Political Art | "Le Ping Pong d'Amour": An upside-down pair of binoculars

"An individual life is a serialized capitalist mini-crisis, a disaster that bears your name. Don't invest anything!" That was written on a banner hanging at night in an ATM room of the Sparkasse bank at Hackescher Markt in Berlin. It baffled a police patrol, who then reluctantly removed it. This is an episode from the "inner city actions" that took place in 1997 in Berlin and other cities against the privatization of common goods, against surveillance and displacement in public space . Even back then, this development was sweeping the neighborhoods clean and transforming them into the hollowed-out inner cities of today.

The sentence quoted at the beginning resurfaced as the motto of the first season of the series "Le Ping Pong d'Amour," which also featured participants in the "Innenstadtaktionen" (Inner City Actions). "Ping Pong" was a collective project that saw itself as an alternative to professional film and TV production and also as an expression of distrust of academic and cultural careers. The first season begins in 1997 in a loft in Munich. The second season is set in the Rodin Museum in Paris five years later and releases—or rather, expels—its members into the world. The subsequent episodes take place separately, including in Damascus, Guadeloupe, and Istanbul.

On June 5, the entire series was shown again at Berlin's Gropius Bau. I'm writing about it because it explains possible reasons for our political silence in the present. In historical retrospect, it seems like an inverted pair of binoculars. The series begins in the 1990s, the first decade of the acceleration of that neoliberal global society whose financial meltdown in 2008 caused the loans of thousands of individual mini-crises to collapse and caused urban homelessness on previously unknown dimensions.

Especially in the first part, it seems as if the actors in "Ping Pong" are trying to cultivate immunity against this form of economic coercion in their shared apartment, of which they are, after all, a part. They carry books from which they read aloud like human shields. They also use these books as ammunition, throwing them at stubborn roommates. These books were the literature of the moment at the time: French theory and gender-critical feminism. But the people who appear in them, of course, had to earn money. Carrying books around is also a privilege, a distinguished form of alienation at a time when the employment office was renamed the "employment agency"—one of many casual euphemisms for the unconditional availability of labor.

Shared apartments in TV series are like capsules that convey a non-binding sense of security. They are neither families nor communes; their members are prepared to separate depending on their fortunes. The shared framework of the ping-pong shared apartment consists, on the one hand, of the landlord and, on the other, of a small business, then called a "Ich-AG" (one-man company): a French language school. The landlord is also the psychoanalyst of a stubborn shared apartment member: a reversal of the transference principle. The language school uses the rooms (and the people in the shared apartment) as a language laboratory. It is this reversibility of existential constraints that makes this season seem so carefree—as non-binding as a loose ensemble of monads.

The second season is titled "Ideological State Apparatuses," a term coined by Louis Althusser . The French Marxist used this term to describe the family, schools, politics, and the media, all of which exert an ideological influence on people. As a title for the series, it seems like an allergic reaction to the then newly established Federal Cultural Foundation, which financed both the second and third seasons. In the series, a state curator now takes on the role of landlord. She is exhausted by the constant hunt for creative resources to revitalize the museums. The ping-pong community moves to Paris, to the Rodin Museum. Art student Camille (what else could she be called?) destroys the sculptures—they tumble down the stairs far too easily—in an attempt to free the community. But it's no use, because they don't suffer from musealization; they suffer from themselves.

In a conversation, the characters fall apart and come back together, as if they've never played anything other than themselves. The project's openness has become a burden. The actors are thrown back on themselves. After all, it's they themselves who are tormented by the trappings of a negative freedom that tolerates no obligations, when their sentences never lead to conversations, their interactions never to actions.

The state curator enlivens further residences in Istanbul with "mini-crisis subjects," and two flatmates appear in Damascus. It is the period between the two Assad dictatorships, the transition of power between father and son; a brief springtime when the coming society could be discussed in salons. Photographs by Claude Cahun, a well-known surrealist artist of the 1920s and 1930s, are recreated, as if mounted on a set. When they return to Paris, the cover of Edward Said's book "Orientalism" is superimposed. Only the camera remains, filming someone learning Palestinian dance on the roof among the laundry and among other people, not with them.

In Guadeloupe, a salon is filmed as part of a wake, a nine-day gathering open to anyone. The island's leading women discuss the coming society. The corpse being commemorated is another member of the shared flat, a European, but one from Yugoslavia, which no longer exists as a state.

The narrative of bohemian groups that break up when members outgrow them and become part of the "ideological state apparatus" stretches back to the bourgeois coming-of-age novel of the 19th century. But the ping-pong shared apartment serves not as an education, but as a record of aversions: against the state and business apparatuses and against one's own condition within them. Such subjects cannot design a new society because there is too much state within them, which they reject. They remain their own onlookers. When Hegel, in the "Phenomenology," the coming-of-age novel of concepts, describes the law of the heart and the madness of self-conceit as a deviant poetry that opposes the reason of bourgeois society, that is, the unity of individual and community, then this reason, through its tendency toward enrichment, has been driven into the self-conceit of chainsaws.

And the law of the heart? The Ping Pong series was produced by the Minimal Club, an artist group (originally from Munich), and the bookstore b-books (Berlin). These were and are intertwined, constantly meandering collective contexts that, to this day, practice art, film, theory, literature, and political activism as a practice engaged in debate. This persistence is a protection in a time when free spaces are becoming narrower. Viewed from this perspective, Ping Pong is a critique of the mendacious triumph of the so-called free society of those years, which happily promoted its liberality culturally so that forms of enrichment would not be disrupted. Of course, this critique was unintentional.

»Le Ping Pong d'Amour« (Germany, 1997–2005, approx. 400 min.) by and with Team Ping Pong (Elfe Brandenburger, Esther Buss, Katja Eydel, Stephan Geene, Monika and Stefan Rinck, Niko Siepen, Klaus Weber, Cornelia and Mano Wittmann, among others)