Rethinking Comradeship from a Feminist Position

With regard to the aim of the pilot programme of the School of Common Knowledge that seeks ‘to co-learn how to resist and transform the alliance of neo-liberal and neo-fascist forces in today’s world’, I would begin by mentioning the book published in 2017 in which Enzo Traverso, historian of modern and contemporary Europe, answers the questions posed by social anthropologist Régis Meyran. In English translation, the book is published under the title The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right.

Traverso names the present moment as a period of post-fascism, since the current ascent of the radical right in Europe displays a semantic ambiguity and differs from the fascist movements of the 1920s and the 1930s. His concept of post-fascism ‘emphasizes its chronological distinctiveness and locates it in a historical sequence implying both continuity and transformation.’11.Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (trans. David Broder), London: Verso, 2019, pp. 15–16. He pays particular attention to the issue of right-wing identitarianism, arguing that, when the right talks about identity, its main concern is identification – the politics of social control adopted in Europe since the late nineteenth century. In so doing, Traverso reminds the readers that identification is just one aspect of what Foucault called the advent of biopolitical power, and argues that ‘the radical right would combine very modern biopolitical measures of identification and control with a very conservative identitarian discourse that aims at denouncing cosmopolitism and globalisation as vectors of rootlessness.’22.Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism, p. 111. Finally, he concludes, ‘the “good” people of the post-fascist imagination are nationalist, anti-feminist, homophobic, xenophobic, and nourish a clear hostility toward ecology, modern art and intellectualism.’33.Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism, p. 110.

In his endeavour to elaborate linkages between post-fascism and populism, Traverso emphasizes that the very definition of populism is highly problematic. Given that it is not reducible to the ‘rhetorical procedure that consists of exalting the people’s “natural” virtues and opposing them to the élite – and society itself to the political establishment – in order to mobilize the masses against “the system”’, he argues that populism is above all a style of politics rather than an ideology.44.Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism, p. 37.

Traverso’s comprehension of populism as a style of politics rather than ideology leads me to Baudrillard’s 1990 statement that reads: ‘Of the political sphere one can say that the idea of politics has disappeared but that the game of politics continues in secret indifference to its own stakes.’55.Jean Baudrillard, ‘After the Orgy’, in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (trans. James Benedict), London: Verso, 1993, p. 7. More than thirty years later, it is evident that in so-called high politics any trace of political thinking has disappeared. But my question, to which I have no answer, is: How come that, today, a field of contemporary art practices that are inseparable from critical theories has become the rare sphere where political thinking is taking place – and is this field of extended and perpetually redefined notions of art capable of generating tools to resist the lethal alliance of neo-liberal and neo-fascist forces? Here, I am thinking of art practices that address prevailing conditions in the world – a permanent state of war, environmental destruction, poverty, global inequality, racism, violence against women and sexual minorities.

A few years ago, Rosi Braidotti argued in one of her talks that today revolution is a fascist concept.66.Rosi Braidotti, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 2019. See https://x.com/cececebe/status/1114430101930823682. She was thinking of the global phenomenon of the so-called conservative revolution and its inherent ‘anti-gender ideology’ movement. Abundantly financed, conservative revolution, which is operated by an alliance of neo-liberal and neo-fascist forces, primarily targets feminist epistemologies. A syntagm that demonizes feminist deconstructions of gender, gender ideology was coined to blur and reinforce the lethal agency of the most persistent ideology – the patriarchal ideology that relies on the construction of sexual difference and the petrification of the gender-binary system.

Regarding the notion of revolution, it is worth recalling that, in response to the 1789 ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, in 1791 Olympe de Gouges published ‘Declaration of the Rights of Women and of the Female Citizen’. Two years later she was executed by guillotine. A playwright and social activist, Olympe de Gouges was one of the first opponents of slavery in France. In her writings she was concerned with issues of unemployment, social insecurity, children’s and women’s rights.

In 1938, at the dawn of World War II, Virginia Woolf published the book-length essay Three Guineas.77.Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, London: Hogarth Press, 1938. See https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200931h.html. It was an answer to a question posed to her three years before by an unnamed educated man: that of how, in her opinion, it was possible to prevent a war. She stated that it had taken her three years to respond because it was a unique case in the history of human correspondence, that an educated man had asked for an answer to such a question from a woman.

Focusing her answer on epistemology, precisely on the British higher educational system from which women, ‘daughters of educated men’, as she calls them, were excluded until the beginning of the century, she meticulously and masterfully deconstructs concepts of culture and education, focusing on the effects of hegemonic epistemological paradigms. She starts from the fact that the right to education outside of their own home was denied to women for centuries. Even in her time, only a few women had access to universities where men whose political decisions shaped the fate of the world were educated. Remarking on the planned investments of educated men in the education of their sons for influential professions, through generous donations to universities, she recalls that the only profession available to the ‘female class’ from ‘time immemorial until 1919’ was marriage, and that ‘daughters of educated men’ for centuries gave up their own education for the benefit of their brothers, which was evidently a failed investment for them. To the unnamed educated man who had asked her in a letter how it would be possible to prevent the war, she answered by citing biographies of famous men from which she concluded that, for most men, war was a profession, a source of happiness and excitement precisely because they learned in the elite schools they attended that war gave them an opportunity to show their patriotism and express their masculinity.

In her answer, Woolf relies not only on the data she draws from the literary genre of biography (or autobiography) but also on archival documents and exact, publicly available statistical data that show the enormous disparity in the funding of men’s and women’s colleges since the end of the nineteenth century, when it was that the latter were allowed to exist at all.

She does not fail to emphasize that women who graduated were not allowed to use an academic title that would eventually enable them to pursue an academic career and teach others. She also mentions the vote in which the overwhelming majority of students at the University of Cambridge rejected the proposal that women who had passed all exams be allowed to add the honorific BA to their names. Even this ban was not sufficient satisfaction for the male students, who were so consternated by the proposal itself that they demolished the bronze doors of Newnham Women’s College, made in memory of the first headmistress Miss Clough. Woolf asks:

Need we collect more facts from history and biography to prove our statement that all attempt to influence the young against war through the education they receive at the universities must be abandoned? For do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it? Do they not prove that education, far from teaching educated generosity and magnanimity, makes them on the contrary so anxious to keep their possessions, that ‘grandeur and power’ of which the poet speaks, in their own hands, that they will use not force but much subtler methods then force when they are asked to share them? And are not force and possessiveness very closely connected to war? Of what use then is a university education in influencing people to prevent war?88.Ibid.

Woolf also offers her own view of the reasons for the lack of public resistance by educated women to the evident culture of violence generated by the principles on which education at the most prestigious and influential universities was based:

In the first place, what reason is there to think that university education makes the educated against war? Again, if we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge, are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she may win the same advantages as her brothers? Further, since the daughters of educated men are not of Cambridge University they have no say in that education, therefore how can they alter that education even if we ask them to?99.Ibid.

Through the imaginary answer of a potential financial donor toward the cost of renovating a dilapidated college building, to the principal of a hypothetical women’s college asking him to contribute, Woolf, as early as 1938, denounces the principles on which the neoliberal reform of the higher education system was to begin in the 1980s, first in Great Britain and then in the whole of Europe. Since then, an insistence on ‘education for the needs of labour market’ and on the imperative of competitiveness for scientific research has foreclosed many ‘unprofitable’ fields of study, especially in the humanities. The imaginary answer of the potential donor reads:

Let us inform you we are spending three hundred millions annually upon the army and navy, for according to a letter that lies cheek by jowl with your own, there is grave danger of war. How can then you seriously ask us to provide you with money with which to rebuild your college? … Cambridge can be quoted as an example of practical results which come from Research for its own sake. What has your college done to stimulate great manufacturers to endow it? Have you taken a leading part in the invention of the implements of war? How far have your students succeeded in business as capitalists? How then can you expect ‘very handsome bequests and donations’ to come your way?1010.Ibid.

Concluding that neither the old system of education nor the old colleges bred a particular respect for liberty or a particular hatred of war, Woolf offers her own vision of a new, impossible, peace education. Such a college should be young and poor, an experimental, adventurous college, not built of carved stone and stained glass but of some cheap, easily combustible material that does not hoard dust or perpetrate traditions. It should not have chapels, museums or libraries with chained books, because pictures and books should be new and always changing. Asking what should be taught in such a new, poor college, she answers:

Not the art of dominating other people, not the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital. … The poor college must teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practiced by poor people; such as medicine, mathematics, music, painting and literature. It should teach the art of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people lives and minds, and the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery that are allied with them. The aim of new college, the cheap college, should not be to segregate and separate, but to combine. It should explore the ways in which mind and body can be made to cooperate; discover what new combinations make good wholes in human life.1111.Ibid.

Virginia Woolf’s vision of impossible, cheap college articulates an idea of comradeship far beyond the standard notion of that term, which usually implies male bonding or an association of people where patriarchal principles are not subjected to discussion.

In the chapter ‘Multitude against Empire’ of their book Empire (2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri remind the readers of the fact that communication has increasingly become the fabric of production, and accordingly, that, as linguistic cooperation has increasingly become the structure of productive corporeality, issues of control over linguistic sense and meaning and over networks of communication become ever more central for political struggle. They argue that ‘all the elements of corruption and exploitation are imposed on us by the linguistic and communicative regimes of production: destroying them in words is as urgent as doing so in deeds. … Knowledge has to become linguistic action and philosophy has to become a real reappropriation of knowledge.’1212.Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 404. They also warn that machines and technology are not neutral and independent entities but biopolitical tools deployed in specific regimes of production, both facilitating certain practices and prohibiting others. Too, they warn that the hybridization of human and machine is no longer a process that takes place only on the margins of society: rather, it is fundamental episode at the centre of the constitution of the multitude and its power.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Gertrude Stein, who in her experimental writings deprived words of their standard meaning, was fully aware that knowledge has to become linguistic action. In a lecture-performance entitled ‘Poetry and Grammar’ held during her American tour in the early 1930s, she pronounced: ‘Poetry is concerned with using and abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns.’1313.Gertrude Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar’, Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Selected Works 1911–1945, London: Peter Owen Publishers, p. 136. Language, she said, ‘as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is intellectual recreation and there is not possible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that as long as humanity is anything.’1414.Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar’, p. 140.

Language, both visual and verbal, considered as intellectual re-creation lies at the core of the complex and multilayered intermedia works that contemporary artist Nicole Hewitt has articulated during the last two decades. The issues of poetry and grammar too are of crucial importance. Hewitt is an experimental filmmaker, writer, performer and educator who works as a professor in the Department of New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. All of her works explore the agency of grammar and syntax in procedures of representation, or – better, maybe, to say – of storytelling. It is clear that all of Hewitt’s works are at once grounded in feminist epistemologies, as well as being a considerable contribution to them. Her ‘de-figuration’ procedures of verbal and visual language, her soundscapes and her invention of specific cinematic language that undermines hegemonic discourses should be considered with regard to Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges. First published in 1988, Haraway’s article ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ defines situated knowledges as a knowledge of communities rather than isolated individuals. In it, she argues for ‘politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims.’1515.Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, Autumn 1988, p. 589. For Haraway, situated knowledge requires that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen, a ground or a resource.1616.Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges’, p. 592. Challenging the dogma of so-called objective scientific knowledge, Haraway has recalled that vision requires instruments of vision, arguing that ‘an optics’ is a politics of positioning.1717.Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges’, p. 586.

In Hewitt’s films, lecture-performances and books, the objects of knowledge are literally shown as actors and agents. Likewise, their instruments of vision are not hidden but revealed, showing thereby how ‘an optics’ becomes a politics of positioning. In 2008 after two years of research, which, in this case, was inseparable from cinematic performance, including appearances by cinematographers and the director herself in front of the cameras, Hewitt’s film In Time was released. The film was shot using two different cameras, mini DV and 16mm, with the aim of emphasizing the agency of various instruments and pointing to the materiality of media, in particular in relation to corporeal materiality.

In the preface of the eponymous book, which is not reducible to the film script and has to be considered within a notion of autotheory characteristic of feminist art practices, Hewitt writes that the film In Time ‘involved a prolonged immersion in a particular community, a particular culture or subculture in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro. For several years I trained and competed in Latin American dancing to produce a film where I was both participant and observer.’1818.Nicole Hewitt, In Time,  Croatian Film Association, 2013. However, her learning to dance and competing were not for the dance’s sake at all. At the beginning of the film, the director’s voice-over informs the spectators that the dance school in Zagreb in which the film crew enrolled was located in the Croatian military academy and that most of the participants of the dance school were cadets. Whoever wanted to make a scene for the film was welcome, says the voice. Bearing in mind that filming began only a few years after the wars ended in the territory of former Yugoslavia, the fact that this civilian dancing school was located in this military building, or architectural object, opens a wide range of questions. In the film, war is not mentioned at all, but its permanently interrupted narrative flow and visual insistence on repeatedly shot scenes imply the radical social changes occurring in the new nation states established on the ruins of former Yugoslavia in the so-called transition period – from socialism to wild capitalism. For example, a dance competition in Mostar is depicted with images of various granulation showing the emblematic Mostar bridge. Speaking in the first-person plural, the voice-over describes the light conditions before the old bridge, but the bridge appearing in the film as a set of identically-framed images of different materialities is not the bridge that was protected as cultural monument. It is, rather, a replica of the original bridge that was intentionally destroyed in the 1990s war, with the aim of cutting connections and setting up a border between different ethnic communities that lived peacefully in the city before the war. In Time also tells a story of two young dancers from Montenegro who, being invited to the United States, prepare for emigration.

Beginning in 2010 and continuing as a series of lecture performances until it ended in 2022 when a book of the same title was published,1919.Nicole Hewitt, This Woman is Called Jasna: A sketch for a historical novel in cinematic form, Zagreb: Pangolin, 2022. Hewitt’s work This Woman is Called Jasna also tangentially addressed issues of war, displacement and migration. The book’s subtitle contains the specification of its own genre: A sketch for a historical novel in cinematic form. The subtitle clearly points to a procedure of transgression, not only of the categories of genre or particular media but, above all, narrative conventions including those of historiography. It points, furthermore, to the impossibility of identifying the speaking subject-position, which permanently slides between the individual and of the multitude. This work – then in progress – took the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in Hague as its subject. The project does not thematize any particular war crime, nor does it concentrate on the culprits or their victims. Instead, it focuses on ‘peripheralia’, concerning itself with every aspect of the technology of the trial and its media transmission. It could be said that the real object of Hewitt’s interest is the gap between the impossibility of the mediation of trauma and the obvious medialization and spectacularization of traumatic events – it is in this gap that her work manifests itself as an interminable process of translation.

While developing this work in progress, Hewitt was concerned with polyrhythmic and migrating voices. In her words:

The polyrhythmic is the simultaneous performance of conflicting rhythms, an entanglement of rhythmic fields where each trajectory proceeds in parallel with the other, they divulge, undulate and converge – meeting on occasion for a single beat. I place the notion of polyrhythmics alongside that of the syncope – a suspension of the dominant beat, producing a faltering absence – a gap in time.2020.Nicole Hewitt, unpublished manuscript, n.d.

In all its manifestations, whether it be lecture performances or a defamiliarized printed sketch for a historical novel in cinematic form, This Woman is Called Jasna shows how ‘an optics’ becomes a politics of positioning that occurs in the interspace of personal and official history. Being fully aware that seeing, as the essence of cognitive activity, is an unintended political act, Hewitt concentrates on what is overlooked – and how the overlooked lies in the foundations of the media images that build official history. From this situation stems the need to dissect the media image of the trial: to abstract it in diagrams produced on the basis of the pixilation of the digital image; to pronounce a choreography of movements of anyone caught on camera in the courtroom; to translate the figures visible on the screen of the accused, witnesses, prosecutors, defenders and judges into contours reminiscent of those that remain after a corpse is removed from a crime scene; to versify the instructions given by tribunal authorities and to render everything into the as-yet non-existing language capable of awakening the echo of the original trauma.

When war broke out in Croatia in 1991, a group of Hewitt’s friends – artists, musicians, students – dispersed throughout Europe. Many found ways of getting to Amsterdam by initially working sans papiers in various temporary jobs, settling in squats aided by the squatters’ community in Amsterdam, negotiating their immigration status and finding temporary jobs before getting employment at the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia). Thus, this art project produces its stories from an a priori position of inhabitation – that is, from the lived experience of these now-official ICTY participants who work in Chambers, the Office of the Prosecutor and Witness Support Sections but who were once the semi-legitimate immigrant underbelly of a dominant order. One of them is the title character, Jasna. At the beginning of Hewitt’s first lecture performance in the series, as well as at the beginning of her sketch for a historical novel in cinematic form, the reader, spectator or listener encounters the following text:

In 1990 Jasna was 23 years old. She was studying Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University in Zagreb. In earlier years she had often appeared on the covers of youth journals. Sometimes she had long hair, sometimes short, sometimes curly. … The photographers always made sure that they left the full format of the photograph untouched, that the black edge was clearly visible and that the composition was dynamic. Sometimes she was shown cut off from the head, sometimes from the waist. She was interested in the black edge of the photograph. It seemed to her that it formed a constitutive part of the photograph, which, along with her, provided a constant of sorts. Many years later, she read that this edge served as a sign and as evidence of an untouched format, that the photographer had framed the photograph in the moment of its taking and had not later reframed it. She was comforted by the fact that the graphic editor respected that evidence. She felt as if she were offering him psychosocial support and simultaneously proofing the materiality of the photograph. She often listened to Galeta’s talks at the MM Centre. Galeta also talked about the edge of the frame and about the space beyond the frame, about reality, that is, the materiality of film. It seemed to her that that very edge was the material reality of the film and she wondered if she too had an edge, or whether the edge referred only to the frame. Much later, at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s while she was working as a database administrator in the documentation and video-documentation unit for the Office of the Prosecutor in The Hague, she was troubled by the disappearance of the edge in digital photography.2121.Hewitt, This Woman is Called Jasna, pp. 33–34.

Delivering this text in the calm voice of a storyteller and producing, in the process, the position of the narrator, whose grammatical personality constantly slides across the fluid territory where she and me merge, Hewitt addresses time. But does time allow itself to be addressed? How can time, or more precisely the gap in time that is a faltering absence where the mute trauma resides, be uttered? To do this, Hewitt found it necessary to induce the sense of the corporeality of time, to reproduce it in its materiality, to find the material evidence of the time in question, forensic evidence that would enable the reconsideration of the concept of cultural history.

The issue of material evidence, forensic evidence, is problematized throughout the whole work in ways related to the construction of memory as an act of remembrance of the past but that occurs in the present. Questions of its reliability are addressed by de-figuring the visual and verbal language of the printed book’s chapters, which thematize still life, ruins, lies, metaphors, cities, shadows, voices and apparitions. These chapters are, as the stages of her lecture performances became, zones where reality and imagination merge and where multiple temporalities occur: past meets future, in a form of time travel that dissolves the borders of the speaking subject.

In Hewitt’s most recent work, entitled Women Minor Speculations (2021), the interplay of the personal pronouns spoken, I and we – that is, singular and plural – is connected not only to the procedure of questioning the acts of seeing and understanding, but above all to ‘the optics’ considered as a politics of positioning. Women Minor Speculations was also conceived as a work-in-progress that explores registers of visibility, sonority and intelligibility. The field research, during which most of the visual material was produced, started in 2015. It took place in an area that could be termed the south-eastern border of Europe, which includes north-eastern parts of Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Moldavia. The research was focused on neolithic female figurines specific to the prehistoric cultures of the Danube river basin, namely the Vučedol, Vinča, Baden and Cucuteni-Tripoli cultures. Hewitt was attracted by these figurines that ‘squatted’ in Bulgaria, Romania and Moldavia, but that were not displayed in any western European museum. In her words, ‘this peripheral prehistory of female representation becomes an alternative continuity of invisibility.’2222.Nicole Hewitt, Studio Pangolin, n.d., https://pangolin.hr/tko-smo-2/nicole-hewitt/hrvatski-projekti-nicole-hewitt/hrvatski-zene-minorne-spekulacije/. Translation by author. With a research group consisting of artists, she travelled across north-east Croatia, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria visiting archaeological sites and museums. The artist’s intention for the project was to speculatively connect material remains as evidence with the biographies of archaeologists, intertwining the subjects and objects of research that appeared at the same location within a period of 5,000 years – female figurines, constellations, astral calendars, vampires, vessels, music. In Hewitt’s own words, ‘the project vibrates between historiography, documentary, the analysis of objects, travelogue and speculative fiction.’2323.Ibid.

Between 2016 and 2021, Hewitt was developing Women Minor Speculations in different formats of public presentation, including open studio visits where artists were at work, a series of lecture performances realized in cooperation with artists Vida Guzmić and Ivan Slipčević, a multimedia installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, and finally an experimental film released in 2021. The film was shot on 35mm, 16mm, digital Bolex, Digital 8, mobile phones and still cameras. In Hewitt’s words, it was her attempt to ‘rewrite a historical narrative I manipulate with the levels of authority of an image, trying to inscribe into each frame or sequence the possibility of another one, thinking about forms of representing the minor subject in history, in images and in collective memory in a particular geopolitical location and within particular time frame.’2424.Nicole Hewitt, ‘Women Minor Speculations’, n.d., https://pangolin.hr/hr/women-minor-speculations/.

But what is the time frame in this case? As with her earlier works, time is not considered as a linear sequence but rather as non-chronological time. Or, to borrow Gertrude Stein’s concept, Hewitt’s works generate a continuous present. Paradoxically, this present is continuous and at once vanishing – a field in which the past and an uncertain future collide. The multiple temporalities within which the story of visibility and invisibility, intelligibility and non-intelligibility along the banks of the Danube river unfolds are emphasized by the narrator constantly shifting between first person singular and plural pronouns. When the voice-over tells us ‘we see’, that we includes not only the position of the filmmakers, and of the cinematic apparatus that gives us something to be seen, but also the position of spectator who is invited to reflect on what and under which conditions s/he sees, understands or misunderstands. In Hewitt’s film, there is no thing clearly given to be seen; rather, the ‘we see’ statement functions as an invitation to explore the patterns of visibility and audibility, the modalities of seeing, speaking and listening, as well as the positions from which observing takes place. Thus, the ‘we see’ in Women Minor Speculations denotes the forensic archaeology of vision that leads to numerous speculations.

But there is also an ‘I see’ in Hewitt’s film. The characteristic voice of this ‘I’ is that of a narrator that often shifts registers, being electronically modulated or being disturbed by white noise. Such electronic modulation indicates, maybe, that this voice of reflection or speculation comes from some other or outer space, or from the future. It might be the voice of an archaeologist from the future who explores dystopic landscapes, finding remains of our actual civilization mixed with traces of the Neolithic cultures signified by mysterious female figurines: this voice generates the field in which prehistory coexists with post-history. The question that arises while listening to the voice of the narrator speaking in the first-person singular is: To whom does that voice belong – to the individual or to the multitude? Is it corporeal? Is it a human voice at all? Are we listening to some kind of artificial intelligence, or the nonhuman entity reflecting on its own findings, doubts and possible conclusions?

It is worth recalling here Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image, which he articulated while working on his theses ‘On the Concept of History’:

The dialectical image is an occurrence of ball lightning that runs across the whole horizon of the past. Articulating the past historically means recognizing those elements of the past which come together in the constellation of a single moment. Historical knowledge is possible only within the historical moment. But knowledge within the historical moment is always knowledge of the moment. In drawing itself together in the moment – in dialectical image – the past becomes a part of humanity’s involuntary memory. The dialectical image can be defined as the involuntary memory of redeemed humanity.2525.Walter Benjamin, ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”’, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940 (trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings), Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2006, p. 403.

There is, literally, a ball of lightning in Hewitt’s Women Minor Speculations. Also connoted in this film is the involuntary memory that is the knowledge of this particular historical moment. But can we speak about ‘the involuntary memory of redeemed humanity’ in conditions of a permanent state of war and climate catastrophe caused by human agency?

In her 2022 text ‘A Livable Life? An Inhabitable World? Scheler on the Tragic’, Judith Butler, reflecting on the syntagm common world, argues that there is no such thing as a common world. Instead, she reminds the readers that there are many and overlapping worlds, for so many of the major resources of the world are not equitably shared. She poses a question:

But what if it remains descriptively true that some worlds are not quite part of that one world, that common world, or that there are zones of life that exist and persist outside the common or the commons? Perhaps those who dwell in such zones do the work for that common world, and are tied to it through labor, but are not for that reason of it, if by ‘of it’ we mean to designate a mode of belonging.2626.Judith Butler, ‘A Livable Life? An Inhabitable World? Scheler on the Tragic’, Puncta, vol. 5, no. 2, 2022, p. 8.

Butler enumerates here those who constitute replaceable labour, those who dwell outside of the zone of productivity as recognized by capitalist metrics or in the zone of criminality and who are considered the refuse, the waste of the common world: Black and Brown lives, the poor or those living in unpayable debt. ‘If we ask the question, what makes life livable’ – writes Butler – ‘we do so precisely because we know that under some conditions it surely is not, that that are unlivable conditions of poverty, incarcerations, or destitution of social and sexual violence, including homophobic, transphobic, racist violence and violence against women.’2727.Butler, ‘A Livable Life?’, p. 1. Furthermore, Butler argues, the question of livable life cannot be separated from the question of an inhabitable world. She writes:

The earth persists in many places without been inhabited by humans, but a world always implies a space and time of inhabitation. A world includes the temporal and spatial coordinates in which a life is lived. If the world is uninhabitable, then destruction has had its way with a world. If a life is unlivable, then the conditions of livability have been destroyed. The destruction of the earth through climate change makes for an uninhabitable world: it reminds us of the necessity of limits on the human inhabitation of the environment, the fact that we cannot inhabit all of the earth without destroying the earth, and imposing limits on where and how we live is necessary to preserve the earth which in turn preserves our lives.2828.Butler, ‘A Livable Life?’, p. 19.

Reflecting on Achille Mbembe’s argument that the devastation of the planet requires a planetary strategy that would allow us to imagine a world, a common world in which to breathe, Butler concludes that ‘to be a body at all is to be bound up with others and objects, with surfaces, and the elements including the air that is breathed in and out, air that belongs to no one and everyone.’2929.Butler, ‘A Livable Life?’, p. 22. Nicole Hewitt’s film Women Minor Speculations resounds with analogous thoughts.