Implementing iPads for paperless patient records

4.If we are to develop an understanding of culture through
‘feedback’, what does it mean for forms of organisation,
aesthetics and practice?
如果我们要通过“反馈”来理解文化，这对组织、美学和实践的形式意味着什么?
Week 9: Feedback and Systems Wednesday, 13.03.2019
Through the application of mechanical and scientific models for
the understanding of social and political life, cybernetic theory
– in particular notions of feedback – informed the development
of many cultural, artistic and political projects in the mid-late
20th century, yet its influence is still under-recognized,
especially in contemporary techno-political debates. This
session will address cybernetic genealogies of information
theory and systems thinking to see how current ideas around
‘planetary computation’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ draw on
much longer and more equivocal histories than is often
recognised.

6.Hacking is seen as a paradigmatic form of innovation, but also
of political resistance and of contemporary knowledge politics.
Working through some examples, discuss how these might come
together.
黑客行为被视为一种创新的典范形式，但也被视为一种政治阻力和当代知识政治
。通过一些例子，讨论它们是如何组合在一起的。
Week 4: The Hacker Wednesday, 06.02.2019
As a figure of the culture industry, the hacker is both symbol of
ultimate innovation, of a free- thinking high-skilled rebel, but
also as the avatar of destruction and chaos. This lecture will
survey some of the claims made around the figure of the hacker,
in particular examine Mackenzie Wark's reading of the political
economy of hacking as a general theory of the production of the
new in 'A Hacker Manifesto'. We will also open up the concept
of ‘hacking’ as an intervention into the nuts-and-bolts of a
technological system to interventions on the very structures of
cognition, as in Catherine Malabou’s concept of neuroplasticity,
and a metaphorical cannibalism as post-colonial ‘culture
hacking’.

7.The figure of the user has become increasingly important in
contemporary culture, how has this come about and what effects
does it have?
在当代文化中，用户的形象变得越来越重要，它是如何产生的，产生了什么影响?
Week 2: Users-Things-Machines Wednesday, 23.01.2019
Alongside the consumer, the figure of the user is one of the
casts of the culture industry that is most incessantly modelled
and pre-figured. As cultural processes are often interwoven with
computational and networked digital media and as design might
be said to provide if not a general theory of culture but a
'general practice' of entities, processes and events, this lecture
traces some of the ways in which users, consumers and
audiences have been theorised, created and invented. At the
same time, the technologically and ecologically inspired shift in
social theory from subjects to objects, from masses to networks,
and from people to things means we need to re-visit some of our
assumptions about the agents of cultural production, also
viewing the production of culture in line with other shifts in
social approaches to knowledge, technics and labour.

8.Participation is a quality of organisation, social process and
cultural life that is increasingly emphasised. It is also
articulated and understood differently in multiple contexts. By
tracing discourses and practices of participation map what it
may mean. You can take a case study of some particular
projects, and use it to trace how questions of participation and
collaboration in contemporary art are articulated.
参与是一种组织、社会过程和文化生活的质量，越来越受到重视。它在不同的上
下文中也有不同的表达和理解。通过追踪参与的话语和实践，描绘出它可能意味
着什么。你可以以一些特定项目为例，用它来追踪当代艺术中参与和合作的问题
是如何表达的。
Week 10: Participation, Collaboration, Platforms Wednesday,
20.03.2019
Participation has been established as a new mode of explanation
and of operation in contemporary art, in social networks, in
place-making and in a wide swathe of organised cultural
activities. Like many such terms it is plagued by vagueness, but
it marks a very real shift in practice and policy. As this shift
occurs participation as a theme and an imperative is also
something being 'versioned' by artists, technologists,
institutions, government and network media organisations. The
present time is characterised by multiple kinds of figuring out
in practice of what participation means. ‘Participation’ will be
linked to related terms such as ‘collaboration’ and ‘sharing’ as
emblematic modalities of artistic practice today, whose
meanings circulate but also are taken in different directions by
tech enterpreneurs, cultural producers and activists.
Project Requirements/Risk/Cost Paper Grading Guide
CPMGT/300 Version 11
3

Project Requirements/Risk/Cost Paper Grading Guide
CPMGT/300 Version 11
Project Management

Copyright
Copyright © 2018, 2016 by University of Phoenix. All rights
reserved.
University of Phoenix® is a registered trademark of Apollo
Group, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.
Microsoft®, Windows®, and Windows NT® are registered
trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or
other countries. All other company and product names are
trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective
companies. Use of these marks is not intended to imply
endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation.
Edited in accordance with University of Phoenix® editorial
standards and practices.
Learning Team Assignment: Project Requirements/Risk/Cost
Paper
Purpose of Assignment
The purpose of this assignment is to identify all resources
needed to complete the project. This includes defining the
process for collecting the data from the customer, as well as
identifying procurement needs, project requirements, the
potential risks, and the estimated costs. The most important part
of this process is gaining the knowledge of the current business
environment and identifying the expected changes as a result of
the implementation of this project. Involving the users
therefore, is imperative to the success of this phase. A project
requirements matrix, risk assessment matrix, and a cost

breakdown are important initial documents for a project and
provide the students practice in preparing these documents for a
project. Grading Guide
Content
Met
Partially Met
Not Met
Comments:
The team prepares a project requirements matrix, a risk
assessment matrix, and a cost breakdown for the project.
The team collects and evaluates the high-level project
requirements.
The team prepares a project requirements matrix that includes
the requirements, phase of project, responsible party, cost to
complete, and duration to complete.
The team prepares a risk assessment matrix that includes the
risk, potential of risk occurring, level of impact to the project,
and how the risk can be mitigated.
The team prepares a project cost breakdown sheet.

Total Available
Total Earned
3.5
#/3.5
Writing Guidelines
Met
Partially Met
Not Met
Comments:
The paper—including tables and graphs, headings, title page,
and reference page—is consistent with APA formatting
guidelines and meets course-level requirements.
Intellectual property is recognized with in-text citations and a
reference page.

Paragraph and sentence transitions are present, logical, and
maintain the flow throughout the paper.
Sentences are complete, clear, and concise.
Rules of grammar and usage are followed including spelling and
punctuation.
Total Available
Total Earned
1.5
#/1.5
Assignment Total
#
5
#/5
Additional comments:

Copyright © 2018, 2016 by University of Phoenix. All rights
reserved.
1
6
Project Proposal
The purpose of this proposal is to establish a clear
understanding on how to plan and execute a new branch to the
company. The project shall involve a collaboration of team
members each delegated with a critical task to ensure the
successful opening of a new branch. The marketing team shall
undertake the feasibility study to ensure the branch’s location is
the best. The market research needs to include test marketing
and pilot test of sales of goods and services (Entrepreneur,
2019). The finance team will evaluate the cash flow as well as
prepare a budget that outlines the overhead costs as well as
expected revenues. The Human Resource team shall be
responsible in hiring and training new staff who will work at the
new branch. This proposal is very important because it signifies
progressive growth of the company and expanding gives an
exciting opportunity to acquire a larger market share and a
larger customer base which in turn promotes the brand image.
Our brand image is one of the most important factors in the
proposal because we are reinventing ourselves. Adding an extra
step in our operate business will give us a major boost in our
day to day operations. Getting rid of paper and going to a
digital platform will that will organize all patient files and make
them extremely easy to access by doctors and other hospital
personnel. Make sending and receiving patient records easier

than before, because it is just a click away and it’s secured
because access to records will be password protected. Adding
this aspect to business will beneficial to stakeholders in
addition to all involved in success of the hospital.
Project Overview
The mission to move from paper to virtual forms by
implementing the iPad would allow for a positive ramification
all throughout the hospital and healthcare system. There are six
values that using an iPad has: Simplicity, Automation,
Standardization, Compliance, Satisfaction, and Cost Savings.
With Simplicity the value starts immediately. Consider the drag
and drop method when it comes to entering forms this allows
for forms to be automatically optimized for digital input.
Having the drag and drop simplifies things to make it
straightforward and swift. Also, with removing the cumbersome
coding, forms can be edited and managed as well as controlled
by business users and eliminates the burden on IT.
Automation allows Hospital staffs to be freed up for more
strategic roles. This also eliminates manual data entry errors.
This also provided the Hospital Personnel a better way to
engage with patients at the point of care. This also eliminates
storage of paper documents and the risk associated with lost or
stolen files. Standardization allows for the forms to be mapped
correctly up to the EMR, creating a truly efficient hyperlink to
all content. Compliance, with an iPad-based healthcare form
makes for compliance to be simple. It allows for patients not to
feel if they forgot anything and allows for staff to not have to
manually check over the forms for completeness. The
application itself will notate when the form is finished. An iPad
application for healthcare forms increases the satisfaction for
all stakeholders.
The training of hospital personnel is minimal due to the
intuitive nature of the iPad. This also allows for the patient
experience to enhance b making form completion easier and

more straightforward. With spending less time admitting, staff
can focus more on quality time and dedication to patients. Cost
Savings comes from many sources, automation of manual tasks,
increase in staff productivity, the elimination of data entry
errors, being able to process patient information more quickly,
enhanced compliance and security, the more a hospital system
uses the iPad application functionality, the greater the return on
investment is. (Chris Joyce, Director of Healthcare
Solution
s, Bottomline Technologies, 2016).
Resource Requirements
For the iPad implementation to be a success at the hospital, we
would need to order 100 iPads. That would provide enough for
each staff member, with spares in case they get broken or
experience malfunctions. The iPads come with 32GB worth of
storage and a 9.7-inch screen that would be large enough for
staff members to input patience information while assisting in
removing human errors. Each iPad is priced at $329, which
would bring the total purchase cost to $32,900. With fewer
errors from staff members, they are freed up to help more
patience then they usually could during a work shift, helping
bring in extra income to offset the purchase for the iPads. The
hospital runs on a wireless network that we can connect the new
iPads for easy uploading of medical patient’s forms to our
existing patient portal. This flexibility is vital for our staff

members to continue giving our patients the high-quality
service they require.
The Team
The team will consist of seven (7) experienced engineers and
two (2) trainers from various countries that work with this
technology day to day. To minimize the travel leading up to the
proposed date of implementation, the team will have meetings
via Skype to discuss the project deliverables. The Project
Manager will go over the scope of the project, assign roles, set
goals, and provide timelines to the team during such meetings.
Once the project is one month from the date of start, the team
will assemble in the city of the implementation site. The team
will report directly to the Project Manager for the life cycle of
the implementation.
The Importance of Project Leadership and Sponsorship
The application of leadership and management in the project
execution is usually dependent on the type of project and the
life cycle stage that the project is in. For projects which are
huge impact, large scale, complex and global in nature the
standards to be achieved, the goals and the deliverables are
constrained by the time frame, budgets and the market
dynamics. These types of projects involve large and distributed
project teams, comprising members from diverse disciplines.
Also, the implementation is going to be multi-phased. In such a
situation the project success and business sustenance can be

achieved only through an effective and smart leadership.
The leadership style should be flexible, sharing, and innovative
to bring about the project success. At the same time the leader
should emphasize on team building and motivation so that the
divergent members can work together as a team. In review we
have gone over several subjects including the purpose of this
proposal, our brand image, the mission, training requirements,
implementation, leadership and sponsorship. We hope after
reading this proposal supporting us will be a very easy decision
to make.
1
Taking Michel Serres' figure of the Parasite as a starting point,
track some of the ways in

which abstract dynamics are materialised and invented in
cultural practice.
Walking through the Geffrye Museum of the Home in Hoxton at
noon on a weekday is a
complicated modern experience.
“Look” says a man to his young daughter “can you see how the
house has changed,
doesn't it look different?”
It does, there is no denying it.
The museum consists of a series of chronologically organised
‘period rooms’ leading the
viewer through the ages from 1630 right up to the present day.
Visitors are invited to consider
the changing styles of domesticity, chairs, textiles, dining
habits, within an imagined London

terrace house. Each room is historically crystallised, a set piece
of the times; a stage for
episodic imaginings. There is an 1745 parlour with matching red
velvet curtains and seat slips
which complement the dark wood and Japanned cabinets and
sideboard.There is an 1830
drawing room with cobalt blue chaise longues and a crackling,
projected-image fire for ladies to
warm their feet by. There is an 1936 flat with it’s ubiquitous
faded avocado color scheme and an
early television set in the corner, towards which every flower-
print upholstered armchair, with
matching antimacassar, is keenly pointing.
The museum, so says the brochure, is limited to the domesticity
of the middle classes.
Yet each room seems expectant, primed for the entrance of B-
list actors from BBC period

dramas and adaptations: Downton Abbey, Great Expectations,
Return to Cranford, Abigail's
party, The Good Life. The period-drama imagination, it seems,
has already been colonised by
television.
2
The last display room is a reasonably contemporary ‘studio-
style loft,’ complete with
abstract paintings, flat-packed bookshelves and compact kitchen
units. Here, the middle-class
Londoner could, presumably, insert themselves as the
protagonist in the piece. However, if you
too had been visiting the Geffrye Museum of the Home on this
particular afternoon, if you too

had run the gauntlet of school trips, overpriced food and
informative displays, contemplating
curated slices of history from the early 15th century to the
present day; you would have seen
me- the scruffy nearly-thirty middle-class mature student-
standing in front of the last room, with
most of my earthly possessions slung over my shoulder, having
been asked to vacate my flat
earlier that day, seething in silence before a fantasy i could
never possibly afford.
So where is the parasite?
The Parasite
Most essays written about The Parasite by Michel Serres
include two things: 1) a

warning of the book’s impenetrability and 2) the itemisation of
the French definitions of Parasite.
In the translator’s introduction of The Parasite (Serres 2007)
Laurence R. Schehr writes:
“the parasite is a microbe, an insidious infection that takes
without giving and weakens without
killing. The parasite is also a guest, who exchanges his talk,
praise, and flattery for food. The
parasite is noise as well, the static in a system or the
interference in a channel.” (Serres 2007
px) These multiple meanings are symptomatic of the very
framework Serres is trying to
champion. He describes his book as fuzzy: “Mathematicians call
this new rigor “fuzzy”: fuzzy
subsets, fuzzy topology. They should be thanked: we have
needed this fuzziness for centuries.

3
While waiting for it, we seemed to be playing the piano with
boxing gloves on, in our world of
stiff logic without broad concepts...my book is rigorously
fuzzy.” (Serres 2007 p57) Indeed,
tucked away in the text, is another translator’s note on “fuzzy”:
“Flou means “nebulous,” “blurry,”
“fuzzy,” “cloudy,” and so forth. I have chosen fuzzy as a
translation because of the use of the
word in mathematics...the reader should bear in mind, however,
the meanings of the word flou.”
(Serres 2007 p56) This polysemic lexicon is all very admirable,
but it makes summarizing The
Parasite a nightmare.
Having to bear in mind the multiple meanings of words while

assuming one translator's
decision, is perhaps one of the reasons that only 11 of Serres’s
44 books have been translated
into English. Steven Connor adds “After a determined flurry of
activity in the 1990s, translators
seem to have given up the struggle to keep up with Serres’s
torrential output. I think it may also
be because his work is distinguished from that of many of his
contemporaries by a disinclination
to cabin or crib his thinking or its implications in any one form
or idiom of thought” (Connor 2009
p1)
But why dwell on all this? Many books are hard to read, but the
two things often written
about The Parasite, namely that it is dense and that the
eponymous “parasite” has many

translations, are really one and the same concern. They are part
of a stylistic choice which
spans Serres’s work and one that is quite deliberate. At the end
of the introduction, Cary Wolf
writes “to paraphrase Serres’s philosophical soulmate, Deleuze,
Serres is not content to say
that we must rethink certain notions, redefine certain concepts;
he doesn't say it, does not argue
for it, he just does it, and in so doing, he sets out new
coordinates for the praxis of thinking.”
(Serres 2007 pxxv)
Just as Deleuze and Guattari took a decision to write A
Thousand Plateaus as a
‘rhizome-book’ (Deluze and Guattari 1987) in the manner of
their theory, Serres’s The Parasite

4
is what Wolf calls a “book made of books, a text made of
texts...Serres’s work, in a profound
sense, struggles against clarity, which is to say that it struggles,
in a way, against language
itself.” (Serres 2007 pxxII) Therefore, before starting on a close
reading of Serres, we must
consider Conner’s warning:
“Serres’s is a work that does not seem to allow short-cuts, does
not surrender easily to
the economy of synecdoche, or permit the parsimony of
paraphrase...Read some way
into any Michel Serres book, and you will find yourself having
made headway with them
all; but you will have to read them all before you can finish
reading the one you have in

your hand. As a result, the reader of Serres finds himself
subject to a growing
compulsion to quote at length, the feeling that the only way to
render the work would be
to reproduce it, to subject oneself to rather than summarising
it.” (Connor 2009 p3)
Taking the figure of Serres’s parasite as a starting point, is not
an entirely hopeless task,
as long as the figure of the parasite is never considered a stable,
rational or reliable entity. The
style and spirit in which the book is written must always be
taken into account, a reading must
remain fuzzy, not fixed, because ultimately The Parasite has to
do with communication,
relations and noise. It would be inappropriate to assume the text
as a rigid, cookie-cutter

framework. For my essay I will focus on the abstract concepts
of irreversible history and noise,
but I make no excuses for the roundabout manner in which these
theories present themselves
as I believe it would be disingenuous to write a straightforward
summary.
*
The Parasite uses as its backbone, a text by La Fontaine, which
itself takes from
Aesop’s fable of two rats and a farmer. The city rat invites the
country rat to enjoy a feast in the
5
house of a tax farmer. However, the feast is interrupted by a
noise at the door, the spooked

country rat flees the house proclaiming: “Let’s go to the country
where we eat only soup, but
quietly and without interruption.” (Serres 2007 p3)
Serres goes onto twist, invert, redefine, change his mind,
deconstruct and recompose
this tale throughout the book, identifying parasites and the
parasitic transactions within the tale.
For Serres the country mouse is a parasite to the city mouse,
who is a parasite to the tax
farmer, who himself is a parasite to the producer of the meal
and all are subjected to the
parasite of the noise. Crucially though, Serres writes: “the flow
goes one way, never the other. I
call this semiconduction, this valve, this single arrow, this
relation without the reversal of
direction, ‘parasitic.’” (Serres 2007 p5)

Figure 1
This parasitic direction, i.e. an univalent direction, is in keeping
with Serres’ larger
conception of history. Influenced by nineteenth century
thermodynamics, especially its inclusion
of time into the science of things, Serres repeatedly emphasises
the cumulative, irreversible
nature of time. As Brown puts it in In Praise of the Parasite:
6
“The processes that define living cannot be run backwards to
reveal their initial
conditions, in the way that that is suggested by ‘clock time’.

Living is decent, a downward
progress from differentiation through a long series of
equilibriums that follow the
energetic thalweg leading toward indifferentiation and eventual
stability: death” (Brown
2013 p84)
The parasite operates within these constraints, Serres calls it
“the parasitic cascade.”
(Serres 2007) However the parasite is ‘fuzzy’ it can morph. In
The Parasite there is a myriad of
characters: three rats, a snake, an athlete, a farmer, a paralytic,
a blind man, two ducks, a
tortoise and so on, “the infinite number of parasitic relations.”
(Serres 2007 p99) These figures
switch and morph between parasites, hosts, guests and intruders
“the parasited one parasites

the parasite.” (Serres 2007 p13) In the book there is no one
figure who can lay sole claim to the
role of the parasite, even the rats. This is because the parasite
operates within relations.
In a chapter called The Best Definition (bearing in mind there
are many definitions for the
parasite in the book) Serres calls the parasite a “thermal
exciter” (Serres 2007 P190)
“The parasite… far from transforming a system, changes its
nature, its form, its
elements, its relations and its pathways… the parasite makes it
(the system) change
states differentially. It inclines it. It makes the equilibrium of
the energetic distribution
fluctuate. It dopes it. It irritates it. It inflames it.” (Serres 2007
p191)

So, bearing in mind its fuzziness, its ability to morph, its
resistance to figuration and its
systematic nature, let us see if we can find the parasite at work
in the Geffrye museum.
7
Rooms
As we have established, the parasite operates within a cascade,
one that moves in one
direction, with irreversible time. However, in the Geffrye
Museum, one can travel back and
forwards with ease from room to room, era to era, comparing

and contrasting the domestic
spaces of history. This contradicts Serres’s historical thinking.
It is important, from the start, to identify the systems at work
here. There is more than
one. We need to deconstruct the museum into its various
systems. The Geffrye Museum is a
series of rooms within a series of rooms, one set of rooms are
part of an exhibition, the other set
is subject to the wear and tear of everyday life. This is an
important distinction.
In the general leaflet the Geffrye Museum claims the displays
show : “...how the rooms
were heated, lit and lived in, show how they altered over time,
responding to changes in
domestic life and the wider world.” So, here the wider world
completes the system, therefore

both the display rooms of the exhibition and public rooms: the
cafe, the hall, the cloak room of
the museum’s infrastructure (an old Alms House) must be
considered. Through the relation
between these two systems, the museum tries to recreate a more
holistic representation of
historic domesticity and historic society, (Leibnitz analogy of
fish and pools comes to mind)
But why would the observation of furnishing/lighting/workings
of one room bring us
closer to the societies of the time? Serres’s mentor Gaston
Bachelard has this to say: “Space
that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain
indifferent space subject to
measures and estimates of the surveyor.” (Bachelard p13) Here,
Bachelard takes the first steps
in understanding how the room’s representational powers are

activated by the viewer.
8
In his book Poetics of Space Bachelard seeks to develop a
“phenomenology of
imagination.” (Bachelard p3) using the house as his field of
investigation. “The house” he writes
“is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts,
memories and dreams of
mankind.” (Bachelard p28) He goes on to interrogate the house,
the cellar, the tower, the
garrett, the room, wardrobes, draws and corners, identifying in
each a strong poetic
“resonance-reverberation” (Bachelard) which acts on the
memory and the imagination.

Figure 2
We can feel this process is at work standing in front of the
period rooms of the Geffrye
museum. A Walnut wood corner cupboard, a green felt card
table, a wide open hearth or a
teapot, can become “subject-objects” in the poetic imagination
as the past and the present
come together with a view to the future. (Bergson 2004)
However, the subject-objectivity of
these objects, the memory imbued in the matter, is itself highly
subjective. For example, these
poetic imaginings: oak panelling imbued with the dread of
traditional, restrictive space such as
9
the school or the club, a display cabinet filled with white bone

china with a fussy, grandmotherly
feeling of care, are limited to one subjectivity: mine, as I am the
surveyor. Another surveyor will
understand the room differently. An 1830 checkers board or an
art nouveau bookshelf probably
may mean nothing to you, yet everything to me. So, yes, there
are poetics in these spaces, but
they must be given rhythm by a willing imagination.
Matthew Fuller wrote “...(it is) the explosiveness and precision
with which it explores and
establishes its dimensions of relationality that marks poetry,
and it is by means of these qualities
that it escapes simple identification as memetic.” (Fuller 2006
p33) This distinction is important,
because there are also dead objects in the period rooms that
strike no phenomenological

resonance with the viewer, (again depending on subjectivity)
and therefore recede into
memetics.
A table in the 1910 drawing room looks like any other table. I
read, from a display plaque
that it is part of the Arts and Craft movement, fashionable with
aesthetes of the time. I have
identified my information, the table is just a table, a simple
meme. It does not dance like Marx’s
fetisized table, (Marx 2005) it does not resonate in my poetic
imagination. But an old man next
to me is weeping at the sight of it. What is going on? Is the old
man a more important viewer
than me, giving this table subjecthood, giving matter memory?
Before I can ask, the old man
moves to the next display, to 1930, where more memories await
him. Meanwhile a little girl is

being dragged away by her mother in the opposite direction,
kicking and screaming, furious,
bored by these dead old things. Her mother is equally cross that
the girl is not behaving herself,
a train rumbles past on the overground line from Dalston to
New Cross, an invigilator yawns and
a country rat runs across my shoe, fleeing the room, to escape
all the noise.
Here we are looking at relations of representation. Poetics and
memetics go some way
to explain the subject’s influence on the process, but Serres
tells us that, as energy is being
10
turned into information, there is always waste: “if information
was equal to energy, we would all

be gods.” (Serres 2007 p99). The museum sets up objects within
a space to transfer
information. Yet the transference is not clean, perfect, silent.
Serres urges us to listen to the noise, not as a by-product, but as
part of the system. The
parasite is noise.
Noise, feedback and entropy describe similar processes in
different disciplines: feedback
in cybernetics (information,) entropy in thermodynamics
(energy) (Connor 2009) and there are
elements of both in what Serres calls noise. Noise gets in the
way of the simple historical
information of the rooms, it parasites the transference.
*
If this is the case, then we need to ascertain where the noise is

coming from. In this
instance, the parasite is noise, but the room and the noise are
the only players in this game.
There are no rats because there are no meals in these rooms.
This leads us to question the period rooms. Why are they
inhospitable? Here we can
identify the cultural practice of preservation within the
museum: preservation is anti-parasitic.
Serres writes “health is the silence of the body.” (Serres 2007
p125) The exhibition
rooms are silent, for all their glamour and decoration, for all the
memories and representations
they hold, they are just that, representations and artificial
spaces. History or irreversible time,
has been emptied out, or at least artificially slowed.
There are two giveaways in the period rooms: 1) the project-

image fire in the grate of the
1790s parlour that will never burn and 2) the plastic sandwich
on the table of the 1960s living
room will never rot. “Rotting and plague are not only symbols
of violence but also real, singular
referents that only need themselves to give rise to clearly
defined processes.” (Serres 2007
p156)
11
Figure 3
There is nothing for rats to eat in the period rooms because they
show only a
representation of space, not lived space (Lefebvre 1991.) So
does the analogy break down

here? Not necessarily. I would argue that one should view the
period rooms not as rooms, but
as meals. If we take the rooms as meals, the museum as host and
the viewers as the rats, then
the parasitic cascade, with all its noise and disorder is restored.
However, there is another problem. If the rooms preserve
history and work outside the
remit of irreversible time, (anti-parasitic) then how do we
understand their historic order? How
do we account for chronology?
Clock Time
Now that we have identified some of the representational
systems at work and

re-orientated the rooms as meals in order to re-engage with the
parasitic system- including the
12
essential disruptive parasitic noise- we can begin to understand
the rooms’ relations to each
other. But first, we have to go back to the issue of clock-time.
As Brown said earlier “living is decent” rather than ordered
‘clock time,’ but what is clock
time? “Clock-time was for Bergson a way of spatializing time,
and as such, it really isn’t time, it’s
a form of space.” (Vitale 2011 p1) Christian Vitale describes
this conception as a string of pearls
each representing a moment, like the ticking of the arms of a
clock. (Vitale 2011) Bergson is
very influential in Serres work, his theories appear throughout

the text.
Rather than ‘living as decent’ or a parasitic cascade, the rooms
are actually a
representation of space as “clock time.” The rooms then do not
contain a slice of time from 1650
or 1935, only a curated space, an arrangement of objects
masquerading as time. This is
important. This chronology is a trick, the lie of clock-time. It
appears natural to us (the
observers) because history is often presented to us in this way.
However it only takes a minute
of contemplation to unpick the system.
Chronological organisation asks the viewer to consider all the
rooms as the same room,
spread out on a timeline, each room having been subjected to a
different amount of time, forced

into change according to the tastes of the period. But we know
that each room is, in its matter,
entirely different, subject to the same time at the same pace, (an
interesting idea to consider is
whether the objects strive to make the room look old, or
whether the room strives to make the
objects look young.) We can see that the one-way arrow of time
is not acting laterally from left to
right, 1630 to the present day, but universally, through every
room at the same (artificially
slowed) speed. If the chronology was to be believed then each
object in each room would be
roughly the same age, yet we know this is not true. If the room
was really the same, it would be
impossible to see past the present.

13
Serres writes: “History is the river of circumstances and no
longer the old orbit of the
mechanists.” (Serres 2007 p20) In this he is in agreement with
Bergson who rejected “clock
time.” This is what Serres means by the parasitic cascade only
going one way, the “...simple
arrows, pointing in only one direction.”
In truth there is no theoretical link between the rooms, none
whatsoever. Time does not
preserve order. As the great dystopian J.G. Ballard said “society
is a stage set, one that can be
swept away at any time.” (Ballard 1997 p65) .The rooms in the
Geffrye Museum will never be
replaced, destroyed, become outdated or decay. It is the
chronology, or clock-time, the false link

that gives the impression of passing time, but in reality the
rooms are only a sequence of
spaces.
The false link between the rooms is an abstract dynamic
maintained by the cultural
production of the museum. It is anti-parasitic. The rooms are
like a string of meals, a string of
consumable spaces pretending to show the passing of time.
However, once these false links
are exposed, we can better understand the relations at work.
Meals
The parasite overhauls the deception of clock time, debunks
chronology. Still, this is not
to say that the rooms are in not inter-connected. The rooms are
still bound in relation to each

other, within a false system, bound by the museum and the
viewer.
If we think of the rooms as frames in a film, then in the blank
spaces between the
frames, parasites have infiltrated.
Tastes and fashions are deeply parasitic. The move away from
Art Deco to Minimalism
occurred through interruption and oscillation. The parasite gets
“branches into the channel”
14
(Serres 2007 p35) the system shifts. “The parasite invents
something new. Since he does not
eat like everyone else, he builds new logics.” (ibid)
So, although the system is manufactured by cultural production,

the reality being imitated
is relational, parasitic. I.e. the representation of space is hostile
to the parasite, but the reality it
represents is parasitic. (Serres 2007) The reordering of the
rooms, the divans that replace the
armchairs, the softwood that replaces hardwood, the blinds that
replace curtains, these trends
were real, part of irreversible time, they are part of the parasitic
cascade. Like Benjamin’s
Anglus Novas (Angel of History) “His face is turned toward the
past. Where we perceive a chain
of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin
upon ruin and hurls it in front of
his feet.” (Benjamin 1988) The parasite drives this ruin, while
moving in the same direction,
re-arranging, re-constituting, morphing. But this is not a change
of regime, a handover of power,

an ordered change, this change come from chaos, from noise,
from infiltration, the host-guest
relation ”...this power comes simply from the fact that he is the
relation and not fixed in the
essence.” (Serres 2007 p156) However in the Geffrye Museum,
the parasite is hidden. Noise
comes from between the walls, not the rooms, noise is outside
the rooms, between the rooms,
the rooms are silent. The parasite is hidden.
15
Figure 4
The Last Room

Serres Writes: “Man milks the cow, makes the steer work,
makes a roof from the tree;
they have all decided who the parasite is. It is man...History
says so without symbols, without
translations or displacements. But history hides the fact that
man is the universal parasite, that
everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space.”
(Serres 2007 p128)
As I contemplate the final room, with most of the historical
baggage stripped away, I
must conclude then that I am the parasite. I am the country rat,
but what am I parasiting? This
room is communicating something different from all the others,
here I am jealous. This jealousy
springs from the concept of private property.
On the issue of property Serres is somewhat of a hard-liner. “If

property were not
founded on murder alone, history would not be quite what it is,
a river swelling with entreaties,
blood and tears” (Serres 2007 p140) Serres compares the
concept of private property to dogs
16
pissing on roots or guests who spit in the salad: “Whoever was a
lodger for a long time... will
remember someone not willing to divide the salad course.”
(ibid)
Serres equates economy directly with violence. “The first
person who, having enclosed a
terrain decided to say this is mine, was a dead man, for he
immediately gave rise to the
assassin.” (Serres 2007 p141) Yet, standing at the final room,

coveting the space, the stability
and the assurance such a place would afford me, I do not feel
like a parasite or an assassin. I
feel like the unwanted guest, the third position. “The jealous
excludes the third. He invents the
excluded third.” (Serres 153) Serres urges the excluded third to
be “the cuckold,” to be included
in the system. To understand this I want to include a text of my
own.
In The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, the protagonist, a stunted 3ft
tall dwarf with sonic
powers called Little Oscar sing-shatters holes into the windows
of jewellery stores and delights
in watching ordinary folk reach in and steal diamond necklaces.
He watched the people passing dark store windows, waiting for
someone who seemed

tempted by a certain object. Then he would sing out a section of
the window with his
voice, making a circular cut in the glass. He would watch as the
person would slip the
coveted object into their coat and move along. (Grass 2010 p78)
This is the sort of noise I need, the ideal third, a direct
intervention. Of course, if i did
reach into the 1998 loft-style apartment room, I would come out
with nothing, The room is a
black box, a meal, a representation. However it is a
representation of the contemporary, the
now. In this way, it differs from the other rooms and induces
jealousy.
“Power” Serres tells us “is nothing but the occupation of
space.” (Serres 2007 p142)

Serres sees this occupation of space, this marking of territory as
akin to soiling an area to
17
prevent others coming close (para means distance from) “Those
who see only public space
have no sense of smell. As soon as you soul it, however, it is
yours.” (Serres 2007 p167) Can
we see then the objects in the rooms, the beautiful furnishings,
as mere historical soilings?
Perhaps this is the consumable quality of the rooms as meals,
we covet the crystallized property
of others. The shit of historical belonging. It seems less enticing
than diamonds.
However Serres turns to agriculture to show that actually, it is
in empty, rather than the

full space where power is defined. He used the example of a
field, where everything is torn up,
homogenised, covered in silt, “the abstract space from which
everything was subtracted, from
which everything was uprooted, from which everything was
taken away.” (Serres 2007 p170)
This may seem counter intuitive, given the stuffed rooms, the
conception of wealth as the
accumulation of things, but Serres identifies the power of the
pure white space:
Agriculture and culture have the same origin of the same
foundation, a white spot that
realises a rupture of equilibrium, a clean spot constituted
through expulsion. A spot of
propriety or cleanliness, spot of belonging. (Serres 2007 p179)

Walking around areas in London that are undergoing
development, one can see this
agricultural clearing, this desire for what Serres calls “the white
domino.” (ibid) Rather than
expand or maintain or interact with the existing network or
system, the area is wiped clean,
tabula rosa, like farmers clearing a field. This “invention of
empty space” strikes me as deeply
colonial. But what has it got to do with the Geffrye Museum?
With the parasite? With Little Oscar
and the rats?
Little Oskar disrupts the rhythm of city life in The Tin Drum by
cutting holes in the shop
windows, creating a direct link between inside and outside, the
excluded third and the system.

18
But this is not how the parasite operates. Little Oskar gets
caught breaking windows, Little
Oskar is not a parasite. The parasite imitates the host, the
parasite disrupts systematically.
Earlier in The Tin Drum, Little Oskar does act like a parasite
when he sits in the grandstand and
disrupts the rhythm of the marching band at Nazi rallies by
playing his drum.
I broke up rallies, reduced speakers to stutters, and turned
marches and hymns into
waltzes and foxtrots.(Grass 2010 p81)
Little Oskar interrupts and influences the system by making
noise, by entering the
system as “a cuckold.” In these two instances a disruption

occurs, but in only one does the
parasite morph into the relation, “occupy the channel” (Serres
2007 p45). Only in the bandstand
does noise affect the system.
“The noise stops, someone leaves, someone, anyone: both
formal and random.” Noise
re-orders systems, but as we have seen, it can perform
metamorphosis- the noise is sometimes
an animal, the noise is sometimes Little Oskar.
Serres agonises about the difference between noise and music,
contained within is the
deeper debate between harmony and chaos. For Serres the
collective is “a black box of noise”
(Serres 2007) A black box is a concept lifted from system
analytic mathematics. Black boxes are
“a device of which one may precisely specify the input on one

side, and equally precisely
describe the output on the other, but be unable to describe in
detail what happens in the
middle.” (Conners p8) Serres realises, that in a multitude,
collective or plurality, noise
overwhelms, one cannot see inside the workings of many
relations, hence the black box.
However, Serres sees this chaos as warding off repetition and
homogeneity “noise destroys and
horrifies. But order and flat repetition are in the vicinity of
death.” Music, or the “miracle’ of
19
harmony, like a line of notes can emerge “islands of coherence
appear that had not been
perceived” (Serres 2007 p151) and the parasite switches

definitions, becomes guest, becomes
disease, become figure, morphs. “Noise gives rise to a new
system, an order, that is more than
a simple chain” (Serres p140.)
*
The figure of the parasite is notable by its absence in the
display rooms of the Geffrye
Museum. The abstract dynamics of this system are designed to
ward off the parasite. But
parasitism is teeming all around the rooms of the Geffrye
museum, in the walls, in the spaces
between, in the cafe and the bookshop, behind the counter, in
the lockers of the cloakroom, the
noise is deafening. The rooms seek to empty and purify these
relations, to clean up and present
perfect historic meals, which we, as rats, enjoy. Veiled under

the banner of chronological
history, we can parasite the cultural belonging of our historical
forebears, but confronted with
representations of the now, we feel cheated. Confronted with
the realities of property and an
economy which Serres says “relies on violence,” we realise we
are being excluded. Noise
comes from the wider world again, this time it is the world
outside the museum, the noise of the
streets, of London, of the conditions of the present. The period
rooms become black boxes, the
noise spooks the rats, the system changes.
Conclusion
I have attempted to conduct an investigation in the spirit of the
text. The Parasite is no

textbook, it relies on ‘fuzzy logic.’ In this way it is wholly
different from the museum, which relies
on order. The figure of the parasite seeks to disrupt order, the
museum attempts to restore
order through space. I have focusses on the false ordering of
time, (against the parasitic
cascade,) and the concept of noise. This interior/exterior
struggle, the processes of
20
belonging/exclusion that defines the abstract dynamics within
the system. The museum relies
on the cultural production of chronology and representation to
stabilize its display. But the
parasite is always looking for a way in.
The disorientating effect of the museum stems from this

dichotomy between the
displacement in time and the parasitic noise of the present.
Walking through the display rooms
the viewer is accosted by both systems. The further through the
rooms the viewer gets, the
more like the real world the representations become, but the
network of relations get
increasingly harder to untangle. Like Leibniz's fractal analogy
of pools and fish in which there
are pools and fish, the system can feel like rooms considering
rooms considering rooms.
(Leibniz 1989)
Stepping back into the real world, back to the total chaos of the
city, felt like a relief.

21
Bibliography
Bergson, H., Paul, N.M. and Palmer, W.S., 2004. Matter and
memory. Courier Corporation.
Bachelard, G. and Jolas, M., 1994. The poetics of space (Vol.
330). Beacon Press.

Benjamin, W., 1988. Angelus novus (p. 242). Suhrkamp.
Brown, S.D. (2013) In praise of the parasite. Informática na
educação: teoria e prática, 16(1),
83-100
Connor, S., 2009. Michel Serres: The hard and the soft. A Paper
Given at The Centre for
Modern Studies, University of York, 26.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1988. A thousand plateaus:
Capitalism and schizophrenia.
Bloomsbury Publishing.
Dolwick, J.S., 2009. ‘The social’and beyond: Introducing actor-
network theory. Journal of

maritime archaeology, 4(1), pp.21-49.
Fuller, M., 2005. Media ecologies: Materialist energies in art
and technoculture. MIT press.
Game, A., 1995. Time, space, memory, with reference to
Bachelard. Global Modernities,
22
Grass, G., 2004. The Tin Drum. Random House.
Hall, S., 2001. Encoding/decoding. Media and cultural studies:
Keyworks, pp.166-176.
Lefebvre, H., 1991. The production of space (Vol. 142).
Blackwell: Oxford.

Leibniz, G.W., 1989. The monadology. In Philosophical papers
and letters(pp. 643-653).
Springer Netherlands.
Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the social: An introduction to
actor-network-theory. Oxford
university press.
Macdonald, S. ed., 2011. A companion to museum studies (Vol.
39). John Wiley & Sons.
Mason, R., 2006. Cultural theory and museum studies. A
companion to museum studies,
pp.17-32.
Massey, D., 1993. Power-geometry and a progressive sense of

place.
Marx, K., 2005. Das capital. Volume 1. Translated by Samuel
Moore and Edward Aveling. The
Marx-Engels Reader, pp.439-442.
Serres, M., 2007. The Parasite, Minneapolis.
23
Serres, M., 2008. The five senses: A philosophy of mingled
bodies. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Ruse, M. ed., 2012. What the philosophy of biology is: essays
dedicated to David Hull (Vol. 32).
Springer Science & Business Media.

Vitale, C 2010 Guide to Reading Deleuze’s Cinema II: The
Time-Image, Part I: Towards a
Direct Imaging of Time to Crystal-Images,
https://networkologies.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/time-new-2/
accsessed 2017
Index
Figure 1: Diagram from Serres, M., 2007. The Parasite,
Minneapolis.p4
Figure 2: A drawing room in 1830 - photography Chris Ridley
http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk/explore-the-
geffrye/period_rooms/drawing-room-1830/
Figure 3: Photo of plastic sandwich Taken by the author
Figure 4: A loft-style apartment in 1998 photographed by Chris
Ridley
geffrye/period_rooms/loft-style-apartment-1998/

geffrye/period_rooms/drawing-room-1830/
https://networkologies.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/time-new-2/
Course Code and
Title: Essay Title:
Date:
CU71016A - Practices of the Cultural Industry
What is the role of the stage crew within the
cycle of production of performing arts?
23 April 2017
2
1. Introduction
Standing under the light or standing in the darkness. There is a

crucial difference
between those two experiences for both individuals: the person
who, from a distance,
observes such a scene and for the person who stands there. We
are not exclusively
talking about the symbolic differences, which can lead us to
classic dichotomies as good
and evil; life and death; pure and corrupted. The act of placing
something –or someone–
in an area where it can be visible (or invisible) gives the
observer a message about the
value of what is being presented: what someone consider is
worth being observed and
what is not worth paying attention. The place occupied by the
object or individual inside
a specific power structure.

Here, we are referring to those spaces where artificial lighting
is present, brought
by the will of an individual –or group of people– who gets to
decide what belongs
where. There are few places where we can encounter a constant
and evident dialogue
between light and darkness, that is why a performing arts
scenario is the perfect location
to reflect about these dynamics; because everything happening
in it operates from a
premise of light or the absence of light. Separate ambiences
used to suggest the
spectator what he/she is invited to watch and what information
is supposed to be
missed. Overlooked. Throughout this essay we are going to pay
attention to that
difference, locating our analysis within the dynamics of a stage;

but also within a bigger
and wider production and working system operating in the
contemporary world. With
that aim, we are going to focus our analysis on the concept of
immaterial labour –as
understood and analysed by Maurizio Lazzarato (1996)– to
build up a wide frame that
will allow us to understand the performing arts as an industry
that does not produce
objects as commodities, and functions under a seemingly
different cycle of production,
one presented as non-vertical and non-hierarchical.
In this setting of new social relations inside the chain of
production, new and
different interactions with the previous 'consumers' and new
kinds of commodities –that

are not meant to be destroyed– there is a strong need to rethink
the exclusions that are
still being experienced; perhaps, even more intensively than
before. How are agents
being excluded inside a system where hierarchies seem unclear?
Who stands in the
base? Lazzarato argued that the organisation of the cycle of
production of immaterial
3
labour might not be that obvious to the observer, because it has
been remove from the
four walls of a factory (1996, p.136). However, that is an
invitation to further analysis
on alternative spaces of production, in order to understand –and
make evident– those

existing organisations, and also the current rank that may lie
underneath the surface.
For that purpose, we are going to centre our attention on the –
perhaps– classic
opposition between the creative act and the maintenance act, as
two actions that share
common grounds –as they take place within the same space– but
still remain separate
within the production cycle of the performing arts. We argue
that both, the innovative
and the maintenance are indispensable and dialogical parts of
the creative/production
process; following the ideas presented by Steven Jackson (2014)
about the crack as a
trigger for creation/production. In his own words, "the world is
always breaking; it's in

its nature to break. That breaking is generative and productive.
(...)" (p.223) The author
of this text refers to the activity of media and technology, but
we are taking his ideas
and applying them to a different context: an analysis of the
performance inside the
structure of a theatre, where innovation and maintenance also
have an important and
constant presence, generally affected and valued by their
presence under the light, or
their actions tanking place within the shadows.
That difference –between what we, as observers, can recognize
and identify and
what we only see as distant dark shapes– will be insightful for
our understanding of this
new production chain, but also for our understanding of the
social relations that take

place inside of it; relations in a so-called collective 'learning
process', where expulsions
–if any– are embodied and represented in new, several, diverse
ways.
2. Immaterial labour: inclusions and expulsions
When discussing the concept of 'industry' as the system,
mechanism or space
designated to produce something we meet a recurrent
connection to the factory, as the
quintessential location where workers, with separate and
specialised roles, manufacture
things –commodities– under a Fordist model of production.
However, the mentioned
model belongs to an economic and work structure from a
different time and social
context, and offers a restricted perspective to understand the

processes of production
today, as it excludes several activities that can be incorporated
now under the concept of
4
'immaterial labour'; the kind of labour that generates the
informational and cultural
content of a commodity. (Lazzarato 1996, p.132)
Maurizio Lazzarato presented the concept of 'immaterial labour'
as a more
accurate way to conceive work –and the power relations that
have risen as a
consequence of it– in the post-industrial world. This new
approach to labour was
envisaged in a setting where modes of production and relations

have, apparently,
changed and can be now identified as broader ideas, when
compared to the previous
ones. In this context, the concept of 'work' is reconstructed and
now involves a wider
range of activities that were not usually recognized as work
(p.132). Thus, the
emergence of "immaterial labour" is connected to the blurring
of the division between
labour and leisure activities, or even the arts; and sets the
ground –and gives us tools–
for the understanding and analysis of the culture industry: a
series of activities where
the ideas and the execution (or the mental and manual labour)
are no longer opposed or
separated.

The presence of an industry of cultural 'goods' triggered some
transcendental
inquiries as, perhaps, the important –and also permanent–
question about the arts being
created under classical industrial conditions: can we talk about
arts being mass-
produced? Certainly, this topic has been widely discussed
among artists, who deny the
possibility of an industrial production of the arts, or even talk
about the death of art, as
we knew it. This happens because the arts –specifically
performing arts as theatre,
dance or performance– face the difficult task to be understood
in terms of industrial
production due to a prevailing connection with an out-dated
labour structure. Where
production happens exclusively inside a factory, and where

objects, as commodities, are
ensemble. Lazzarato puts emphasis on the nature and
characteristics of immaterial
labour, giving us some keys to overcome this challenge:
"The particularity of the commodity produced through
immaterial
labour consists in the fact that it is not destroyed in the act of
consumption but rather it enlarges, transforms and creates the
"ideological" and cultural environment of the consumer (...) it
transforms the person who uses it" (1994, p.137)
5
The production of performing arts indeed offers a commodity
that cannot be
destroyed, one that is transformed through contact with an
audience or spectator, and

that also transforms the person who receives or goes through
this commodified
experience. From these ideas, we can acknowledge one
additional, yet crucial,
characteristic of the 'immaterial labour' as understood by
Lazzarato, and it is related to
the transformation of the relationships between the workers –
within a labour division–
and between the worker and the consumer. For the author,
there's a shift from the logic
of 'supply and demand' to a new production-consumption
relationship (p.140) where the
consumer (or the spectator, in this specific ground) is no longer
restricted to the act of
'consuming' but is able to acquire a more active –productive–
role. This introduces a
profile of the spectator in the same line of the approach to the

topic of Jacques Ranciere,
who understands the observer as active, as a body that is being
'moved' by the body that
is presented in front of her/him on stage. (2009, p.3) Finally,
Lazzarato sum up these
ideas as: "It seems, then, that the post industrial commodity is
the result of a creative
process that involves both the producer and the consumer"
(1994, p.141).
There is another transformation from a previous model of
production to the rise
of 'immaterial labour', which is perhaps more central to our
analysis: the blurring of the
roles in the production process. An author is not only an author
anymore. She / he–
under this new approach to the cycle of production– occupies
several roles and might be

in charge of every aspect of the production process, within the
intellectual, the manual
or the entrepreneurial. This implies that the worker is no longer
located at the bottom of
the chain of production, due to its 'brand new' capacity
regarding decision-making.
Seems like today, we all are 'the worker' and we all have the
possibility to participate in
the decision-making, instead of being "subjected to a simple
command" (1996, p.134).
This idea is presented to us as a seemingly disappearance of the
hierarchies in
production, a sort of accessible realm, where divisions are no
longer operating and
where the classic definitions of work and workforce are being
constantly questioned.

Has capitalist production really experienced a transformation of
the oppositions
on topics as economy, power and knowledge? Are we
experiencing the transformation
of the social relations within the cycle of production? Can we
look at this setting as
different? About this, Lazzarato himself thought this system is
opening up antagonisms
and contradictions that demand "new form of exposition".
(1996, p.146)
6
There are a lot of signs that certainly conduct us towards
visualising those
antagonisms. Saskia Sassen (2014) argues that current economic
systems –although

successful in terms of growing– allow the emergence and
coexistence of new and
diverse logics of expulsions. And, despite the fact that she is
referring to physical and
symbolic expulsions from the mainstream economic systems and
its benefits –for
instance, the expulsions of communities caused by
gentrification– we are going to apply
here the term 'expulsion' within the dynamics of production,
where we argue that we
can still identify an 'oppressor' and an 'oppressed' that stand at a
certain distance, even
when –apparently– there is not such a visually clear hierarchy
anymore.
For Sassen, the possibility of the 'opressed' rising against their
masters is soon to

disappear completely, because 'the opressed' have been expelled
(p.10) and are no
longer visible. So, what are the means currently used for
expulsion if –under the logic of
a worker who is able to make decisions– we can no longer
identify whom the oppressed
or the oppressor is? Sassen emphasises that, "these expulsions
are made. The
instruments for this making range from elementary policies to
complex institutions,
systems, and techniques that require specialized knowledge and
intricate organisational
formats." (2014, p.2) It seems quite logical to think about more
complex mechanism of
expulsion in a context where capitalist relations and modes of
production have
apparently shifted. It is only natural to also detect a change in

the ways of being
expelled. We just need to think about mechanism of expulsion
in alternative production
spaces, such as theatres or auditoriums.
At this point, we need to go back to a single idea brought by
Lazzarato in his
initial definition of 'immaterial labour', and it is related to the
commodity not being
destroyed in the act of consumption. (1994, p.137) What
happens if a commodity does
not get depleted from use? What happens when a commodity is
not an object for use
and discard? When referring to this, we necessarily have to
introduce the concept of
maintenance, which is an idea that was not included in the
theories presented by

Lazzarato, but we think is perfectly connected to the model of
production of cultural
commodities in performing arts.
Maintenance is usually conceived as the one activity at the
bottom of the
production chain, performed by workers under serious
mechanisms of exploitation;
7
minimum wages, housewives who receive no pay at all, etc.
(Laderman 1969) The artist
Mierle Laderman (1969) spoke about this topic through her art;
aiming to re-think the
status of maintenance work in public and private spaces, and by
that, also beginning a

reassessment of what we consider 'work' and what we
understand by 'art'. Generally,
these two ideas stand in completely opposite sides of the same
system, whereas on one
side, 'maintenance' is set to preserve the new and is understood
as a mechanical action
with no possibility for creativeness; on the other side, 'art'
renews the excitement, it is
the exercise of pure creativeness.
We can follow the question raised by the artist in her
'Manifesto for
Maintenance art' about "what is the relationship between
maintenance and freedom?"
and we can go even further and reformulate that last word as
"What is the relationship

between maintenance and creativity?" Steve Jackson (2014)
addressed our question by
analysing the topic from a different perspective. Jackson
proposes a different approach
to the concept of 'starting point' (the creative act) taking decay
or erosion as places to
begin, breaking the habit that usually associates this concept to
novelty, growth or
progress (20014, p. 221). This idea represent a breakage from
the habitual way we deal
with both –maintenance and the creative– and represents, as
well, another way to
establish the cycle of production; where maintenance is no
longer at the bottom, but is
located all across the production process.
If we think about maintenance, identifying it as a crucial agent

in the creative
act, can we still see it as an expulsion? Is maintenance still at
the bottom of the chain? Is
she/he still valued as less important within a production cycle?
We are going to deepen
our analysis and attempt some answers in the following section.
3. The Stage Crew: innovation or constant repair
The spectators arrive at the theatre and take a seat in front of
the scenario, where
the creative act will take place once the general light is turned
off. In the darkness, one
light –or a group of lights– is turned on and so the spectacle
begins, delivering an
artistic experience to the observer but also, a hint of how a
performance on a stage is

executed, and who are the ones involved in the diverse tasks
implied in this activity.
8
There is an apparent separation of roles within the performing
arts act –a
division of labour, to maintain the use of a language related to
the industrial production
inside the factory–. On one side, we have the act of creation,
identified as the process of
giving birth to something new, to innovate; done by the person
who holds the know-
how of a certain artistic discipline. And, on the other side, we

have those who maintain
the creative act; the one that is both constructed and destroyed
in every scene and in
every show, in a continuous cycle. Thus, the maintaining is
performed –and we are
using the concept of 'perform' strategically– throughout the
play; first, as the mechanism
to introduce new scenes or moments, and later, at the end of the
play, as a necessary
reconstruction of the space where the play has been presented
and will be presented in
the next show. This is a vital recovery from the destruction that
happens on stage,
which may not imply an actual demolition of the set design, but
it does mean that things
should be re-organised, returned to their original state, to give
space for a new

beginning. This represents also a significant connection
between the past time and the
future time, one that questions the understanding of the
'innovation' as the "start of the
technology chain" (Jackson 2014, p.226) or any other
production chain, because it
introduces a circular cycle with no clear beginnings or ends.
The act of maintenance is performed by a group of people who
is not involved in
the creative/performative activity in that specific space/time,
giving place for a
hierarchy among the participants within the production process.
Nevertheless, that does
not mean that those in charge of repairing the scene are non-
artists because they usually

are trained performing artists, and that is related to the
conditions and the nature of the
maintenance in this particular field, which happens during the
play, mainly located in
the scenario. This might appear to us as a blurring of the
hierarchies, as we mentioned
in the previous section, but we should first take a deeper look
into the scene.
The scenario or stage has a central importance in the creative
production for
performing arts. It is the place where everything happens, as it
is the setting where the
creative-communicative/commodity experience takes place, to
be seen/consumed by a
spectator/consumer. There, in the black box, is where the
innovative and the repairing

coexist, entangling both actions as if 'the efficacy of innovation
in the world [would be]
limited until completed in repair' (Jackson 2014, p.227). This
means that innovation, as
well as repair, have to necessary work together in order to
produce, making it difficult
9
to separate or oppose those two dimensions. Hence, as we
mentioned, there is an
apparent blurring of the hierarchy between the creative and the
maintenance, however,
and spite of their co-presence and dialogue in the same space,
there is still a symbolic
separation between those two realms which is embodied by the
presence of light and

darkness; but also and more importantly, by the fact that there
is a subject and activity
that should be seen and a subject and activity that should remain
in the invisible.
In the majority of traditional1 performances presented in a stage
there are a
series of conventions related to light and darkness. For instance,
just before the show
starts there should be an absolute black that would set a
transition between the general
light –that falls on every corner of the room, spectators
included– and the stage light –
that falls exclusively on the activity of the scenario. The light
design is usually a way to
indicate the observer where the attention should be directed.
Likewise, whatever action

happening under the light is supposed to be seen and, therefore,
whatever action
occurring in the darkness should not be recipient of the
attention of the spectator. But
the light and darkness convention is not only a simple theatre
dynamic to enhance
certain actions in the scenario; it is also a way to distribute the
value among the diverse
activity happening on stage. To establish a rank between what is
important and what is
not inside the production cycle of the performing arts.
Notwithstanding what we previously mentioned, we have to pay
close attention
to such organisation. What happens in the darkness cannot be
understood as a simple act
of 'putting things in order', or the action of rebuilding the space
after the creative

happens, because the activity of the dark is as fixed as the
activity that is taking place
under the must radiant light. This occurs because everything –
the innovating and the
preserving– is appearing in front of the spectator's eye. Each
small change in the
distribution of the furniture, every wall removed or relocated
has to be choreographed
and has to run smoothly, as if it were part of the major creative
activity. But, isn't it part
of the creative endeavour?
1
When
we
mention
"traditional"
performances
on

stage
we
mean
those
that
take
place
in
a
proscenium
kind
of
structure,
where
the
spectators
are
located
in
seats
in
front
of
a

distant
scenario.
There
are
artistic
proposals
in
performing
arts
that
scape
from
that
type
of
structure,
or
aim
to
break
the
fourth
wall

convention,
but
we
are
not
including
those
in
this
analysis.
10
A brief review is needed before moving on. When Lazzarato
discussed the
concept of immaterial labour he introduced the idea of a
different labour structure,

based on a collective learning process that has now become the
heart of productivity
(1996, p.134). This notion lies in the fact that one agent can
now be in charge of the
intellectual, the manual and the entrepreneurial aspects of work;
changing the way
relations of production were thought before: now, they should
be analysed in terms of
networks and flows. Walter Benjamin already addressed these
topics by recognising –in
terms of authors as writers– that the authority to create is 'no
longer founded in a special
training but in a polytechnical one' (1998, p.90). Hence, the
poly-function, and the
articulation of those roles, inside the production cycle of the
cultural commodities is our
setting to think about the innovating and the preserving on

stage.
Throughout her/his formation, a performing artist is trained to
be on stage but,
besides an artistic discipline, he or she learns how to take care
of several aspects of the
production cycle, from creative decisions to managerial ones,
and also to the
maintenance of the 'artwork', that is to say, the scenario and
everything that happens on
it. As we previously mentioned, this is particularly important in
the context of a
spectacle, where an observer is invited to watch, and indeed is
able to visualise every
little detail happening in front of her/him. Thus, in order to
maintain a specific
atmosphere and not break the convention with every change in

the scene, the
maintenance of the stage is choreographed and rehearsed as a
crucial part of the artistic
piece: the act of cleaning is a dance of coordinated brooms and
transforming the
scenography is an exercise of fixed movements. All
strategically thought and
performed. This fact –the presence of a choreographed
maintenance– is where the
preserving and the innovative meet and blend. Here, we can
acknowledge the creative
work behind the cleansing and moving; recognising that
everything on stage has the
same creative value.
In this context, the observers may perceive the maintenance as
the primal action

that allows the innovation to happen, but a creative act in itself
as well; performed and
directed. Why, then, the separation between what lies under the
light and what remains
in the darkness?
11
When Jacques Ranciere (2009) referred to the agency of the
spectators in a
theatre play he was introducing a new focus of attention on their
ability to process the
information sent by the interpreters from the scenario and to
affect them back.

Acknowledging the active participation of the observer in the
performing act is, also, a
way to make relevant what message is being sent and how is it
being released into the
audience. Additionally, and discussing the creative production
by Bertolt Brecht, Walter
Benjamin (1998) stated the urgency of the artists (he actually
meant 'the writer') to
reflect upon their position in the production process and the
importance to bring that
reflection into their artwork: "Does it underwrite these
relations? Is it revolutionary?
What is its position within the production relations of its time?"
(p.101)
This information allows us to analyse the importance of the
visual division

among creative and maintenance, despite the fact that them both
are set and performed
on a stage under the same conditions and by the same agents.
What the light and
darkness represents to the spectator is a reaffirmation of the
cycle of production that
happened inside the factory, where the division of labour was
also setting a hierarchy
among the participant individuals. This time is no longer a real
division, as the
individual at the bottom is not easily recognisable from the
theory; it is now a
exclusively symbolic separation. Perhaps, even more
transcendental than before because
it is not emphasising an operating system, or a current position,
but it is bringing an out-

dated system back and making it relevant in the present time.
The creator who follows the light/darkness convention in
her/his artistic
proposal is not only suggesting the observer about the existence
of a rank among the
activity happening on stage; but is also (actively?) forgetting
about its own position in a
quite different system of production. Therefore, we move
between two poles. On one
hand, there might be no actual reflection involved inside the
production process for
performing arts, because that would represent a necessary
transformation on the way the
'maintenance' is presented in front of an audience –perhaps,
more integrated to the
creative, as a mimic of what happens in the actual production

process–. On the other
hand, there might be no intention to "expose the present"
through the performing arts
product/commodity, as Brecht aimed, from the perspective of
Benjamin (1998, p.199).
12
These two options are equally perverse as, in both cases, there
is no dialogue
with the actual system of production from where commodities
are being created an
offered. Whilst in one case there is not a real interest –or maybe
an intended oblivion–

in analysing the shifts in the cycle of production –where we all
are inserted and occupy
a place–, in the other case there is an actual interest in
emphasising the vertical structure
and making it feel permanent and valid when it is no longer
operating.
Hence, as we already noted, the use of light is sending us a
message: a
permission for us, viewers, to participate of a certain moment:
an open window to
receive mediated information. The darkness, then, is where the
irrelevant and restricted
habits, everything we are not supposed to see, a black void we
are not allowed to
interact with. But it is still visible. It still has a voice and it still
releases its own

questions and makes us confront them.
4. Final ideas.
Before ending this essay, we have to be completely honest
about the topic that
brought us here. There are a lot of mechanisms used nowadays
to present the
creative/maintenance as part of a non-divided creative
production in performing arts,
where every part of the spectacle is integrated and presented to
an audience through a
wide range of styles. For instance, numerous performance acts
are set as one-man
proposals where the maintenance activity is embraced, showed
and thought, but not at
all hidden. Or, even, shows being held outside the black box: in

the public space or in
alternative spaces like art galleries or classrooms. Thus, it is
crucial –for this exercise–
to emphasise the fact that we are only referring to the classical
theatre distribution,
where spectators are located in front of the scenario, and where
scenes, moments or
transitions are conveyed through the presence or absence of
light.
The starting point for this analysis was the significant
transformation of the
concept of 'work', from a previous –even 'classic'– one, and the
social relations implied
in the cycle of production of the so-called 'immaterial labour'.
The rise of this different
kind of labour brought major changes in several aspects of the

production of
commodities, pushing us to use new tools, concepts and to think
about different social
13
and economical settings in order to understand how the cycle of
production operates in
the contemporary world.
Despite of the apparent breakage of the classical hierarchy
among the roles
inside the division of labour –now understood as a system of
poly-functional agents
who integrate networks and flows– we argued, following Saskia
Sassen's (20014) ideas,

that the mechanisms of expulsion did not disappear with
progress or economic growth,
but are 'disguised' or dimmed and can still be found, even in
more radical forms. For
Sassen, the expulsion of the 'opressed' from the social and the
economy hegemonic
systems is making them actually invisible and when something
is removed from the
visible realm, it is forgotten. Overlooked. This last idea
introduced the question about
how are these expulsions depicted today? Which are the current
mechanisms applied to
expel the 'opressed'? Based on these set of inquiries, we decided
to focus our attention
on a commodity produced under immaterial labour, to analyse
the mechanisms of

expulsion currently used in a space outside the factory.
By paying attention to the dynamics of light and darkness on a
theatre stage, we
were able to notice that there are too separate dimensions
cohabiting on the scene,
something set to be seen and something placed to be
overlooked: a difference
established between what is artwork and what is work, to follow
the phrasing applied to
the artistic discourse of Mierle Laderman (1969). We found that
the creative act is
separated from the maintenance act despite them both sharing
the same conditions of
creation, as the artistic and the maintenance are –both–
choreographed, rehearsed and
performed by artists in front of a group of observers. Thus, the

exclusion here lies in the
use of no light, pointing to the audience that the cleaning or the
change of scenography
is not worth being watched and, therefore, draining the action of
its actual creative
value. But, why is it necessary to emphasise the division
between those two dimensions,
if the cycle of production is no longer functioning under such a
restrictive, vertical
structure? Why is it still necessary to locate a role at the bottom
of the production
chain? Why do we need it to be invisible and to keep sending
that message to the
spectators?
The exclusion here is not applied to a specific "oppressed"
individual, but to a

symbolic role, to a singular activity that is connected to the
labour of workers obeying
14
to their boss' command inside a vertical structure. This is a set
of components or
characteristics are mainly associated to the production inside
the factory, but do not
belong to the production of commodities for performing arts
under the system of
immaterial labour. The presence of a symbolic 'oppressed' –
made invisible to the eyes
of the viewer by being placed in the darkness– is the
consequence of a) the artist's lack

of reflection about her/his own place within the production
relations of its own time and
place (Benjamin 1998, p.87) or b) an intended mislead for the
audience, taking them
away from an actual system of expulsions that might be a lot
more complex than this
hierarchy of labour.
This –perhaps intentional– oblivious look to the conditions and
relations of work
currently operating, allow us to bring new inquiries related to
the topic. In spite of the
use of other structures, spaces and dynamics inside the
production of performing arts,
Why is this structure still relevant? Is it slowly falling into
abeyance? Or, Is the
darkness and the invisible a necessary foundation for everything

else to stand on top of?
Fortunately, standing in the darkness of a stage is not such a
radical position, as there is
not ever an absolute invisibility. There is still a blurry vision of
the movement beneath
the shadows, caused by the excessive shine of the ones who
stand next to them.
5. Reference list.
Banks, M. (2007) The Politics of Cultural Work. New York:
Palgrave MacMillan
Benjamin, W. (1998) Understanding Brecht. London: Verso
Debord, G. (1994) The Society of the Spectacle. New York:
Zone Books

Foucault, M (1984) 'What is an author?' in Rabinow, P. (ed.)
The Foucault Reader. New
York: Pantheon Books.
Gill, R. and Pratt, A.C (2008) 'In the Social Factory? Immaterial
Labour, Precariousness
and Cultural Work' in Theory, Culture and Society. 25 (7-8),
pp.1-30. Available
15
at:
http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/4114/1/In%20the%20Social%20Fac
tory.pdf
(Accessed: 10 April 2017)

Jackson, S. (2014) 'Rethinking repair' in Gillespie, T;
Boczkowski, P. and Foot, K.
(eds.) Media Technologies. Essays on Communication,
Materiality and Society.
Cambridge: The Mit Press, pp. 221-239.
Laderman, M. (1969) Manifesto for maintenance art. Available
at:
http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/blog/manifesto-for-maintenance-
art-1969
(Accessed: 17 April 2017)
Lazzarato, M. (1996) 'Immaterial Labour' in Virno, P. and
Hardt, M. (eds.) Radical
Thought in Italy: A potential politics. Minneapolis, MN:
University of
Minnesota Press, pp. 133-147
Marx, K. (1967) Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Vol

1. The Process of
Capitalist Production. New York: International Publishers
Ranciere, J. (2009) The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso
Sassen, S. (2014) Expulsions. Brutality and Complexity in the
Global Economy.
Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Steinert, H. (2003) Culture Industry. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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