Hertford College, Oxford

Earlier on in the month, I received a reminder email asking me to renew my hosting arrangement for this website. It was only then that I realised that it had been a year since I set up and started this blog! I have found it really quite useful for a number of reasons. Firstly, it serves as a record of my research and how the process is developing. It is not quite my research diary but as a friend put it, a form of public note-taking. Secondly, it is a space for me to engage with different kinds of topics as well as experiment styles of writing. Thirdly, it has allowed for a sharing of my work with both those who may search for me online and/or stumble on my site after searching for a certain collection of key words. Unfortunately, this sharing has been rather hampered by on-going problems connecting to other sites through the use of trackbacks and pingbacks (apologies for the recent ‘test’ posts). I have asked for help from both those on the wordpress fora and my internet host but have had no luck as yet.

There are a set of posts which are in draft form at the moment but that I shall try to finish off during the course of this week. Here’s hoping! As ever, please feel free to leave comments or get in touch with me directly,

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Brussels: fieldsite / collaboration?

I spoke with Maja Kuzmanovic last Friday over Skype, following several emails over the past few months, about the possibility of spending time with f0.am in Brussels. When I was in Montreal in the Autumn, Sha Xin Wei mentioned the group, and Maja, to me as they had worked together on a project. The fo.am website looks amazing and is really interesting; I’m intrigued by their committment to

growing inclusive, resilient and abundant worlds.¹

Although we did not speak for very long, I was able to explain my research interests, provide a flavour of my work and hear a little about their research group. Maja explained that they had had experience of ethnographers and anthropologists spending time with the lab; many of them had gone on to became actively involved in the group. When we tried to deal with practicalities, dates were problematic. Whilst f0.am are planning a workshop (or gathering) at the end of July, I was told it would not make sense for me to arrive beforehand unless it was for a few weeks. I would be very welcome to do so, and be involved in the organisation of the gathering, but shall be in Berlin at that time. Therefore, Maja suggested that I apply to present at the gathering; although if selected, I would be a participant and not a collaborator with f0.am. There would then be the chance to meet at a later date; perhaps in September as the lab will be very quiet after the July gathering. I’ve sent over a short bio as requested and am keeping my fingers crossed to be involved in some way. Here’s hoping!

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Ethnographic research: a workshop with Georgina Born, Oxford

On Friday 16 May there was a half-day workshop on ethnographic research in my department run by Prof. Georgina Born:

Ethnographic research is one of the most fashionable, and perhaps most misunderstood, methods in the social sciences today. What does it mean to carry out ethnographic research, and how can it be defended against accusations that it is utterly unrigorous, or an entirely subjective engagement with the object of research, whatever that is? Is reflexivity a panacea for such criticisms? In this workshop, we look at a number of central issues in ethnographic research, from theoretical and epistemological questions to very practical challenges to do with how to go about ethnographic fieldwork.¹

I had attended the same workshop two years earlier, while I was studying for my MSc. This time around, with some experience of ethnographic attempts, it was even more interesting. Drawing on her own ethnographies of major cultural institutions (such as IRCAM and the BBC, to name but two), she held to two methodological (Foucauldian and Bourdieuian) injunctions: (1) attend to the historical specificity of each field and its coherence and differentiation; and (2) in analysing causality, trace the multiplicity of causes and the contingency of their conjunction. Put differently, the second is a counter-reductive injunction where you have to multiply the causes, to keep adding to the richness of a case. Georgina argued that ethnography is an analysis of the disjunctures, contradictions and discrepancies between discourse (what is said) and practice (what is done). Ethnography, she contended, can be both rigorous and robust and can approach (or aspire to) objectivity. Interpretation does not mean merely subjective. The workshop (perhaps more of a lecture than a workshop?) was fantastic and I found myself taking a lot of notes. Comments on: preparing and doing fieldwork, the concept of problematisation, post-positivist empiricism, Tarde and (neo-)Spinozist ontologies, difference as a methodological principle and operationalising multi-site ethnography, were all thought-provoking. Although I would normally like to work against having some sort of list, I think that these themes are really important and would like to explore them further here (there is however, no order).

Preparing and doing fieldwork is closely related to choosing a site; this quite literally situates the whole research, focusing or condensing a research problem and framing it in terms of a larger question which it can speak to. Ethnography is neither purely, nor primarily, inductive, yet neither is the ‘empirical’ subsumed by the ‘theoretical’. There are two kinds of background knowledge pre-fieldwork: substantive (about the object) and theoretical / conceptual (kinds of analysis and questions). Thus ethnography is both deductive, using background theoretical and substantive knowledge) and inductive (deriving concepts and analysis from empirical fieldwork): an oscillation between the two which is productive, making it possible for empirical research to amend and/or develop theory.

The concept of problematisation was considered through:

Rabinow’s idea of ethnography as a response to Foucault’s ‘problematisation’; and as a way of implementing what, after Deleuze, might be called a ‘post-positivist empiricism’ – an empiricism with inventive conceptual effects.

For Foucault, problematisation is an introduction of uncertainty, or a loss of familiarity, a rendering difficult of a previous way of understanding. For Rabinow, this is a particular style of inquiry, a shift from unseeing a situation not only as a given but as question. Georgina explained that her driving motive for her ethnographies was emphatically historical: to respond to, and problematise, a critical cultural historical moment (e.g. crisis in the musical avant-garde). She also asserted that instead of a ‘master-slave’ model of social theory in which theory (abstraction and reduction) presides over the empirical (complexity, subtlety, mess…), empirical research can have theoretical effects and serves a basis for conceptual invention. She quoted Deleuze, himself drawing on Whitehead’s notion of empiricism, to argue that the abstract does not explain but must itself be explained. Here, ethnography works towards a post-positivist empiricism.

Counterposing the work of Gabriel Tarde and Spinoza to that of Emile Durkheim and his explanatory tropes – a re-thinking of the Durkheimina settlement – Georgina argued against employing reified and deterministic notions of society, culture, area or region. This questioning of common-sense notions (and the superior truth associated with it) was challenged by her productive provocation: how could ontological hierarchies be possible, if you assume that the cause does not precede its effects; the whole, its parts; or unity, division? Ethnography, she argued, can suspend these judgements, or ontological hierarchies / assumptions, and be concerned with precisely the articulation of the relationship between the collective and individual.²

Drawing on Foucault’s ‘Questions of method’³, Georgina teased out three modalities of difference as a methodological principle: synchronic (differentiation of formation, coherence, dispersion), diachonic (dynamics, different temporalities) and analytical (a multiplication or pluralization of causes). She also drew attention to a part of the text which I rather liked:

Clearly, viewed from the standpoint of this style of analysis, what I am proposing is at once too much and too little. There are too many diverse kinds of relations, too many lines of analysis, yet at the same time there is too little necessary unity. A plethora of intelligibilities, a deficit of necessities. But for me this is precisely the point at issue, both in historical analysis and in political critique.

Later on in the afternoon, we discussed recent developments in ethnography, and in particular multi-site ethnography. Whilst highlighting some of the advantages of this approach, there was  a sense that it was onerous in terms of access, a trade off for depth in one site and thus might lose some of the benefits of ethnography (such as trust, empathy in relations, perhaps unable to build a subtle or complex picture). She suggested that multi-site ethnography might be worthwhile if you were hoping to: (1) follow the object, (2) explore abstract connections, (3) develop a comparativist study, capturing heterogeneity / multiplicity, (4) study difference over time, or (5) engage with non-linear, cross-scalar relations. When asked where my work would fall, I’m not sure it fits easily within any of the categories. Whilst it is comparative, it is not strictly a comparison of ‘experimental space A’ with ‘experimental space B’ and I would not hope to capture heterogeneity but perhaps evoke it, or provide glimpses of it. In another sense, I am following an object, although this would require an expanded notion of object which would include not only the space but also the materials, people and ideas: an enriched ethnographic object. I shall have to think more about this and why I have chosen particular sites to explore the relationship between geography, art and method.

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Philosophical anthropology with Bruno Latour, Maison Francaise, Oxford

Bruno Latour was in the country last week and, more importantly, in Oxford for a few days. Although I missed his ‘A Compositionist Manifesto’ on the Wednesday (as I was over at Royal Holloway), I was able to attend both the session of ‘Mapping Controversies’ at the School of Geography on Thursday morning, and the launch of his newly translated book on law, at the Maison Francaise the same afternoon. A recent addition to the MSc in ‘Nature, Society and Environmental Policy’ (NSEP), Mapping Controversies is a:

course developed from an EU project MACOSPOL (MApping COntroversies on Science for POLitics) and a course on mapping controversies first taught by Bruno Latour to students at the École des Mines in Paris. The online version of the course has been developed jointly by Sciences Po, MIT and the École des Mines (http://www.demoscience.org/). As well as Oxford, the University of Manchester (Department of Architecture), the École Polytechnique Féderale de Lausanne and the University of Amsterdam (Department of Media Studies) are also part of the Mapping Controversies programme.

The session began with a series of presentations of group projects and their particular controversies, followed by a conversation between Andrew Barry and Bruno Latour. Taking matters of concern rather than matters of fact as his point of departure¹, Latour explained that through MACOSPOL he was trying to create a platform for mapping, an opportunity to orient yourself both in a map and in a controversy. Arguing that the web has not been exploited well so far, Latour contended that if a website can be printed, it’s a bad one (as an aside, this one can be printed but it doesn’t look the same so perhaps it’s not all bad). Demoscience, part of the larger MACOSPOL project, is an attempt at developing a handbook of good practice as there are no standards for websites, as well as differently visualising the micro and the macro. But there is much more to be done, in particular in terms of being able to navigate from one controversy to another, and how you might enter a controversy (a particular style of front-page), to navigate a matter of concern. Indeed, the very notion of controversy is itself controversial, Latour noted, as it is is positivist but he claimed it had become a technical term.  What he was most interested in talking about was what is the effect of a well-designed web-site, and how it  might encourage intervention in a debate (or even transform the debate). Latour seemed to be advocating a particular approach when he argued that the general public does not exist (and that there are many intermediary steps in the fabrication of any public), privileging smaller cases as they (1) are easier, as there are fewer scientific paper to read and (2) enable you to see how an issue becomes public. The talk ended with a few comments on Geography, as we were told that it is ideally placed as the only discipline to have maintained the connection between the physical and human:

(AB) The connection is sometimes tenuous… and actually, I think that, one of the importances of this kind of work is precisely to re-think what these connections are.

(BL) It’s tenuous, it’s disputed, in many Geography departments… But it’s there!

The talk in the afternoon was titled: ‘Law as a special type of social link: a field study of a French Supreme Court’.

After a long period of fieldwork on one of the French supreme Courts, [Latour] has published a monograph La Fabrique du droit. Une ethnographie du Conseil d’Etat. The English translation, The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat (Polity Press, Cambridge) has just been published.²

Latour’s philosophical anthropology, as it was called by one the panelists, sought to engage with the question: if the social is made of associations, how can these associations connect? Law, for Latour, is one of these ‘connectors’, rather than a domain as such. The paper was accompanied by a PowerPoint slideshow, displaying a few key themes – such as A place of justice, A paper technology, A world of files, A strange institution – and plenty of photos (although none of him, as has been noted before by Sarah Whatmore³). The talk was recorded and can be streamed (as well as downloaded) here.

The following day, Latour was involved in the ‘Beyond the Academy: Research as Exhibition‘ conference over at the Tate Britain in London. Although I was unable to attend there is a report by a geographer from the Open University over at her blog.

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I’ve been meaning to post this video for a while now as I think it’s a really beautiful and quirky take on the everyday. It’s created by David Jhave Johnston, a multimedia-poet currently living in Montreal and teaching/researching at Concordia. Check out his website glia.ca for more digital poetry!

Reflections

Just where did February go? The promise (hope?) of more regular posts has not materialised: apologies.

This month has been rather busy with lectures on ‘Spaces of politics’; several bus journeys over to Cambridge for events on at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH); a couple of trips to London to visit part of the Office of Experiments (OoE) and attend a discussion at the RGS-IBG (a colleague and friend was in dialogue with the president Michael Palin); preparation for a grant towards a collaborative training scheme; a few meetings with my supervisors and plenty of reading. Perhaps not enough writing though…

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Berlin: fieldsite / intervention?

We agreed to ‘meet’ on Skype at 14:00 (GMT) on Thursday 21.01.2010 to continue our discussion, started in September, and before that by email. By we, I mean myself, Anna Engberg-Pedersen and Christina Werner. Anna and Christina are both based on the Institute for Spatial Experimentation [Institut für Raumexperimente (IfREX)] in Berlin, itself an on-going experimentation in pedagogy.  Unfortunately the Skype connection was unstable and Anna and Christina ended up calling me on my home phone (I was in my flat). It was much better audio quality but meant that I was unable to record both sides of the conversation. Anna asked how my work was going and wanted to know about my time in Montreal. I explained as best I could what I had been up to, outlining the people I had been working with and the spaces I had been moving in. Although Anna had not heard of the SenseLab or the TML, she was well aware of Brian Massumi and Erin Manning and told me she had very much enjoyed reading Brian’s (2002) book Parables for the Virtual.

Christina then came on the phone – I was on loud-speaker their end – and asked me about my interests, but said that first, she would tell me how the previous semester had been. Christina and Eric Ellingsen take care of the running of the school and their work oscillates between the studio (Olafur’s) and the school. The winter semester (2009/2010) was very busy for them, and the twenty students or so were involved in class discussions (some with Olafur), reading groups (organised and led by Christina and Eric) as well as workshops with invited guests. There are also public lectures and meetings which follow a more classical (or orthodox) form. The time with Christina and Eric aims to cover what they describe as the ‘standard stuff’, which seemed to suggest reading which would help situate the more experimental sessions. One example of these sessions was to create a book on-the-fly; the students had three days to design and make a book comprised of lots of different parts. This can be seen as part of the Institute’s attempt to challenge and actively work against so-called ‘ready-made’ knowledge.

The Institut für Raumexperimente is in itself an experiment. To me, the experiment as a mode of inquiry is necessary if we are to insist on a constant, probing and generous interaction with reality. Or to put it differently: by engaging in experimentation, we can challenge the norms by which we live and thus produce reality.¹

It was now my turn to explain so I sketched out my research questions and interests, notably: the historio-philsophical lineage of their experiment(s), the architecture of space and how it might facilitate experimentation (as well as what kinds of experiments) and an exploration of what is at stake (in effect, asking what purpose the Institute/school serves). All really relevant questions, I was told, and Christina and Anna were keen to detail some of the facets of the Institute. Firstly, whilst it is an Institute it occupies a strange position in relation to the College of Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts [Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK)] and operates outside of the institutional framework of the university, although its public lectures are open to all of its members. Secondly, the IfREX provides hybrid space which at once offers close ties to a practising artist’s studio (downstairs) as well as a place to do research. The students are invited to lunch in the studio twice a week – where they are able to make links to all kinds of people – and are provided with an accessible place, with room to work. Thirdly, there is no syllabus as such; instead there are themes. The IfREX is concerned with trying to make connections: it works to push us to think differently. So whilst the semesters are unplanned, there is room to respond to invited speakers and other visiting academics or artists. Trajectories are constructed, connections are seized upon and there is a tendency to experiment with ideas. Indeed, the teaching is an experiment in itself which is a five-year research project. The IfREX is an educational platform, a space where people are trying to learn how to learn, an experimentation with experimentation.

The Institut für Raumexperimente is a research experiment attached as a satellite to the College of Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts. Its purpose is to experiment with new approaches to teaching art in the university setting. The programme focuses on spatial practices and problems in the fine arts and their intersection with architecture as well as their relationship to the humanities and natural sciences. By way of workshops, experiments, different exhibition formats, publications, and symposia, participants are encouraged to interact across disciplinary boundaries and to productively engage with the intersections between art and scholarship.

When asked what I would like, or hoped, to do in terms of fieldwork, I replied that I would be guided by them although I would very much appreciate the chance to visit the Institute and to meet the people who worked there. Christina said that they had been discussing beforehand what they could offer me, and made two different propositions. The first is to apply for a short-term grant for postgraduate study which would last six months, or one semester (April-September). This position is offered to those who are either (a) involved in further education more advanced than the students at the School or those who are (b) not artists, in order to make different sorts of connections. The role is fairly open-ended, with the award-holder expected to be there full-time, attend all events and be able to mediate the content, to provide another perspective. The deadline: 15^th February 2010. The second option would be more non-committal and would allow for me to be in Berlin for a month or so, where I would be able to sit in on all the events that I would like. The IfREX is keen to cultivate a feeling of hospitality as well as make links across and beyond disciplines. The next semester’s theme will be landscape architecture, with an interest in architecture and sound. Sounds good!

At Institut für Raumexperimente, time and space are considered inseparable even at a methodological level. Space cannot be externalised; it isn’t representational and nor are the experiments with which we work. To work spatially does not necessarily entail the creation of representational distance, and we can precisely avoid this distance, essentially static and unproductive, by insisting that time is a constituent of space. Or as a friend has said: space is ‘a constantly mutating simultaneity of stories-so-far’.

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Multitudes #34 (Autumn 2008)

This journal looks well worth checking out:

Established in 2006, Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy is dedicated to publishing the latest work on continental philosophy, along with new translations and interviews with contemporary thinkers.

There are not one but two (!) current issues: #7 On Gilbert Simondon and #8 The Post/Human Condition.

Another bookmarked journal of mine is Multitudes, “une revue politique, artistique et philosophique”. The content is arranged thematically and engages with contemporary debates. Don’t be put off by the French!

Fieldlife, TML

I’ve been back from Montreal for a few weeks now and it all seems very far away at times. I have met up with my supervisors to let them know a bit about how things went and I’m now trying to work on an account of my time there. It’s not going to be some coherent piece, let alone a chapter, but perhaps some strands of thought will emerge as I write. Or at least I hope so! At the same time I’m also trying to outline the structure and chapters of my thesis. It’s certainly an iterative process but I think it might be useful to explore how some of the constraints of a PhD might prove to be enabling or generative.

Expect some more posts in the new year, have a merry Christmas,

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