Interview of Jeroen Peeters by Anouk Llaurens
Anouk Llaurens: Hi Jeroen, thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions. I would like to start by asking how you would like to situate yourself.
Jeroen Peeters: We are in 2022, and I met Lisa for the first time in 2004, so I don't know where to start… Today I am a researcher at Hasselt University, a researcher in the arts, preparing a PhD on Conceptual Landscapes: Readership in the Expanded Field. Readership here is related to the question of how we interpret things, such as artworks, bodies in performance, or indeed text-based works. Looking at the latter, there is a whole spectrum to be covered, with familiar kinds of readership at one end and at the other end "thinkership", when you come to conceptual art.
My practice is one of a writer. Essayistic writing but also writing and performing lecture-performances and making artist books––also as a publisher and editor. So text is very present in what I do. Literally embracing readership is for myself also a challenge because, having been working for 25 years in the field of dance, there is a lure of a sort of ‘pure’ spectatorship. As if dance can help you get rid of too much meaning. You can look at dances as if they're just effervescent, abstract––I mean, they're concrete in the sense that they are carried by bodies, but they're not legible in narrative terms so much.
You could say that readership is somewhat taboo in dance, and I like to take that on board too, because as a dramaturg––that's yet another role that I take on––part of what you do is interpret dances in the studio. Even if you decide to not interpret them, or translate them into text or things you can express in words, then, you're still reading. So even if you want to push the reading aside, it will come back through the back door. That's how I came to readership as a research interest.
In the late nineties I started as a dance critic, and then I moved more and more into the direction of making. First by interviewing artists, becoming friends with them, being involved in research labs, then becoming a dramaturg, and somehow, at the same time, also becoming interested in the languages of making. How do people behave, move, work in the studio? How do they speak in the studio? Dance is a medium in which oral transmission is central. That's why we're talking right now, not writing to each other. That's why you're doing a mapping to get the sense of commoning around, in this case, the work of Lisa Nelson. So I've been very interested in oral history. Also as a different politics of writing history and of citation today. Not everyone writes books. Most people that you will be interviewing will not write books. So if you want to have them acknowledged and their words present or transcribed or available differently, then you need to interview them.
At some point I also started performing. I’d say I'm more of a performer than a dancer since I didn't have formal dance training. What I did perform is, on the one hand, lectures that became more artistic products than simply academic knowledge transfers, and, on the other hand, several pieces created in a collective setting. Then everyone is involved in doing everything as part of the politics of collaboration. That's how it went in my case anyway. So performing, but also doing the music and the lighting design, the choreography, the costumes… everything.
It's more or less the bandwidth. Since 2018 I'm also running a small publishing house together with Mette Edvardsen. It's called Varamo Press. Finally I've also been working as an editor for several magazines and online publications: Sarma, Etcetera and so on. Speaking of editing... when I contributed texts to Contact Quarterly over the years, Lisa was the editor of my work, so this is an interesting aspect of our dialogue too.
As a whole, it's not so obvious to situate myself. I like to think of what I do as essayism across the media of writing, performance and publishing. What connects them for me is perhaps an interest in embodied knowledge, oral transmission, certain sensitivities that come from dance that I apply in different fields. Writing is something else than doing dramaturgy, performing and so on. When I started out some 20 years ago, I always took on the viewpoint of a writer, thinking "ah I want to have knowledge about all these fields", that could then nurture my writing. It took me a long time before I understood: performing has a gravity of its own, as a medium, as a practice. So does dramaturgy, and so on.
I would also throw the term “spectatorship” in the mix. Because in all these roles and functions I am a spectator.
Anouk Llaurens: Also when you perform?
Jeroen Peeters: We'll get to that... but that's a good question. I think yes, probably. You know, we need to mark this question for later. Because I think what I've learned from Lisa is that being a spectator is also performing. That's one of the important lessons of her Tuning Score. And of her philosophy in general.
No, actually, when I'm performing, I'm not a spectator I think. Let me compare it to playing music, which is something I do on the side, but it’s also performing. I understood something else about performing by playing music.
Anouk Llaurens: What instrument do you play?
Jeroen Peeters: I play the drums. In my experience, playing in a band is very different from working on a dance piece where you make things, but you also need to talk to figure things out during or in between rehearsals. In music, you can––that's a fiction, of course––you can more or less negotiate everything within the music itself while playing. Maybe some dancers can do this as well, but with long-standing bands… of course, you need to talk a little bit, you say hello when you arrive… but you can immediately play together and the sense-making happens in the playing rather than in sort of a discussion afterwards.
Anouk Llaurens: Yeah, this is improvisation. And you’re mentioning long term because it's also about knowing each other, having some kind of a shared culture...
Jeroen Peeters: It's maybe depending also on the kind of dance that I've been involved in, but, coming from dramaturgy where sense-making and talking are loud and present––however you want to embrace it or avoid it––my understanding of music is very much like that it's through the doing and through the material that you negotiate the composition and the work constantly. And of course, this is also what you do in the Tuning Score or as an improviser and what I do in dance too if I perform. But then in the dance studio I will often be in a spectator role as the dramaturg.
Spectatorship is an important thing. If I situate myself in my work, in my life, I'm a spectator. I mean, a spectator is somehow who I am in the world. And it's a wide spectrum, of course.
Anouk Llaurens: What is a spectator then?
Jeroen Peeters: I like to observe. I like to watch things. So, we might get to that later with Lisa but I have an appetite for watching things and just staying with the phenomenology, you know… looking at these plants, to sort of just look at them and not think like “oh, it's a plant or…” For me this has to do with the tension with readership. Do you interpret or can you leave things open? Where are you projecting, where are you simply following shapes and textures with your eyes? But then also, I am a keen observer, and that comes back to your question of the theory/practice divide. I mean, I'm a practitioner. I practice watching, I practice thinking, I practice writing. And in that sense, I don't merely apply concepts to the world. You're looking at the world, you're curious, and you discover things.
There is an anthropological aspect in being an observer. You look at the things themselves, but also how they're framed. I have a double gaze when I walk around or when I see things. When you're in a conference, you're taking notes, but you're also looking at how people are performing, at the scenography, at the institution, for instance. I do this constantly. It's probably a professional embrace of who I am, but I feel like I'm a spectator or observer in my own life as well, you know. Or a tourist. Somehow I don't know how to live.
Anouk Llaurens: "Tourist" for me brings about a sense of being detached or staying superficial. But when I hear you speak about it, there is an intensity in the practice of watching and having this kind of zooming out perspective or distance.
Jeroen Peeters: Absolutely. I'm not a tourist in my practice at all. I mean, I said it jokingly, "I'm a tourist or spectator in my own life". But in fact, you turn your own obsessions and weaknesses into your work.
Anouk Llaurens: Maybe we can get to the next question now, which is about the aspects of the Tuning Scores that are touching you. What is touching you, or where does the encounter happen between Lisa’s work and yours?
Jeroen Peeters: My first encounter with Lisa was in January 2004, in the framework of Connexive #1 with Vera Mantero in Vooruit in Ghent. It was a three-week research lab. Lisa was there, together with Steve Paxton, for the last week or a few days, I don't remember. And they performed Go. I was a writer in residence there and Myriam Van Imschoot, who was the curator of the event, put me in contact with Lisa. Lisa, you can philosophize about her work, but what I remember most vividly is the appetite she communicates on stage. She's a rather small woman with a lot of aura, and with this appetite for large objects on stage. So she will at some point disappear into the wings and come back with, like, a heavy pipe used for hanging lamps, or pull a sofa onto the stage. Something like that. Go is like a chess game, just at a very small table with objects. The two performers are moving things and it goes very slowly. The entire cosmos of perception is mapped out and sort of reconfigured a little bit. And at some point, the appetite grows too big for the table and then Lisa disappears and she comes back with something huge. I mention that because it's that idea of communicating appetites.
I find “appetite” a good word here, to not speak about interest, nor about desire––desire is somehow too big and loaded. Appetite resonates with curiosity, your eagerness to figure things out. It comes with taste, with touch. It communicates a certain scale related to the body, the right scale of how curious you can be about the world. And a certain perception, because Go is about "I see this small thing here and this hair"... and as a spectator over there, you would also know that there are a few very small objects there, this glass and some other thing. This is all part of a world that gets noticed here and then transpires, or not.
I don't know whether I'm with Lisa on all the small grains––I have a lot of patience, but my interest in the very little details will not last for 30 or 40 years.
Patience is perhaps another interesting word in terms of, not taking distance really, but having some reserve, rather than immediately knowing what you see. Inhibiting your impulses. And then watching longer. See what it does to you then.
It's a patience for a sort of emergent compositions as a performer, but also as a spectator. And interestingly, it has to be very decisive. A problem that I see with embracing process is that it can go on forever, and it can remain exploratory rather than research oriented. You need to make conclusions at some points. A conclusion can be that you make a new gesture. Lisa will be very decisive in composing things. And by that go sometimes against the grain or against the intuition of others, of how they would make decisions, and it is decisive. It's not violent, but it's very clear and precise. And that's something that you learn too. That there is a limit to how long you can look at these small things, the fluff and the hair and so on. At some point you feel like “oh, wow, I'm still a human being sitting here in relation to this kind of thing”. And we are also interested in the room and the person in front.
Anouk Llaurens: It makes me think about the lifespan of an event. Things are not living forever. It is also about being aware of that. How long can you live a certain situation?
Jeroen Peeters: The lifespan or the timing of watching, that's very central in my conversations with Lisa. And of course, watching is also listening, and sensing, and so on. But visual perception is very present there.
Anouk Llaurens: About “process”, I see that the notion of emergence is very present in the arts, in some fields of philosophy, and also in some ways of living. Compositions need to be emerging, everything has to emerge in collective, and so on. You see that in Contact Improvisation that has become very flowy nowadays. There is not much sharpness. But in Lisa’s work, there are constant interventions. Making decisions and using calls. Entering and cutting the flow. But at the same time there is this patience of first letting things be before you intervene.
Jeroen Peeters: Yeah, I’ll add something that runs counter emergence or counter the "happy" philosophy of "everything needs to emerge". I remember Lisa speaking a lot about habits. Because now you go to an art school and people will constantly say "oh, you need to go beyond your comfort zone, you need to change your habits” and so on. And Lisa would say: no, without habits, you have no ground. And of course, 99% of what you do in life consists of habits. In art, maybe 90% – there is a bit more margin in challenging them. But you need a ground of habits, in a positive sense. And she says "one of the habits I cherish is dance making". So that's important. Indeed, you need to have a strong basis of habit. Because, where does the composition come from? And, the strength to cut the flow? Habit is also of course like a practice, an embodied practice that has grown and gained precision and acuteness over the years.
The frame Lisa would speak, watch, and compose from is that practice, as it is embodied by her. So from the inside out. It's interesting to me that she comes from an American tradition. I would say as a quick framework that in Europe we're used to thinking from an institutionalised definition of art. You go to the theatre and the frame is already there – I mean the decision to accept that whatever you’re going to see there is ‘art’. Lisa's approach is much more based in practice. In an artistic practice, but not in the definition of art. It is perhaps closer to an anthropological notion of art that sees it as embodied in people and how they perceive. They then do compose and create frames from there, from within. It's a very different approach from negotiating with existing institutional frames. Then you're much more interested in readership versus, let's say, emergence, patience, see what comes and then cut the flow.
Anouk Llaurens: It is very interesting you bring this contrast between Europe and USA. It makes me reflect on the fact that in this research project, I'm addressing European people actually, not the Americans.
Jeroen Peeters: The philosophy of emergence is really how Americans and Canadians have interpreted Deleuze and others. That's how it's so present in certain things.
Anouk Llaurens: ...from the French to the States back to Europe.
Jeroen Peeters: At the launch of the Vermont Conversations four years ago, I remember asking Lisa about the context of making art. In her work there is this layer of survival, of habits, of composition, of practice––so different kinds of embodied knowledge that moves from nature to culture, you could say, from things you are born with to things you learn––and then at some point there is the artist and the artistic practice. But Lisa would never speak of the context of making art itself. How come? And indeed she was puzzled when I asked her about it. It was interesting. She didn't give an answer back then, and asking the question was enough for me to show that the focus of her project is elsewhere than in making art pieces as when one intervenes with an artwork in the world. No, she starts from a practice, from a philosophy of embodied spectatorship and composition.
Anouk Llaurens: I would like to come back to a pair of terms you’ve mentioned earlier, “reading” and “interpreting”. Do you make a distinction between them?
Jeroen Peeters: I don't know, maybe it's just the same. But if I say reading, I think about reading words on a page, like reading a book, but then of course, reading is also used to read a dance. And then you're not reading letters, but you're interpreting movements, for instance.
Anouk Llaurens: I'm asking because in Lisa’s work, she also makes a difference. For instance she speaks of reading for this Blind learning practice where you are eyes closed, touching somebody who is moving, and try to understand what is going on and mimic her movement. There, to me, reading implies not interpreting. I just read, trying to stay at the beginning. Really letting the event talk before you start to distort it or change it with your interpretation or your action.
Jeroen Peeters: Yes, I agree with that. So there's indeed reading of, say, the surfaces and the events versus reading that deeper layer of symbolism––which, again, will always be a projection also.
Anouk Llaurens: Exactly.
Jeroen Peeters: I'm close to that.
Anouk Llaurens: When you mentioned readership, is it what you're talking about?
Jeroen Peeters: Well, I'm talking about both kinds, of course. But my interest in readership is really the limits of readership––just like with spectatorship too. That's the conversation on blindness with Lisa Nelson, which is a literal interpretation of the situation where we close our eyes: how do we reflect on what we see or don't see? Or how are blind spots always already part of our seeing? It brings us to think about the limits of what we can see. The same with reading. So I'm interested more and more in not-reading actually, in opacity, or in distraction.
For a while, I have had an interest in “composing attention”, both in terms of spectatorship and readership. Lisa says somewhere that it's about crafting the attention of the performers. And I would add “slash and also of the observer”. Because the observers in the Tuning Scores are also performing their observations. And sometimes, they're watching from the viewing space, sometimes they go into the image space and so on.
Within my work I'm more interested in crafting the attention of any observer, let's say, whether it's a reader or a spectator. And I started to call it composing attention. There's a lot of discourse about “managing attention”. The discourse on attention originated in the 19th century discoveries in psychology and it comes with a whole history of taylorism and the efficient organization of workers in factories, which was the second Industrial Revolution. Today we still have this. There is a very large biopolitics around attention and how we're addicted to apps and gadgets, and what have you. So composing attention rather than managing attention is like: is it possible to set the frame smaller, to get to these embodied compositions also? And see how we can appropriate, perhaps, to a certain extent, technologies we use to learn to watch different things––art being of course one of them.
But then I thought recently “no, I'm also interested in the distractions”. Composing distraction. You're reading a book and you're fantasising or dreaming away with and without the world proposed by the writer. Then you're thinking about your shopping list and you're really distracted, and then you go back, or you look out the window, and back into the book. So you're always slipping off the page into the world and coming back. Of course, if you read Virginia Woolf, the entire work is composed like that.
You're always slipping out of the book into the world or into your own life and then back into the book and so on. So is distraction at the heart of the work? No, of course not. Not anything goes, you need to stay attentive with your distractions. But I find this an interesting shift: to think about the distractions as an integral part of attention. Because attention gets confused with concentration, with being disciplined, being always right where you are supposed to be. The adventure and the appetite might actually reside somewhere else. And of course you can be subjected to your distractions. If you're checking your emails yet again for the hundredth time in a day, then you're not owning your distractions or appropriating them.
Anouk Llaurens: So it's about owning your distraction.
Jeroen Peeters: I don't know whether you can really own a distraction, but you can indeed embrace them and then own your drift, have a reflexive attitude towards it.
Anouk Llaurens: Do you think this is happening in Lisa's work? This going out of the page and then coming back to it? Have you experienced anything like that?
Jeroen Peeters: I've never thought about that, because in my own thinking, it is more something of the past five years, and I haven't been so closely in touch with Lisa recently. But I would say yes because with Julien Bruneau’s work for instance, that sort of drift is present––also drifting to meaning and other things and coming back. In my history, I associate this approach to Lisa even though it is translated differently. That sort of practice of perceiving, imagining, performing your awareness... If I think back of the event that David Weber-Krebs curated at the rooftop, Durations, where you performed a while ago, it is really happening, distraction is really part of it. I see you dancing but then there's also this little terrace garden around, there are some birds, there is the noise from the street, the people, there's a lecture by Julien that somehow charges this thing very heavily. It was partly composed, partly not.
Anouk Llaurens: Well, watchers are composing their experience, that's the whole point. There is something given to you to be able to compose.
Jeroen Peeters: It's not fully curated, that's what I mean. And I imagine that some people thought "oh, yet another siren, I don't want to have it". But I was like "oh wow, what a wonderful timing".
Anouk Llaurens: It depends on your level of patience, I think.
Jeroen Peeters: And it depends also on the kind of work. Because that work allows for it.
Anouk Llaurens: And the place also. It's a perfect place for this work. You have so much of the outside, so much presence. You're so supported by the outside, by the other agents. There are so many other agents than us. I can talk from my perspective of being the performer of this. You're not so "ashamed", I would say, of being the centre of attention. Because you’re not the centre! It's almost like you are a support for attention. But as you say, it's a support for being able to drift and also owning your own drift.
Jeroen Peeters: “Composing attention” is what you do yourself. While “managing attention” or “guiding attention” happens by the framework outside. I like the word composition.
Anouk Llaurens: And why do you like this word?
Jeroen Peeters: Because of its history, and because “composition”, it means that you place things together. This also implies that I am myself part of the composition…
Anouk Llaurens: ...as a watcher, as a spectator…
Jeroen Peeters: …Slash doer, slash human being. So if this is a composition, we're all part of it. It's a set of relations.
Anouk Llaurens: I'm discovering this author, Karen Barad, and she's talking about the "intra-action" rather than interaction. I cannot say very much about this, but it points at what's happening in between agents that are not existing as distinct entities before they are intra-acting.
Jeroen Peeters: Karen Barad, it is again a philosophy of emergence, not of composition. And she speaks about these matters in relation to physics––though it's now often referred to in the arts too... My focus is somewhere else. The word composition has a history within the arts and culture. That's very different from taking a term from science and importing it into the arts. Science could provide great insights or open up different worlds, but for thinking about daily activity, like attention for instance, I prefer a modest scale. I realize that what I've learned in and through watching art, I also use it in my daily life. Not all the time, but somehow, it's there.
Anouk Llaurens: So it's a practice for daily life.
Jeroen Peeters: Yes.
Anouk Llaurens: Maybe then, there's no more daily life, or everything is daily life…
Jeroen Peeters: I don't know. But some people go to movies, others go to the theatre or read books, others do sports. These activities will inform who you are and how you watch things. And how you're patient or less patient, open for emergence or not, wanting to compose things and cut...
Distraction helps me to think about how it works, the attention and the composing and so on. It's not that there is more truth in the distraction than in the attention. Quite the contrary mostly.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, they go together. It's kind of mixed.
Jeroen Peeters: But the question is indeed, can you own it? Because if you're distracted by your phone all the time, it's very different than being distracted by events in the world or by noise and not being able to concentrate. Can you negotiate it and can you make it part of how you do things also in today's condition?
Anouk Llaurens: We have to.
Jeroen Peeters: Exactly. We have to find the strength partly in ourselves, so that's why Lisa’s perspective of having embodied knowledge to carry with you and give you strength for cutting the flow is useful.
Anouk Llaurens: It makes me think of inhibition. In the sense of owning your attention or maybe owning your distraction. I've been doing this Vipassana retreat. Ten days, no talking, and the whole point is not reacting. Not that you are inhibiting anything, but you are not reacting. You live your things, you experience them, but you're not making any action. You just let them pass you. In that sense, you are not disturbed. The distraction can be part of your life, because you're not disturbed by them. It's not that you have to isolate yourself or cut yourself from a certain environment.
Jeroen Peeters: That's very important indeed, inhibition. You are inhibiting things like quick interpretations and projections, but you're also inhibiting getting carried away too quickly by your appetites and desires, or by your wild imagination or by distractions. You notice them and let them pass.
Anouk Llaurens: Before this interview you've sent me an excerpt of an article about "report"...
Jeroen Peeters: This is part of my book that will come out next month, on dance dramaturgy, And then it got legs. There's one chapter called Naming that is specifically about naming dance material in the studio as it emerges in rehearsal. It can be in any kind of method, also non-emergent methods. In the end, when you work with a group of collaborators, you will give names to your material, or at least you will use words at some point. We are human beings, we use language. So beyond the "hello's" and "goodbye's", there will always be use of words in the dance studio. And you could call it a dramaturgical practice, because using words, even in their practical sort of use, is meaningful. Even if you say "okay, this section we're going to call the ‘T-shirt’ just so we can all refer back to it", it's meaningful. But there are of course many different ways to do that, and I wanted to invite several artists to talk about practices of naming, of using language in the studio that I would consider dramaturgical.
My interest in inviting Lisa there by asking her about reporting is because I think reporting is a specific call within the Tuning Score that does that. You are called to report your experience as a doer, whether you're doing or observing. The other interest is that Lisa is part of my history so I wanted to acknowledge my own interlocutors. That's part of the oral history. And then the third interest is maybe that you wouldn't think of her work as dramaturgical. So she's again, in a way, an American foreign voice that comes into a European perspective. I was interested in that shift too. To include her as a sort of non-dramaturgical voice.
Anouk Llaurens: Next to this chapter on naming, would you say you're busy with reporting ?
Jeroen Peeters: No, I don't use a reporting practice myself… Well, no, that's not true what I'm saying. Because then right after I was working with Clara Amaral, and I ended up proposing a reporting practice. Because I had just received an email from Lisa, I guess… Rather than write, one of us would report, or dance and report, and the other would transcribe it.
So I do use it. When I'm working on a text, typing notes quickly is also a way of reporting a flow of thinking, in a sense.
Reporting is a method. As a writer, it's not that I just write, you know. I need, say, a fiction or method to do things. As soon as you start to craft what you're doing then, somehow you have to say, for instance, "okay I'm going to report". Then I might speak out loud and transcribe what I think. Or I fake that method by quickly typing first and not editing it, entering a particular kind of writing mode.
Anouk Llaurens: It thus starts from orality and then it goes into transcription?
Jeroen Peeters: Yeah, in this case. An awareness of methods brings precision to the doing for me. And so in that sense, reports––in a more expanded sense perhaps than for the Tuning Scores––is a way of working that I use. One of the very many methods.
In German, they have this word that really interests me: mitschreiben. It means “to take notes”, as in writing the report of a meeting for instance. If you take it literally, it means “to write with” or “to write along”. There is a subtle difference between being with or being along, but basically there is an interest in being and writing ‘with the situation’. Mitschreiben is a method that I've been using for 12 years or so, maybe longer... Recently I met a German woman in a seminar who said "oh, but we don't use that word that way. Mitschreiben, what are you talking about?"
Anouk Llaurens: For me, report is linked to orality, and somehow also to the subjectivity of one’s voice. Do you ever talk in the first person when you write?
Jeroen Peeters: I think all my writing since ten years is first person writing. Of course it's also again a fiction. "I" can be many things. It's me the author, but it's also the narrator of a text, and possibly an unreliable narrator, be it in fiction or even in nonfiction. I'm interested in that because as soon as you say "I…" you are in a fiction of yourself. How far can you push that to create this sort of reality effect? You have to be aware of the sincerity, that might be fake or not, and that serves the text or the composition. It may also create a certain density. You spoke about intensity... Composition is also about compressing things and creating a certain density. I take aspects of all the fluff that I am and "I" becomes slimmer and gets a certain shape. Maybe reporting, specifically, is a search for that shape. Because you're talking through the fluff, really. You're in a situation with a few things you know, but with all the distractions also. And as you're reporting, you're looking for words, you go on, and once in a while there's something popping up. Then, maybe, after a while, the report can find a form. It starts like a cloud and then somehow gets a more defined shape.
With Julien's work that's very present. You know, almost brainstorming to formulate the question or a statement. You're taking in that cloud and then when it's formulated the report stops.
Anouk Llaurens: So it's a mode of getting to the point.
Jeroen Peeters: And again of cutting the flow. You make a small gesture. I write about this also in the book: for me, the difference between exploration and research is that you can endlessly explore and be in a flow and be curious... But then when you're doing research, you have at least an intuition or a question, and maybe after seven minutes, suddenly it's done. And then you make a gesture or a statement or something like that. And you start again, maybe, or you continue. So the drift and the distraction are for me interesting as an inhibition that invites openness but then at some point you also need to say "okay, now I compose, now I constrain myself".
I'm just reading The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, a modernist, Brazilian writer. The whole book is sort of a vision. It's a mystical novel in which the protagonist transforms into all kinds of things. In the first chapter, she asks herself "how shall I tell the story? How can I resist putting a form on something that is beyond form and beyond what I can name?" It's quite an intriguing book that I'm also quoting in my book.
Anouk Llaurens: Earlier, you already talked about this limit of things... the limit of watching, the limit of spectatorship, readership...
Jeroen Peeters: Yes, limits allow you to acknowledge what’s possible and what’s not possible within a certain practice or context. What can you do? Is there anything you can not do? It creates a sense of modesty, helps you to embrace vulnerability and failure. It charges practice with a political awareness.
That's also what happens in the novel. It starts with a well-off lady whose in-house maid just leaves. She goes to the chambre de bonne she assumed to just be a small storage space with a bed. But no, it happens to be like a very neat, clean space. A small asylum within her house she had no idea about. It is indeed a limit to her world and she just realizes suddenly that there is a world beyond that, a world that her maid had access to. And now she's gone.
Anouk Llaurens: It sounds great, this book.
Jeroen Peeters: It is like a threshold into a different world... or it is a different world that comes over the threshold into your world.
There's another text that I'm also quoting, "She unnames them", a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's only two pages. You will find it on the Internet, it was published in print in the New Yorker, in 1984 I think. It starts with Adam naming all the animals. And then comes the question: how about unnaming them now? What happens then?
When all the animals and plants are unnamed, the narrator gets in a sort of crisis. There's a different challenge because at some point you need to get into language again, but then it's not God doing the work. How do you relate to things then differently? Suddenly the stakes are much higher.
Anouk Llaurens: So you have just finished your book on dramaturgy, and then, do you already have another project?
Jeroen Peeters: First I would take a break. After that, I imagine my writing in the coming years will be more about attention, composing attention, and how that relates to readership in the expanded field... and to my own writing practice. I spoke before about the reading and slipping off the page into the world or your own thoughts and back onto the page. That sort of movement means that your attention is intercut or interlaced with distractions––whether you can own your drift or not. So there are moments of not-reading in the reading. Whether it's Virginia Woolf or Roland Barthes or others, there are many people writing about this. But then I start to wonder, could you compose the moments of not-reading rather than the reading? How can I compose a framework for distraction or for readers to own their distraction through my writing? Which also means: does the not-reading have a not-writing as a mirror? Do I need to write something to get people to not-reading, or do I have to not-write to get to it? I'm basically busy with methods of not-writing.
But I'm not sure whether the drifts or reporting are my methods there. For me it's more about collecting. I collect lots of things until there's a critical mass from where something emerges and starts to speak back. Also using constraints, arbitrarily imposed compositions, will make a collection speak.
Collection and constraint are more important methods than drift and report for getting to the not-writing. There are also methods of not-quite-writing. Reporting would be one, but also pencil sharpening, transcribing, translating, collecting, cataloging, typing... the very many things that are part of the process of writing, and that you could isolate and focus on. You discover that there's a lot of not-writing hovering around the writing; it can perhaps, have a weight of its own.
I'm interested in ghostwriting also. I mean, ghostwriters who write books for other people, for instance. Recently I've been talking to a ghostwriter to write my PhD. If I write a PhD about my work and my methods, in the end, there is also me as an embodied document, as a living archive. How could I get to that aspect? For that, I imagine hiring a ghostwriter to write that. But then again, when meeting a ghostwriter, she told me that I would actually need a ghostreader! So ghostreading is also one of my drifts…
But now, first, I will take a lot of time to drift, for half a year or a year or so. Not thinking about the next book. No. To inhibit myself and see how all these different strands of attention and distraction, of not-reading and not-writing will speak back to me and yield something. What would it then say or not, about attention today within the arts and our society at large? But I don't want to put these big questions up front. I'm always with the small questions and concrete practices. I'm always looking at what's happening in the margins. I'm always looking in the trash can.