Provocation - 麻省理工学院人工智能研究专业

Provocation

The Con

Aliza Shvarts

A con, or confidence game, formulates a future that will not come to bear. As the sociol-
ogist Erving Goffman describes in “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation
to Failure” (1952), a con involves the triangulated interaction of several roles: the con artist
or operator, who sets the plan in motion; the sucker or mark, who is the con’s victim; 和, 最多
重要的是, the cooler, who ensures that the mark not go to the police or take other types of
vengeance, and upon whom the con — the reproducibility of the act, as well as the future of the
man — depends. The cooler cools by providing the mark basic “instruction in the philosophy
of taking a loss.” Yet at the same time, as Goffman insists, “cooling the mark out is one theme
on a very basic social story.” From the worker whose expected promotion was denied, 到
lover whose marriage proposal was refused, to the patient who has been told there is no cure, 到
the soldier who realizes there is no return, there are endless instances in which marks must be
cooled: in which people who once believed something must be adjusted to the impossibility of
that belief.

It is no coincidence that Goffman — who would go on to become the first theorist of the
“total institution” in his later and more influential work — would take such an interest in the
dynamics of cooling, for cooling the mark out is the central feature of institutionality as such: 作为
he points out in this early work, “an institution, 毕竟, cannot take it on the lam; it must pac-
ify its marks.” The institution’s systemic operations constitute both the force that cools and the
new reality to which we are cooled; that is to say, it is the totality of the institution that paci-
fies or cools, 然而, that totality depends on a continued process of cooling. 在这个意义上, 我们
are reconciled to the impossibility of a future by those very structures that serve to guarantee
未来: those stable enclosures upon which confidence itself is premised. Appeasing individ-
ual workers, or lovers, or patients, or soldiers allows the structure of the office, the marriage, 这
clinic, the nation to continue to function; and in a broader sense, 资本主义, heteronormativity,
and biopolitics are all strategies of appeasement, acclimating us to the impossible situations they
生产, the impossible conditions we come to accept, conditions in which we nonetheless fig-
ure out how to live. It is through this process of adjustment to the impossibility of a future that
such structures are able to insure their own.

Through this broader understanding of the ubiquity of cooling, we are better able to under-
stand the capacity of the con: a capacity to act in bad faith rather than good, to formulate a plu-
rality of possible futures when the future we are assured arrives only as an impossibility. 后
全部, to talk about confidence — or trustworthiness or honesty in general — is to talk about an
attitude toward the future, an assurance that things will be as we have said, that we are able to
rightfully inhabit the language through which we make such assurances and the presumptions
of subjectivity it presupposes. The confidence of the honest, trustworthy man operates with the
privilege of a temporal inheritance, a heritage of futurity that presupposes a neutered, deraci-
指定的, and naturalized universal subject historically figured against a ground of marked bodies
and identities: the drudges, breeders, and transients to whom that future has always been fore-
closed. 骗局, 然而, operates outside the futurity of this cohesive rational actor — outside
the perspicacity of one man, with his one name, his one truth, and his one vote. The con artist
acts at a temporal dissonance to that good citizen, out of sync with the rhythm that reproduces
such men. As both an identity and an operation, the con violates not only the dictum that things
will be as we have said, but that a self will be continuous over time. As an identity that is noth-
ing more than an operation, the con challenges the idea that everyone could ever have access
to such cohesive subjecthood: a subjecthood invoked as the subject of labor and marriage con-
tracts, sexual or social consent; a subjecthood whose very possibility was historically produced
in the nonconsensual and noncontractual relations of domestic and sexual servitude, of colonial
conquest, and of trans-Atlantic slavery.

TDR: The Drama Review 58:2 (T222) 夏天 2014. ©2014
New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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For those of us who understand ourselves as reproduced not in the privilege of the subject
but through the laboring materiality of bodies of historical non-subjects, we understand that
good faith operates through a similar privileged relation to time: a time that is not ours, 一次
that allows for the smooth measure of the waged hour, of labor time, and the attendant logics
of accountability that animate exchange. The good faith of exchange, the confidence of circula-
的, is in fact the original con of capitalism, the abjected origin to which we are all perpetually
cooled. The capitalist subject is its operator, but also — insofar as that subjectivity is reproduced
in the material conditions of non-subjects, a material ground upon which the capitalist is fig-
ured — nothing more than a mark. The con’s local deceit emerges only in relation to the ubiq-
uitous institutional cooling that permeates modern life; in this sense, to con is on another level
to refuse to be cooled in a broader sense, to act knowing that the future will not turn out — was
never going to turn out — as it was promised. To con is not to reappropriate capital’s institu-
tional mechanisms, but to dwell in the latent fecundity of their excesses. The con exploits that
dark teeming crack that contours the smooth surface of production in which detritus gathers,
becoming fertile. In this sense the con does not escape, rehabilitate, or dismantle the structures
and systems that hold us; 相当, the con connives, lives in filth, fouls the nest.

According to Goffman, the con differs from other types of financial deceit precisely in that
it is committed against a private person by a criminal brotherhood. 在这个意义上, the con is the
inheritance of criminality, of an abject reproductive capacity, of a minority belonging. It is a
crime of relation and multitudinousness committed against the neoliberal enclosure of the indi-
vidual. To con is to recall the threat that multiplicity has always posed to singularity: the possi-
bility that the pea might be under any shell. It is the threat of the slave uprising to the master,
the colonized masses to the king, the witch’s coven to the inquisitor, the devil’s legions to a
one true God. The con is always an improvisational relation and never a permanent solution, A
queerly ephemeral intimacy forged in the perpetual motion of evasion. Kin of the convict, 这
con artist lives always in relation to the present threat and historical legacy of capture: 到
slave ship, the torture chamber, the prison cell, the psych ward, the marital bed. To con is to
persist in relation to the eventuality of capture, to the simultaneous promise and impossibility
of the good life, to that trap of good-faith futurity when the future is not for you. 为此,
a con man is a straw man, the besuited grifter merely a legible appliqué over that which terror-
izes legibility: the dark miasmatic threat of an underworld, of wanton effeminate excess, of devi-
ant circulation.

The con is a mechanism that operates in the asymmetries of more expansive social relations;

it is a performance that channels the bestial extensities submerged in the interactions of good
subjects, extensities that undergird our collective material histories. The con is what becomes
possible when the assurances we make can never be true, when the structural support of sure-
ness is not in our power and not on our side. And in a significant sense, this condition allows
for our survival, for an escape that makes possible provisional forays into a subjecthood that
could never hold us, a way to play with that trustworthiness that was never anything we could
have access to, to that temporal enclosure of confidence as part of a lineage of historical enclo-
sures to which we are not, and could never be, the rightful heirs. The con opens up an alternate
economy of living without this inheritance, a way of speaking when we already know that every-
thing we say can and will be used against us, when language and the truths it produces are not
on our side.

Aliza Shvarts is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU, where she writes on doom, reproduc-
tive labor, and extensity. She received her BA at Yale University. Her artwork has been shown at the
Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, at the MoMA PS1 in New York, and at the Tate Modern in
伦敦, among other venues. She currently edits Ampersand, the experimental section of the feminist
theory journal Women & Performance. aliza.shvarts@gmail.com