perform. The film gives you a clear sense of the radius of the personal space that body language creates around a particular person because it is on the limit of this radius that Augustijnen positions and operates his camera.

However, by maintaining this relative distance while he acts as a participant observer in the situation he films, Augustijnen still keeps the frame of his images wide enough so that you may see what is happening around and behind the person he films. Although the person speaking remains in the centre of the image, this cadration does not really fulfill the standards of how ‘talking heads’ are conventionally presented in documentaries or reportages. Instead of a talking head filling the frame, we see a talking body performing in space. The environment in which the speakers perform could be characterised, using Foucault’s words, as a ‘disoriented volume and unmapped space’. Augustijnen films both public and private spaces in a way that their boundaries are never quite visible so that they are never easily grasped in their entirety; they retain their secret as there always remain real or figurative shadows that the camera can and does not penetrate. Since the person speaking is filmed in a way that makes us intuitively grasp that he or she dominates this space, but does not entirely occupy or control it, Augustijnen keeps us alert to the fact that other people or forces may also exist and operate in this space. This residual awareness of the surroundings then contributes to the uncanny sensation that, while we may catch some things happening in the background out of the corner of our eyes, others might actually completely escape our attention as we listen to and watch the talking body talk. In this sense you could argue that Augustijnen is deconstructing the convention of the ‘talking head’. Within the genre of documentary representation, the function of filming someone speak in close-up is there effectively to channel and authenticate information; what is being said is linked to one particular human face which is then supposed to serve as a stable vessel or container for the expressive content. The talking bodies in Augustijnen’s films do the exact opposite. They do not channel or contain discourse, they spill it out and allow it to proliferate in an uncontainable (urban) space.

Instead of authenticating information, the talking bodies dramatize and theatricalize it. In the films, the performative quality of speaking is foregrounded to an extent that the talking becomes an event in its own right. When this happens the necessity of verifying what is being said, by checking it against facts, disappears. It would be pointless to question whether the people tell the truth or whether they are truly the people they say they are—and not actors or impostors—because that difference has lost its meaning. As talking bodies they are by definition performers, actors or impostors, independently of whether what they say is a spontaneous or a rehearsed form of expression. It lies in the nature of their way of talking that their discourse establishes itself as a reality, if not the reality as such, so that it is not them but rather their surroundings that come to seem somewhat theatrical or artificial. Very often, not so much the person who speaks, but the people in the back of the image look strangely, as if they were brought in and placed there like theatrical props to complete the scenic backdrop for the performance of the talking body.

The practical surrealism that Augustijnen exposes by foregrounding the theatricality of discourse is characterised by a double moment of estrangement. As the reality of discourse supersedes the reality of its surroundings, it effectively suspends it and makes the world around the speaker seem unreal (so you become convinced that, metaphorically speaking, the pipe you clearly see hanging in the background is not a pipe). At the very same time, the heightened theatricality of the talking incites the suspicion that the discourse may be nothing more than a self-contained self-referential word game, that is to say ‘mere talk’ (so that there is a pipe after all and that the words denying it are in fact only words). By making your perception shift continuously between these two perspectives, Augustijnen highlights what Foucault described as “the ambiguous power of discourse to deny and redouble”. Since he shows you particular instances of this power at play, he makes you see what this ambiguity is about. Therefore, despite the analytical quality of the observations they present, his films go far beyond a merely descriptive approach. This is not sociology. Augustijnen’s works in fact involve you in an experience which they not only record but actually very much also redouble. In the same way that, as a participant observer, Augustijnen gets involved in the language games that he portrays, you get drawn into them as well—the people on the screen perform for you as they performed for him. In this sense, he gives you a graphic idea of what it means to be affected by the very real surrealism of a society that sustains itself through talk while strange things simultaneously appear to be occurring in the shadow of its discourse.

3.

In Une Femme Entreprenante (2004), for instance, we see how a museum for contemporary art is literally talked into existence. Augustijnen follows a group of people as they meet to speak about plans for the development of the art centre on the site of a disused and more or less derelict brewery in Brussels. In between these meetings, the talk continues in individual visits that Augustijnen pays to each of the people involved. The central figure in the story is a real estate developer who has decided to support the plans for the redevelopment of the brewery into a place for art. Around her there is a whole plethora of other characters, advisers, rich friends, art professionals and representatives of something or other. They convene on site visits to the brewery, basically a ruin where, standing among the rubble in the abandoned concrete structures, they assure each other of the charms and potential of the place and the importance it will have in the future as a place where all that is unique about Belgian culture and art will manifest itself. We also meet the man who has tried to develop the site before, albeit into an office complex, which did not happen because communication with the city authorities somehow did not really work out and the man had to spend time in jail for other reasons. Still, his eagerness to elaborate on his former plans in front of the camera is not compromised by the fact that they have become obsolete.

His flamboyance contrasts with the unassuming way in which the current developer of the site goes about her business. Her clothes are never too flashy and her way of speaking is never too loud or exuberant. Still, she speaks with authority. The reasons for this are gradually revealed on visits to her offices where, it eventually transpires that her family is and traditionally has been among the most powerful real estate developers in Brussels. But really, it is only when we see an otherwise silent representative of her company, cruising over Brussels in a small plane, very briefly point out the sites they have developed in the past and the ones they are currently working on, and when we hear him laconically recount how many billion Euros were put into this hotel or that office tower, only then does it become fully clear that this family positively has the power to change the face of the city. So the twist Augustijnen gives to the practical surrealism of power he portrays here is in fact truly uncanny. In the beginning you are made to feel that, somehow, all that you witness is mere talk and very likely nothing will ever come of it. “This is not a museum,” the pictures seem to say, “it is a brewery in ruins”. The power of discourse in this moment seems to lie mainly in its persistent capacity to deny the reality that we clearly see in front of us. Then, however, it only takes one unreal view of Brussels and a few dry comments to make you grasp the forces at play behind, beyond or below all the talking. The effect of this realisation is dizzying.

Yet, it is dizzying not because it would confirm your suspicion that all the talking was vacuous, but because, quite on the contrary, it proofs that those empty words must actually have some kind of force to bring things into existence—albeit not by virtue of their capacity to make sense, but by virtue of their obscure yet intimate relation to the workings of power. Augustijnen does not offer general explanations (because very likely, there are none) but he gives you an experience of how that intimate, yet opaque relation between words and power may manifest itself in particular contexts and constellations. Even though these constellations are particular, there is still always something paradigmatic about them, because they are exemplary in some way or other. They show how people do what they do when they get things done. Getting an art centre built is one such thing. Pickpocketing is another. In L’ecole des Pickpockets (2000) Augustijnen shows how an amateur receives an introduction to the art of stealing wallets and watches from passers-by without them noticing. In a somewhat seedy looking empty function room with no daylight, two older man teach a younger man a series of tricks known among professional pickpockets. It is an initiation ritual of sorts. Still, the status of that ritual remains unclear. For if the instructors were who they say they are—pros working on the varieté stage as well as on the streets—they would be violating the ethos of their clandestine community by revealing the secret knowledge of their trade. At the same time, you realise that they must be pros since they apparently know very well how to steal. In a fascinating way they rather protect their secret by revealing their identity. None would trust a thief to tell the truth if he said that he was one. As a thief he must be lying. So the best way for a thief to conceal his identity is to tell people he is a thief because they will never believe him. It’s a technique called ‘hiding things in plain sight’ and another paradigmatic example of the “ambiguous power of discourse to deny and redouble”.

Watching the pickpockets exercise their skills teaches you more about this particular power. Most of the tricks are based on diverting people’s attention away from the act of the theft by talking to them. Steal the wallet while you ask for the time. Startle someone by addressing and embracing him as a friend and then pretend it was a mistake and you thought he was someone else. He will not realise that meanwhile his watch has vanished. And so on. This testifies to the power of words to deny acts by virtue of their capacity to distract. The power to redouble in turn manifests itself in other ways in the art of pickpocketing. It lies in the skill to simulate a situation (e.g. a stranger mistakes someone for a friend), which doubles and thereby dissimulates the existing one (a watch getting stolen). And quite practically, as the experts show, it lies also in the prowess of the one who steals immediately to pass the stolen item on to an accomplice so that it may later not be found on him, should the victim realise the crime in time and stop the man who talked to him. In the meantime, someone whom we has never seen has walked off behind his back with his possessions. The art of redoubling then implies a multiplication of actors and persona in the moment of performance. One thief turns into many. His identity is protected by the fact that it dissolves into a multiplicity.

You could say that modern bureaucratic structures use the same trick to sustain their power. When you are dealing with the authorities or bigger companies it is impossible to pin the individual down who abused you and make him accountable, even if he may be sitting right in front at a counter. It is never him himself you are dealing with because he is just one part of a larger structure where responsibility is passed on from one clerk to the next to the next, until no one can tell where and with whom it lies—with the very same speed with which the pickpocket passes on the corpus delicti to an accomplice in order to no longer be identifiable as the thief. This is the high art of diffusion through which power protects and sustains itself. By showing us the techniques of pickpocketing, Augustijnen focuses on one particular example of that art. But it is precisely by exposing this art without any further comment or interpretation that he transforms the pickpocket into something akin to an allegory of how power works. In the same way that a woman with veiled eyes and a scale and sword in her hands represents justice in allegorical form through the sheer fact of her attributes, the pickpocket comes to epitomise the political art of ‘getting things done without people realising it’ through the basic properties of his trade.

Augustijnen has a way of making the performance become paradigmatic by choosing a performer whose manners come across as exemplary and typical, precisely because they are very special. In Le Guide du Parc (2001), for instance, the entire film is centred on one individual, a balding middle-aged businessman or office worker (as far as you can tell by his looks). Incessantly talking to the camera, he takes us on a guided tour through a park in the centre of Brussels. He talks about the monuments, alerts us to the particular beauty of hidden inscriptions on the palace walls and informs us in detail about how you go about finding another man to have sex with in the park when you are looking for it. All this information is conveyed with the same detached passion with which a man of culture shares his knowledge with other cultivated listeners. The tone of his speech is that of a conversation about topics of general interest. It is the kind of discourse that people engage in to reveal their education to each other and thereby to assure each other of their membership in the (humanist) community of the well-educated. As the guide speaks, gesticulates, rambles on, improvises and always varies his tone slightly while he riffs on his repertoire of limited things to say, once in a while we see men walk on the paths in the background, eye each other tactfully and occasionally disappear into the bushes together. However, it does not feel as if these men were particularly real or more real than the words of the guide so that they could prove or disprove what he says. On the contrary, they seem rather like apparitions, like spectres summoned by the magic of his words. In this way, they testify to the power of discourse to redouble. Like magic spells his words seem quite literally to procure the reality they invoke.

At the same time, an element of denial is equally apparent in his discourse. By presenting the practice of cruising as a topic of general interest for the community of educated people—like him, like us—the guide is effectively denying the special personal interest he or anyone of us might have in having casual sex with strangers. “This is not a confession” is the message of discourse when it is perfectly evident to anyone listening that it is. At the same time, it would also be wrong to say that he is denying anything because the guide never claims that he is not going to the park to have sex. Where there is no claim there can be no denial. He simply chooses not to mention his own stakes in the matter. His personal interest remains a blank spot at the centre of the disinterested discourse he produces. Yet, this silence at the core of his eloquence is clearly perceptible all of the time. In this way, his eloquent silence epitomises how people handle open secrets (e.g. the lady of the house sleeps with the gardener, the geography teacher likes boys etc.). By unremittingly refraining from naming the one thing that is on everyone’s mind, they constantly evoke it. Like the thief who protects his identity by exposing it, the open secret is hidden in plain sight. It is not revealed and it cannot be revealed because it is constantly exposed. The potential involvement of the guide in the practice of cruising is similarly never denied or concealed by his words, it is rather exposed through his discourse as the one thing he does not address. The intimate link between what he says and what he might be doing manifests itself most clearly in what he does not say. But there is also no need to spell out the unsaid. His discourse is endlessly fascinating, precisely because the continuous presence of the open secret produces iridescence on the surface of his speech—his desires are reflected in the stream of words just like light playing over water.

The extreme realism of Augustijnen’s works thus lies in the attentiveness with which he shows the practical surrealism inherent in the many ways that people talk to get things done, in how they talk always to divert attention from what they are doing and in how they talk to gesture towards what they might be doing or desiring to do by not talking about it at all while at the time they never stop speaking. The realism of his approach is extreme because he disconnects his analysis of how works work from questions of belief. Normally, we judge the truth-value of an utterance on the basis of whether we believe the speaker or not. This is why it has always been a major concern in the genre of documentary film to find believable speakers and present their statements in ways that will persuade viewers into believing them to be true. Similarly, both the press and the people like to judge politicians on the ground of whether what they say is (and thus makes them) believable or not. In his works Augustijnen short-circuits this way of thinking and moves beyond it. He does so by showing us speakers in relation to whose way of speaking it would clearly make no sense to ask whether we believe that their words ‘match’ their deeds (or not) since talking is essentially what they do. So to grasp the secret link between their words and the trade they practice we simply have to learn to see what is exposed in _and _through their discourse. By drawing our attention to the facticity of discourse and away from futile ruminations over the credibility of speakers and words, Augustijnen’s films lead us to realise what is there to behold. They show what is hidden in plain sight through exposing it as that which would always be exposed if we just knew how to see it.

Notes:

¹ Foucault, M. 1983. This is not a pipe. Los Angeles: University of California Press, Berkely.

² Ibid., 53-54.

³ Ibid., 37.

⁴ Ibid., 37.