3.4.2: 'Utterly Unconvincing' Claims

This chapter argues against a progressivist framing of arts-based methods. I cannot attest that the methods I have outline will improve knowledge work, nor that they will produce better research. My insistence on this point is not to devalue the arts. I produce art. It is a necessary part of my research practice. The previous sections detail how creative projects inform my scholarship.

My reason for this move comes from a more concerted move to deflate the discourses around emergent approaches to knowledge production.¹ Academics, myself included, have a long and storied history of bloviating about the qualities of new methods.² Moreover, reflecting on the hype trains of years past, especially from the supposedly ‘disruptive innovators’ in Silicon Valley, I have a hard time seeing revolutionary interventions as being anything but the covert, or overt, machinations of capitalists funding the takeover of an otherwise functioning industry.³

My approach to arts-based research is borrowed from Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s second postscript to Laboratory Life. They write,

In the closing section of the original draft we declared that our analysis was “ultimately unconvincing.” We asked our readers of the text to not take its contents seriously, but our original publishers insisted that we remove the sentence because they said, they were not in the habit of publishing anything that “proclaimed its own worthlessness.”⁴

Latour and Woolgar’s claim is worth adopting more generally in scholarship: rather than saying the value of the work, and conscribing actors in defense of a claim,⁵ the two science and technology studies (STS) scholars turn their pockets out and invite critique. Their tongue-in-cheek claim is undoubtably one of unbelievable privilege and self-assurance, amended onto the monograph after it was a success, no less, but it is also one inviting continued discussion.

The kind of tactical parasitism that I described in the previous section (3.4.1), is indebted to Latour and Woolgar’s nonchalance, but it is also tied to a broader history of critical theory informed, academically adjacent scholarship employed by tactical media artists, like the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), RTMark, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation among others. Working in an ideologically slippery and technologically adept mode of practice, these artists tried to leverage the mechanisms and platforms of late stage, neoliberal capital as a space of critique—hacking websites, remaking and redistributing consumer technology, and producing counter cultural installations, performances, and essays. Often these practitioners worked in collectives, hoping to disperse authority of their work, pushing for ephemerality in relation to the built infrastructures of information capitalism.⁶

I want to, briefly, look to the work of CAE as a means to outline how arts-based research informed their work, before folding it back into my argument. A collective of five artists who, beginning with filmic works in the 1980s, became known for various scientifically mediated art pieces. Inspired by the work of cultural theorists Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze and others, these artists have hacked GameBoys, and built antagonistic robots, and performed using lecture-like scientific methods. Their most well-known performance, Flesh Machine, addressed the eugenicist (1.3.5) subtexts which are implicitly bound to genomic science.⁷ The performance was broken into acts, the first of which was a straight-faced lecture on genomics, the second incorporated a hands-on lab experience, before concluding with the literal commodification of human biomatter, as the performers raise money to pay the rent on a cryotank housing a human embryo.⁸

CAE’s work is medium ambivalent, choosing instead to work on subject matter and produce artworks that responds to the ways dominant, authoritarian ideologies are part and parcel of that practice. As the artists articulate in an interview,

CAE begins inquiry by developing an understanding of a given territory using critique to rip at the territory to expose hidden and transparent ideological strata. Then we try to exploit those areas with participatory cultural practice.⁹

As with Flesh Machine, CAE often works in the context of scientific capital: in biomedical, telecommunication, and the militaristic contexts, which all depend on the scientific sophistication as part of their identities. While they are trained as artists, they navigate these epistemic regimes to address their linkages to dominant authoritarian capitalism. Their work is an entangling of methods and approaches, which undermines the discursive and disciplinary hierarchies so common to biomedical research.

CAE works within discipline and without it. They both articulate a deep understanding of the technological and scientific modes within which they work, but they are not actively engaging in the discourse itself. The production of knowledge, without the disciplinary apparatus of academic expertise, means that the work can be ignored. In Steve Kurtz’s—one of CAE’s founding members—case, his legal battles with the post-9/11 American justice system was hampered by his lack of a disciplinary position as a scientist.

Reflecting on the movement in 2008, Jean Ray and Gregory Sholette note the ways tactical media artists have productively and problematically eschewed the utopian logic of leftist thought. They write, “[f]or better and for worse, the nomadic agency of [tactical media] corresponds exactly to the de-territorialised spaces of global capitalism.”¹⁰ Moreover, these tactical interventions point to an oblique and undetermined arena of critique, which the explicitly logical is at odds with the theaters of terror exemplified in post-9/11 America. Joan Hawkins, writing of Kurtz and the CAE’s legal battles, notes that while the legal apparatus obviously note the artists’ innocence, it seems to be by an illogical force that continued the government’s legal case. The drive of the second Bush administration and the anti-terrorism arms of its justice system, which can conceivably be extrapolated to the various administrations who have held power in the two decades following Kurtz’ initial arrest, is and never was logical, but instead a result of the production of political force.¹¹

For Hawkins, logic and its political antecedents are bound within a broader discourse of taste, which police how and when and why an artist can make their art public. Also associated with this taste hierarchy are standards by which claims are deemed politically relevant—what can effect social change and what cannot. She writes,

[t]hat to mount provocative art—especially art which deals with disaster—when something real IS at stake is somehow in bad taste. And that to raise the question of the politics of taste—the fact that the whole notion of bad taste is itself an ideologically inflected construct—is also intolerable in the face of real crisis.¹²

The policing of art in the post-9/11 moment, and the literal policing of Kurtz and his CAE collaborators, begs to ask the utility of the arts in any moment, especially a moment where a nation state is vulnerable. Hawkins’ argument ends with a shift in research objects, writing that “we need to focus our analytical attention more on processes than on products, but in such a way that logic is not taken to be the defining feature of process”.¹³

While Hawkins is noting ‘process’ to be an analytical object for cultural scholars, I want to expand this to think in terms of process to analyze process. Tactics, for CAE, operates with an understanding of its own futility. As the artists describe in an interview,

It should be added that resistant models and processes will never be dominant. Perhaps this is one romantic characteristic that CAE can’t seem to shake. We only believe in temporary solutions, temporary improvement. There is only permanent cultural resistance; there is no endgame. Authoritarian culture won the day on the first day. . . . But there can be spaces and processes within certain moments that can successfully stop the flow of capital, lift the repression, and in so doing, actually allow for the emergence of pleasure and happiness.¹⁴

Creative praxis operates in these moments of striving for articulation and imagination, but always in imperfect, seemingly inconsequential ways. An arts-based method is, at best, an opportunity to ruminate and reflect on some implicit practice, some ideological construct, some forgotten object, and produce some kind of argument in relation to those projects

For my work, and the arts-based research for which I am arguing, this canny operation moves between the aesthetic production and written research, gaming academic desires for novelty and the reflective affordances of aesthetic interpretation and creation. The arts-based research approach I am arguing for works with the epistemic discourses of knowledge workers and academic institutions.¹⁵ Artists position themselves neither within or separate from their fields of interest, and from this they can produce critical responses in their work (3.1.3). For me, this creation is then complimented by more traditional scholarship, like “Dermographic Opacities” or this dissertation (3.3.1).