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they nonetheless return, during the entire history of modernism, as objects for
representation: Oriental fantasies, idealization of the Primitive… Jens Haaning’s art
is clearly distinguished from this history, drawing practical conclusions from the
theoretical rejection of representation as a device of power. Never to speak
for others, but to let them speak for themselves. While the issue is not to be
a spokesperson for anybody, a voice nonetheless expresses itself, anonymous,
impersonal, like a clamor…
The confrontation of difference, the making present (and not the representation) of
the other, are thus opposed to the mechanisms of recognition, of identification:
I feel so alive when I am confronted with the fact / feeling that I do not understand
anything at all (1999)… What’s the point of making art about things we already
know? Gilles Deleuze said, that writing necessarily encounters by itself, when it is
not official, some "minority", about which the author does not write, in the sense of
taking them as object, but within which, on the contrary, he ends up being caught
because he is writing. "The fact that the writer is a minority signifies. . .that writing
always encounters a minority which does not write, and it does not take it upon
itself to write for this minority, in its place or about it, but that there is a meeting
where each pushes the other, dragging it in its line of flight, in a conjugated
deterritorialization." 8 Take Rimbaud’s "Bad Blood" for example: "I lived everywhere.
Not one family in Europe that I don’t know. – I hear families like mine, which owe
everything to the declaration of Human Rights. . . It’s very obvious to me that I’ve
always come from an inferior race. . .I’ve never been one of this people. . .I’m a
beast, a nigger…" 9 Or, to say it in a different tone, inspired from Rimbaud’s prose
poem, Patti Smith in "Rockn’Roll Nigger": "any man who extends beyond the classic
form is a nigger-one sans fear and despair...........translating new languages new
and abused rock and roll and love lashing from the tongue of me nigger…" 10 By
comparing his own marginal situation in society to that of immigrants, and by
affirming the privileged position of this situation for his activity, Haaning affirms
his practice as an art of the becoming-minor, such as it was defined for a certain
kind of literature. Rather than an expression in a minor language, it is the expression
of a minority inside a majority language (the feeling of being alien from his own
culture) — dragging the latter toward a becoming minor of language (or of forms).
Translated from French by Mai-Thu Perret, Geneva.