"Paul Pfeiffer with Jonathan T.D. Neil"

Anyone familiar with Paul Pfeiffer’s pioneering moving-image work knows that he has been out ahead of “the culture” for more than twenty years. Yet the manipulations and labors he thought to exert on at-one-time recalcitrant film and video frames have now been incorporated into platform and persuasion technologies that have touched us all, whether we’re aware of it or not. Perhaps that’s why the tone of the conversation that Pfeiffer and I conducted on the occasion of a survey of his work at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Los Angeles tended toward the elegiac. Something is changing. That to call it a “vibe shift” already traffics in cliché attests to how much “the culture” has accelerated. Our more recently inherited poetic forms can barely keep up, if they aren’t already broken down and smoldering on the shoulder. Which perhaps is why our conversation hinged so much on ideas of freedom. Pfeiffer’s exhibition is titled Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom. What that freedom is, how it is manifest in what artists do and produce, occupied much of our time. As today, its prologue is set in a wilderness of uncertainty. As you will read, how art may stage or facilitate our “exodus” remains an open question.

Jonathan T.D. Neil (Rail): Why are you obsessed with Justin Bieber?

Paul Pfeiffer: [Laughter] In my defense, he’s kind of one in a string of obsessions—the list includes Linda Blair, Larry Johnson, Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, Manny Pacquiao, I could go on…

Rail: [Laughs]

Pfeiffer: But seriously, I was thinking of Bieber as one of the original YouTube stars. To me, he’s emblematic of viral image circulation in the era of social media. He appeared on my radar in 2017 just as I was embarking on a project to work with “santeros” or Catholic statue carvers in the Philippines. Justin Bieber was on a world tour at the time called the Purpose Tour. There was an upcoming stop in the Philippines and I noticed he was scheduled to perform at the newly opened Philippine Arena about an hour north of Manila, a venue that happens to be the largest indoor arena in the world. It’s a massive, airconditioned amphitheater built by a religious organization called Iglesia Ni Cristo, an indigenous Filipino religious movement disconnected from any international governing body. Iglesia Ni Cristo was founded in the early 1900s by Felix Manalo, who studied with American Evangelical leaders in California.

So, here’s Justin Bieber performing in a venue that people may not realize is a megachurch. I was preparing to buy tickets, because I wanted to go see the show while I was in the Philippines working on this art project. But suddenly around September 2017 he canceled the last third of the tour and disappeared from public view. He reemerged a few months later in early 2018 as a born-again Christian, hanging out with Carl Lentz, the pastor of Hillsong Church. In January of that year, I remember, he appeared on his Instagram feed, I think for the first time announcing his religious conversion via an image of himself sitting on his private jet with his shirt off to reveal that he was completely covered in tattoos, with “Son of God” written across his chest, and a Bible sitting in his lap. If you zoomed in on the picture, which I did, you could see that almost every line on the page that the Bible was open to was underlined, as though he had been furiously studying it. It completed the sense of Bieber embodying a merger of several seemingly separate things: religion, the entertainment industry, and communication strategies in the era of social media.

There was one other thing that added to this coincidence, which was that I was embarking on this sculpture project, in which I was delving into the culture of ecclesiastical image making in the Philippines. I’ve always been fascinated with Catholic iconography. It so happens that the most famous image in the Philippines is an image that—so the legend goes—Magellan brought on his fateful trip in the early 1500s…

Rail: Right, the first “global tour.”

Pfeiffer: Yes, the first global tour. And it’s an image of the Santo Nino, as in the Holy Infant Jesus, the Child King. It’s the most venerated image in the Philippines. It exists to this day in a basilica in the south, the Basilica del Santo Niño de Cebú, just an island away from where I grew up. It all clicked suddenly: Justin Bieber is the embodiment of the Santo Nino in the Internet Age.

Rail: As displayed in the exhibition, it reminded me of these two models of representation: the icon and the relic. I take this from Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood on the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, in which these competing ideas of temporality and representation are playing themselves out. The icon gains its power through resemblance. With icon paintings, it doesn’t matter who they are painted by or what their origin is, it’s this character of resemblance, of fidelity to an image, which is what lends them a power of evocation. The relic is more familiar to us. The relic maintains a relationship to the physical body, or to a physical presence, and connects that relationship over time. With the saints, the relics are some finger or toenail or strand of hair; it’s necessary that they have this physical connection to the person. Many of our ideas of art and originality and authorship today issue from the relic model. With “Incarnator,” (2018–2022) there is this mixing of those two models. It’s the body in pieces, and the image of Bieber, as if to evoke both the relic and the icon at the same time.

Pfeiffer: I have an idea I’d like to try and articulate regarding these two kinds of authenticity or power associated with religious objects of veneration: while I consider digital video to be my primary medium, I’ve always been attracted to sculpture. And I’ve noticed I’m not alone in this. Many film and video artists with whom I feel an affinity exhibit a similar fascination with or tendency toward sculpture. And the reverse is also true. A number of sculptors whose work I’m drawn to also seem compelled to explore the moving image. I find that intriguing. For me, what’s attractive about sculpture has to do with its material and physical presence, the way it organizes the haptic sense and makes you navigate space around a room, but this is also what makes it challenging to me. As much as I love it, object making doesn’t always come naturally. By comparison, my earliest encounters working with digital video were relatively easy. The first time I experimented with manipulating found footage on a computer screen, something about the tools and grammar of editing were immediately intuitive, serving to facilitate the translation of ideas into sharable, material form. In fact, I’m tempted to say I could foresee what I wanted to do even before becoming familiar with the editing tools. So, while earlier attempts in other media often felt like fighting with the medium, with digital video it was like I stopped fighting and found a flow. And yet while sculpture comes less naturally, I feel compelled to explore it. I intuit that there’s a primal connection between the two, video and sculpture, or more specifically found footage and found object. They’re like two different aspects of the same animal.

These ideas coalesce for me in the viral image of Justin Bieber reinterpreted in the idiom of religious wood carving in the Philippines. Since 2017 I’ve been commissioning artisans in the provinces of Pampanga and Luguna working in the centuries-old craft tradition of the santero or encarnador. The most well-known of these is Willy Layug, who I think is the only contemporary santero in the Philippines to apprentice with encarnadors in Seville, Spain, where the craft originated in the Middle Ages. The works on display at MOCA are by Willy Layug, as well as by his teacher in Seville, Jose Antonio Navarro Arteaga. And also, most recently from an artisan in Tlaxcala, Mexico, named Ricardo Molina. There’s a kind of ventriloquism going on here that relates to my use of found footage since day one.

Rail: You have a work in the show titled Self Portrait as a Fountain (2000), a clear nod to Bruce Nauman. That work must be important for you, but since your work is based on Hitchcock’s famous shower scene from Psycho, how is your Self Portrait as a Fountain a self-portrait?

Pfeiffer: It’s interesting, the connection to Bruce Nauman. That piece was made in 2000, just a couple of years after the very first works of mine that had a public life to them. There was stuff before that, but in some ways, the pieces in the first room in the show, Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) (1999), and The Pure Products Go Crazy (1998) and John 3:16 (2000), those are where I wanted to start. That’s 1998 to 2000. So to answer your question: I was working on intuition. The key term for me was self-portrait. It was both this specific image of Bruce Nauman, using his body as a vessel that could be a fountain in this punning way. But it was also, by extension, about the entirety of his work. There’s a way in which he evacuates himself as a vessel, abstracts himself, and becomes the object. My intuition was about art historical tropes, a certain kind of speculation that I sense in Bruce Nauman’s work. In a way it is kind of like the moment of phenomenology, how that opens up philosophy to ideas of embodiment, and in ways that I think, in 2023 or 2024, become even more clear and urgent as a question. At that point, and then in 2001, I was already thinking about tropes of art and art history, like the self-portrait, but I was also thinking about architectural references like the Vitruvian Figure. These are ways of giving form to a whole cosmology, of subjectivity or of selfhood. How I wanted to interject, or to contribute to the field, was to develop certain intuitions that I had about these things.

It was around that time that I also experimented for the first time with images from sports. It occurs to me in retrospect that I was looking for a set of found forms that I could use as a platform to explore these ideas. I was experimenting with, intuitively, language from art history and from film history, thinking that these would be existing systems or conversations that I could jump into. I realize that there’s an aspect of sports that’s connected to what drew me to art historical references and film references, which is that they come pre-loaded. The one thing I think about sports now, which makes it different, is that it doesn’t require an art historical armature as a language. It’s a common language that goes beyond the art world. It also contains DNA that relates to art history, but it isn’t limited; it doesn’t privilege the art historical.

Rail: That work was made around 2000. It’s the same time that you also make the work that gives the exhibition its title, which is the two-channel work that shows Cecil B. DeMille not quite making it onto a stage in order to introduce The Ten Commandments (1956). If I survey the whole show, for twenty years it seems you’ve been interested in both the “church,” which is the energetic container, the architecture of the religious container, and you’re interested in the icons, the figures that inhabit those places and are invested with all of their various different energies. Those are two different scales, and they’re constantly in tension with one another in your work. It’s interesting to hear you talk about how that moment of the late-1990s to the early 2000s is this first engagement with film as a pre-loaded set of materials, then you launch into twenty years of work on the icon and the church. This retrospective is then a behind-the-scenes look, a peek behind the curtain of the production of this American religion. But from the perspective of 2024, what is “the story of the birth of freedom”?

Pfeiffer: Over the past few years I’ve been working with a title that I was tempted to pull out as a title for this show, and that title is “Exodus.” In a way, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom is another way of saying Exodus. What Cecil B. DeMille says when he reaches that mic is, "What you’re about to see is the story of the birth of freedom." And then it opens onto the scene of the slaves toiling in Egypt.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Exodus. In 2019 I had a side project: I curated a group show that took place in Washington, DC, and the title of that show was Exodus. It was held in an empty space on the ground floor of the Watergate building. It was a show of about fifteen found-object makers. I was thinking about the current state that we’re in. Not a geographic Exodus, but an ontological Exodus. The idea that Exodus is a way of talking about a revolution occurring, or leaving the existing Nation State to strike out and to attempt to innovate something new. It’s a title and an idea that I’ve been thinking about a lot because I think that the era of social media that we’re in entails moving past inherited categories, political categories, and social categories in a way that we don’t yet fully understand. There’s this idea of a kind of leaving behind of an existing order and entering into something like a wilderness. What happens from there? Does it lead to the creation of another Nation State? Or is there something that can be learned this time without the necessity of that endpoint, where the wilderness might be the place to focus?

Rail: There is a model of what art is, of what art does, for us, that’s strongly tied to the legacy of modernism. It persists in the ideas of estrangement, of defamiliarization, of creating these gaps in habitual perceptions to open up the horizon of something new. Working on found material, on the found world, and tweaking it in some way, or creating a parallax, a critical distance, in very broad terms, is a modernist project. But also, depending on how you want to periodize it, the idea of freedom—of freedom wrought from revolution—is coincident with the modern. The idea of liberty, of undoing the shackles of convention, of religion, of authority, that each moment is a step in the direction of individual and social liberation, of human potential, is very much what modern art and modernism were about at bottom.

Pfeiffer: Yeah.

Rail: Do you feel like that model has become exhausted? Defamiliarization and estrangement is just what the world is presenting to us all the time. It’s a new wilderness. Do you feel like the project of art and its relation to a broadly defined liberalism is coming to an end?

Pfeiffer: Absolutely. What I feel like I’ve been trying to do since the beginning is something that I would pose as distinct from an inherited notion of a critical project or a critical distance. In some ways, the notion of critical distance is the part that doesn’t hold water anymore. If being outside of the thing you’re critiquing is a necessity to conduct criticism, then we’re fucked. And yet we are compelled to repeat this pattern as though it were the only option.

Rail: I think your work suggests a different set of models. One of those is the figure of the athlete, the subjectivity of the athlete. In one sense, it is the most highly constrained. It is playing by a set of rules that are adopted at will, the harnessing of talents, of training, of pain and suffering. For the athlete, liberation is not a continual state, it’s not something that you achieve, that you exist within. It’s more of a moment, a punctual event, the beautiful play—not just the winning of the championship but the landing of that well-placed punch or combination. It’s a transcendental moment inside of this highly constrained field. The “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (2004–2018) pictures are, if anything, attempts to capture that. There is a way of looking at those pictures as modeling that moment of subjectivity. There is freedom there, but it’s different than the model of Exodus. How does the model of the artist and what the artist has to do change when faced with the model of the athlete as achieving a moment of artistic transcendence?

Pfeiffer: This conversation is making me think about embodiment in the case of the athlete and embodiment in the case of Bruce Nauman. In a way, with the athlete, the court or the playing field is a representation of the system that is a necessary backdrop for whatever athletic performance will happen. In some ways, Bruce Nauman is like an athlete, in the sense that his body is his vessel, but the field is his studio. The playing field is his studio. Something that’s interesting to me about Nauman is that he is a model, a very elegant model of self-evacuation in the name making the self a kind of laboratory, as a kind of agency. Maybe it’s a similar dynamic to that of an athlete, in that they’re fully embracing the field of play, as a bedrock of their existence, and playing the game.

The whole question of agency, and the way it plays out in art, and how that relates to the very real urgencies of society today—the question of how an art practice relates to this desire to self-actualize and to contribute, given very real concerns about the world. The question is: What is the efficiency of art to do that? In the current generation there’s a tremendous amount of social practice energy. Yet the one thing that will always make art “Art,” and not everything else, is an insistence on an authorial voice. Bruce Nauman, or Warhol, are interesting in that they present a model of occupying the platform of an authorial voice that entails a strategic evacuation of itself. There’s no better place that you could do that than on the platform of art. Unlike the rest of the world, there’s this insistence on “it isn’t art unless there’s an artist.” To present myself as an artist, as an evacuated self, is a very intriguing formula.

Rail: In Red Green Blue (2022), which takes as its subject the University of Georgia football stadium and its players and marching band, how did your own perceptions or attitudes towards the band, the music, the spectacle change from the beginning of your engagement with that place and those people to the end of it?

Pfeiffer: The more I delve into the field of sports the more respect I have for the people that perform in it, and the more I see it as a very interesting filter on society. I began with an earnest interest in the band director. But I will also just say that both of my parents were musicians. I was raised as a cultural Christian and both of my parents were church musicians. So I grew up around the rehearsal and then the performance of music in that ritual setting. More than being a believer per se, I really grew up behind the curtain, seeing how the ritual is choreographed. My engagement with the band director was on that level; I was fascinated with the myriad decisions he was making, and he was very generous to talk about it. He was very self-aware about what he was doing.

Rail: In that work there’s always this sense that you’re looking past something, or there is something in the visual field that you’re not really seeing or attending to. This was an interesting way of setting up the viewer, where so much about these situations conventionally is about the spectacle. But just a mere shift of attention can give you a different perspective on what’s going on; it’s a different kind of liberation. One just needs to momentarily attend to something different. And that moment of renewed or alternative attention, even within the most highly managed spectacle you can orchestrate, is enough to give you a potential for Exodus.

Pfeiffer: The word that’s coming to mind is “protagonist.” In the inherited form of the novel, the protagonist is a focal point that serves as a guide, a mirror to the reader. The reader can identify with the protagonist, and therefore has a foothold through the landscape. I think the protagonist is like the artist. It’s a necessary fiction to conduct what the tradition of a certain kind of storytelling requires. Taking on the role of this protagonist, and then using it to evacuate that subject position, does something that’s like navigating through a system and glimpsing a possible exit but in a way that is also enigmatic because it doesn’t necessarily result in leaving the system. It reveals a contradiction or a porousness to the system itself. The systems thinking associated with video games, for example, could become a model for a different mode of storytelling. Here the protagonist is immersed in the game, as an avatar for the player, and they begin the game at the center of a maze. The story that unfolds has to do with an attempt to discover the rules of the maze in order to escape it, or to reach some kind of goal. I find that interesting, the idea that we’re already working with a model of storytelling that begins with the assumption of total immersion within the system, and a navigation through it. It scrambles traditional notions that we inherit from previous traditions of storytelling, like the novel, which I associate with modernism.

I would argue that in the tradition of the avant-garde the winner is the innovator. Or the winner is the one who controls the horizon line, or the playing field, by understanding it the best and, by superseding it, propels itself forward. It’s very idealistic, a belief in progress. To reveal that the protagonist is a construct could be thought of as an end in itself, to be replaced by an even more super protagonist, a version to supersede it. But if you dispense with the notion of progress, then what you’re left with is simply the possibility of living with the realization that there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between your performance as a protagonist and your existence in the world. It’s simply to lose the insistence on individual singularity.

Rail: It’s our universal Buddhist future where there is no ego?

Pfeiffer: In a sense. What’s at stake is less of a justification for the role of artists today, and more a real question of how can we take this thing that clearly has so much importance in society, the making of images and objects, and have it relate to real concerns that we’re facing. I think that there’s a real profound purposefulness that art can have as a singular place that is built on a notion of authorship in which we can absolutely experiment and innovate our ideas of what a subject is. That’s how I see the work of Bruce Nauman. How in 2024 do we get beyond the Eurocentric mindset to just simply live in the world. One of the museums in Hong Kong called Tai Kwun is preparing to do a Bruce Nauman show and they’re specifically taking on Bruce Nauman, but opening up the work to be in dialogue with mostly artists based in Hong Kong or in mainland China. The idea being that there’s something about the subject position that Bruce Nauman leaves behind that can be picked up to reveal conversations or just relationships that are otherwise silenced or marginalized because of a Eurocentric discourse. We really need these new openings, just simply to keep up with the Twenty-First century.

Rail: Nauman was coming out of this generation that looked at the artistic subject as suspect. There’s a period where there is this “Cageian” evacuation of subjectivity, the opening up to chance operations, an understanding of that avant-garde moment as having continued what came in the wake of World War One and its refusal of authorial subjectivity, of the author’s refusal of authority. Is this what you’re describing today?

Pfeiffer: There’s the example of John Cage and then there’s also the example of Picasso. It’s common knowledge now that the repressed other has always been the absolute necessary ingredient for innovation to occur. If we’re not careful innovation gets re-harnessed to fortify a notion of the author as the protagonist; it just ends up never going far enough in questioning the underlying ontology. When I think of the stadium, I think of the Colosseum, the athlete is basically someone who historically has been not a citizen but a slave. The point is to really think through the situation we’re in without having everything fortify a sense of the primacy of the citizen and of the individual aligned with the state, with this whole egocentric cosmology—

Rail: Now you’re talking like a true libertarian. [Laughs]

Pfeiffer: What it makes me think is that, just to go back to Exodus, it was, in a way, two versions: some people think Exodus is the story of the birth of the nation. But if you dispense with that finality, there’s just a wilderness. Here I’m channeling this Italian Semiotext(e) Marxist Paolo Virno: what he proposes is uncertainty. The limitation of our inherited political tradition is the language insists on certainty. There are two camps: the idealists and the anarchists. One believes in the absolute goodness of humankind and the other believes in the absolute chaos of humankind. One needs a system and the other wants to abolish all systems. Neither has any room to imagine uncertainty as a guiding principle. So Virno proposes, if you want to see the quintessential nature of a post-nation-state world, look at Exodus. Not them arriving in the Promised Land, them in the wilderness, fighting with each other and with their leader, questioning everything. I would argue that the categories that we need now dispense with a certain kind of naive universalism, a naive belief in the primacy of the individual. These are such hardcore, wired-in belief systems in consumer culture. We need to go from that into a mode that’s more like improvisational jazz, a permanent state of indeterminacy, in which you’re not frozen, so you can perform, you actually embrace it. That indeterminacy becomes part of the performance. To me that’s already talking about a very different kind of ontology.

Rail: It is also closer to the performance of the athlete, the boxer. Every boxing match is a kind of improvisation. It’s a collaboration. One of the brilliant moments in Three Figures in a Room (2015–18) is when at the beginning of the final round, Pacquiao and Mayweather shake hands and give each other a hug. There’s this moment of mutual recognition. In order to try and win they would have had to believe that they can beat this other person, both metaphorically and literally. By the end of the contest, in which they’ve followed certain rules, they are still going to attempt to win, to beat the other, but they recognize in each other a kind of equality. That moment of recognition is both touching and in some sense a parallel to what you just described as these other forms of improvisation.

Rail: Nauman was coming out of this generation that looked at the artistic subject as suspect. There’s a period where there is this “Cageian” evacuation of subjectivity, the opening up to chance operations, an understanding of that avant-garde moment as having continued what came in the wake of World War One and its refusal of authorial subjectivity, of the author’s refusal of authority. Is this what you’re describing today?

Pfeiffer: There’s the example of John Cage and then there’s also the example of Picasso. It’s common knowledge now that the repressed other has always been the absolute necessary ingredient for innovation to occur. If we’re not careful innovation gets re-harnessed to fortify a notion of the author as the protagonist; it just ends up never going far enough in questioning the underlying ontology. When I think of the stadium, I think of the Colosseum, the athlete is basically someone who historically has been not a citizen but a slave. The point is to really think through the situation we’re in without having everything fortify a sense of the primacy of the citizen and of the individual aligned with the state, with this whole egocentric cosmology—

Rail: Now you’re talking like a true libertarian. [Laughs]

Pfeiffer: What it makes me think is that, just to go back to Exodus, it was, in a way, two versions: some people think Exodus is the story of the birth of the nation. But if you dispense with that finality, there’s just a wilderness. Here I’m channeling this Italian Semiotext(e) Marxist Paolo Virno: what he proposes is uncertainty. The limitation of our inherited political tradition is the language insists on certainty. There are two camps: the idealists and the anarchists. One believes in the absolute goodness of humankind and the other believes in the absolute chaos of humankind. One needs a system and the other wants to abolish all systems. Neither has any room to imagine uncertainty as a guiding principle. So Virno proposes, if you want to see the quintessential nature of a post-nation-state world, look at Exodus. Not them arriving in the Promised Land, them in the wilderness, fighting with each other and with their leader, questioning everything. I would argue that the categories that we need now dispense with a certain kind of naive universalism, a naive belief in the primacy of the individual. These are such hardcore, wired-in belief systems in consumer culture. We need to go from that into a mode that’s more like improvisational jazz, a permanent state of indeterminacy, in which you’re not frozen, so you can perform, you actually embrace it. That indeterminacy becomes part of the performance. To me that’s already talking about a very different kind of ontology.

Rail: It is also closer to the performance of the athlete, the boxer. Every boxing match is a kind of improvisation. It’s a collaboration. One of the brilliant moments in Three Figures in a Room (2015–18) is when at the beginning of the final round, Pacquiao and Mayweather shake hands and give each other a hug. There’s this moment of mutual recognition. In order to try and win they would have had to believe that they can beat this other person, both metaphorically and literally. By the end of the contest, in which they’ve followed certain rules, they are still going to attempt to win, to beat the other, but they recognize in each other a kind of equality. That moment of recognition is both touching and in some sense a parallel to what you just described as these other forms of improvisation.

Pfeiffer: And at the end of the fight you could hear Mayweather say to Pacquiao, “this is going to be good for both of us.” Mayweather’s like, “chill, we both made multiple millions.” Mayweather made many more millions actually. When I was working on that piece, I was obsessed with getting access to higher resolution footage of the fight. When the fight occurred in Las Vegas, the administration in the Philippines came up with a deal so that everyone in the country could see the fight. They projected it in the streets, so that everybody could watch it, because Pacquiao was the most visible Filipino in the world. I thought to myself, I bet one of the broadcast companies must have the high-res footage. Eventually I talked to some people high up at one of the channels that showed the fight. They said, “Oh, yeah, we got access to the footage. We showed it. But then we had to delete it. And the person who owns the rights to the fight itself is Floyd Mayweather.” This is a new model of the athlete as the protagonist. He’s his own business person. We see it coming with the change of the law in California that now allows amateur athletes to self-monetize. This is where we’re going. This is the new role of the individual as an influencer. An athlete, any athlete, can make tons of money by simply controlling their own image. That’s fascinating. We’re at a stage where we can accept the nature of games and performing and decide for ourselves what we’re trying to get out of it. Who we are in history, in our field of play—we have enough information now that we don’t need agents, we don’t need institutions to be mediators of these powers. We have it in us to potentially function independently of all inherited institutions.

Rail: That’s a very interesting populist impulse. It’s interesting how this has become a more prominent political marker, exactly because, as you say, the institutional frames, the authority of the institutional frames, have really begun to suffer. But outside of the way that these institutions have controlled or captured value, for whatever reasons and through whatever legacies, I still go back to Mayweather owning the rights to that fight. There’s control over one’s image or the authority that one has over those various different assets, in the model of the influencer, from a persona to a public. It’s the audience that invests that persona with value. But personas can become captured by their audiences. In the arena, however, if the integrity of that contest is damaged—the big fear is always if someone is paid off to throw a fight—it’s not authentic. In its most distilled form, the boxing match, or now the MMA fight, the spectator is looking for the integrity of that unvarnished self that can only become visible in confrontation with another, a moment of truth within that space. The model of the individual influencer, it’s compromised integrity from tip to tail.

Pfeiffer: I saw a commentary after that fight, the 2015 fight, that described Mayweather’s technique as a boxer as an innovation in the field of boxing in that a certain kind of defensiveness that he uses simply means that you can get through a fight being hit less, both hitting less and being hit less. It’s literally a less violent version of the match because of the strategic way that he fights. That, to me, is an example of where the athlete, stylistically, can innovate. It is more of an improvisational style than a kind of final changing of the game per se. There are games within games. If you’re smart about it, you don’t have to be the heavyweight fighter wailing away.

What I’m trying to connect to is the fact that the increasing familiarity with the possibilities of self-fashioning and game playing and manipulation could lead to horrible, horrible things happening. I think this is the uncertainty that Paolo Virno talks about. If we take a hard look at the situation, what we realize is the potential for violence or evil. There are no institutional rules, which the gatekeepers don’t follow anyway. What we’re faced with is sheer unbridled violence. Maybe the mythology that the state could control such a thing was a kind of screen to begin with. We know that the Nation State was founded on violence. What we have to dispense with is just an attachment to the notion, the aspirational notion, of becoming the citizen, becoming the subject in a particular way within the hierarchy, which, potentially, was an illusion all along, one held out to us so that we would continue playing the game. If the fact is that what we’re faced with is the potential for sheer evil or sheer innovation, then what becomes possible?