Irit Rogoff – Becoming Research

Hello everyone. It's very nice to be here, I'm glad it's kind of worked out at last, and it's particularly nice to be here under the aegis of wording complexities.

In the kind of virulent neoliberal context in which I operate, complexity and seriousness have been virtually banned, and the the the drive towards um sort of legible and transferable knowledge and thinking has become more and more dominant, so wording complexity is um a very nice context for me to find myself in this particular moment.

What I'm going to talk about is comes out of a really peculiar situation, which is that pure research was something that was developed by the sciences.

And um it is sort of diminishing in terms of its importance and the support that is given to it, and um in favor of applied knowledges, um computable results, etc.

Now, one one of the things that really interests me is the way in which research um as an event in and of itself has migrated to uh creative practices.

And so what becomes less and less possible to do within research rich environments such as universities and research institutions, etc, has been uh taken on and developed in different ways uh within creative practices, and it's this shift that really interests me, and it interests me primarily in terms of what it means um has taken place in the understanding of research.

So what I'm interested in is the fact that the concept of research uh has has shifted.

Research is at the heart of so many of our discussions, and most often in some wrong, misguided or diminishing sense, whether contained within the scenarios of R&D, or thought of as a preparatory stage in advance of some perceived main event, or served up to tortured forms of evaluation.

Research is forever instrumentalized as part of the necessary ensemble of producing knowledge that is deemed original, verifiable, and therefore evaluable.

Research also used to be thought to be a highly academic activity, consulting great terms of knowledge, borrowing in dusty archives, interviewing certified actors in certain scenarios, conceptualizing experiments in a laboratory, or relying on expertise from elsewhere to give credibility to a claim.

But research is actually the thing itself, the event and the process of becoming, I'm invoking the slightly old Deleuzian notion of becoming in order to disrupt the telos in which research is embedded, the notion of a process given to a natural progression.

Instead of which, we might have a disrupted have disrupted relationships between the discrete elements of the assemblage, in becoming, one piece of the assemblage is drawn into the territory of another piece, changing its value as an element and bringing about a new unity.

So this is this is the kind of of of meeting point of two bodies of thought that have been extremely central to me in terms of trying to understand what uh creative practices in their full complexity are able to offer us at this moment.

And so I'm thinking processes of becoming on the one hand, and perhaps even more important for me, the notion of singularity, the ability the new relational mode of the subject, the new relational mode of knowledge, etc, the ability to create and break non-identitarian, non-ideological, um sets of alliances in order to be able to actually address the moment, rather than to speak from a predefined moment in which you already know what the right approach is towards something.

In fact, research has changed greatly all around us, becoming an imperative, an urgency, a widespread practice, quite distant from that old notion of research in the academy.

One of the reasons I've been trying to conceptualize new models of research in our lives, is my sense that to think of ourselves as researchers, allows us a small amount, a very small amount of agency, within a world whose rampant neoliberal drives have taken away both agency and the ability to actually argue points in terms of content and substance.

The shift from someone who expresses themselves individually to the position of being a researcher, which is I think a considerable shift, is a shift in which one doesn't simply acquiesce or protest against, but one that allows to get involved with the workings of institutions, of protocols, of memories and of communities, not in compliance or in defiance, but in efforts to rewrite these through their very workings.

When we claim research for ourselves as an activity, we actually inhabit our numerous worlds differently, as we inform ourselves and test out different ways to think a particular reality, which is the activity of research.

So with the advent of ever more virulent neoliberal managerialism and rampant cognitive capitalism, and I operate in the context of of Britain and um sorry, I cannot say the words UK because it's a marketing category.

Um and therefore I'm always in a situation of a slightly more rampant situation than on the European continent, but believe me, it's coming.

So with the advent of ever more virulent neoliberal managerialism and rampant cognitive capitalism, we've had to constantly revise our understanding of both, so as not to lose their capacity for critical and resistant invention.

If we pursue a model of knowledge as singularity, never universal and constantly reinventing its alliances with far-flung insights, practices and protocols, we might have a form of learning that is not so easily captive by dominant cultures of evaluation and prediction.

Trying to position ourselves somewhere between neoliberal algorithmic management and questions of subjectivity, which is kind of the the two poles, we recognize that the demand to expand, to be entrepreneurial, to act on our ambitions, to financialize everything, aims at granting us more revenue, which in turn feeds the management by algorithms with data that serves as indicators for targets and for achievements.

The opposite realm is that of subjectivity, the tension between multiposition knowledges and subjects, and the undefined realms that take place at the interstices of named positions, named identities and named knowledges.

As Andre Lepecki has argued in his timely and captivating study, singularities, quote, in permeating our actions, neoliberal conditioning shows how it has captured subjectivity.

If subjectivity had previously delineated the arena of stakes and relations, of affinities and solidarities, of shared imaginations and shared criticalities, the multiple and often dissonant positions of the subject, in its hijacked form, it is geared to achievement, success, forging new markets and new desires for more than commodities, for affects, for energies, for spectacles, for expansion, growth, reach, brand recognition and credit, above all credit.

So for me, the notion of deconditioning, borrowed from Lepecki, comes in the form of becoming research, it also comes with an understanding that research is not the purview of the privileged and institutions of research, but a matter of necessity, the necessity for migrants to survive, for those transitioning gender to understand what they're facing biologically, legally and civically, for those who fight for justice, and for those who simply want to do no harm.

For those who develop an understanding that knowledge is spectacle, knowledge is revenue, knowledge is branding, even when it is about harm, actually does harm.

What has changed so fundamentally in contemporary understandings of research is that we have shifted ground, shifted from working from inherited knowledge, knowledges, to working from conditions, so this is absolutely at the heart of what I'm I'm sort of trying to argue, that the the engagement with knowledge historically has always been working from inherited knowledges, perhaps um renewing them somewhat at the end, finding a position from which you could add something perhaps, uh question something perhaps.

But uh I think that the immense shift, and what I started out with, the shift from what used to be the environments of pure research, which no longer allow for pure research, for a notion of research as it's getting enacted, uh being enacted through creative contemporary creative practices, is precisely linked to this, to the move from inherited knowledges to working from conditions.

So the conditions are the overall framework, but the need to produce methodologies that resonate with those conditions are really what I'm I'm sort of trying to think about.

These conditions become the drive, not the subject matter, never the subject matter of the work, they anchor investigation differently, disconnected from the historical and procedural annals of how a body of knowledge has come about, of what sustains its claims to originality and to legitimacy, of how a body of knowledge claims an identity, disciplinary, technological, theoretical, material.

They intervene in the false divisions between the academic, the creative, the professional and the performative, instead, they offer a series of current vectors as entry points, sorry, there's something wrong with the grammar here, that point to urgencies, not in the journalistic sense of an urgency in which one captures a dramatic moment of extremity.

But in the sense that certain events, certain conditions, certain atmospheres cannot be isolated as only such, but demand a complete reconfiguration of how to know.

No one living in Trump's US, or Orban's Hungary, or Netanyahu's Israel, or Bolsonaro's Brazil, or Britain's Brexit would argue that these are not events, but they are conditions, research, as we experience it now in both institutional and culturally active contexts, has moved away from stable bodies of knowledge to be excavated, as well as away from recognized subjects whose validity is universally recognized.

So the the and and this is this is a sort of of of whole set of issues that this this is a very brief um version of what I've been trying to think about for the last couple of years, but one of the things that for me is really central is the fact that spatially, technologically, atmospherically, um and in terms of social conditions, we are in states of extreme instability.

So precarity, the destabilization of space through the terroristic, the fact that what may once have been borders that could be fortified and used as a kind of of line of defense in the face of exploding bodies, exploding cars, exploding planes, exploding buildings, cannot sustain any notion of security or defense, the fact that extreme economic precarity has afflicted simultaneously several generations um within within our world.

So given that this and these are just two elements of quite complex sets of conditions, given uh that these are our conditions, the modes by which we study, we excavate, we investigate, we try and ask questions about, themselves can no longer be stable.

So we cannot think about precarity in some sense of fixed set of criteria, which if we study them, will actually explain to us what precarity is, so the the sort of one of the things that I'm very preoccupied with is how how do the methods by which we approach something, actually emulate the kind of affective texture of the thing itself?

What is the let's say the precarious study of precarity?

So these these are really underlying um this this and we might, you know, we have a few minutes for discussion, we might be able to um to unpack that a bit more, but this is what underwrites the shift for me, from uh working from inherited knowledges to working from conditions.

So the conditions are the overall framework, but the need to produce methodologies that resonate with those conditions are really what I'm I'm sort of trying to think about.

Research is now the arena in which we negotiate knowledge we have inherited with the conditions of our lives, those conditions, whether economic, geographical, or propelled by subjectivity, have become the drive, not the subject matter, never the subject matter of the work, they anchor investigation differently, disconnected from the historical and procedural annals of how a body of knowledge has come about, of what sustains its claims to originality and to legitimacy, of how a body of knowledge claims an identity, disciplinary, technological, theoretical, material.

They intervene in the false divisions between the academic, the creative, the professional and the performative, instead, they offer a series of current vectors as entry points, sorry, there's something wrong with the grammar here, that point to urgencies, not in the journalistic sense of an urgency in which one captures a dramatic moment of extremity.

But in the sense that certain events, certain conditions, certain atmospheres cannot be isolated as only such, but demand a complete reconfiguration of how to know, no one living in Trump's US, or Orban's Hungary, or Netanyahu's Israel, or Bolsonaro's Brazil, or Britain's Brexit would argue that these are not events, but they are conditions, research, as we experience it now in both institutional and culturally active contexts, has moved away from stable bodies of knowledge to be excavated, as well as away from recognized subjects whose validity is universally recognized.

So the the and and this is this is a sort of of of whole set of issues that this this is a very brief um version of what I've been trying to think about for the last couple of years, but one of the things that for me is really central is the fact that spatially, technologically, atmospherically, um and in terms of social conditions, we are in states of extreme instability, so precarity, the destabilization of space through the terroristic, the fact that what may once have been borders that could be fortified and used as a kind of of line of defense in the face of exploding bodies, exploding cars, exploding planes, exploding buildings, cannot sustain any notion of security or defense, the fact that extreme economic precarity has afflicted simultaneously several generations um within within our world.

So given that this and these are just two elements of quite complex sets of conditions, given uh that these are our conditions, the modes by which we study, we excavate, we investigate, we try and ask questions about, themselves can no longer be stable.

So we cannot think about precarity in some sense of fixed set of criteria, which if we study them, will actually explain to us what precarity is, so the the sort of one of the things that I'm very preoccupied with is how how do the methods by which we approach something, actually emulate the kind of affective texture of the thing itself?

What is the let's say the precarious study of precarity?

So these these are really underlying um this this and we might, you know, we have a few minutes for discussion, we might be able to um to unpack that a bit more, but this is what underwrites the shift for me, from uh working from inherited knowledges to working from conditions.

So the conditions are the overall framework, but the need to produce methodologies that resonate with those conditions are really what I'm I'm sort of trying to think about.

Research is now the arena in which we negotiate knowledge we have inherited with the conditions of our lives, those conditions, whether economic, geographical, or propelled by subjectivity, have become the drive, not the subject matter of the work, and it is here, in the immersion in conditions, that research transforms from an investigative impulse to the constitution of new realities.

So that's the other the other sort of of I think the second main tenant of this argument is research is about the constitution of new realities, not the study of existing realities, so a notion of research that is active, that has agency, that invents methodologies is also the possibility to constitute new realities.

It is thus that we recognize that research is not some elevated activity requiring a great deal of prior knowledge, nor is it simply the urge to find things out, it is in many ways the stuff of daily life, every form of hardship encountered, whether one is an immigrant or living out catastrophic conditions, affected by emotional sea changes or crises of identity or of security, generates research.

And everyone researches, and the forms of current research have equally shifted as contemporary multivalent research moves between archival, documentary, conceptual and performative modes, and utilizes everything from fictioning, docudramatizing, to infrastructural mimicry, to the queer animation of archives, and to structural self-instituting to produce new realities of knowledge.

The permissions that have entered the arena of knowledge production, and this this is sort of of another tenant of this thinking, what is permission, so it's very clear to me in this in the context of what I'm thinking about that permission is not something that one is granted, right, permission is something that one struggles for, but more than struggles for, one articulates and identifies oneself.

So the permissions that have entered the arena of knowledge production, doing, inventing narratives, and I I've been very, very influenced by the work of Keller Easterling, um in terms of the invention of narratives.

I don't know if you're familiar with her work, but um I have found her ability to weave a narrative out of a curious fact, it's always starts with a curious fact, and it always weaves into an almost fantastical narrative, uh to be one of the the sort of of of exemplary modes by which contemporary research is operating, so inventing narratives, mapping subjectivities, intervening, stimulating, proposing, as for example, in Jonas Stall's projects recently on kind of propositional unions for Europe, a whole set of unions that might replace um the the slightly overwhelming and kind of of of um fictitiously humanistic kind of umbrella of what the EU is into a whole set of unions between elements of the EU that would certainly benefit from um some sense of a relation to one another.

Sketching out intergenerational lines of affective connections, the rages, the longings, the hopes, the melancholy that moves us up and down our social histories, as in the work of Tony Cokes, Bushra Khalili, Theaster Gates, a whole series of of uh practitioners, always working at the intersection of several practices, and um producing forms of research that don't discover, but recover or but rediscover, moments that might mean today and mean differently, that constitute a history and an archive for moments that have been erased and have dropped out of hegemonic history.

They address the long-standing dilemma, where do I start from when I don't have a sanctioned place to start from, how do I take up erased histories and make them a genealogy for myself today?

Where am I in the great chain of meaning if I do not start from a series of sanctioned inherited knowledges, last year in the context of a project at the Pompidou Center called Cosmopolis that I was taking part in, I heard Theaster Gates do something quite extraordinary, he gave a sort of lecture performance, he came on stage, he had a turntable and some LPs, and he started playing at unbelievably loud volumes, so all the windows of the Pompidou shook, Mahalia Jackson's it's gonna rain.

And um and then he said, in the beginning there was nothing, there was no memory, there was no history, there was no archive, there was Mahalia Jackson and James Brown and another musician whose name I've forgotten right now, and then he kind of parlayed that, uh that invented moment, which is not a historical moment, but a moment, an affective moment in which he can start.

And talked about museums and about the fact that we value them because they are the repository of uh our memories, um the archives of our histories, but he said museums are racist, and museums erase whole histories out of the narrative, and then I'm I'm shortening this, this was a very long and complex kind of presentation, but then he said something which I have not stopped thinking about, which is he said, but even erased memories leave behind a rhythm, and that rhythm is that from which we can start working.

Thank you.