Ruination: Notes on Innocent Power / Die Unschuldige Macht by G. M.

Tams Possibly these notes could commence with a bravely political comment on ruins, such as Durutti's 1936 interview by the Dutch journalist,1 which would set a context within a century and a half of oppositional politics. Or perhaps draw on a commentary from or about the Art in Ruins project,2 thereby setting our span in a quarter century of oppositional culture. But these are choices unchosen. Instead a frivolous epigraph may provide a longer and wider perspective outside those imposed by the Jacobins or the Romantics into the ruins of former academic-theological power at St Andrews. The professors entertained us with a very good dinner. Present: Murison, Shaw, Cooke,
Hill, Haddo, Watson, Flint, Brown. I observed, that I wondered to see him (Dr Johnson) eat so well, after viewing so many sorrowful scenes of ruined religious magnificence. 'Why, said he, I am not sorry, after seeing these gentlemen; for they are not sorry. Murison said, all sorrow was bad, as it was murmuring against the dispensations of Providence. Johnson: Sir, sorrow is inherent in humanity. As you cannot judge two and two to be either five, or three, but certainly four, so, when comparing a worse present state with a better which is past, you cannot but feel sorrow. It is not cured by reason, but by the incursion of present objects, which wear out the past. You need not murmur, though you are sorry.

(19 August 1773 in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides by James Boswell) Innocent Power3 is a pamphlet of no more than nine tightly packed pages, at first sight on the theme of ruins. Its function is unclear what relationship to dOCUMENTA, through which it was published? Who is Tams addressing and for what purpose? Why the double structure of an outer shell of play on ruins and inner discussion of power, democracy and law? Tams's text opens as an apparent commentary directed into a conversation that is elsewhere. It is schematic, dogmatic even, in an opening enumeration of five types of ruins. And once listed, these do not recur; instead the text passes on to the fragment as mode of critique. Were it no more than that, the text could be just a straightforward and commonplace justification for certain cultural practices based on the fragmentary good
1It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America, and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place, and better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. (Buenaventura Durruti, 1936)

2In fact the story of the avant-garde is the history of both the playing out of theories of ruination and the failed attempt to
transcend them. ...In modern democratic society it is the first duty of any institution or discourse to question and continually re-define the nature of its procedures of legitimation. As a self-invented project it is precisely our aim and one of our functions to call into question the operation of those procedures, partially by asserting our democratic right of participation . (Art in Ruins interview 1994) 3 G M Tams: Innocent Power / Die Unschuldige Macht 100 Notes - 100 Thoughts No. 013, dOCUMENTA (13), ISBN 9783775728621, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 201 1

enough for Novalis and Adorno, so good enough for reflections from our own damaged lives today. But were that all, then it would be insufficient when dropped into the curatorial / professorial space of dOCUMENTA - omitting the material positions of the curator and the curated, and implicitly accepting the spectacle of inert displays by those on whom patronage confers access to tools, space, resources. They speak, or refuse to speak, but their privilege in the gallery goes unspoken. What does it mean to speak of legitimacy and legality in that context? What does it say or not say? Tams passes on from the evocation of ruins, of fragments, to consideration of the overall system of impersonal rule, a sense of the innocence in two aspects of the power networks in contemporary societies. In Democracy there is the homogeneity and symmetry of the governor and the governed, where opposition is deferred and neutralised in the potential for future alternance. Know the way things are done, be a loyal opposition and wait your turn for a moment of power within the system: the principle of the equal change the legality of the momentary possession of power.4 The second is the State based on rule of law an order of things to which people are subject, where legitimacy rests in everyone's cognitive knowledge of their place in a total impersonality of the legal conceptual system. No right of resistance to this impersonal power. In that double context, what can be done? Moral outrage cannot fasten onto and delegitimise an impersonal power whose innocence dissipated through the system, nor can its counter-power a change of personnel bring any real change. If Tams's proposal is for a cognitive critique, the reconstruction of a citizenship unrelated to the State, outside Capital and Law, how does critique or reserved intelligentsia position withdraw from the play of legitimacy and legality? At this point, he briefly returns to mention of ruins, to potential creative use in art and politics. But again, what and where are these ruins?
4 Carl Schmitt Legality and Legitimacy, p88

What is the artistic and/or political practice that is being projected as refusing to play power games? Schmitt's description of depoliticisation is equally apposite to the artworld and its dynamic of perpetual competition and perpetual discussion.5 And Nietzsche described artists as always valets of some morality, philosophy or religion who rely on protection, a prop, an established authority.6 What are the fragments and are they curated, or do they locate and create their own ground like Schmitt's partisans? Ultimately the article is directed against faith in co-optable alternative powers. But there can be no real expectation that aesthetico-political ruins will fare any better aping Capital's creative destruction and open to the risk of a romantic aestheticism - either of ruins or of power's innocent indifference - which has been around at least as long as Novalis's beginning of an endless novel.7

5 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p72 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Third essay, Section 5 7 Novalis Miscellaneous Observations fragment 65