A Pair of Doxa and a Paradox

Published in Uncommon Ground, David Garcia et al, eds. Amsterdam, Bis Publishers, 2007 A Pair of Doxa and a Paradox Sher Doruff Doxa is opinion. It is what everybody knows or what everybody should know. It is common sense or good sense…” Todd May The inspired premise of ‘Uncommon Ground’ challenges the orthodoxy of ‘common ground’ solutions in the emerging domain of transdiciplinary, cross-sector research and development. It enters the debate over the ethically untidy fusion of academia, industry and the arts by respecting differentiated perspectives rather than uncritically convolving them into homogenised praxis. The construction and facilitation of cooperative solutions that propagate consensual ’common ground’ in collaborative R&D is a tricky business. While transdisciplinary practice has obvious merit in stimulating discourse, initiating new methods and facilitating real time interaction between diverse practitioners, cross-sector collaboration is also tainted by the dubious history of the military industrial complex and its progeny – the military entertainment complex. The notion of cross-sector convergence on uncommon ground acknowledges the complexities of situating diverse creative and analytical processes within a dynamic field of pragmatic market-driven experimentation. It perceptively retains the distinction between disciplinary “forces” or players in a pervasive gamespace. Retaining the distinction emphasises the emerging relations, the interplay itself, between players in an Innovation ecology based on mutual aid1. A seemingly progressive step, this is a double-sided coin. The intangible and abstract “power” of creative processes and their affects, in this scheme, are now invested with a surplus value - branded. Creativity itself becomes a commodity. Affect Incorporated. Creativity International. Late capitalism effortlessly subsumes the ineffable. 1 This could be construed as a paradoxically ironic ideology swap from anarchist Petr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid ideas on evolution. 1 On Shapeshifting Societal Paradigms Ostensibly, the cold war era ushered in a shift in the politics of power relations. The tendencies of 18th/19th century disciplinary rule advanced by Foucault were entering a state of slow dissolution. The top-down, hierarchical institutional enclosures endemic to these transient societies of discipline (family, school, military, factory, prison, hospital) began to seep outside their containments, spreading and disseminating their functions in more fluid ways. Capital begins to flow unencumbered, to trickle between enclosed spaces. Deleuze saw this shift from closed to open structures as a turn towards what he called societies of control. In Foucault’s disciplinary society (1977), each institution serves as an independent variable through which an actor/player discontinuously passes in life, leapfrogging from family to school to factory, each time starting from zero, from a relatively blank slate. Roles and realities separate into discreet life compartments. But for Deleuze, the institutional enclosures of the discipline society become increasingly porous and the control functions that manage it take on new affect as they seep out-of-bounds. Disciplinary societies “[…] are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point” (1990). In other words, control societies are topological figures, continuous and multiple transpositional vectors rather than positional points. Can we now imagine shapeshifting tendencies in power relations from top-down to bottom-up, passing from discipline to control through the spectacle of gamespace? For both Foucault and Deleuze, control no longer emanates from a dominant outside power but emerges from the subject and is self-varying. It modulates an affective in-between; modulates the relation itself. As a porous capitalism leaks from closure to openness, from local to global, it nonetheless folds disciplinary structures into its complexity. Institutions don’t disappear, they mobilise and globalise even as power is potentialised in the local node or individual. Controls then, are the modulators of a society that finds spontaneity and playful- 2 ness advantageous. And therein lies the truly confounding bit. Late capitalism thrives on difference and the production of variety. It rewards improvisation and exploits affect. “Capitalism starts intensifying or diversifying affect, but only in order to extract surplus-value” (Massumi, 2003). But Massumi also offers another more optimistic angle: “It seems to me that alternative political action does not have to fight against the idea that power has become affective, but rather has to learn to function itself on that same level — meet affective modulation with affective modulation” (Ibid). Is this then the role market-driven interdisciplinary research creation – the affective modulations produced by uncommon ground sees for itself? Problematising Uncommon Ground Is capitalising on the primacy of “the process” in creative collaboration itself problematic? Can it fuel the emergence of bottom-up artistic tactics from a metastructure of top-down corporate, economic strategies? When creative processes themselves, irrespective of any tangible product, are market-driven (though conventional product is generally forthcoming), the subsumption of alterity into the cogs of the system tends to transgress the dimensions it fosters. The implications can be commendable or despicable, depending on the orientation of the playerslash-collaborator. Problematising collaborative, cross-sector effort is in itself a useful endeavour. Arguably, that is the current phase of this ideology. Problematising charges the unpacking of structural complexities with a vital, almost refreshing exuberance. As Uncommon Ground parses the problematics and complexities of cross-sector creative practice through case studies and investigates the pros and cons of inter-institutional alliances, it must also weigh the affects of difference-crunching in collaborative compromise. Contextualised in this way, dual interpretations of the term “collaborator” come to mind. They are worthwhile exploring through common sense (popular opinion) doxa. Doxa #One: To Collaborate - Working-together is fruitful 3 The prospects for knowledge transfer between disciplines and sectors is encouraging. The historic compartmentalisation and demarcation of academic disciplines has rigorously stifled, for many, hopes of affective interplay within the ivory tower. That sectarian protectionism of expertise is dissolving in spite of itself is a matter of debate, and the question of whether the University is capable of forging interdisciplinary relations within its midst remains open. The exponential growth of non-academically credentialed research centres and the migration of personnel between these domains is evident and healthy. Financial support for collaborative transdisciplinary research from industry and public funds that enable trustbuilding allegiances and path-breaking discourse between sectors is certainly a way forward. ICT frameworks further enhance the possibility for meaningful exchange. The premise of creative industries2 engendered collaboration employs all the bells and whistles for nurturing productive and original intersects between practitioners and publics of all stripes. Shared lexicons and methodological mash-ups emerge from transdisciplinary co-operative engagement. All good news. There’s enough unpredictability in the mix to keep it exciting. And after all, earlier examples of cross-sector pollination between, for example, the military, academia and industry have given us the Internet, the primary tool (weapon) for wide-scale, pro-active knowledge transfer/exchange as well as a platform for tactical intervention. That the enabling platform is a shared infrastructure for all interest groups is an unruly and fascinating feature of a mighty panopticon. Take a step onto the slippery slope. Doxa #Two: To Collaborate - Sleeping with the enemy is questionable Warning flags over the co-option of a co-operative social meshwork have long flown from disparate political, philosophical and artistic camps. The usual suspects, Debord (see illustration), Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, a host of critical theorists … and even the outgoing American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican ex-general, who advised in a 1961 speech: “The prospect of domina2 See wikipedia for a comprehensive definition of the creative industries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_industries 4 tion of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.” (emphasis added)3 The breathtaking speed with which the academy, the arts and the commercial sector have converged under the wings of Creative Industry values is indeed remarkable. It builds upon already established marriages of convenience ramped up by the Cold War military-industrial complex and the ever-emerging and frighteningly robust military-entertainment complex that generates much of the technological protocols and kit used by independent producers (artists, designers, activists, researchers) as well as a fair amount of content. It’s convenient to turn a blind eye to the sources and referents that fuel AND siphon creative activity under the broad umbrella of the technology sector that services society. While the role of the artist can never be contained in a generic “ism’, the practice of art and design often provokes surprise, shock, nonconformity, disorientation, eccentricity, marginality, activism, etc., etc. Any assumption of a uniformity of creative intention kills whatever life is left in the idea of artistic activity. In the new creative industries paradigm there is collusion between the gods of capital and power and their academic/artistic antagonists. Collusion, like collaboration, carries both negative and positive weight, spanning interpretations from agreement to betrayal. It could certainly be argued that the line in the sand between arts/academic creative practice and commerce is washed away with every incoming wave. Are “collaborators” in this complex gamespace double agents, ide3 “Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present * and is gravely to be regarded. D.D. Eisenhower, 1961, “Farewell Address” 5 alistic entrepreneurs, self-serving pragmatists, proto-post-capitalists, enthusiastic ‘creatives’ looking to pay the rent, all of the above? The Paradox of Collusion At times, transdisciplinary intersections are at their most functional when they are superficial and informative, a simple transfer of knowledge. Start-from-scratch, bottom-up working-together initiatives are more compelling. They celebrate a pioneering indeterminacy while risking invasive interpenetration. The co-creation of knowledge rather than merely its transfer is the issue. It’s both laudable and frightening when one considers the collusion of the players and the scope of the game. The playfulness of art and design research/creation has much to offer in the open discourse and shared praxis between rigourous scientific methodologies and the crapshoot of entrepreneurialism. But that same playfulness, the dynamic relations that emerge through interplay, have already been subsumed by the system and are driving it. An alert awareness that the ontology of play and interplay in this uncommon ground has shifted is an important mnemonic. McKenzie Wark expresses this well: Play was once the battering ram to break down the Chinese walls of alienated work, of divided labor. Only look at what has become of play. Play is no longer a counter to work. Play becomes work; work becomes play […] The utopian dream of liberating play from the game […] merely opened the way for the extension of gamespace into every aspect of everyday life. While the counterculture wanted worlds of play outside the game; the military entertainment complex countered in turn by expanding the game to the whole world, containing play forever within it. – GAM3R 7HE0RY The navigation of uncommon ground, as an exploratory activity, as an affective modulation, illustrates another emerging dimension of a control society. That we seem to have entered this dimension without so much as a hiccup offers some clue that as a movement, it plays by the rules. The pervasive gamespace it inhabits generates the constraints and conditions of play. But the more ideological 6 the “experiment” becomes, the more entrenched in market-driven values it becomes, the more downright scary it becomes. Perhaps that’s giving this ‘trend’ more influence than it deserves, as it is itself a by-product of runaway globalisation. Panel section from a May 1968 Paris poster (English translation) of the Situationist International: “In our spectacular society”4. References Deleuze, Gilles, 1990. “Society of Control”, published online: http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/netzkritik/societyofcontrol.html 4 http://picturebook.nothingness.org/pbook/situgraphics/display/82 7 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 1961. “Farewell Address” http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/farewell.htm Foucault, Michel, 1977. Discipline and Punish. Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, London, Pantheon Massumi, Brian, 2003. “Navigating Movement: An Interview with Brian Massumi”, http://www.21cmagazine.com/issue2/massumi.html May, Todd, 2005. Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press Wark, McKenzie, 2006. GAM3R 7H30RY, Future of the Book, published online: http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/ 8