Ethics and the political efficacy of citation in the work ofSantiago Sierra
Ellen Feiss
In his essay ‘Signature Event Context’, Jacques Derrida utilises J.L.Austin’s definitive theory of the “performative utterance”1from ‘How to Do Things With Words’.2 That “utterance whichallows us to do something by means of speech itself”3interests Derrida; a speech act which does “not designate thetransport or passage of content of meaning”4 but in itselfenacts an event, provides an entry point through which to break downthe conception of speech, and therefore communication, as it isdefined within Western philosophy.5 By destabilising theinstitution of communication, Derrida contests the understanding ofmeaning as a fortified entity transported from speaker or author tolistener or reader, in order to undo the notion of the consciousintention of the speaking subject as the central force in language.However, more specifically, it is what Austin expressly excludes fromhis definition of the performative utterance which presents Derridawith a framework for recasting speech as constituted through itscitationality, or “iterability”6, rather than tied to thecontext of a speaker.
Austin’s strict definition of the performative utterance requires the“conscious presence of the intentional speaking subject”7and a laundry list of historically contingent regulations in order forthe “successful”8 performative utterance to come intobeing. Austin contends that the “successful” or the “serious”performative utterance is its only form. For example, the historicallycontingent ‘I do’ speech act in a marriage ceremony is a performativeutterance for Austin only when it is between two consenting people,and its success further demands that the subject not be “alreadymarried with a [spouse] living, sane and undivorced.”9Austin specifically excludes those utterances outside the conditionsof intention and context that don’t result in social constitution. Heprecisely states that performative language in “circumstances (whereit is) intelligibly used not seriously but in waysparasitic upon its normal use… All this we are excluding fromconsideration”10 (my emphasis). That Austin renders thosefailed performative utterances outside the terms of his argument – a“possible risk” in all performatives, as he highlights them as aconstant structural possibility – is significant. In contrast, Derridaresurrects these utterances which Austin casts off as failures11and establishes them as spoken citations; indications of a “generaliterability”12 without which the “successful” performativewouldn’t be possible. Derrida uses Austin to extrapolate his notion ofiterability by illustrating both forms, the serious and non seriousutterance, as citational.
I restrict my discussion of Derrida to ‘Signature Event Context’ inorder to use his analysis of Austin’s original conjuring of the stageand the fictional in his definition of the parasitic utterance, or thenon-serious. The conception of audience and the context of the stagein Austin’s examples of fictional exclusion are crucial in myapplication of iterability to art. I exclude other theorists’ use ofthe parasitic and its fictional backdrops, specifically John Searle,because of my exclusive reliance on iterability – I don’t engage atthis point with debates surrounding the legitimacy of iterability butinstead move forward with the concept as a core pillar.13 Iuse ‘Signature Event Context’ in tandem with Judith Butler’s conceptof performativity to describe artistic utterances that hover betweenstatement and embodiment. To clarify, Derrida’s iterability reachesbeyond my restriction of it to the success and failure of utterances.Rather, the term serves to account for the role of the speech actwithin a notion of language as socially constituted, as part ofDerrida’s larger project of deconstruction.14 Iterabilityas a process of alteration, accounting for the way in which meaning isunbound by context and infinitely transmutable, as opposed to anaccount that emphasises context and linguistic conventions in theservice of individual intention, is bound up in Derrida’s notion ofthe non-serious but is not confined to it.15
Derrida’s establishment of the serious and non-serious utterance16as co-dependent linguistic structures, reliant on each other in thecreation of meaning, presents a paradox. What of the event thatembodies both the serious and non-serious performative utterance? Theexcavation of such an event offers a method for analysing theself-referential nature of power in late capitalism, that utterancewhich acknowledges the terms of its constitution while simultaneouslyacting. Significantly, iterations of the serious and non-serious eventhave been employed in contemporary art practice since the post-warperiod as a mode of critique, from Claes Oldenburg’s storefront to theinstitutional critique of Andrea Fraser. This article seeks toquestion the dissident potential of this framework in art byconsidering the work of Santiago Sierra. The ethical and politicalconsequences of Sierra’s work have been debated for over a decade,most significantly, perhaps, in Claire Bishop’s pioneering essay‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’. However, the performativeutterance I attempt to illustrate is a conceptual mechanism throughwhich the binary of ethics that Sierra’s work is often trapped in (ie,is the work damaging or necessary artistic transgression?) can betranscended. Furthermore, I seek to reconsider the question ofcitation and political potency: is it possible to use the language ofpower in critique? How does one assess the political potential of acultural strategy of resistance that utilises the hegemonic structuresit seeks to dismantle? As well as drawing on Derrida, I will look toJudith Butler’s incarnation of iterability17 in order toestablish a new framework for understanding the consequences ofSierra’s work.
Further definition of serious and non-serious utterances is needed,particularly in establishing them as necessarilymaterialised enterprises. Austin’s specification of thenon-serious, when an utterance is “intelligibly used notseriously”18, implies a conscious and purposeful usage ofthe performative utterance out of context. These incorrect contextsare listed as “said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in apoem, or spoken in soliloquy.”19 Austin deems the“non-serious” as contextualised within the staged medium, or indeedany form that indicates fiction. This not only serves to undermine theability of those contexts to enact social landmarks, but additionally,it connotes the “non-serious” as being necessarily experiential and asalways having an audience. While Derrida’s central problem withAustin’s argument is his reliance on “the conscious intention of thesubject”, I wish to highlight that the conscious mis-use ofperformatives alternatively indicates that intention can be part ofthe larger societal process of iterability.20 Derrida doesnot disagree with intention playing a role in language as long as theprocess of iterability, as a process outside the consciousness ofindividuals, is understood to be responsible for the production ofthat language, requiring that conscious intention should no longer beunderstood as the central governing force in language.21 Assuch, Austin’s non-serious ‘staged performative’ becomes theperformed citation; the referencing of speech said or writtenelsewhere. This, performing the non-serious utterance is both anunconscious and conscious act with performers embodying an unconsciousmedium of the iterable process whilst knowingly, and consciously,reciting a script.
The non-serious is a transparent speech act, as its conditionsforeground language as necessarily circulated and constituted throughrepetition. Derrida chooses the performative utterance as an entitywhich, through its non-serious manifestations, provides windows ontothe iterable process. Conversely, Derrida describes the serious as a‘statement event,’ experienced as having a status of singularity andunderstood (incorrectly) through the intention of the speaker. Theserious utterance can thus be understood as invisible throughnaturalisation, concealing the processes by which language isconstituted, and the non-serious as necessarily that of repetition asit is, in part, knowingly performed.
Judith Butler moves the concept of the materialised citation onto therealm of the body, through her definition of gender“performativity”22, an analysis which uses Derrida’siterability to deconstruct sex and gender categories. Recognising theprocess of iterability as a force of hegemonic power, “the citationalpractice by which discourse produces the effects itnames”23, Butler’s performativity is fundamental to anunderstanding of iterability as “materialized”24 and as atool of social control. In terms of importing Butler’s analysis intothe terms of the serious and non-serious, “naturalized gender”25can be understood as the serious and the non-serious as those actswhich “reflect on the imitative structure [iterability] by whichhegemonic gender is itself produced”.26 Butler understandsthe “reiteration” of gender as a process that fundamentally includes“instabilities” and that it “mark[s] one domain in which the force ofthe regulatory law can be turned against itself”.27 Butlerfurther establishes such instabilities – the politicised non-serious –as having the potential for the revolutionary use of the“alterity”28 of citation and a fundamental ability todeviate from, while also reflecting the original. The potential forcritique in Butler’s “non-serious” is conceptualised as gender parody,specifically practices of drag, which situates Austin’s specificationof the utterance used “intelligibly not seriously” as one in revolt.This is not to say, however, that certain subjects are not constitutedthrough the involuntary process of iterability, or interpellation29in the case of Butler’s performativity. Just as it was the case thatunder Derrida’s account all utterances were subject to iterability,for Butler, all subjects are gendered through that “very regulatorylaw”.30 Derrida’s allowance for intention requires thatwhile a subject’s intention is not completely void in speech, it is nolonger the central axis. The same is true in Butler’s evocation ofdrag: where the intention in these events could be seen as palpable,it does not undermine the larger structure of performativity. Rather,as a non-serious entity, drag can only be comprehended in relation tothe “serious” normative categories of gender and the overarchingprocess of performativity. Butler is clear that in drag, and it ispossible to infer that in all citational parody, “there is nonecessary relation between drag and subversion” and that “drag maywell be used in the service of both the denaturalization and thereidealization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms.”31In establishing the non-serious as potentially political, but notstructurally subversive, Butler’s drag can be appreciated as a crucialtool for evaluating instances of the non-serious in other criticalcultural practices.
The definitional capabilities of the stage, and its accompanyingrelationship of speaker and audience, are a structural component inButler’s understanding of the serious and non-serious. In heranalysis, both serious utterances of gender and non-serious“instabilities” are physically materialised, however, staged qualitiesare structurally necessary for recognition of the non-serious as acitation. In her analysis of Paris Is Burning (1991) – Butler’scentral discussion of drag – it is precisely because “dragpageantry”32 is watched by a live audience that thenon-serious is articulated. The audience within the film reads thepageant, judging each performer in terms of the success of theirimpersonation by a degree of “realness”.33 Attainingrealness is the ability of a performer to successfully dissolve theartifice of their own performance, or any indication of non-seriousqualities, and seamlessly become, for example, a “bangie, fromstraight black masculinist culture”.34 The judging audienceand the performer together evoke the non-serious, creating a literalrunway where the serious utterance, a successfully “real”impersonation of a straight black male, for example, is recognised asa citation. The necessary context of the non-serious, then, is on thestage and in the mouths of Others, revealing that recognition is afoundational component of citation. While the serious (in the case ofButler, hegemonic gender) also requires performance for constitution,as a normalised occurrence, its viewing is not announced. The stage ofthe non-serious is what marks it as such and, as inParis is Burning, the naming by its audience is also whatestablishes it as citation. The gaze of the audience, Butler reminds,is “structured through those hegemonies” and, therefore, through “thehyperbolic staging of the scene”35 the non-serious is born,or, in fact, witnessed.
An “ambivalent”36 politicisation of the audience isarticulated by Butler as the audience being “drawn into the abjectionit wants to both resist and overcome.”37 While Butler isdiscussing an audience with a specific “abject”38 identity,the ambiguous political potential of the non-serious that shedescribes is applicable to citational events more generally. Thenon-serious is often interpreted as universally subversive, a citationthat is, therefore, a critique of the norm, where a closer readingcould prove otherwise. If “realness” is an example of the dual event,the enactment of the serious as a non-serious project, a similarlycomplex combination of utterances should be read in other citationalmobilisations.
Guy Debord’s “integrated spectacle” argues that the serious andnon-serious event is a powerful tool in service of liberal democratichegemony. Here, it is clear that the dual utterance is not only anoccurrence in (sub)cultural39 activities. Rather, theintegrated spectacle contextualises Butler’s reminder of thereinscription of power as a possibility in citation, in terms of latecapitalist strategy. The stress Butler places on the precarity ofcitational subversion, the possible reinscription of power, isexpressed by Debord’s integrated spectacle as not solely a possibleoutcome but a method of expanding capital’s frontier. The integratedspectacle is a form of power that “has integrated itself into realityto the same extent that it is describing it, and that it wasreconstructing it as it was describing it.”40 Understandingmanifestations of the non-serious and their ‘description of reality’,as a re-establishment of the serious (the hegemonic) highlights thepower of description to integrate power. Contemporary art practice isone method of description and given the art market’s inseparabilityfrom global capitalism, its practices of integration operate with muchat stake. Santiago Sierra’s “ethnographic realism”, or his art“actions” which “form an indexical trace of the economic and socialreality of the place in which he works”41, can beunderstood as an incarnate of the serious/non-serious utterance. Heenacts a labour contract which cites its own construction incapitalism. In terms of the logic of the performative utterancehowever, can the context of Sierra’s work be localised, as ClaireBishop suggests through the “indexical trace”? As he is replicatingthe same power dynamic42 in each city he is invited to workin, hiring cheap labour, Sierra is, rather, providing a view into theconstruction of the impoverished subject. This non-serious gesturepries at a process much larger than local economies, while at the sametime excavating local realities both for aesthetic definition as wellas in a serious utterance that is not as “ephemeral”43 asBishop concludes in ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’. Like theintegrated spectacle, Sierra’s work reinscribes an abusive powerrelation by describing it, in an iteration that garners power throughthe embodiment of the labour contract, contextualising performativityas a process which similarly constitutes the identity of the worker.For the performer-workers inThe wall of a gallery pulled out, inclined 60 degrees from theground and sustained by five people(2000) orTwenty-four blocks of concrete constantly moved during a day’s workby paid workers(1999) they perform acts of manual labor that utilise their bodies asany “real” contract would, albeit in the ‘wrong’ context of the artinstitution. Bishop points out that Sierra’s critics quickly summarisehis work as illustrating the “pessimistic obvious: capitalismexploits”.44 She is right that the work is more than that.Like the mixed utterance of the ball queens, that expression ofsubscription and simultaneous defiance, Sierra’s work is a complexinterrogation as well as a proliferation of the processes of capitalit deals in. As in the drag pageant, some utterances are moreresistant and others more complicit.
Sierra created a living map of the racial and class based exclusionsof the Venice Biennale, evoking a sense of role reversal for viewersof Persons Paid to Have Their Hair Dyed Blond, (2001). Thiswork astutely references the systematic oppression of wholepopulations by liberal democracy, which the art world is a part of, asBishop rightfully points out.45 Bishop describes feelingimplicated by this piece in the processes of economic exclusion thatstructure society, noticing the unsettlement of herself-identification at the fair because of the inclusion of the streetvendors. “Surely these guys were actors? Had they crept in here for ajoke?”46 The unsettlement of identity, in this case one ofelite cultural belonging and financial privilege, is what thesuccessfully denaturalising serious/non-serious utterance sends out inrippling waves. Other variations of Sierra’s practice though haveyielded what Butler described as the “reidealization” of norms.Ian the Irish (2002), involved Sierra paying an Irish streetperson to stand outside a gallery in Birmingham, England, repeating,“My participation in this piece could generate a profit of 72,000dollars. I am being paid 5 pounds”.47 An instance ofintegrated spectacle, this dual utterance serves only to echo arelation of inequity. While attempting a citation, this event fails toactivate a non-serious relation to its audience, as the street personremains naturalised: in a familiar position, soliciting passersby onthe street. Serving up the obviously pessimistic, in a form which doesnot transcend the serious labour contract it enacts. The same is trueof 160cm Line Tattooed on Four People’ (2000). As both anunusual and aggressively exploitative project, Tattooed avoidsa non-serious reading as an un-placeable utterance, rendering viewerseither appalled48 or non-plussed, such as Bishop when shereferred to it as “ephemeral,”49 which even its titledisproves. Its formal relationship to minimalism adds a dimension tothe exploitation of bodies as part of the history of art, but confusesthe labour relationship it references. Therefore,Tattooed cannot be seen as citation. Lacking “realness”, like abad drag performance, it has gone too far.
The serious/non-serious utterance can be described as parasitic, inrevival of Austin’s original term, to both its conflicting ends.Either it is a hegemonic parasite, burrowing deeper down new pathways,or it is a counter insurgent, attaching itself and poisoning the vitalinternal system of power relations. At the end of ‘Bodies ThatMatter’, Butler addresses this relationship by asking: “How to knowwhat might qualify as an affirmative resignification – with all theweight and difficulty of that labor – and how also, to run the risk ofreinstalling the abject at the site of its opposition?”50Sierra’s work puts this question to task with much at stake, namelyintensifying contemporary complicity in the degradation of Others and,as Butler will come to in later writings, their precarious lives.51Looking forward, Butler notes the mutual, “unstable and continuingcondition of the ‘one’ and the ‘we’”, or as humans we are all “usedby, expropriated in” language together, “the ambivalent condition ofthe power that binds”.52 Sierra’s work implicates both theI and the We, to variously parasitic ends. The reinscription of poweroccurs. But alternately, like Bishop and the whole of the Biennalethat Blond (2001) year, an entire community can berearticulated through such an utterance.
Sierra’s work illustrates that the political potential of the citationas always a potentiality, and that strategies of resistance openthemselves up to failure every time they import the language of powerinto critique. This risk however, is structural to the citation’scritical efficacy. As the activation of the audience is the dissidentpotential of the citational utterance, this effect can only be aimedfor and not preemptively guaranteed. The risk of not being recognised,as in the case of some of Sierra’s labour contracts and for anyvariable reason not affecting viewers subversively, is inescapable,structural to the citation and cannot be accounted for. As an eventwithout a ‘successful’ formula to appropriate, I would argue it is oneof the more potent strategies available in cultural critique. In termsof evaluation, each instance of the serious and non-serious utterancemust be analysed individually, with an eye to the activation of theaudience; the impact of Sierra’s work cannot be appropriatelyaddressed when viewed as a whole. In light of this risk, Sierra’s workoperates through an ethics of pragmatism rather than of drama orshock. He puts into play citation after citation, as few will succeed.
Notes
1 J. Derrida. ‘Signature Event Context’. Margins of Philosophy.(Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1982.) p321.
2 J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1962.)
3 J. Derrida. ‘Signature Event Context’. Margins of Philosophy.(Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1982.) p321.
4 ibid., p321.
5 Earlier in the essay, Derrida deconstructs the primacy of speechover writing in Western philosophy, see pp309-321.
6 Derrida’s concept of the potential for citation as a structuralnecessity of language. Iterability equals ‘repetition/alterity’, p317.
7 J. Derrida. ‘Signature Event Context’. Margins of Philosophy.(Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1982.) p322.
8 J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1962.) pp8-9 qtd. in J. Derrida. ‘Signature EventContext’. Margins of Philosophy. (Chicago: University ofChicago P, 1982.) p323.
9 J. Derrida. ‘Signature Event Context’. Margins of Philosophy.(Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1982.) p323.
10 ibid., p325. In the text Derrida italicises seriously andparasitic and signs J.D. I am doing the same, to draw attention toanother aspect of Austin’s quote.
11 ibid., p324. Derrida notes Austin’s creation of asuccess/failure opposition.
12 ibid., p325. Or a ‘general citationality’.
13 Furthermore, Searle’s notion of the parasitic utterance as relianton the non-serious intention of the speaker or writer isn’t useful formy analysis and instead serves Searle’s description of literature,namely metaphor. Towards an analysis of contemporary art, I use Austinand Derrida’s deconstruction of Austin, and the definition of theparasitic as the product of abnormal context. See: J.R. Searle.Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
14 Derrida utilises the non-serious because it is the centralexclusion of Austin’s argument, the exclusion for Derrida being anecessary mechanism in metaphysical thought. Derrida’s conception ofthe “trace” and his work on absence and presence in ‘On Grammatology’and ‘Writing and Difference’ are important precursors to iterabilityand together, form a more complete picture of Derridiandeconstruction.
15 Searle’s critique of ‘Signature Event Context’ elucidates thelatter claim, that language is tied explicitly to context andintention and iterability is the process by which linguisticconventions are repeated, across contexts. I do not enter into much ofDerrida’s debate with Searle, instead taking Derrida’s conception ofiterability to task uncontested.
16 In this essay, the serious and non-serious will be used withoutquotations to signify the use of them as terms outside the context of‘Signature Event Context’.
17 Specifically, Butler’s discussion of drag and its precariouslysubversive potential inBodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits Of ‘Sex’ (NewYork: Routledge, 1993.)
18 J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1962.) pp8-9 qtd. in J. Derrida. ‘Signature EventContext’. Margins of Philosophy. (Chicago: University ofChicago P, 1982.) p323.
19 ibid., 324.
20 Derrida’s response to Searle in Limited Inc. providesfurther elaboration on the role of intention, and its limits, initerability. In Reiterating the Differences, Searle understandsiterability to be the “necessary presupposition of the forms whichintentionality takes,” and therefore, iterability solely constitutesthe meaning of linguistic conventions, which are then applieduniformly across contexts. Iterability provides the tools for theindividual speaker to load with meaning. Rather, Derrida clarifiesthat iterability is both the basic presupposition for the creation ofmeaning, and the creator of meaning itself, that which continuallyfragments meaning through repetition. See: J. Derrida. ‘Limited Inc aB C …’ and ‘Summary of Reiterating the Differences’Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. Print.
21 J. Derrida. ‘Signature Event Context’.Margins of Philosophy. (Chicago: University of Chicago P,1982.) pp326-327.
22 J. Butler.Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits Of ‘Sex’ (NewYork: Routledge, 1993.) p2.
23 ibid., p2.
24 ibid., p2.
25 Hegemonic expressions of sex and gender, where the iterablestructure of gender construction is rendered invisible.
26 J. Butler.Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits Of ‘Sex’ (NewYork: Routledge, 1993.) p125.
27 ibid., p2.
28 J. Derrida. ‘Signature Event Context’.Margins of Philosophy. (Chicago: University of Chicago P,1982.) p317. ‘The essential iterability of communication(repetition/alterity)’.
29 “Interpellation is the constitutive process where individualsacknowledge and respond to ideologies, thereby recognizing themselvesas subjects.” ‘Interpellation’. Index. 12 Nov. 2011 <
30 J. Butler.Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits Of ‘Sex’ (NewYork: Routledge, 1993.) p2.
31 Ibid., p125.
32 J. Butler.Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits Of ‘Sex’ (NewYork: Routledge, 1993.) p128.
33 ibid., 129. Butler defines realness as “a morphologicalideal”. “What determines the effect of realness is the ability tocompel belief, to produce the naturalized effect.” Ibid., p129.
34 ibid., p129.
35 ibid., p132.
36 ibid., p124. “Ambivalent” is Butler’s term to describe dragas not always subversive, but rather containing both “a sense ofdefeat and a sense of insurrection”. Ibid., p128.
37 ibid., p132.
38 Butler uses abject to signify the construction of bodies outsidethe norm. “Given this understanding of construction…it is stillpossible to raise the critical question of how such constraints notonly produce the domain of intelligible bodies, but produce as well adomain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies.” Butler, xi.
39 Sierra’s work and the art world more generally cannot be considereda subculture, whereas drag as a practice is connected to a specificqueer subculture.
40 Guy Debord. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.(London: Verso, 1998.) p9.
41 Claire Bishop. ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’. (October110 2004: 51-79) p70. Available at:
42 The same power dynamic but different outcomes of oppressiondependent on the city. As Bishop notes “immigration, the minimum wage,traffic congestion, illegal street commerce, homelessness”.ibid., p72.
43 Claire Bishop. ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’. (October110 2004: 51-79) p70.
44 ibid., p71.
45 ibid., p73. Referencing her own discomfort at the 2001Venice Biennale at the inclusion of illegal street vendors in Sierra’spiece, Bishop clearly articulates “Sierra’s action disrupted the artaudience’s sense of identity, which is founded precisely on unspokenracial and class exclusions”.
46 ibid., p73.
47 Katy Siegel and Paul Mattick. Money: Art Works. (London:Thames & Hudson, 2004.) p77.
48 “Sierra has attracted tabloid attention and belligerent criticismfor some of his more extreme actions, such as160 cm Line Tattooed on Four People (2000)”, Bishop p70.
49 Claire Bishop. ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’. (October110 2004: 51-79) p70.
50 J. Butler.Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits Of ‘Sex’ (NewYork: Routledge, 1993.) p240.
51 J. Butler.Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence. London:Verso, 2004. Print. In which Butler considers the relation to theOther after 9/11. In relation to my concluding paragraph, her call for‘imagining interdependency’. Ibid., xii-xiii.
52 J. Butler.Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits Of ‘Sex’ (NewYork: Routledge, 1993.) p242.