Fisher - "Towards a Metaphysics of Shit"

Fisher, J. “Towards a Metaphysics of Shit” in Documenta 11 Platform 5 The Catalog, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hajte Cantz, 2002, pp. 63-70.

Jean Fisher in "Towards a Metaphysics of Shit" looks at the possibility of resistant art practices through the notion of the trickster. The trickster is the position governed by excess – “a doubling up with laughter, repeating, proliferating, saturating, insinuating, miming and masquerading...a guerrilla war of position designed to confuse the enemy” (Fisher, 69). This position takes a lateral approach (rather than direct opposition) with which to subvert authority which is similar to Archille Bonito Oliva’s description of the ‘traitor’ in The Ideology of the Traitor: Art, Manner and Mannerism.

The Ideology of the Traitor is a book primarily about Mannerism, but in the introduction it draws a parallel between the alienation experienced by the intellectual/traitor/mannerist artist and that experienced in the late 20th century by the modern intellectual. Both periods are characterised by a shift from heroic confrontation with the world (Renaissance, Modernism) to a space of minority characterised by a “relentless nomadism” and detachment (Oliva, 18).

The difference, it seems, between Oliva’s traitor and Fisher’s (69) description of the “tricky-carnivalesque spirit” relates to agency. Where Fisher (69) considers the position of the trickster as one of action and “reclamation of the language of agency through the transforming power of the imagination”, Oliva notes that for the traitor, representation replaces real action. The traitor is consumed by melancholia, suspicion, and ambivalence, which leads him to paralysis; he is characterised by action on the stage rather than in reality (Oliva, 37). Oliva (35) suggests the traitor is forced to oscillate between the prince and the madman, that is between authority and open excess. In this oscillation he approaches the position of the fool, the character that cannot master one pole nor the other, so retreats into language, to performance. Although, for the traitor, there is no way out of this oscillation, this position allows him to occupy a space of possibility – the traitor constructs a surreality through using the weapon of language, he “replaces life, because life cannot be lived” (Oliva, 37).

Works Cited

Oliva, A. B. The Ideology of the Traitor: Art, Manner and Mannerism, Milan: Electa, 1976.