• No-Self.

Ten Rules: No Rules [123]

forgoing intention: nothing unaccomplished
forgoing needs: no requirement unfulfilled
forgoing satisfaction: no favoring
forgoing judgement: no inappropriate action
forgoing comparison: exact oneness
forgoing attachment: nothing to eliminate
no true generality
no progress, no regression: static change, complete punctuality
no coming, no going
no grasping

- George Brecht, 1962

The way never acts yet nothing is left undone.

- Tao Te Ching, Chapter 37

The very name of Fluxus points to an appreciation of the world as a field of transformation, as flux. Like Zen, Fluxus posits a reconfiguration of the subject as an inextricable component within this field. Rather than presenting the subject as acting upon the world, there is a sense of reciprocal determination, an inter-action. George Brecht notes: "I conceive of the individual as part of an infinite space and time; in constant interaction with that continuum (nature), and giving order (physically or conceptually) to a part of the continuum with which he interacts." [124] In Zen thought, this continuum is known as sunyata, the primordial emptiness.

"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form," reads the Hannya Shingyo, the Heart Sutra, one of the essential texts of Zen. Indeed, the essence of Zen thought is found in the notion of emptiness, sunyata, the very ground of being. All dharmas, that is manifest forms, are seen as having no independent self-nature, no individual essence that separates them from the fabric of being, from any other dharma. These forms are themselves impermanent, provisional, continually becoming but never arriving at a moment of being.

Norman Bryson examines the notion of sunyata in the work of the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani, pointing out that the notion of an entity as a fixed body, clearly delineated from the world, does not hold up when regarded in the light of sunyata. "Subject" and "object" become inappropriate terms, as they are both revealed to be aspects of the other, each part of "the universal field of transformations."

Moved on to the field of sunyata or radical impermanence, the entity comes apart. It cannot be said to occupy a single location, since its locus is always the universal field of transformations: it cannot achieve separation from that field or acquire any kind of bounded outline. Because of its inseparability from the field of impermanence it cannot be said to enjoy independent self-existence, since the ground of being is everything else. And it cannot present itself in the guise of enduring form. [125]

Nishitani's project, as outlined by Bryson, is a radical critique of the Cartesian cogito, the notion of the subject as a permanent, stable center around which objects arrange themselves, shifting in and out of the subject's experiential horizon. Rather than regarding the subject as isolable entity, Nishitani - whose terms are clearly structured after Buddhist progenitors - asserts that what appears to be a given object is only the difference between that object and the surrounding field. The inverse is also true: the surrounding field is constituted of the difference between it and the given object. As discussed earlier, object and field, "it" and "other," are interdependent, and thus the object can not be examined in isolation from that field, can not be framed. Nor, for that matter, can the subject be isolated or framed.

In Zen, the individual, not bound by the notion of self as fixity, is rather understood as an integral part of an ever-shifting field of becoming. With no selfhood to preserve, the individual - who Rinzai calls "the one who has neither shape nor form, neither root nor trunk, and who, having no abiding place, is full of activities" [126] -is perpetually responding to the newest developments within the field of sunyata.

If a man comes to me and says, "I am seeking the Buddha," I come out in conformity with the situation of purity. If a man comes to me and asks about the bodhisattva, I come out in accordance with the situation of compassion (maitri or karuna). If a man comes to me and asks about bodhi [or enlightenment], I come out in accordance with the situation of incomparable beauty. If a man comes to me and asks about nirvana, I come out in accordance with the situation of serene quietude. The situations may vary infinitely, but the Man varies not. So, [it is said], "[It] takes forms in accordance with conditions, like the moon reflecting itself [variously] in water." [127]

It is thus inaccurate to conceive the self as a static entity, sitting solitary on a meditation cushion. On the contrary, the individual continually manifests both stasis and motility, and produces these experiences as new occasions arise. "He responds to all kinds of situations and manifests his activities, and yet comes out of nowhere." [128] Suzuki points out that the self, a manifestation of the formless field of sunyata, is thus difficult to locate as a center of experience.

The Self is ever moving or becoming. It is a zero which is a staticity, and at the same time an infinity, indicating that it is all the time moving. The Self is dynamic.

The Self is comparable to a circle which has no circumference, it is thus sunyata, emptiness. But it is also the center of such a circle. The Self is the point of absolute subjectivity which may convey the sense of immobility or tranquility. But as this point can be moved anywhere we like, to infinitely varied spots, it is really no point. The point is the circle and the circle is the point. [129]

Meditation, the principal practice of Zen, is thus not a recentering of the subject, a cultivation of "inner" tranquility or stability. Rather, meditation is a continuous process of responsiveness in accordance with "exterior" forces, a decentering of the subject's illusory selfhood. As Dick Higgins explains, the "point" of which Suzuki speaks can indeed be moved anywhere:

We have no fear of becoming: our thought processes are meditations (for our parents, the purpose of meditation was medicinal—it was to clear the mind and restore perspective. It had to be slow, for fear of losing control. But we begin where they left off—we need not control in order to experience, so we can meditate at any speed and virtually in any situation)— "meditations" they are, in the sense that they are liberated processes of thought and feeling, as opposed to directed ones. We are quite readily capable of experiencing these as emptiness and beyond concrete conceptibility. All this adds up to a new mentality, at least for the Western world. [130]

As Higgins points out, thought is not "directed" outward, but is "liberated," able to respond and conform to any given situation. The thinking self is reflexive of its surround, reconstituted in the margin between the subject and object. Here is a mutual interdependence of subject and object, two centers which reestablish themselves—through interaction—as a unity. In a 1978 interview, John Cage examines the notion of the "new mentality" of the decentered self, the dismantling of the cogito:

John Cage   I like to think that each thing has not only its own life but its
                   own center and that that center is, each time, the exact center
                   of the Universe.That is one of the principal themes I've retained
                   from my studies of Zen.

Daniel Charles   Must we dissociate the idea of life and the idea of the
                  center?

John Cage   Suzuki taught me that in fact we never stop establishing,
                   outside the life of things, a means of measure and that we
                   then continually try to re-place each thing into the grid of our
                   measure. Thus, we lose the things; we forget them, or we disfigure
                   them. Zen teaches us that we are really in a situation of decentering,
                   relative to the grid. In this situation, everything is at the center.
                   There is then a plurality and a multiplicity of centers. And they are
                   all interpenetrating. And Zen adds: in non-obstruction. To live, for all
                   things, is to be at the center. That entails interpenetration and
                   non-obstruction. [131]

This non-obstructive interpenetration, or rather, interaction, is a principal function of Fluxus event scores, themselves meaningless if taken as isolated structures. As discussed above, it is precisely the engagement of a participant in the interpretation and realization of a score which enables the work - and the participant - to come to presence. There can be no one correct interpretation, only provisional examples of realization. In this respect, Fluxus event scores are similar to koans, and they are also similar to Nietzschean aphorisms. Gilles Deleuze describes the generation of meaning in the aphorism as wholly contingent upon the intervention of external forces:

An aphorism is a play of forces, a state of forces each of which is always outside the others. An aphorism means nothing, signifies nothing, and has no more a signifier than a signified element. … An aphorism is a state of forces, the last of which is at the same time the most recent; the most present and ultimate/temporary one is always the most external force. Nietzsche poses it very clearly: if you want to know what I mean, find the force which gives a meaning, a new meaning if need be, to what I say. Connect the text with that force. There are no problems of interpretation of Nietzsche, there are only problems of machination: machinating Nietzsche's text, trying to find out with what external, current force he succeeds in getting something through, a flow of energy. [133]

Like the aphorism, the Fluxus event score is forever unfinished, continually calling to external forces to provide completion, to resonate with and overlap the text as set forth by the author. In the field of transformations, there is only a perpetual coming into being of the text—a becoming which includes as part of its constitution the very subjectivity that is engaged in its realization. There is thus only "legitimate misinterpretation," notes Deleuze: "treat the aphorism as a phenomenon awaiting new forces that come and "subjugate" it, make it work, or else make it explode."

Exercise

Determine the center of an object or event.
Determine the center more accurately.
Repeat, until further inaccuracy is impossible.

- George Brecht

It is the provisional nature of the Fluxus event score, its ability to be legitimately misinterpreted by any external force, that releases it from the grid of subjectivity, the notion of a permanent fixative power, which Deleuze calls the despotic machine. Like Nietzsche's aphorisms, Fluxus scores maintain an immediate relationship with the outside; indeed, they can not be said to have independent being apart from this externalizing relationship. Another blow to the cogito. Says Deleuze, "opening a text by Nietzsche at random dispenses us for one of the first times from interiority, the interiority of the soul or of consciousness, the interiority of essence or of concept, in other words, from what has always been the principle of philosophy." [134] The same is true of Fluxus event scores. To quote Rinzai, the work - like the participant who is engaged in the work's realization - "takes forms in accordance with conditions, like the moon reflecting itself [variously] in water."

Shadow Piece II

1. Project a shadow over the other
side of this page.

2. Observe the boundary line between
the shadow and the lighted part.

3. Become the boundary line.

- Chieko Shiomi, 1964

As sites of potential transformations, with no autonomous formal or material interiority, such texts stand outside the mechanisms which serve to implement social codes: laws, contracts and institutions. Such works, notes Deleuze, "can be understood neither through the establishment or the application of a law, nor through the offer of a contractual relationship, nor through the setting up of institutions. The only conceivable equivalent might be 'to be embarked with.'…Rowing together is sharing, sharing something irrespective of law, contracts, institutions. A drift, the movement of drifting, of 'deterritorialization."' [135] This is the movement of flux.

Opus 50

Place the palms of your hands side by side on this
piece of paper - After a short time: Raise the hands
and place your eyes in the same level as the palms -
Notice the coincident unus pultorum retardation in
the situations

etc!

or something else

- Eric Andersen

In place of interiority, both of the text and of the subject, Fluxus events establish a shifting zone of impermanence, a nomadism in which the self is continually redefined in accord with the external force (e.g., an event score, a performer, the weather) which is now asserting its momentary demands, and with which it now interacts. In Fluxus, as in Zen thought, the self is whatever one happens to be doing at any given moment. In the field of sunyata, a third entity reveals itself, an entity neither subject nor object, and yet constituted by both - subject and object are, as we have seen, the same thing. Identity becomes multiplicity.

One must take special care not to influence oneself. Tomorrow one will write Schubert's Fifth Symphony, cook some kohlrabi, develop a non-toxic epoxy, and invent still another kind of theater; or perhaps one will just sit and scream; or perhaps…

- Dick Higgins [136]

You don't try to make a style, or to achieve some identity - I mean your artwork doesn't try to achieve identity. You try to be out there in the waste open land and fool around.

- Eric Andersen

Here is the notion of self as a passage, a nomad, a flow of intensities as one shifts from one plateau of experience to the next. [137] On the periphery, out in the "waste open land," the nomad is a marginal entity (if he can be called an entity at all), a circle without circumference, without a center. The nomad stands in direct confrontation with the prevailing understanding of the artist as mythic subjectivity, the Producer of Great Works, organic, whole, fixed, comprehensible. The nomad escapes the over-coding of the State, of stasis, functioning instead within a smooth, open-ended, decoded space, a space in which one can freely move from any one point to any other. This perpetual play of difference and joyful anarchy in the face of the determinate is the space of a counterculture. "Its mode of distribution," says Brian Massumi, "is the nomos: arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort)." [138]

America was, you know, patting itself on the back. It already had its new art form [Abstract Expressionism], but we could have the street.

- Alison Knowles [139]

We are not nonparticipants, like the beats were: We are arming to take the barricades.

- Dick Higgins [140]

As Higgins notes, the beats were a generation of self-perceived rebels who played the role of "nonparticipants," and whose pursuit of a romantic individualism ultimately led them back into the fold of a tradition, back into the mythos of the American frontier. (Indeed, the beats' attraction to Eastern philosophies rang of transcendence, of the sublime, of the ecstatic Self subsumed into the Oneness of Nature.) This same mythos was concurrently being lionized and reified in the visual arts as "American-Type" painting: big, fast and unshaven, the abstract expressionist gesture became the loaded signifier of American Selfhood - the automatic writing of the American unconscious, vast and spontaneous, but always bound to its territory.

Nam June Paik points out that it is not only the destiny of American arts to be the vehicles of such territorialities, but that of Zen as well. In the June 1964 edition of cc fiVe ThReE, Paik had a great deal to say about Zen:

Now let me talk about Zen, although I avoid it usually, not to become the salesman of "OUR" culture like Daisetsu Suzuki, because the cultural patriotism is more harmful than the political patriotism, because the former is the disguised one, and especially the self-propaganda of Zen (the doctrine of self-abandonment) must be the stupid suicide of Zen.

Anyway, Zen consists of two negations.

the first negation:
       The absolute IS the relative.
the second negation:
       The relative IS the absolute.

The first negation is a simple fact, which every mortal meets every day; everything passes away… mother, lover, hero, youth, fame… etc. The second negation is the KEY-point of Zen. That means........

       The NOW is utopia, what it may be.
       The NOW in 10 minutes is also utopia, what it may be.
       The NOW in 20 hours is also utopia, what it may be.
       The NOW in 30 months is also utopia, what it may be.
       The NOW in 40 million years is also utopia, what it
       may be.

Therefore

We should learn,
       how to be satisfied with 75%
       how to be satisfied with 50%
       how to be satisfied with 38%
       how to be satisfied with 9%
       how to be satisfied with 0%
       how to be satisfied with -1000%......

Zen is anti-avant-garde, anti-frontier spirit, anti-Kennedy. Zen is responsible of asian poverty. How can I justify ZEN, without justifying asian poverty ?? It is another problem, to which I will refer again in the next essay.

• • •

The frustration remains as the frustration.
There is NO catharsis.

Paik, in this passage, in part an invective against Zen, strikes an important note. Zen, he asserts, is "responsible of asian poverty," and if Zen is to be justified, it must be seen in that light. In feudal Japan, for example, Zen was revived in the fourteenth century, transmitted within a monastic system overseen and subsidized by the Imperial court, as well as by the many military governors, or shogun, who ruled the provinces. The monks, trained in cloistered mountain monasteries and respected by the masses as highly educated spiritual leaders, were regarded by the rulers as "effective means for quelling unruly elements among the populace." [141] Zen promotes an essential quietism amongst its practitioners, a "doctrine of self-abandonment" which demands that one reigns in desires. As Paik points out, Zen teaches "how to be satisfied with 75%, how to be satisfied with 38%;" in short, it teaches one to accept and be satisfied with one's lot in life, even if that lot is economic poverty. Clearly, such a teaching would have been immensely useful to a military ruler (who himself would certainly not be satisfied with these percentages), and Zen quickly became official culture in Japan.

In the United States of the 1950s and 1960s, the incorporation of a methodology of Zen in the arts meant something quite different than that of its use in feudal Japan. For the beats, and for artists such as Franz Kline (a student of D.T. Suzuki, Kline painted large-scale canvases that fetishize the spontaneous calligraphic gesture), Zen's appeal was that of a pure, exotic, certainly mystifying Other. Zen offered an ancient, solemn set of artistic traditions far removed from reason and naturalistic representation; a sanction and inspiration for a self- perceived advance guard, Zen was employed by artists and poets as a tool to explore the frontiers of the unconscious, the unmitigated, spontaneous source of selfhood.

Like the beats, and certainly like the counterculture(s) that flourished throughout the 1960s, the artists of Fluxus were concerned with establishing an unmediated relationship with the world. But the artists of Fluxus, as we've seen, did not regard the self - particularly the unconscious - as the absolute, generative center of this world. Rather, there was a concern with decentering the self, positioning the self as one provisional center in perpetual interaction with the infinite multiplicity of centers that constitute the world. In contrast to the Zen of the beats - a means to consummate the "manifest destiny" of modernism, the revelation of the frontiers of selfhood - the Zen appreciated by the artists of Fluxus was, as Paik says, "anti-avant-garde, anti-frontier spirit, anti-Kennedy." Indeed, Zen, as received by some of the artists of Fluxus, posits a self that is no self at all. George Maciunas understood this, and employed it to advance his own notions of "selflessness." Here, in a letter dated March 16, 1964, Maciunas offers some advice to Ben Vautier:

…I notice with disappointment your GROWING MEGALOMANIA. Why not try Zen method - Curb and eliminate your ego entirely. (if you can) don't sign anything - don't attribute anything to yourself - depersonalize yourself! that's in true Fluxus collective spirit. De-europanize yourself! [142]

As Jackson Mac Low points out, Maciunas' notions of "depersonalization" and "true Fluxus collective spirit" "were based on half-baked Leninist ideas and have little if any relation to Buddhism." [143] Yet the understanding of Zen as a method of decentering the self is consonant with Maciunas' desire to eliminate "the idea of the professional artist, art-for-art ideology, expression of artists' ego through art, etc." [144] Such a radical revision of the conceit of authorship goes hand-in-hand with the critique of the autonomy of the object posited by Fluxus artists. This stance stood in marked contrast to that of the thriving art market of the period - a market that flourished by promulgating the mythic individuality of the artist as well as the monolithic authority of the artist's product. Fluxus downplayed - indeed, it sought to eliminate - the artist's traditional role as unique producer of unique objects, instead creating situations in which objects, often objects of daily use, would be allowed a space in which to reveal themselves.

Know honor
But keep to the role of the disgraced
And be a valley to the empire.
If you are a valley to the empire,
Then the constant virtue [power] will be sufficient…

- Tao Te Ching, Chapter 27

The artists of Fluxus walked an alternative, ultimately revolutionary passage through, or rather as, a valley to the empire of representation. In contrast to the logos of the beats and abstract expressionists - the narrative of the frontier, the production of a myth of formal wholeness validated by a logic of transcendental affirmation - the artists of Fluxus posited no absolutes, no methods, no tools, no fixed structures for their works. Rather, their mode of production was based on the notion of a plenitude of possible meanings and interpretations - detached from an understanding of the work as an extension of the artist's identity. Dick Higgins calls such work post-selfcognitive, or postcognitive for short. The postcognitive work, says Higgins, is concerned with

…the object qua object, the poem within the poem, the word within the word - the process as process, accepting reality as a found object, enfolding it by the edges, so to speak, without trying to distort it (artistically or otherwise) in its depiction. The work becomes the matrix - any kind of matrix will do for the particular needs of the particular work. The artist gives you the structure: you may fill it in yourself. This is not formalism (though it includes structuralism as an aspect) - the emphasis is still on the subject. But the subject is accepted - the artist will have to look elsewhere, if he wants to prove his identity. [145]

The works of which Higgins speaks are no longer grounded in the subjectivity of the artist, but in the horizons of a particular work's inception, its many possible centers and contexts. The form of a work is entirely contingent upon the exigencies of its moment(s) of realization, beyond the control of the artist. In another essay, Higgins notes:

One thing above all was foreign to Fluxus works: personal intrusion on the part of the artist. In fact there was almost a cult among Fluxus people - or, more properly, a fetish, carried far beyond any rational or explainable level - which idealized the most direct relationship with "reality," specifically objective reality. The lives of objects, their histories and events were considered somehow more realistic than any conceivable personal intrusion on them. [146]

Higgins' statement might be fruitfully related to this passage by R.H. Blyth, in which he discusses the place of the object within the poetic form of haiku:

Each thing is preaching the law [Dharma] incessantly, but this law is not something different from the thing itself. Haiku is the revealing of this preaching by presenting us with the thing devoid of all our mental twisting and emotional discoloration; or rather, it shows the thing as it exists at one and the same time outside and inside the mind, perfectly subjective, ourselves undivided from the object in its original unity with ourselves… It is a way of returning to nature, in short, to our Buddha nature. It is a way in which a cold winter rain, the swallows of evening, even the very day in its hotness and the length of the night become truly alive, share in our humanity, speak their own silent and expressive language. [147]

Adopting this viewpoint, it would be incorrect to say that Fluxworks (many of which were known as "neo-haiku events") are inexpressive as a result of the artist's self-limiting role in their production. Rather, the site of expression in Fluxworks has been radically shifted from the artist to the object (no longer necessarily an art object), which in turn must be engaged by a receiving subjectivity, an arbitrarily imposed force, if it is to come to presence at all. In Zen thought, object and subject are interdependent, and this is clearly the case in Fluxus as well. Fluxus works are singularities, each moment of performance identical only with itself, subject to the intervention of an infinite number of potential, temporary forces. Lines of force and transformation can be drawn between any number of works, realizations, participants, available materials, points of view. There is thus no repetition, no re-presentation, in the space of the Fluxus nomad, only the production of possibilities, permutations, and new intensities. Nothing lasts long enough, or speaks with enough authority, for it to be re-presented. Jean-François Lyotard declares that, in the place of representation,

…one should insist on the forgetting. Representation and opposition imply memory: in passing from one singularity to the other, the one and the other are maintained together (through channels of circulation, set-ups, fantasies or libidinal configurations of cathexes). An identity (the same) is implied in this memory. In the eternal return as a desire for potentiality, there is precisely no memory. The travel is a passage without a trace, a forgetting, instantaneouses which are multiple only for the discourse, not in themselves. Such is the reason for the absence of representation in this voyage, this nomadism of intensities. [148]

We find this same idea in Zen - the notion of forgetting as a way of maintaining an immediate awareness of the shifting present, beyond representation. In the Hsin Hsin Ming, one of the earliest Zen texts, Seng Ts'an (d. 606?), the third patriarch of Zen, points out that in forgetting, one moves beyond the realm where comparisons can be made, and where even the notion of identity ("oneness") is transcended:

Forget the wherefore of things,
And we attain a state beyond analogy:
Movement stopped is no movement,
And rest set in motion is no rest.
When dualism does no more obtain,
Even oneness itself remains not as such.

In this idealized space of transcendence, says Seng Ts'an,

Nothing is retained now,
Nothing is to be memorized,
All is void, lucid, and self-illuminating,
There is no strain, no exertion, no wasting of energy -
This is where thinking never attains,
This is where the imagination fails to measure. [149]

This idealized space of transcendence and forgetting is sunyata, emptiness, the source of everything that is the case. [150] In the Hsin Hsin Ming, itself quite imbued with a Taoist sensibility, we are given instructions as to how one might fully experience this: "no strain, no exertion, no wasting of energy." [151] In Zen and Fluxus, one simply does what one is doing now, even if that something is not very much at all. This can be art, if one wishes to call it such, or it can be Zen or meditation, sport, music, work, relaxation, education - whatever one might wish to call it. In a 1967 letter to John Cage, George Brecht strikes to the heart of the matter: "I continue to do as little as possible and to be closer perhaps to Chuang- Tzu than to Hui-Neng though they're both great guys. The refrigerator door works better now that I've oiled it." [152]

In Zen, many of the artists involved in Fluxus found a paradigm for destabilizing the individual's relationship to the object and to the world. This paradigm necessitated a rethinking of the forms of presentation that would seek not do violence to the object or the individual by submitting them to closure. Instead, the new forms would re/cognize the relationship between object and self within a condition of constant change, each presencing for a moment and then receding back into the horizon whence it came, leaving behind scarcely a trace of itself. In this recognition, Fluxus, like Zen, shed doubt on the notion of ownership and so circumvented the mechanisms of the system of official "avant- garde" culture, the business of art as business - at least temporarily. Commerce, after all, has a way of catching up with even the most fleeting of ephemera.

1997 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the first Fluxus festivals. During these thirty-five years, the artists of Fluxus have dodged and flitted between categories, surfacing now and again to tweak the collective nose of the art world. Fluxus brought the very act of perception up for accounting by attempting to clear the slate, eliminating everything that was held to be nonessential to the acts of perceiving, of doing, of simply being in the world and acting as if it mattered. If the sporadic outbursts of performances and publishing offer any indication, Fluxus still has the power to do so. In Fluxus, said George Brecht in 1964, "individuals with something unnamable in common have simply naturally coalesced to publish and perform their work." [153] Today, after so many exhibitions and articles, that "something" remains unnamable, those "individuals" remain individuals. Perhaps this is what has kept Fluxus vital over the course of these thirty-some-odd years: try as one might to name it, Fluxus still can't be pinned down, can't be explained away. The passage of time has demonstrated that the ultimate fact of Fluxus may be that which is inscribed within its very name.

Coda: The myriad creatures rise from it yet it claims no authority;
It gives them life yet claims no possession;
It benefits them yet exacts no gratitude;
It accomplishes its task yet lays claim to no merit.
It is because it lays claim to no merit
That its merit never deserts it.

- Tao Te Ching, Chapter 2