It does not so much allude to antecedent theories as represent, in the broadest sense of that concept, the contesting claims of politics, feminism, morality, psychoanalysis and personal needs, desires, fears and myths, on an individual perplexed by urgent decisions about how to live and what to do… [it] is a dialogue of dissonant and at times contradictory voices discoursing on topics like political and psychological domination (and oppression) and the interrelation of the two.[…] a species of free-floating forensics with voices antiphonally adding information and opinion to a breccia of neighbouring issues.

And in so doing,

[It] is the kind of film that makes a space for audience 'participation' ... [where] the participatory style itself operates as a metaphor of value, proposing the spectator as a 'free' agent involved in the active application of 'judgement' as he or she partakes in the 'democratic' construction of the film. This theme of participation in the fine structures is, of course, strictly analogous to the position of the spectator in regard to the gross 'dialectical' structures where the viewer (or perhaps more aptly, the listener) weighs counter-vailing arguments, judges them and above all chooses - not only what is relevant to what, but also a stand on the issues. 'Choice' like 'participation' is morally charged...¹

These words are not a description of 9 Scripts from a Nation at War (2007), a ten-channel video installation by Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander and David Thorne. Although they could be - almost. Rather, they are Noel Carroll's description of Yvonne Rainer's equally epic film Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980), published as an introduction introduction to Carroll's substantial series of interviews with Rainer in Millennium Film Journal. Journeys is a complex, if not unique film that Carroll and Rainer discuss in over thirty pages - 9 Scripts warrants much the same space and time, which is not possible here. The fact that Carroll's words come so close to a description of this other work, made in 2007 and first exhibited at documenta 12, is an indication of how much can and cannot be contained in my text. In the same introduction, Carroll points at a new 'tendency', a 'direction' away from the dominance of (American) Structural film (such as work by Hollis Frampton or Michael Snow) towards 'The New Talkie', a branding that the passage of time has relegated to one of avant-garde filmmaking's lost labels.² Carroll cites other examples of this tendency: Argument (Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall, 1978), Sigmund Freud's Dora (Anthony McCall, Claire Pajaczkowska, Andrew Tyndall and Jane Weinstock, 1979) and Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977) - works of a certain kind of European-influenced cinema which over the past two years have been looked at again, re-assessed, restored and shown again.

Carroll describes these filmmakers as distancing themselves from the modus operandi of the Structuralist filmmaker, 'the epitome of rarefied intellect', not least 'because the qualities [that their work] mines and projects … cannot, for all sorts of reasons, be regarded as heroic in the way they were in the early 1970s'.³ These new authors are moving from a high-modernist notion of filmmaking to a filmmaking that begins to critically incorporate the social and political positions adopted by its makers both in relation to their practice and in more general terms. If we allow Rainer to be one of the few exceptions, then this also implies a move away from the single (heroic) author towards co- and multi-authored works, towards collective or more explicitly collaborative practice. My appeal to Carroll's text in relation to 9 Scripts is not in order to rehearse an argument about the contemporary relevance (or irrelevance) of Structural filmmaking, or to wonder about the precise reasons for a resurgence of interest in 'The New Talkie'. Rather, it is motivated by an interest in the model of mapping that the correspondence between text and artwork performs, as a way of reading (or thinking into) 9 Scripts and as an example-in-action of one of 9 Script's strategies: a radical re/deferral or transference, where the words spoken by one person become a transcript to be read and re-spoken by another.

The New Talkie emphasises language…Structural filmmakers seem primarily interested in the possibilities of language (e.g. the polysemy of words) and its limitations, whereas practitioners of The New Talkie are preoccupied with this while at the same time with 'saying something'. Undoubtedly, it is the urge 'to say something' that accounts for the rise of The New Talkie…⁴

Language is the material of 9 Scripts. In it, a small 'cast' including men and women of different ethnicities say a great amount of things, to the extent that this act of speaking (speaking as something enacted or embodied, as the position from which a person speaks or is spoken to) is also its material. The centre of the piece is occupied by the matter of the position from which someone speaks, the position from which we receive what is spoken, and the position from which the viewer/listener/reader also looks/hears/speaks. These positions are repeatedly made material by the constellation of dissonant and interrelated voices that have been collected together from a variety of sources and grouped in ten sections: 'Citizen', 'Blogger', 'Correspondent', 'Veteran', 'Student', 'Actor', 'Interviewer', 'Lawyer', 'Detainee' and 'Source' ('Source', rather than one of the 'scripts', just shows the source material included in the work). What brings all these voices together is the condition that what is said relates to the contemporary circumstances of war, be they physical, conceptual, political, legal, personal, governmental, etc. This war is both war in general and, implicitly, the Iraq war - America's current state of war that its government does not admit.

From what position do I speak (write)? (And from what position are you reading this?) I did not see 9 Scripts installed at documenta 12, but watched the nine videos on three preview DVDs on my computer at home. There is a material difference between this linear order and the physical movement necessitated by the work's installation, where the videos were shown on separate, custom-built units arranged in space, to be watched by one or two viewers with headphones, sometimes facing other viewers, sometimes not. 'Participation' in this work had a physical manifestation, a piecing together that might occur mentally but that was also staged in time and space through the physical movement of the viewer's body. It brings to mind another artist exhibiting in documenta 12, Mary Kelly, whose new work there dealt more directly with transference from a specific time - 1968 - to today, and from one artist to another generation of artists. In a recent interview Kelly described to me her preference for the exhibition space over the cinema auditorium, the former implying a self-reflexivity inherent in moving between one thing and another, the viewer determining the duration of engagement, the direction of movement and its construction of a 'psychological time'. The museum is understood as one of the last sanctuaries for experimental work, where 'the outmoded has some redemptive value'.⁵ These things, however, remain imaginary to me, a psychic participation that is nonetheless self-reflexive precisely because of the way in which 9 Scripts represents various kinds of speakers and listeners (viewers), as well as the way in which these representations are paced and ordered by shot changes or repetitions (as moments - or prompts - in which we might move from one screen to another) - and, finally, how 9 Scripts encodes and enacts position as content. I am in a different time (and space) but I am still addressed.

The nature of this address looks simple but in fact is multi-faceted. Each category of speaker is constituted by a careful, constructed relationship between what is spoken (transcripts derived from interviews, tribunal recordings, blogs, interviews conducted by the artists), the person speaking (not always their own words), the register of their language (public, personal, informative, formal, casual rehearsal), represented or implied others (questioners, audiences, imaginary readers) and the composition of the image as a scene that describes the power relations (and their institutional foundations) which underpin this language and these addressees. The camera never moves. Like in 'The New Talkie', where according to Carroll 'language is more important than image', in 9 Script such primacy seems equally present, but is also accompanied by a formal arrangement of colour, furniture and choreographed bodies: speakers wear clothing in block colours; suits match ties and the walls of lecture theatres; bodies are arranged asymmetrically in rooms, the frame divided by classroom desks and rows of chairs; and a mass of New York buildings is the suffocating backdrop to an interview. These are representational codes not without analytical and visual pleasure despite how Spartan this form might otherwise seem.

In 'Blogger' a man sits facing the camera, reading from a sheath of pages in front of him. We see his face in close-up until the camera eventually jumps to a wide shot, showing an audience of six people sitting opposite the reader, with their backs to the camera. Although he inflects the words he speaks with an actor's timbre, these words are not his own: each page contains an extract from a different blog, adding up to a subtle but thorough range of different re-spoken voices. Some writers identify themselves; others do not. They offer details of life in Iraq from the perspective of inhabitants, coalition soldiers or activists. They include personal responses to the war and reports of air strikes; impassioned, objective, resistant, reflective or urgent meditations on whether self-reflection is ever possible; desires, fears and descriptions. They are like the sentences that the cast of 9 Scripts take turns to write in chalk (and immediately erase on a blackboard) in 'Citizen', showing real (or fictional?) people's responses to the question of what they will do when 'democracy' comes: 'I will comply'; 'I will understand that someone has to die', 'I will force my demands to centre stage'.

'Blogger' is like an alternative news service read on video by one person but with no fixed centre, no single speaker, no common ground other than the fact that all of these things have been written in or about a particular place or a situation, in the first person, for an unknown reader. And that is the thing. If one of the generative and sustaining tenets of the war on Iraq is actually the war on an invisible (read 'silent') enemy, an abstract 'terror', then this section of 9 Scripts inverts the equation: the imaginary here is not 'the other', but the viewer, figured as imaginary by the reader of these blogs. Me. I am addressed, but the twice-removed writer does not know who I am. So who am I?

'Do you feel it's possible to tell the story of somebody else without telling your own story?,' says one woman to another as the first question in the 'Student' section. The image is split in two screens: one showing a room in which the questioning occurs and one showing its closed door, through which another woman enters and replaces the questioner, who replaces the respondent (who leaves). This round-robin structure continues throughout the section. The concern in 'Student' with the understanding of particular words - such as 'enemy', 'ethical violence' - is mirrored by the legal definition of other (related) terms in 'Lawyer', such as 'unlawful enemy combatant', 'ethical violence' and 'torture'. 'Can you imagine me saying something to provoke you to hit me?' The list of questions in 'Student' is fixed and they are occasionally repeated according to the order the questioner chooses. The response is not scripted, which makes me wonder if that means that the language of the responses is more authentic than that of the questions, a speaking and a thinking through definitions - is this where I place myself?

As the correlations within 9 Scripts accumulate, audiences (listeners, receivers, us or I) are present or figured in other sections by their absence. In 'Veteran' the transcribed words of a female soldier and a male marine are spoken separately by a woman and a man in uniform from a podium to a massive and spectacular auditorium with no one inside. Their speech is intercut with scenes showing the speakers rehearsing their lines backstage - personal stories publicly declared or pronounced. In 'Actor' members of the cast walk through corridors and enter a lecture theatre, with the camera facing the empty rows of seats. They sit briefly in silence and leave again, repeatedly assembling and dissembling. Some actors wander less purposefully, attempting to remember their lines. In 'Correspondent' first a male then a female journalist (a news reporter and a newspaper columnist) answer questions about their work (the words they use, objective or opinionated, the positions they assume) that the viewer does not hear. The reported speech of their questioner is spoken by a male and a female actor standing in the side aisle of an empty lecture theatre in 'Interviewer'. The nine scripts of 9 Scripts are discrete and interlaced, explicitly and implicitly participating in each other. If I piece them together in this text across its various sections it is not to resolve their positions into one, but to reflect the accumulation of positions within language.

While the work's structure refutes narrative form - that is, it circles without a single point of climax - words, as the stuff of narrative, become a dissolute, disseminated, mediated theatre that stands for or becomes the theatre of war and its corollaries, itself encapsulated in another kind of theatre, the tribunal re-played in 'Detainee'. Across three screens an expanded cast re-speak the transcripts of the (non-)trials of Guantanamo detainees. Language here is absolute in the sense that it absolutely determines the form and content of the tribunal that persecutes 'unlawful enemy combatants' and withstands deviation by physically removing anyone contesting its terms, its absolutely inflexible semantics made physical, material. Language here is a spectacular injustice, and this is perhaps what 9 Scripts as a whole addresses, as it addresses me in its multiplication of linguistic registers, its self-reflexive and epic exegesis of complicity, subjectivity, authority and 'individual perplexed by urgent decisions about how to live and what to do'.⁶

Complicity too is participation. It can only be a galling irony that this war is one of the most prolific cultural producers of our time. In the radical overhaul of the nature of these cultural representations (into language) I locate the political imperative - and effectiveness - of 9 Scripts. I am not in a room viewing atrocities happening elsewhere, propagated by a political system that is not mine, supported by people who are not me and who are literally and symbolically elsewhere, being fed the comfort or the fantasy of my non-participation. I am in my room and I am in language, writing. In the 'Source' section the screen I look at is a computer screen, as the various transcripts of 9 Scripts are being written up from audio recordings of interviewees. I quote these transcripts from their re-spoken sources and type them into this text. You are reading. I - actually I mean 'I', whoever occupies that position - am/is the subject of 9 Scripts.

So what about the other inverted commas that frame words in the quotation that opens this text? 'Participation', 'free', 'judgement', 'democratic', 'dialectical', 'choice' - the generative functions of Journeys from Berlin/ 1971? Carroll used these words in relation to Rainer's film in order to indicate critical certainty as a possible outcome of the work. These words almost describe 9 Scripts, but the outcome is now critical instability or complicity, in which the generative function of language becomes representation and a 'polysemy of words' is contested by contesting itself. The contestation otherwise absolutely excluded from our political establishment's absolute construction of this war.

While planning this text I remembered something that I thought Gregg Bordowitz had written in an article in Artforum about another time of extreme crisis and radical, urgent activism - 1980s and the nascent AIDS epidemic. I thought he had written 'there is no such thing as community, only people coming together in a time of need'. But he did not write that. Describing the revelation that occurred to him after visiting the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York ('the only hospitable place to go' in the face of mass-media hysteria, misinformation and prejudice about the disease), he wrote: 'Community is the space claimed and defended by people who need one another'.⁷ If that is true, 9 Scripts is community.

— Ian White