Irit Rogoff: Academy as potentiality

The thoughts presented here have to a large extent been developed through an extensive conversation we have been having around the “Academy” project, an exhibition-symposia-book project supported by the Siemens Art Fund, the Hamburg Kunstverein, MuhKa Antwerp, the Van Abbemueum, Eindhoven, and the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College. This conversation initially included, among others, Bart De Baere, Rob Stone, Charles Esche, Angelika Nollert, Dieter Roelstraat and Florian Schneider. It is at times a bit difficult to tell whose thoughts are whose, but that too is in the spirit of “Academy ”.

Right Now

Occasionally in class I find myself saying “I have no Idea” to my slightly disbelieving students. This is not a false profession of ignorance or an unbecoming modesty but a genuine expression of the fact that I do not know, in terms of structured knowledge, how to get to where I need to be. It seems to me that the urgent questions and the bodies of knowledge I have at my disposal do not tally and produce a route by which issues, arguments and modes of operating, merge seamlessly. And so it would seem that the task of ‘academy’, of education, is not to affect this seamless merger but to understand this productive disjuncture and its creative possibilities. That subjects and knowledges do not live in a simple state of productive harmony, is the unspoken dimension of the contemporary debate on education, unspoken because it counters the aims to uniformly instrumentalise education towards a set of predetermined outcomes. As inhabitants of these spaces and atmospheres of ‘academy’ we are forever caught in a, hopefully productive, tension between knowing where we might want to go, being empowered by the sense that we have every right to embark on this journey and equally being aware that that we might lack the tools we need or the strength of spirit demanded by any journey into unknown territory. This “I Can / I Can’t” dilemma is at the heart of my understanding of ‘Academy as Potentiality’ which I hope to unfold here.

Perhaps for the sake of clarity I should say that throughout this text, I have collapsed notions of learning spaces and exhibiting spaces. While they may belong to different institutional orders, with different funding sources, employing differently trained professionals, with different expected outcomes etc’, the project at hand -- ‘academy’-- is working to refract them through one another. We have come together in this project in a suspension of the professional categories which normally define us and we have given ourselves permission to work in whatever vein we might need to; performers as archivists, theorists as curators, curators as philosophers, philosophers as artists etc’. Here we are following in the footsteps of recent art practice’s self authorising to take on any format that works to circulate its questions and proposals; from giving guided tours, to establishing Think Tanks, to founding art academies, to providing essential social services, to performing faux conferences and ghost exhibition. In this mode, art practices have raided the entire cupboard of formats and structures - inhabiting them differently and in an other modality, which is not aimed at usurping these tasks but at actualising their potential to do more than might be expected. In envisaging the museum as the space of unexpected learning, both for ours selves and for our visitors, we are hoping to slightly collapse the boundaries that keep these various institutions at an artificial distance from each other and to make them join forces through curiosity, discovery and possibility.

But first to practicalities: It seems everyone today is up in arms about education. Not since the mid 20th century has education reform been so contentious, so invested with drives towards an assumed efficiency on the one hand, countered by drives to safeguard a seeming freedom to speculate on the other . A rather weird war has come about in which those who want to maintain ‘meaning led education’ engage with those who want to police and invigilate its forms and structures with much regard for its effectiveness and little regard for its content or more importantly, for what it might make possible. Education in general and ‘academy’ in particular are the metaphors being used, and occasionally over used, to wrestle with all that is wrong and all that might be possible, in gaining access to the urgent and important issues of our day. Overall there is much gloom, disappointment and fear, yet here and there, in tiny marginal pockets, there is also an odd kind of optimism surrounding this energetic debate for as Homi Bhabha said a long time ago ”In every emergency , there is also an emergence”. Were this not the case, were education not imbued with some sense of possibility, we would not have so many exhibition initiatives that take up notions of research, of laboratory, of learning and of teaching as their format. In an odd way, the massive initiative of ‘Bologna’ and the kind of supra-national controls it is bringing about, along with the ever-increasing bureaucratic control of education in the UK, have resulted in producing ‘academy’ as the site of both oppositions and imaginative possibilities. And so, what has languished for some 25 years (since the late 1960s) in a benign bubble of individualist freedoms has suddenly emerged into the front row of political debates, concerned with far more than institutional administration. I have to confess here that despite knowing full well the dangers of this over zealous attention, I am quite pleased to see education actualised to its full political potential and become the arena in which issues larger than its own internal questions, are being discussed. In particular, education in and of and for, the arts with its flimsy, unstable and non-teleological epistemologies, is becoming an appropriate proving ground for the necessity to distance and problematise the relations between inputs and outputs in education and to insist on the complete impossibility of knowing in advance where thought and practice might lead.

The moment in which we enter into this discussion of academy, this moment now, is one that is suspended between a variety of concrete concerns. In continental Europe there are concerns about the forthcoming ‘Bologna Accord’ which aims at homogenising higher education across Europe and rationalising it in accord with the Anglo American model of several, more short term degrees with clear and comparable outcomes. The fear that is repeatedly expressed around this process is that all individuality and possibility for a longer term, more processional, reflective and less outcome-bound model of education, will be lost through these developments. Certainly the spectre of the extreme bureaucratisation and increasingly result-oriented culture overtaking British higher education is hardly an encouraging one for the fearful ‘Bologna sceptics’ in Europe.

How this impacts on education in the arts is particularly thorny, because here process and investigation are everything and the possibility of establishing hard and fast ‘outcomes’ that testify to the successful completion of a training or an educational apprenticeship, are virtually impossible to arrive at. One shudders at the thought of increasingly ‘professional’ artists, curators, directors, critics etc’ whose schooling is aimed at producing prescribed museum quality final exhibitions, performances, exquisitely professionalized displays of cultural resistance, perfectly honed critically positioned texts which are publication worthy. One shudders not because this is dull, though it certainly is that, but because the idea of being able to foresee the expected outcome of an investigative process, is completely alien to the very notion of what ‘education’ is about.

At another level tensions have increased between different tendencies surrounding the field of educating ‘creativity’; old fashioned notions of inspiration without articulation, slightly less old fashioned notions of the importance of analytical and critical proficiency all vie with contemporary pedagogies of actualisation, embodiment, and criticality as the lived out consequences of knowing. All these jostle around in the same institutional stew, occasionally producing head on collisions but most of the time co-existing in the kind of liberal indifference in which the contradictions and contentions of ‘difference’ are ignored for the sake of some ill conceived harmony in which all the bases are covered.

I would argue that these factions produce a false set of conflicts and engagements. That the question in education in general and in art education in particular, the question that we have not yet begun to deal with, are not that of specifying what we need to know and how we need to know it, of who determines this and who benefits from it; instead it is a question regarding how we might know what we don’t yet know how to know. And it is here, in the aim of accessing this complex aspiration that we need to change our vocabulary – to swap knowledge transfer and knowledge assessment, professionalisation, quantifiable outcomes and marketability for another set of terms and another set of aspirations.
These aspirations might have to do with the lived contemporary realities we experience, with the sense of urgency they might instil in us, with how these lived realities might point us towards the critical tools that allow us to enter the fray and become actors within it. Within this volume, my colleagues at Goldsmiths, where we often speculate on the relation of needs and drives to knowledge, have put forward a whole set of concepts by which knowledge unfolds through it own urgencies. What I would like to pursue here is a set of alternate emergent terms that operate in the name of this ‘not-yet-known-knowledge’. Terms such as potentiality, actualisation, access and contemporaeinity, which for me are the building blocks and navigational vectors for a current pedagogy, a pedagogy at peace with its partiality, a pedagogy not preoccupied with succeeding but with trying.
The sceptics among you will shake your heads and decry my naiveté, will say how can she not acknowledge the demands of bureaucracy and of the market, of the new entrepreneurship in the arts and the all importance of branding and consumption through the academy. Without for a moment denying the overwhelming pressure of all these factors, I would nevertheless argue that we need to learn to live in parallel rather than in conflictual economies; moving sideways, finding the opportune moment, engaging in numerous non-legitimated processes, producing the new subjects that we need for ourselves, always starting from right here and right now and forever searching for what might be important rather than useful, to know.

Potentiality

First then to potentiality. Potentiality, following an old Aristotelian argument, is the opposite of actuality, so that it inhabits the realm of the possible without prescribing it as a plan. Giorgio Agamben says he might characterise his subject as an attempt to understand the meaning of the verb ‘can’, “What do I mean when I say ‘ I can, I cannot’?” … “In an exergue to a collection of poems she called’ Requiem’, Anna Akhmatova recounts how her poems were born. It was in the 1930s, and for months she joined the line outside the prison of Leningrad, trying to get news of her son who had been arrested on political grounds. There were dozens of other women in line with her. One day one of these women recognised her and turning to her, addressed her with the following question: “Can you speak of this ?”. Akhmatova was silent for a moment and then, without knowing how or why, found an answer to the question: “Yes” she said “I can”. Did she perhaps mean by these words that she was such a gifted poet that she knew how to handle language skilfully enough to describe the atrocious things of which it is so difficult to write ? I do not think so, this is not what she meant to say…. For everyone a moment comes in which he or she must utter this “I can” which does not refer to any certainty or specific capacity; to be able to write, or paint, or forecast the weather, but is nevertheless absolutely demanding. Beyond all faculties, this “I can” does not mean anything – yet it marks what is, for each of us, perhaps the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality”1

There are, says Agamben following Aristotle, two kinds of potentiality; there is generic potentiality , and this is the one that is meant when we say, for example, that a child has the potential to know, or that he or she can potentially become the head of state. The other sense of potentiality, belongs to someone who has knowledge or an ability. In this sense we say of the architect that he or she has the potential to build, of the poet that he or she has the potential to write poems. One of the most interesting aspects of potentiality is, that it is as much the potential for not doing as it is for doing, and radical evil is not this or that bad deed but the potentiality for darkness which is at the very same time the potentiality for light. “To be potential” says Agamben “ means to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own non-being. In potentiality ; sensation is in relation to anaesthesia , knowledge to ignorance, vision to darkness”.

So thinking ‘academy’ as ‘potentiality’ is to think the possibilities of not doing, not making, not bringing into being at the very centre of acts of thinking, making and doing. It means dismissing much of the instrumentalising that seems to go hand in hand with education, much of the managerialism that is associated with a notion of ‘training’ for this or that profession or market. Letting go of many of the understandings of ‘academy’ as a training ground whose only permitted outcomes are a set of concrete objects or practices. It allows for the inclusions of notions of both fallibility and actualisation into a practice of teaching and learning (of which more later), which seems to me to be an interesting entry point into thinking creativity in relation to different moments of coming into being.

In thinking ‘academy’ through ‘potentiality’ , we exit the realm of generic potentiality – we are not interested in the production of skills and knowledge, we do not think about the liberation of someone’s deeply buried creative possibilities nor do we think romantic moments of self expression or moments of analytical and investigative exposure of the grim realities of our world. Instead ‘academy’ becomes the site of this duality, of an understanding of ‘I can’ as always, already yoked to an eternal ‘I cant’. If this duality is not paralysing, which I do not think it is, then it has possibilities for an understanding of what it is about ‘academy’ that can actually become a model for ‘being in the world’. Perhaps there is an excitement in shifting our perception of an educational and training ground which is not pure preparation, pure resolution. Instead it might encompass fallibility, understand it as a form of knowledge production rather that of its disappointment. At this moment the debates and events that have been raging around the around the EU constitution come to mind as an example of fallibility built into a process whose outcomes are guaranteed to remain unknown and incalculable for some time to come.

Most importantly for me is that within the context of ‘academy’ defined by the duality I have sketched out and by which I do not mean an institution but a series of processes and of speculations – we can locate various important shifts that have occurred in our shared culture. Rather than thinking these through a series of increasingly relaxing authorities; of generic divides between media, of authoritative professors, of demands for output and product, of the negation of a concept, of apprenticeship and its requirement to imitate and reproduce – we can think ‘becomings’ that have no originary identity to emulate. “A line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination…. A line of becoming has only a middle, a middle is not an average, it is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement”2.

What are the shifts to which I refer and that exemplify this inbuilt duality of ‘potentiality’ ?
One of the most important ones has been the shift from critique to criticality. From a model that says the manifest of culture must yield up some latent values and intentions through endless processes of investigation and uncovering.
Using literary and other texts, images and other forms of artistic practice, Critical Analysis attempts to turn the latent of hidden conditions and unacknowledged desires and power relations into a cultural manifest. Using the vast range of structuralist, post and post post-structuralist tools and models of analysis we have at our disposal, we have been able to unveil, unravel, expose and lay bare the hidden meanings of cultural circulation and the overt and covert interests that these serve. But there is a serious problem here, as there is an assumption that meaning is immanent, that it is always already there and precedes its uncovering.

Criticality

But as we have moved to engage increasingly with the performative nature of culture, with meaning that takes place as events unfold, we need to also move away from notions of immanent meanings that can be investigated, exposed and made obvious. For some time we thought that a teaching practice that exposes what lies beneath the manifest and a learning practice that entails a guided ‘seeing through’ things, was what was required. That it will somehow counter any inherent naiveté by helping students work against naturalised assumptions by being, what we conventionally termed in education, ‘being critical’. While being able to exercise critical judgement is clearly important, it operates by providing a series of sign posts and warnings but does not actualise people’s inherent and often intuitive notions of how to produce criticality through inhabiting a problem rather than by analysing it. This is true across education whether theoretical or practice oriented. It is equally true of experiencing art and other aspects of manifest culture. Within this shift we have had to be aware not only of the extreme limitations of putting work in ‘context’, or of the false isolation brought about by fields or disciplines, but we have also had to take on board the following;

- The fact that meaning is never produced in isolation or through isolating processes but rather through intricate webs of connectedness.
- The fact that participants, be they audience, students or researchers, produce meaning not simply through the subjectivities they project on works whose circuits of meanings they complete, but that they produce meaning through relations with one another and through the temporality of the event of the exhibition or the display.
- The fact that college courses, art works, thematic exhibitions and others forums dedicated to making culture manifest, or work to re-produce them into view, do not have immanent meanings but function as fields of possibilities for different audiences in different cultural circumstances and wildly divergent moods, to produce significances.
- And ultimately on the fact that in a reflective shift, from the analytical to the performative function of observation and of participation, we can agree that meaning is not excavated for, but rather, that it 'Takes Place' in the present.

The latter exemplifies not just the dynamics of learning from, of looking at and of interacting with, works of art in exhibitions and in public spaces, but echoes also the modes by which we have inhabited the critical and the theoretical over the recent past . It seems to me that within the space of a relatively short period we have been able to move from criticism to critique, and to what I am calling at present criticality. That is that we have moved from criticism which is a form of finding fault and of exercising judgement according to a consensus of values, to critique which is examining the underlying assumptions that might allow something to appear as a convincing logic, to criticality which is operating from an uncertain ground of actual embededness. By this I mean that criticality while building on critique wants nevertheless to inhabit culture in a relation other than one of critical analysis; other than one of illuminating flaws, locating elisions, allocating blames.

But what comes after the critical analysis of culture? What goes beyond the endless cataloguing of the hidden structures, the invisible powers and the numerous offences we have been preoccupied with for so long? Beyond the processes of marking and making visible those who have been included and those who have been excluded? Beyond being able to point our finger at the master narratives and at the dominant cartographies of the inherited cultural order? Beyond the celebration of emergent minority group identities as an achievement in and of itself?
Many of these issues and questions are being rehearsed in the arenas of displayed culture and in the shift of focus from the objects on display to the strategies of their staging and the responses of the viewing audiences.

This publication accompanies a series of exhibitions, one of which , “Learning From the Museum” ,I have been working on. This has required a fundamental shift in understanding the museum as a site of learning. Previously we immersed ourselves in forms of ‘institutional critique’ that served to expose the museum as a staging ground for dominant culture and the locus of vested ideological and commercial interests.
Over the past generation we have seen an extensive critique of the museum as everything from the staging ground of national histories to the performative sites of private obsessions. Artists such as Hans Haacke3, Marcel Broodthaers4, Daniel Spoerri5, the Guerilla Girls6, Fred Wilson7 and Barbara Bloom8 have launched complex stagings of the disavowed dimensions, both public and private, of cultural display. We have even seen institutions such as MOMA NY put themselves on supposedly reflexive display by looking at their own practices through the art works that unravel them as "The Museum as Muse"9. Spurred on by the work of Michel Foucault 10, we have looked at issues of categorization and classification, by the work of Haacke at "Museums as Managers of Consciousness" through the machinations of sponsorship, by that of Daniel Buren at the way museums turn "History into Nature" 11. From James Clifford12 we have taken the understanding of the relation between collecting and colonizing and from Hal Foster13 of the relation between establishing something called "Primitivism" and maintaining the hegemony of the West. From Carol Duncan14 we have understood how deeply notions of gender are embedded is the museum as a mode of display and a public notion of edifying space while the Guerrilla Girls, have documented the continuing absence of women artists from both permanent collections and temporary exhibitions within mainstream American Museum culture15. From Andrea Fraser we have learned the combined rhetoric of middle class cultural ornamentation as it performs itself through institutional rituals. The Canadian artist Vera Frenkel offers another mode of troubling the realms of museological display in her documentary project accompanied by videos and performance activity entitled "The Cornelia Lumsden Archive"16. In it Frenkel traces, through her veritable absence, the shadowy presence of a fictional 20th century woman writer; she does this by scrupulously emulating the archival modes that would have represented her had she ever existed, which takes us back full circle to Foucault. From all of these theoretical and art practice sources we have mobilised an extensive critical arsenal which we can deploy for a critical analysis of the ways in which institutions have functioned and of what they have hidden or elided or simply disavowed.

The exhaustion of this vein of working does not mean that the institution is now reformed; that it has stopped being the vehicle for all of those things we were able to see through. What it means is that we now expect more from it, we can think beyond what is in the museum and what this represents, and instead, move towards what the museum may enable.

In Visual Culture some partial responses to the question of what comes after critique can be teased out through a shift of the traditional relations between all that goes into researching as a mode of learning, all that goes into making (practice) and all that goes into viewing (audience) the objects of visual cultural attention. This of course, builds on that mighty critical apparatus that evolved throughout the 1970s and the 1980s and in which an unravelling of the relations between subjects and objects took place through radical critiques of authorial authorities, of epistemological conceits and perhaps more than anything else, through the ever growing perception of knowledge as an extended wander through fields of intertextual subjectivities. That project is well underway and in its wake comes the permission to approach the study of culture from the most oblique of angles, to occupy ourselves with the constitution of new objects of study that may not have been previously articulated for us by existing fields. In fact, it may well be in the act of looking away from the objects of our supposed study, in the shifting modalities of the attention we pay them, that have a potential for a re-articulation of the relations between makers, objects and audiences.

Can looking away, slightly shifting our attention from that which commands it, be understood not necessarily as an act of resistance to but rather as an alternative form of taking part in, culture? The learning from the museum that has interested us in our exhibition project, has entailed a ‘looking away’ from modes of traditional engagement; disregarding the distinction between museological activity and other forms of activity that are supposedly peripheral to it, disregarding the strict spatial and attention driven boundaries that separate ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Equally it has meant taking notice of everyone who is there; curatorial, custodial, administrative, service and cafe staff, to visitors, trustees, and odd vagabond – all are part of the total texture of the place, indelibly linked in completing its total affect. So like a mode of teaching in which you inhabit a problematic rather than survey it, analyse it , know it – a mode I am calling ‘criticality’ -- we have opted to inhabit the museum, to occupy its many spaces in a dialogue with whoever is already there, with the long lines of experience and perception that they have brought in with them. We have opted to ask questions rather than impose proposals, to see if knowing things from inside the museum might mean that we know them slightly differently. We have, we hope, thought the museum as the site of a ‘radical pedagogy’, a pedagogy that eschews the simplicity of accessibilty to information, experience or cultural capital and replaces is with questions about access. What, you might ask yourselves, is the great distinction between these two terms? Why hang an entire bid for a radical shift on the slight semantic difference between two related terms. I would say in response, it is a huge difference, one that signals the limit of culture as a readily available cumulation of information and stimuli, and its potential opening towards a re-articulation of the questions we know how to ask. In the university we know that the questions we ask are far more important than the answers we might provide, that they are our possibility to change the basis of our thought. How to translate this notion of ‘access’ to the site of the museum? How can criticality operate in the museum, turning it into a space of learning in the real sense rather than in one of information transfer, aesthetic satisfaction or cultural edification ?

If the museum can become another mode for ‘access’ - if we can ask our questions entirely differently from there (because it forces us to inhabit them differently, to communicate them to an entirely different set of conversation partners and interlocutors) would that change its nature? As always I know that this is the wrong question to ask without knowing what the right one might be. Perhaps it does not really matter if the museum changes or not, as long as we do – as long as we occupy the museum in the same way that we occupy spaces of learning, less programmatically and more as inhabitations that last for the duration of our presence. Perhaps we are after an ontological understanding, one that perceives of our being there as important, regardless of what we may be doing or not doing, our being there as what Agamben has called ‘whatever singularity’17. And in this we have ample license to fail in our endeavours, unspecified as they might be.

And so ‘academy’ with its built in exhortation to both make and not make, to learn and not learn, is an embodiment of this form of criticality, of never standing outside while deploying some great analytical apparatus which allows us to ‘know’ to really, really know what is going on. Instead we are always already embedded in the problematic we are dealing with, living out its conditions, sharing its effects while being able to think it through.

In such a state fallibility becomes possible to incorporate into the larger scheme of things; not only is it possible and likely to fail but it is also possible to examine failure and to inquire as to how does it become a form of knowledge. For it is failure – rather than the triumph of being able to see through something seemingly hidden -- that produces the affectual aspect of art – that moment which knocks you out of your territory and on the quest for re-territorialsation. “We are only ever interested in the circumstances” say Deleuze and Guattari and I would add that the “I Can “of potentiality is nothing more than the moment in which we make circumstances our own.

Contemporaeinity
This ‘criticality’ that I have been speaking of is enabled by one further recuperated term - the notion of ‘contemporenaeity’ as both the moment and the enabling method of what we are setting out to do. . This is something else my colleagues and I talk a great deal about, that ‘contemporenaeity’ is our subject – not as a historical period, not as an explicit body of materials, not as a mode of proximity or relevance to the subjects we are talking about, but rather as a conjunction. ‘Contemporenaeity’ for us means that in the contemporary moment there is a certain number of shared issues and urgencies, a certain critical currency but perhaps most importantly a performative enablement – a loosening of frames all around us, which means we can move around more freely, employ and deploy a range of theoretical, methodological and performative rhetoric and modes of operation, inhabit terrains that may not have previously made us welcome or more importantly which we would not have known how to inhabit productively.
I am experimenting at the moment with how to inhabit the museum and the spaces of display as what I am in my normal every day life, as a theorist, rather than in pretending to be a curator. Thinking about how this allows me to demand different things from the museum and from myself than had been expected before.
‘Contemporenaeity’ means that there is a conjunction of problems, insights, methods and materials or practices, which meet momentarily and then fall away again. So they do not form ‘the contemporary’ but that we constantly pursue the state of contemporenaeity.
As those of you who labour under the title of ‘theorist’ know only too well, this is an embattled terrain, at any given moment you are accused of being abstract and not materially grounded by the empiricists and of being a bad theorist by other theorists because you do not spend your time reproducing endless quotes from Derrida or Deleuze and thereby proving how very well versed you are in this material, your theory being actually about somebody else’s theory. For some time now I have been escaping this double critical jeopardy, by saying that theory is a practice in the same way that art is a practice. Now obviously a certain amount of training goes into a practice, but I think it is really this full and performative inhabitation of contemporaenity that I have in mind when I think that theory is a practice, that it is the ability to fully inhabit and live out contemporaeinity.

We have been working on an exhibition project for the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, for this very same ‘academy’ being expounded in this collection of essays. In it we are going into the museum with several teams, theorists, students, activists, architects, performance theorists, counter pedagogs, etc’. and we will be asking the question ‘what can we learn from the museum?’ beyond its art objects and educational rhetoric, does it have conduits we can follow out of the museum and connect with various things going on elsewhere ? For some time I thought that the genesis of the project was a long term critical engagement I have had with the museum, then I thought it was linked to an equally long term engagement with radical pedagogy, now I am beginning to understand that it is about the performance of our contemporaeinity – in the world we currently inhabit it is possible for us to come together, to produce a network of those who previously had not come together or had not been able to talk to one another . We do not do so through having learned each others fields, or through the exchange of critical insights, we do so as inhabitants of contemporaeinity in which a critical process has unravelled the territorial boundaries of knowledge and forced them to interact with urgent issues; where lateral modes have replaced teleological ones and the participatory is in the process of dislodging the logics of representation. In contemporaeinity it is a question of ‘access’ – of how do we get to know things, how do we get to take part in them, how do we have a position, how do we intervene not as a response to a demand to participate but as a way of taking over the means of producing the very questions that are asked. That is theory as a practice, firmly situated in contemporaeinity and that is possibly what I think criticality might be, at least for the moment.

Oddly Enough

Many of the above insights have come to us through arts practices, instantiating what we are calling ‘practice driven theory’. This was a term we originally evolved to move on from a 1970s/1980s model of arts practice which was highly influenced by and illustrative of , the theoretical insights that blew away the cob webs of expressivity, interiority and rebellious transgression of previous generations. Instead we have more recently been looking for a practice to spur us on, not because it is self-consciously informed but because it is gives itself a different set of permissions. Permission to not cover all the bases all the time, permission to start in the middle, permission to mix fact and fiction, permission to invent languages, permission to not support every claim by the proof of some prior knowledge, permission to privilege subjectivity as a mode of engaging the world and its woes, permission to be obscure and permission to chart a completely different path of how we got here, at this very moment.

It is this odd space I have been calling ‘academy’ and which is partly university and partly museum, partly theoretical and partly practice based, a space in which it is unclear whether the materials or the subjects are what make up its manifest, a mode of operating is emerging which insists that we can learn not just from doing but also from being.