A possible introduction (Jan Ritsema)

Sorry, we start with a little essay.
Sorry that we have to start with this, that we didn’t find
any transformations, metaphores or whatever poetic imagination
to say, to show, to make it an experience, an event of what we want to say.
So, please. Read this as separate of the performance.
The performance is one thing and this is another. It is not even a prologue. It is what we want to share with you.

But let me first explain the difficulty. The difficulty not to be able the transform reasonable meaning.
Our social space is saturated with fear. Fear is thought to be everywhere. From natural disasters,transporation accidents,famines and droughts, serial killers, sex addiction, fluoridation, pharmaceuticals and medicines, terrorism, rock, rap, house music, assassination, global warning, wrinkles, ozone depletion, satanism, aging, right wing politics, the other, the boss, etc.etc What aspect of life, from the most momentous to the most trivial, has not become a workstation in the mass production line of fear.
Again, our social space is saturated with fear.
Fear-producing mechanisms have become so pervasive and invasive that we can no longer seperate ourselves from our fear. If they have, is fear still part of an emotion, a personal experience, or is it what constitutes the collective ground of possible experience. Is it primarly a subjective content or part of the very process of subject formation. Are we produced to fearfull and no longer to fearless people? And if so, is the way we try to cope with this fear, the many different ways we buy protection, a substituted projection in sex, in pleasure, in commodities and one to one in concrete security measures and products?

Did I explain the difficulty of why we were not able to transform the essay into something more performative? No. I digressed into the subject of the saturation of the social space with fear. The fear is not something outside of us: we are the fear, we are fear. Like fearfull animals, like rats and pitbulls. Their constituion is fear. Impossible to seperate from it.

It is exactly difficult for the same reason as transforming this essay into a performative action, just as it is difficult to distance oneself from the fear we cannot seperate ourselves from. How can we transform this essay, these notions into some performativity without strongly simplifying it. And by this reduction totally ignore it. The complexity of this immanent fear doesn’t even allow simplification. BUT, the great but, and this is where Systems Theory enters the stage, the great but is: how can we resist this fear. Can we reinvent resistance. For if the enemy is us, analysis, no matter how necessary, is not enough to find a practice of resistance.
Fear, under conditions of complicity, can neither be analyzed nor opposed without at the same time being enacted. We need to perform our object of inquiry. Or as William S.Burroughs stated: Never fight fear head-on. That rot about pulling yourself together, and the harder you pull the worse it gets. Let it in and look at it. You will see it by what it does.
He is right, but this is sixties talk which later on transformed into hippie talk and then into good willing but excluding and seperative new-age talk. Times they are a changin. And there is nothing more that Sandy hates than Hippie-talk (were his parents hippies?)
SANDY: and there is nothing more that Jan hates than new-age talk. (are his children members of that church?)
JAN: I have no children and this is no therapy. There is no therapy. This is theory.
As I said: it is here in the realm of complexity that systems theory, the theory of the functioning of systems, natural systems, social systems, artificial and virtual ones, and BACH, Bach and systems theory, enter the stage. The father of social systems theory Niklas Luhmann produced this one liner: only complexity can reduce complexity.
What did he mean by this? (Sorry for this explanation but in a moment we happily will produce and share a complex system in front of you with Bach,two Bodies and 60 Observers. And you should be prepared for this otherwise it is very boring.)

Only complexity can reduce complexity. Systems theory, doesn’t, deny, or otherwise devalue difference, but rather begins with difference—namely, the difference between system and environment, and the assumption that the environment of any system is always already much more complex than the system itself.
Systems handles the problem of overwhelming environmental complexity by reducing it in terms of the selectivity made available by the particular system’s self-referential code. Every system in order to survive selects from the overwhelming offerings of the environment. This specific system functions because of its specific selection. A cat, this system, makes different selections than an eagle although they go for the same prey. A cat prefers not to fly but to be on the ground, the system eagle (which is constituted like the system cat is, out of billions of bigger and smaller subsystems) hates to be on the ground. (By the way a system consists of a structure; the bone structure, the piles, walls, floors and roof which make a house and an organisation, a restaurant is differently organised than an office or a family house. It is the organization that defines the system.)
The system’s inferiority towards its environmental complexity must be balanced by strategies of selection. Complexity, in this sense means being forced to select, and thus, Luhmann’s winning formulation: “Only complexity can reduce complexity”. Under pressure to adapt to a complex and changing environment, systems increase their selectivity—they make their environmental filters more finely grained, if you like—by building up their own internal complexity. And thus determining the complexity of the environment that is possible for the system. This selection is always determined by the system's redundant possibility of selecting one thing to be connected with, of selecting one thing to give meaning, meaning for the system, the survival of the system and not the other thing. It selected the actual selected and not the possible one, the one that could have been selected. Or as Luhmann puts it: “one could say that meaning equips an actual experience or action with redundant possibilities”—namely, what was selected (the actual) and what could have been (the possible)—and this is crucial for any system’s ability to respond to environmental complexity by building up its own complexity via the form of meaning. This selection process, this process of meaning is a non-stopping one, as every possible can be potentially actualised which leaves a range of new possibilities and so on and so forth. The genesis and reproduction of meaning presupposes an infrastructure in reality that constantly changes its states. Every new selection makes a difference, and every difference extracts meaning (which only as differences have meaning). One begins not with identity but with difference. (This paragraph is from quotations of Wolfe’s ‘Adventures of the Event-Machine’.)

Back to the fear, the immanent fear, the fear we cannot separate ourselves from. Are there ways to resist this? Is it our selection? Is it possible that this is obstructed, that someone; myself or input from the outside has put sand into the motor, sabotaged me or I myself, which makes that I select from the environment mostly fear and therefore make me work hard to make me purchase a fortress against the fear.
Would resistance be possible to change this selection attitude, to look in another way at the world, to make other selections which really make a difference. But then we have to change ourselves, then we have to make ourselves a difference that makes a difference. But how can we ever resist the influence from the outside of which we are part of ourselves.
Would this be possible? Or do we enter here finally the poetic realm of utopia?
OR is it possible, but with the help of a friend, an observer, who is able to see the blindspot that I oversee.

And then I will explain the functioning of the BLINDSPOT, and the observers which are needed to tackle this, overseeing their own blindspots, the observers observed. We need the observers to see what we can’t see, we are not separated from the performance and its meaning as we are not separated from the fear.
And maybe the performance means something completely different than what we think it means. One thus begins not with identity but with difference—with two differences, in fact: the difference inherent in every experience, between what is actually given and what can possibly result from it. And this perpetuates as every actualised possible will create other possibles. I only have to steer the selection myself and not have it steered by the enivironment of which I easily become part of, not being able to make a difference anymore. Not being able to communicate anymore. Then communication does not connect the world it divides it. Like any operation of living or thinking communication produces a split, a ceasura.

And then Leonard Cohen comes in with Susanne who: «touched her perfect body with my mind?» A similarly self-enclosed process as the fear we can’t separate us from.
And then the detachedness of Leonard Cohen and maybe the stand-up-comedian act which he did as an introduction to his reading poetry for a vast university audience and maybe we do the screaming of the sad song of Leonard Cohen.
And then we start dancing. 52 min.
We stop the Sonaten and Partitas of Bach interpreted by Izthak Perlman.
We stop dancing.
Black out. The end.

By the way, it is pure coincidence but Sandy, Leonard Cohen and Brian Massumi are all from Montreal.