Freedom

Before all else, we are in common. Then we must become what weare: the given is an exigency, and this exigency is infinite.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Truth of Democracy

What do we have in common with each other? And what do we have in common with the earth? Water. And it is not infinite. Is it given? For Nancy, the question of the given is tied to what cannot be turned into capital; what cannot be possessed; and indeed, what cannot be avoided or fully named.¹ For to name the given is to, inevitably, transform it into trade. (I'll trade my metaphor for two of your similes). And that wearying process contaminates and ruins the infinite freedom carried by the current that must not become currency.

Nancy, like Samuel Beckett, comes closest to that infinite current in the act of thinking. Not in the consolidation of thought called "philosophy" or "the novel" but rather in the still radical act of thinking—an act that Beckett called at two points an "act without words."² For both Beckett and Nancy, thinking seeks the unnamable, while literature and philosophy threaten to enclose it, give it titles, and sell it. For to let thinking consort with the unnamable is to expose the infinity of disaster that threatens to make life itself unbearable, forever exigent and urgent.

I think of oceans as infinite and unmeasurable. Sarah Cameron Sunde's performance project 36.5/A Durational Performance with the Sea invites us to stand at the edge of the sea, physically or imaginatively, and immerse ourselves in water with her. The performance stages the ebbing and flowing of seas, as time and temperature transform the volume of their matter. Sunde's durational performances begin in light and expose the dimming of it. After about thirteen hours, the tide completes one full cycle of coming in to shore and receding. At the end of the tide cycle, the particular performance ends. Sunde leaves the water, and we see that the sea no longer appears to be the same. But each performance takes place in a larger series; and as her performances accumulate and circulate, they touch on something larger than the cycle of each tide. They flap and float in a mathematical currency we cannot yet fully calculate. How many grains of sand touch her feet in each ocean? Was William Blake's math right when he urged us, back then when we were innocent, "To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour"?³

While seeming to embody Foucault's proposition at the end of The Order of Things that "one can certainly wager that man might be erased like a face drawn at the edge of the sea,"⁴ Sunde's performance also pushes against that erasure by maintaining her own stalwart presence at the edge of the sea. She is often visited, accompanied even, for parts of her performance, by onlookers who join her in the water for varying periods of time. Following the insights of quantum physicists who have calculated that the act of observation, the energetic effects of looking, transform what is seen, Sunde's performances transform both the surface and depth of water. They also tilt Foucault's apocalyptic vision to something more subtle and hopeful. By insisting on duration and sociality, Sunde's performances "with" the sea wager that deliberative, focused, and enduring action can change nature, matter, surface, and water. The "with" in the work's title is crucial; offering collaboration, rather than investiture or possession, 36.5 asks us to think and feel our way to partnership with the sea. Instead of dominating it, taming it, or cowering in it, Sunde's work suggests that considering what we have in common with, rather than what we need from, the sea might ease both the sea and the human. When Sunde invites onlookers to stand with her as she stands with the sea, Foucault's lonely man, so vulnerable to erasure, becomes only one possible way to contemplate...