Luke Willis Thompson – Yaw

[This text originally appeared at EyeContact.]

In his essay ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’ James Clifford explains how the classification of objects by collectors is doomed to be a temporary exercise, as objects do not remain in the value regimes of either artistic masterpiece or cultural artefact, but shift between them over time and space. For Foucault, the emergence and decline of stable discourses about objects is precisely the source of their aesthetic power: in the modern paradigm the most powerful artistic experience involves something we thought we knew slipping from our grasp, or something felt which is about to become knowable. Meanwhile, objects themselves hover ambivalently, resisting our attempts to put them in their place.

Luke Willis Thompson’s Yaw presents us with a remarkable, disturbing figure in such a transition. As we enter the gallery a life-sized sculpture of a hunched figure faces away, revealing himself to be a black man in an ill-fitting suit and hat, dressed in the tradition of blackface minstrelsy. He is truly yawing, a ship who has strayed far off course here in Auckland/Tamaki Makaurau, where men of black African descent do not figure in a national story. Wherever this man is supposed to be headed, it is not this city. On closer inspection, his bent posture could be the sculpture frozen in the moment of an entertaining dance, but this possibility is suppressed by Thompson’s precarious balancing of an empty shallow bowl in the open hand. Not only is he a long way from home, but he is skint. He invites the usual distancing comment directed to beggars: “That poor bastard.”

Alone in the gallery with nothing else to look at, our distance cannot be maintained, so he has our attention and his story unfolds. Copied in France from a US sculpture, the figure arrived to an Auckland antique dealer in the early 1970s, entering New Zealand at the same time as a large number of Pacific migrants recruited for economic purposes. On arrival, the figure was placed outside the store to hustle for business on a street corner near the young artist’s then home. After suffering increasing physical abuse on the street, the figure has come to be kept indoors, now on display behind a caged front window. Yet even though he was now inside the store, he was not for sale, continuing to perform his role as the iconic identifying chattel of the antique dealer, a differentiating function for which no money can substitute. He is truly performing the labour of identity, indentured with a debt that cannot be repaid or bought out. The artist’s gesture begins with a three week rented holiday for the figure in RM gallery, where perhaps a certain amount of aesthetic care can be offered as respite from his usual labour. This additional displacement by the artist recalls the efforts among communities and museum workers for the repatriation of cultural artefacts and human remains: this body does not belong here, it should be sent home. But as a copy of a generic stereotype itself many centuries downstream of the founding of the European slave trade, and now on the other side of the world, the figure has no clear “home” to go to.

After a while, the man begins to reveal suffering from not only living rough on the streets, but in the brutality of his creation. In keeping with the tradition of blackface, everything about this man has been designed to caricature, subdue and dissipate the power of the black body in the guilty aftermath of slavery. The nameless, presumably white, sculptor haunts the work with unimaginable cruelty: bowing the black man down before the viewer; slowly kneading the man’s lips into an exaggerated pout; moulding his pants into a decrepit sag; and most disturbingly, leaving sunken hollows in the eyes where the irises should be. A sad political figure in his native habitat of the store, the white cube directs attention to the human singularity of his making and being: he becomes less a political symbol of racism and more a monstrous example of the impossibilities the history of racialisation leaves for an ideal interpersonal community we seek in the art world. There is simply no easy way to be with this man. The artist’s installation strategy engages political and social issues through the modality of the personal and ethical: the plate being offered by our figure bears a Nazi-era stamp on its base identifying it as being from porcelain manufacturer Rosenthal, whose Jewish founder was forced to leave the business and became exiled while the company was “Aryanised” (though retaining its Jewish name) in the 1930s. There is no interpretive text to help the viewer to “get” the connection, but gallery staff have been instructed by the artist to share with interested visitors a moving story about the artist’s father that shows this juxtaposition of figure and object in a new and painful light.

When the art historical brain catches up to this racialised figure in the gallery, one is immediately put in mind of Michael Parekowhai’s works Poorman, Beggarman, Thief (1996) (more easily remembered as the Māori figures wearing the badge “Hi, My name is Hori”); and the 2003 Kapa Haka series of Māori security guards, recently given a reworking in the 2011 Venice Biennale. Those works cunningly (and rightfully) asserted the presence of Māori in the public-commercial sphere through the Warholian strategy of the multiple, while retaining the European individualist authorial signature of the “hand-crafted.” This mark of authorship, further enhanced by the artist’s use of his immediate family as models, turns out to be essential for maintenance of the significant exchange value Parekowhai’s works carry today.  The aesthetic complications of this strategy are perhaps most palpable looking back to Parekowhai’s 1994 work Mimi, a series of carved replicas of Duchamp’s Fountain. At the time, the work seemed like an assertion of Māori (and thus New Zealand) relevance in the Euro-American history of contemporary art; while also a statement in favour of “crafted” sculpture that would “keep it real” in the no-bullshit Kiwi manner. From today’s vantage point, one can see how the art market has enthusiastically consumed Parekowhai’s interplay of cultural difference (differentiation) and individual authorship (property), with the finish and craftsmanship of the works securing the viewer in their position of financial and aesthetic appreciation.

In Yaw, Thompson seems to take the opposite strategy, restoring the power of Duchamp’s ready-made gesture. Thompson has not even been able to buy the figure at the centre of the exhibition for himself, let alone circulate it for financial gain – the trajectory of the figure is away from the market, and hopefully away from comfortable display. We are increasingly used to stories of such limits on circulation taking place in the world of indigenous cultural materials, among communities stereotyped in the West as non-cosmopolitan, pre-modern, and resistant to capital accumulation. This is why Parekowhai’s infiltration of a race- and class-bound artworld’s mode of circulation creates such useful openings. Thompson’s gesture, however, is much more radical, both in aesthetic and cultural terms. Thompson finds in this generic object of blackface minstrelsy an absolute singularity, one that potentially speaks to every instance of the commodification of race. Refusing the shelter a ‘cultural identity’ might provide in the Parekowhai/90s-Peter-Robinson fashion, or any explanatory narratives that justify the work, Thompson’s courageously bare presentation of this object leaves us decomposed by undigestibility of the figure for either cultural edification or capitalist consumption. We are ourselves “thrown off course”, yawing against the bitter squalls of power that punctuate the winds of the global multicultural economy.

Pūrākau: stories of future homelands

Catalogue Essay for Pūrākau project organised by Xavier Meade, 2010.

Mauriora-ki-te-Ao describe pūrākau as “a Māori term for stories which contain mythological perspectives concerning the nature of reality and the human condition. A pūrākau is a story within which is contained models, perspectives, ideas of consequence to the people who recite them”(1). More than just a compelling narrative, pūrākau are culturally specific vehicles for the retention and transmission of knowledge. As Cherokee writer Thomas King says, “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” (2)

All stories spring from a place, but trading and sharing stories is a natural instinct that has always had a role exemplified by the travelling minstrel or today’s artist. Contrary to the scientistic and capitalist models of “information transfer” that values an idea or expression for the universality of its appeal; the story only finds its value in a specific experience or moment. There is no external rationale for this project connecting Cuba, Mexico and Aotearoa New Zealand: it only works because of the specific connections that are mobilised by the project leader Xavier Meade and all those involved. That is a story in itself.

Can a poster tell a story? At first glance, the poster appears to have a more provocative than narrative quality. A poster is not so much studied, but seen as a whole in a flash, instantaneously. Traditionally, a poster makes an intervention in a story, more than it makes a story. Susan Sontag suggested that “a poster aims to seduce, to exhort, to sell, to educate, to convince, to appeal” (3). But in order to do any of this, it must reference a genre or back-story that is already known to the viewer in their cultural environment. No time for weaving intricate tales.

So it would seem that to make posters about myths, legends and stories in an international exchange might be contrary to the nature of the poster itself, because the pre-existing languages and narratives that make the poster effective are not going to be located in all the local environments. A standard poster, on the other hand has an immediacy that stems from its dissemination in a public – and it is no surprise that political posters have such a strongly nationalist history. They almost require an urban public imagined in the European model. The way a poster desires energy and action is captured in a Venezuelan poster from the 1970s documented by Tschabrun:

“Don’t stick it up in your dining room or in your study, don’t keep it in your bedside table. Don’t misplace it. Don’t collect it, don’t archive it, don’t keep it in your library. Don’t give it away. Post it on the walls of the city.” (4)

But when the poster moves outside its intended community, it becomes something else, an artefact that may hold the talismanic force of a possible other future, such as the Che Guevara posters that held pride of place in Australian bedrooms of my teenage friends. Or, in a more aesthetic mode, it might become part of a collection referencing the very history of the poster itself.

The poster collector might be seen by the Venezuelan commentator as a counterrevolutionary force, but posters like those in the Pūrākau project become valuable precisely because they step back from the poster in its usual form. Like the previous Liberators project coordinated by Xavier, these posters require a a consideration of the connections and differences between cultures and environments. To borrow a formulation from William Kentridge , they start to reflect on the poster rather than to just be a poster (5). We can start to ask, what might this poster mean in its own place, and what could it mean in my place? Worlds meet in a place of the imagination, where many stories can be held together.

From my view as an outsider, the imagined world of the Pūrākau project seems connected to the legendary nation of Aztlán, where Aztecs resided many years ago in the North American southwest. Aztlán was also the title of classic silkscreened poster by Richard Duardo (1982) that would fit well in the current collection. Greeley says that Duardo’s Aztlán, with its linking of ancient forms to contemporary urban culture, “posits a ‘return’ to a Chicano homeland, a mythical, pre-Conquest Mexican past invoked in terms of a consciously marginal present that rejects dominant cultural patrimony of both Mexico and the United States” (6). The imagined future is born of the struggle for autonomy, a reaction against racism and oppression. The writer Cherrie Moraga explains her own awakening, saying that “Aztlán gave language to a nameless anhelo inside me.” Through struggle, “the Mexicana becomes a Chicano (or at least a Mechicana); that is, she becomes a citizen of this country [the US], not by virtue of a green card, but by virtue of the collective voice she assumes in staking her claim.” (7)

Since the 1980s, indigenous peoples have insistently asserted their collective voice in the international legal and cultural domain. For the non-indigenous activist, the stories of indigenous history have become less of a symbol that can be appropriated for our own invented mythologies, as they become more powerfully expressed by indigenous peoples themselves, from the Zapatistas to the Taino to the Tino Rangatiratanga movement in Aotearoa. Still, the effort to undo colonial oppression and regenerate indigenous sovereignty invites a future for all peoples. As Lilla Watson put it to her non-indigenous colleagues, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” (8)

This mode of indigenous regeneration deconstructs Western assumptions about the relationship between the present and past, as the Māori whakatauki explains: “Ka haere whakamua me hoki whakamuri” – we must walk into the future facing the past. Ritual, story, legend, language, mythology – pūrākau – are maintained not simply for their own sake, but for the decolonisation of the imagination in the time to come. In this mindset, there is no tension between the immediacy of the European poster tradition as it migrates to the Spanish-speaking Americas; and the traditional tales of the natural world that are embedded in pūrākau. Unlike the flat spatial world created though global financial instruments and intergovernmental agreements, this new homeland of the imagination – a United First Nations perhaps – is as rich and diverse as the planet itself. These posters both speak to this new world and work toward bringing it into being.

Danny Butt, Auckland/Tāmaki Makau-rau 2010

1) http://www.mkta.co.nz/Default.aspx?page=1430
2) King, Thomas. (2003). The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.
3) Sontag, Susan. (1970). “Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity,” in Donald Stermer, ed., The Art of Revolution: 96 Posters from Castro’s Cuba, 1959-1970, New York: McGraw Hill.
4) Tschabrun, Susan. (2003). “Off the Wall and into a Drawer: Managing a Research Collection.” The American Archivist, 66: 303-324, p303.
5) Kentridge, William. (2007). “Director’s Note,” in Ubu and the Truth Commission, edited by J. Taylor. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2007: viii-xv
6) Greeley, Robin Adèle. (1998). “Richard Duardo’s ‘Aztlán’ Poster: Interrogating Cultural Hegemony in Graphic Design.” Design Issues, 14(1), pp. 21-34, p34.
7) Moraga, Cherrie. (2004 [1992]). “Queer Aztlán; the Re-formation of Chicano Tribe,” in Carlin and DiGraza, eds., Queer Cultures. Pearson. p229-230
8) Watson, Lilla. 1992. ‘Untitled’. Health for Women. 3. p.1

The Opposite of Whiteness

“The Opposite of Whiteness”
Presentation to Whiteness/Whitemess : Creative Disorders and Hope
Wellington, May 15th 2010
Danny Butt – danny at dannybutt.net

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak understands the colonial subject through the psychoanalytic notion of foreclosure. The colonised is not simply rejected, but a trace is registered the body as it is expelled. She quotes Freud: In foreclosure, “the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with the affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all”.

It is not just that the idea of the native is rejected, but the feeling that is generated by them is also rejected. So a psychological defense must be made against the idea and the affect returning. This explains why the question of indigeneity or the racial basis of colonisation is not simply a matter for logical discussion about rights. The actual well-being or relative socio-economic or legal status of oppressed peoples has no real bearing on the psychoanalytic functioning of the person that has been raised in racial dominance and expects dominance. The very presence of the discussion also raises in the settler-colonist the spectre of emotions (of fear, for example) that have been rejected, and the lengths to which a psyche will go to avoid bad feelings are profound.

Scholars of whiteness have correctly pointed out that the specificity of this response and rejection has more to do with white culture than indigenous culture or ethnic others; and that this is worthy of investigation. As Richard Dyer describes his project, it involves looking at:

the racial imagery of white people – not the images of other races in white cultural production, but the latter’s imagery of white people themselves. This is not done merely to fill a gap in the analytic literature, but because there is something at stake in looking at, or continuing to ignore, white racial imagery. As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people.

We can perhaps look at this project as filling the gap of anthropology by turning anthropological methods on ourselves. In a way, it makes sense. But what if the problem is not in the gap, but in the method? I think this might explain why whiteness studies has not become a widespread solution in the role of decolonisation, In this paper, I outline three reasons – the privelege of whiteness studies, the appropriation of identity-based activist methods; and the divisive nature of the discourse among whites. Sara Ahmed points out that “the project of making whiteness visible only makes sense from the point of view of those for whom it is invisible.” For everyone else it is already obvious, in need of escape rather than creation and surfacing.

The fantasy of transcendence of the material situation which Dyer, to his credit, desperately wanted whiteness studies to avoid is unfortunately situated in the very terms he uses to bring whiteness studies into being: looking at ‘not the images of other races in white cultural production, but the latter’s imagery of white people themselves.’ But can or should whites learn from other white writing the imagery of other races about ourselves? In some respects this might seem to address the understandable expressions of tiredness among people of colour about the labour of having to “educate” whites who don’t get it. We should indeed take responsibility for ourselves. But the creation of a white learning cycle which excludes non-white others seems an unfortunate repetition, which perhaps misses the point that the most important transformation for white culture is to engage in the slow labour of learning to find one’s role in a language or world created by others.

For me, Ahmed’s intervention is decisive. While the aim of this gathering is certainly worthwhile, I am troubled when the conference info states, “We are asking how through our creative work, can we ‘see’ ourselves and our positionalities in order not to be ‘neutral’ or ‘passive participants’ in conversations around identity and power.” This seems a rather alarming affirmation of our capacity for self-knowledge, what Ahmed calls “express[ing] white privilege in the very presumption of the entitlement to learn or to self-consciousness…” She notes that “studying whiteness can involve the claiming of a privileged white identity as the subject who knows.” If anything, we have been engaged in the project of self-knowledge for too long, sequestering other people into what Fanon called our “spiritual adventure” of colonisation. As Ahmed puts it, “we cannot simply unlearn privilege when the cultures in which learning take place are shaped by privilege.”

Secondly, I think it is problematic for whites to appropriate the methods of ethnic identity-formation and self-knowledge that have been fought for and against by people of colour with very different accountabilities and consequences to our own. Especially not in the name of equality; and especially when all the (residual) structures and value systems in society are set up for us. Whatever our formation of white radicality is, it is not generated out of a reflexive understanding of the racial power structures in our society born out of our lived experience in the same way as people of colour.

Marx and Engels diagnosed processes of class-formation and class-consciousness among the working classes as having an objective character dictated by the structure of the economic system. The processes by which the downwardly-mobile bourgeois could become conscious of the structure of a capitalist economy is very different from the mechanisms that bring class-consciousness to the working classes. It is not that bourgeois political radicalisation can’t happen, it’s just that it’s different. Similarly, race means something different for us in a larger social structure and I believe that there is no point in attempting to find a shared movement with people of colour along racial lines.

This sensitises us to a third problem in whiteness studies, a more fundamental gap between white anti-racism and political movements founded by people of colour. Non-white struggles have often been to foster consciousness in a larger group about the possibility of collective political action. However, white anti-racist action is dissident in nature, attempting to draw a line between the good anti-racist whites and the racist white culture which is our inheritance. There is no “natural” alliance that can be appealed to or fostered here, as the process of identification must involve a dis-identification with a spontaneous white identity to accept the possibility of other identifications.

However the comfort level toward the presence of others (what we might call cosmopolitanism) is unevenly distributed along class lines in white culture. Cosmopolitanism is officially reserved for those with cultural capital; while patriotism (anti-cosmopolitanism) is consciously fostered by the ruling classes for everyone else. While my dis-identification with white culture can eventually be mobilised in, for example, a funded trip to a UN-meeting in Tehran, there is no benefit for the white working classes in giving up what they understand as the little privilege they have to learn to adapt to the ways of the Other. One of the notable things about the activists of colour I know is their commitment to taking their people with them. But on the white left it seems that our commitment to full engagement with our people has a fundamentally different character where we want to escape. The study of whiteness as a skill or field for self-knowledge is potentially a class wedge that paradoxically reduces the likelihood of widespread white support toward for anti-racist agendas.

I really don’t think there’s much language for this. I was struck when listening to Glenn Colquhoun’s excellent presentation yesterday that I had a more developed language for critiquing his privilege as a heterosexual male doctor than celebrating his leadership, when he’s someone who knows more about aspects of his whiteness that I do from my 20 years of studying identity politics, and I think he has a more viable model for framing the intercultural relationship than almost any Pākehā creative practitioner I know. This language imbalance seems characteristic of our predicament.

*

This is quite a negative account of a field of study that I feel like I should support. But it seems clear to me if the overwhelming characteristic of colonial dominance is that we have monopolised the mechanisms for judgement and ascribing value to all peoples, then developing greater self-knowledge is just going to make the problem worse. I’m not saying I don’t like you, I’m saying that you’re all fantastic in ways that are about your ability to be somewhere other than here.

I’m guessing that even many practitioners of whiteness theory would say that their sensitisation to race and accepting whiteness comes from somewhere else outside of the discourse of whiteness. Encouraging participation in this “somewhere else” seems to me to be the most important work that white people can do in our communities. It is about showing a way to live which can accept a relationship with others that is impure and riven with overarching processes of death and disposession among ourselves and our ancestors, and to engage in these relationships without fear. I believe this is only possible through the formation of genuine relationships of shared political and personal aspiration across difference. And I believe that this involves allowing a lack of control over the terms of that relationship.

There are many paths, and we are fortunate that in New Zealand we have in Te Ao Māori a world made generally accessible to us – an official language we can choose to learn which is not ours (and over which we have no authority) but which is uniquely of this place. And as we do the slow work of finding out who we are in another system, I believe that our whiteness becomes both incredibly obvious yet barely possible to discuss in frames that we are familiar with.

The identification of whiteness then is perhaps something like when one is asked to characterise one’s own family. It is a reflection on who one is, knowing that one could not be different, an understanding of the way we are a thread woven into a larger fabric of culture which we do not author. Ultimately, it is a residual, after the fact analysis that encourages reflection, rather than a prescriptive one that can or should guide action.

As we know from our own familial relationships, there can be time when taking the analyst mode to identify patterns can bring insight. But to talk to my parents or brothers about my relationship to them can also simply generate conflict out of the different conceptions of the relationship. More often, what works is moving the way of relating to territory where the relationship can flourish, a territory which may or may not relate to an existing pattern. The grounds for such a move are not knowable to us, but perhaps they lie in an impulse which is the opposite of self-knowledge, the opposite of whiteness.

I think about the relationship I have with my girlfriend – around her difference my boundaries soften. I am taken out of myself by her and returned to a refracted version of myself at the same time. [Aaron in his karakia kai yesterday helpfully asked the powers that be to keep us soft]. Even though I can talk about this feeling, I can’t actually explain it, and increasingly I believe that any attempts to explain it are counterproductive. The attempts at explanation are also attempts to gain possession of my own dispossession. I want to find the feeling rather than diagnose it, and this occurs through maintaining curiosity and lack of knowledge about what is happening. Or as Judith Butler puts it “We must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are.” In this dynamic we can see a relation to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ethic in Provincialising Europe when says that he wants “to write narratives and analyses that produce this difference – and not transparency in the relation between non-Western histories and European thought.”

If I have developed any comfort level with this difference I can only say that it comes from the feminist movement rather than whiteness studies or its ilk, and perhaps the most interesting aspect of this gathering for me is the grounding in feminist activism among so of our 80% female participants. What I observe here as the commitment to process and inclusivity (whether one wants to be included or not), our physical relationship, and the desire to share and register the experience of self and other are part of a genre of gathering that I associate with Western feminist movements.

Paradoxically, I feel close to home in this genre, and it brings to mind the clearest analogy I can see for a whiteness gathering: that of the men’s group. Men’s groups scare me. I’m not saying that there aren’t principled and well-intentioned men involved with them doing good work, but I have also seen so much appropriation of feminist practice coupled with misogyny result. Men need to support each other, but when our available language is phallocentric I think that we shouldn’t try and name and formalise that support if we don’t want to reinforce our dominance. Better to just do some other kind of activity together – play some basketball, build something, go to the pub. Allow the impossibility of our situation to remain unfixed, to see how the emergent feminist frame will recognise our behaviour. Once we try and describe what we are doing ourselves, dangerous silences are reinforced. A whiteness gathering, with the absence of people who are those who should benefit from the term, scares me for similar reasons, this fantasy of transcendence where we think we can know ourselves.

Manu Meyer quotes the Hawaiian leader Pua Kanahele:

[Knowledge] doesn’t only have to do with intelligence, it has to do with spirituality, it has to do with everything that has lined up before you, and all of the things that are lined up ahead of you. All sorts of coming together to make all of this happen. You, yourself, cannot make any of this happen.

And we, ourselves, can not make the undoing of whiteness happen.

References:
Ahmed, Sara (2004). “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti- Racism”, Borderlands ejournal, Vol 3, No 2, 2004. http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm
Butler, Judith (2004). Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dyer, Richard (1997). White. London and New York: Routledge.
Meyer, Manu (2001). “Our Own Liberation: Reflections on Hawaiian Epistemology.” The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 13(1): 124-148
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Alex Monteith: Red Session No.2

[This text initially appeared in the catalogue for The 4th Auckland Triennial – Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon. Documentation is on the artist’s website.]

Alex Monteith is not a body at rest. A phone call is likely to find her en route to Blacks, Graveyards, Bluehouse or Indicators, to name a few favourite breaks. The waves call, the search is on. For Monteith, the landscape is not a field for picture-taking but a scene of action. How many artists would jump into the ocean from a helicopter during a shoot, as Monteith did for Red Session No.2 (2009)? Her monumental screen works eschew traditional documentary points of view to highlight the ‘techniques of the observer’, and to confront us with cameras and agents in motion[1].

Visiting the famous Taranaki surf break Stent Road, the casual viewer might only notice dark wetsuits against the grey water and sky; the soft, Sugimoto-like tonal gradations having little correspondence with the adrenaline surfers experience out in the ‘lineup’. Monteith’s Red Session No.2 brings the human activity to the fore, as the artist wrapped local surfers in red lycra surf vests and captured the scene in a multi-camera panorama shot in a single synchronised take with diegetic sound. The performance and resulting projection explores the technics of relations between human surfers and the Taranaki coast; between perspectives from land and sea.

In 1969, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the coast of Little Bay, Sydney in 1 million square feet of fabric. Their subtle intervention dislocated our sense of ‘naturalness’ and displaced the economic eye which consumes that wave-swept coast as ‘landscape’. This activist mode of discovery aligns with Donna Haraway’s conception of scientific research: the researcher intervenes in waves of force, creating ‘diffraction’. When waves spread out after passing through a narrow gap or across an edge introduced by the researcher, interference between the constituent waveforms becomes perceptible. ‘A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather, where the effects of differences appear.’ [2] The physical intervention does not lead directly to an outcome, but is a way to discover the dynamics of a situation.

Similarly, Monteith’s use of the brightly-coloured surf-contest vest to experiment with aesthetic form would both lift and refract the performative dynamics of the freesurfing session at Stent Road in unforeseeable ways. The hegemony of the black wetsuit reflects the identifiably masculine, perhaps even Calvinist culture, which has historically dominated surfing [3]. The bleak New Zealand sky, cold summertime water and gruff stares from suspicious locals at the average ‘serious’ surf break hardly seem to reflect the sport’s Pacific heritage. While deconstructing the dress code was not the focus of Monteith’s project, a lightening of mood was palpable as the red vests diffused through the lineup.

Relational aesthetics in its canonical form attempts to evoke a better world through the construction of a defamiliarised, utopian space of engagement. Monteith’s collaborative works share a certain elegance of form with that tradition, but her role as an organic aesthetician brings to mind Suzanne Lacy et al’s New Genre Public Art, where ‘communities’ are not imagined but are materially located in specific places and patterns of being together. Where the globalised biennale circuit inaugurates the cowboy practitioner of social sculpture, Monteith seems more at ease working in collaboration with communities she knows well. Her last ride will always be a return.

NOTES

1 Jonathan Crary, ‘Techniques of the Observer’, October, no 45, 1988, pp 3-35.

2 Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’, in L. Grossberg C. Nelson and P.A. Treichler, Cultural Studies, Routledge, New York, 1992, p 300.

3 Daniel T. Jenkins, ‘A Protestant Aesthetic? A Conversation with Donald Davie’, Journal of Literature and Theology, vol 2, no 2, 1988, pp 153-162.

Whose knowledge? Reflexivity and ‘knowledge transfer’ in postcolonial practice-based research.

Keynote address to symposium On Making: Integrating Approaches in Practice-Led Research in Art and Design. Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg, 15th October 2009

It’s a great privilege to be here, and my thanks to Leora Farber, the research centre and the University of Johannesburg for allowing me to come and visit. I moved to Aotearoa New Zealand about 16 years ago to play experimental music, and worked as a designer and new media arts worker before teaching in art schools and media consulting for the last decade. But my intellectual development happened largely outside the academy, with Donna Haraway’s feminist science studies being the political writing that to me seemed to ask the urgent questions about how information and knowledge was shaping our lives. So the study of scientific research and knowledge production has been a research interest of mine for a long time, and it is merely good fortune that the relationship between research and creative practices has become a popular field of enquiry. With Maarit, Ken, Anna and others who have published great work on these topics being present, those general questions will take a bit of a back seat in this presentation.

Over the last six years or so I have also been working with a range of indigenous and non-indigenous artists on what happens to what we call “culture” in the condition of the colonial nation-state. And once again, while these have turned out to be topics of interest to many others, they began less with a conscious desire to learn about these issues as a field and more just a way of making sense of the world I see around me and the community of practitioners I work in. This postcolonial condition, as you know, connects Australia, the country of my birth, to my adopted home in New Zealand, to the continent of Africa, which I am visiting for the first time.

However, Africa as a continent is not unknown to me. My partner, whose family are from Goa, was born in Tanzania and spent her initial years in Nairobi before coming to New Zealand. I have not picked up any Swahili or Marigoli from her. And my favourite rapper, Jean Grae, was born in Cape Town and is the daughter of Sathima Bea Benjamin, the singer born here in Johannesburg. Jacques Derrida’s visits to South Africa have also affected my work, as I try to understand what happens when the European certainty of what it is to be human falls apart under the weight of its reflexive discovery that we have denied so many others their humanity. And J.M. Coetzee’s criticism and fiction and have staged this problematic in its impossible form – a mode of fiction which is subject to some of the same constraints as visual work when it comes to defining the knowledge held in the creative artefact.

I outline all this because I want to indicate why I will use material I have learnt from African writers and practitioners in this talk. This is not because I think I have anything to tell you that you don’t know about your world. [I have in mind the title of Dennis Ekpo’s classic Third Text essay: “Any European around to help me talk about myself?”]. But if I talked about things from my home, I would more easily be able to generate authority, based on my”identity”, “knowledge” or “experience”. Instead, I hope to give a reading of work connected to here to benefit from the full weight of your evaluation over the next two days. Knowledge exists in a place, among people, and the most important knowledge is not what I “own” and give to you in a performance of knowledge transfer, but what this talk might illuminate within you and between us in where our ways of thinking connect and depart. I am here to learn about here, and more particularly to connect with others who might share a sense that the way I’m approaching these questions can be productive. There is a lot of work for us to do in the future on practice-led research in the postcolonial situation and none of us will be able to do it within the perspective of our own nation-states, so I am looking forward to our discussions over the next couple of days.

My argument as outlined in the abstract is too ambitious for a 30 minute paper – especially one with so many prefaces – and it will run into question time, but it is simple enough in its schematic form [think of it as a drawing for a larger work]: Much of the discussion about practice-led research turns on whether creative practices can contribute to a body of knowledge. The practice is interrogated for its systematicity and reflexivity, asked to prove its contribution. But in these discussions the same pressure is rarely applied to the concept of “knowledge” in all its grandiosity. I believe that there is a strong tradition of work in science studies that shows us that the University’s position as the default holder of all knowledge is the result of practices that are not at all “universal”, but highly specific to European culture and the institutions and archives that it has built to store and transmit that knowledge – ones that have held certain people and material practices outside the category of “knowledge”. Universities exist not because they happen to naturally hold human knowledge, but are enabled by nation states with specific policy aims to bolster their own growth and development. However, in the colonial situation we know that the state was not established for “the people” in any general sense, but against indigenous sovereignty, and the various archives which have been developed by the state and its cultural institutions – that material which we call knowledge – have ultimately been established to continue that suppression. While postcolonial critique has sometimes aimed for correctives to the colonial archive to allow it to include all peoples, this does nothing to overturn the aporia between the types of knowledge at stake: a universalising history of European modernism on the one hand, and the various resistances that assert local authority and ways of life. It is my view that these gaps are precisely where the most interesting questions arise in contemporary knowledge production. Therefore, our position here in the colonies gives us a tremendous opportunity to address these questions which affect all “human knowledge”, whether that in Europe or its Others. And creative practices can address these gaps in a specific and powerful way, sharing and provoking knowledge without necessarily reproducing the urge to tame and control every experience into a predetermined knowledge system.

So, what is research? When we discuss it as a verb, in what Raqs Media Collective would call “practices”, the term “research” is full of life, movement and discovery. In the old French, rechercher is to find out about something thoroughly. In this artisan mode, we can share or ways of searching, within and across disciplines. In my experience most people with a research practice, even of the most conventional positivist scientific kind, are interested in the practices of those of us working in the creative disciplines. It is these kinds of relationships and dialogues that are enabled when we describe creative practice as a form of research.

But this is not the conundrum that is driving practice-based research as a hot topic of study. The primary driver of the practice-based research question is an institutional one, stemming from the integration of art and design schools into the University sector and the development of higher degrees in these fields. Institutionally, we are asked to account for our research not as an artisanal practice but as a noun, as something which can be looked at from a distance by a spy. The institutions will seek evidence to piece together a case for the “value” of the research in terms of its meaningfulness to someone else. We are under evaluation. Niles Norris effectively describes the evaluation mindset:

To the governmental frame of mind, beset with accountability, other people’s autonomy is a problem. It is a source of contingency, ambiguity, and unpredictability and a potential for loose cannons. The increasing tendency of governments to prespecify the characteristics of good evaluation by providing guidelines and standards stems from an understandable desire for greater predictability and control over the content and process of evaluation. It is a kind of security blanket.

Immediately we are struck by the poor fit between the unbounded material autonomy of the arts on the one hand; and the forces of accountability that constrain science and research policy. There has even been a substantial amount of scientific research in social psychology “proving” that expected evaluation has a negative impact on creativity by wiring up artists with electrodes and measuring their brain function. As Borgdorf puts it, “art is thought, not theory. It actually seeks to postpone ‘theory’, to re-route judgments, opinions and conclusions, and even to delay or suspend them indefinitely.” Even more problematic is the need of institutional structures to authenticate the value of the work in advance. As Macleod and Holdridge note, the findings presented through art “are always a posteriori and thus, ill suited to the institution’s pursuit of truth and prescribed outcomes. Meanings are made after the event, through the act of viewing or contemplation and by the artist initially.” This is not to deny the importance of creative practices gaining recognition within the academic system of research evaluation. It is just to say that the desire for recognition must be a strategic one, marked by all the ruptures Fanon has discussed in his dynamics of racial and colonial recognition.

So what kind of research is this work which is more valuable to the public sphere than art practice, research whose worth can be measured, assessed, and funded? The dominant research paradigm is scientific, technological, engineering or medical knowledge. Its public utility is generally self-evident because the discourse of the public value of knowledge has become almost synonymous with science. Scientific knowledge is not just the production of data. It is, as Bensaude-Vincent puts it, “a normative activity that generates universal standards and strong values that in turn shape society at large”.

Sandra Harding notes that the claim to neutrality and its particular universalism is quite specific to Western culture. But the material facts belie a specific history rather than a universal one. Xavier Polanco suggests that “the epistemological claim of the ‘universality of science’ . . . covers what is an empirical fact, the material and intellectual construction of this ‘universal science’ and its ‘international character.’ The ‘universality of science’ does not appear to be the cause but the effect of a process that we cannot explain or understand merely by concentrating our attention on epistemological claims.” In this case, attention to the materiality of dominant claims to internationality or universality – soon leads us to the the specific spatialisation of the colonial history. This material history is usually suppressed by science due to the ruptures it introduces into scientific authority. Usually, Harding notes, “for conventional science theorists it is controversial to use the term “science” to refer to the sciences’ social institutions, technologies and applications, metaphors, language, and social meanings: they insist on restricting the term’s reference to sciences’ abstract cognitive core—the laws of nature—and/or the legendary scientific method, thereby excluding the other parts of sciences’ practices and culture.” This account of course makes it easier to control, if less true.

For those of us in the arts, the clearest way of understanding of the essential boundedness of human knowledge is through the study of its material incarnation, the archive. As Ann Laura Stoler notes from the landmark Refiguring the Archive seminars here in South Africa 11 years ago, “where the archive was once a source of knowledge, an unproblematic space for intellectual detachment, a means to an end, this is no longer the case.” Thomas Richards describes the Victorian archive as the “imperial equivalent of the bourgeois public sphere; it presupposed the neutrality and instrumentality of all communicative networks at the same time as it formed and channeled knowledge within epistemological networks specific to a class, a state, and a nation.” Knowledge in the archive was positive and comprehensive. But during the period 1870-1940 institutions like the British museum could not keep up with all the knowledge they were amassing through their colonial apparatus. Richards describes Victorian England as one of the first information societies, a period in history “when it was no longer possible to imagine one person or one institution knowing everything, when the task of collecting and classifying knowledge increasingly fell to civil servants operating under state supervision.”

In the British Empire, this meant that civil servants (rather than academics) in the colonies were routinely involved in information gathering as their key task. As Richards describes it,

The India Survey […] provides a clear example of the process by which an imagined epistemology could intervene to shape the political definition of actual territory. In the series of procedures that the state-organized survey devised to classify Tibet, the archive intervened both in imagining territory as representation and realizing it as social construction. What began as utopian fictions of knowledge, in other words, often ended as territory.

The knowledge that was seen to be important for humanity’s stock of knowledge would be in the first instance, that which would secure the colonial relationship. It is no surprise, then, that the archive would be the site where those subjugated by colonisation would seek to find redress. Arondekar believes that throughout South Asian scholarship in particular, the colonial archive has been recast as “the site of endless promise, where new records emerge daily and where accepted wisdom is both entrenched and challenged.” It seems that only if this archive could be expanded, there would be the potential for the colonised to be adequately represented and the tensions in the relationship could be overcome.

However, in a very useful reading of Derrida’s Archive Fever, Susan van Zyl outlines the fundamental aporia at the heart of the archive that prevents colonial and indigenous knowledge to meet. She says: “the archive does not consist simply in remembering, in living memory, in anamnesis; but in consigning, in inscribing a trace in some external location – there is no archive without some space outside.” For Foucault, the archive is not simply the “sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past.” It is the “system of discursivity” that determines what can be articulated. Appadurai outlines the political economy of this system, noting that “an earlier, more confident epoch in the history of social science – notably in the 1950s and 1960s during the zenith of modernization theory -€” […] was a period when there was a more secure sense of the social in the relationship between theory, method, and scholarly location. Theory and method were seen as naturally metropolitan, modern, and Western. The rest of the world was seen in the idiom of cases, events, examples, and test sites in relation to this stable location for the production or revision of theory” Thus, Achille Mbembe could describe how the archive “becomes a material trace which reinscribes the original violence of its creation even in its democratisation.”

[As an aside, I think there is a lot for practice-led researchers to explore about the availability of audio-visual archives in the networked world. Perhaps Youtube is humanity’s stock of knowledge? I can certainly find all kinds of rare Northern Soul singles that I couldn’t in a library, and indeed many lectures by South African scholars that I viewed in writing this paper.]

Māori researcher Linda Tuhiwai Smith bluntly notes that:

belief in the ideal that the primary outcome of scientific research benefits mankind is as much a reflection of ideology as it is of academic training. It becomes so taken for granted that many researchers simply assume that they as individuals embody this ideal and are natural representatives of it when they work with other communities. […] There was no difference, from [an indigenous] perspective, between ‘real’ or scientific research and any other visits by inquisitive and acquisitive strangers. At a common sense level research was talked about both in terms of its absolute worthlessness to us, the indigenous world, and its absolute usefulness to those who wielded it as an instrument.

Hawaiian activist Haunani Kay Trask demonstrates this gap through the material practices of knowledge collection, noting that “no anthropologist has ever dug up missionary bones, despite their plentiful presence. Nor any haole ‘expert’ ever argued that missionary skeletons should be subjected to osteological analysis, despite historical evidence that missionaries did bring certain diseases to Hawai’i.” The questions of who any knowledge benefits, as this discussion should point out, are deeply fraught and can sure no longer be given unproblematically as a rationale for our research. This brings to mind Joburg academic blogger Pumla Gqola’s related point, that the media only need to evoke the public interest in order for the public interest to quickly become assumed. We need to stage the who benefits question more clearly in our research undertaken in the public interest.

Knowledge in the European academic sense is a unique and paradoxical creature: it is supposed to be cumulative and universally available, yet it can only be acquired through disciplinary expertise and extreme forms of specialisation. The challenge in this environment, as Patti Lather notes, is to develop forms of translation between worlds and the linking of diverse methods. This is the well-rehearsed call for interdisciplinarity, but as the NZ-based artist Charles Koroneho says, one’s ability to be interdisciplinary is a function of the time spent at the limits of one’s discipline. As makers, we know this better than anyone: the time required to develop a practice, the time required to change it, do not occur simply at the level of conscious, instrumental thought or through funding a research programme seeks to “make things better.” Most of the greatest thinkers of modernity, from Kant through to Benjamin and Foucault, Derrida, Spivak and Butler to name a few, are not frightened by this as a limit, and unsurprisingly they have been the writers most attentive to the operations of the aesthetic. As van Zyl and Kistner note of Foucault, “it is only in paying careful attention to the threshold positions and the great aesthetic works that so often exemplify them most vividly, that it is possible to uncover both the emergence and the obsolescence of discourses. This is why, most noticeably in Foucault’s archaeological writings, references to works of art, and literature are never far off.”

As we seek to activate a material interdisciplinarity, we can see the opportunity for the creative artefact to act as what Susan Leigh Star calls a “boundary object”: “Boundary objects are both adaptable to different viewpoints and robust enough to maintain identity across them.” They are curious objects, both uniquely positioned between known paradigms and yet elusive in their operation, for their role is to sensitise us to gaps and slippages in knowledge, rather than to incorporate experience into the disciplinary realm of the known.

Coetzee has described fiction as being defined precisely by its lack of exact correlation to the world, to the tight discourses of critique and knowledge. Stories are defined their ultimate irresponsiblity, or better yet their “responsibility toward something that has not yet emerged.” Spivak points out that it is a mistake to treat art and literature as a blueprint for social policy – they are “figures awaiting disfiguration” in the meeting between creator and audience. There is an element of abstraction in required in this kind of reading. As William Kentridge puts it, “Our theatre is a reflection on the debate rather than the debate itself. It tries to make sense of the memory rather than be the memory.” Creating objects that bridge and breach boundaries in the imagination requires us to depart from the governmental mindset and the “impact factor”, to trust in the recipient and their ability to work with what we provide for the future.

The contemporary creative work requires not just an audacious producer but a willing receiver: it is characteristically incomplete, awaiting the viewer who will bring the meaning into the world. Writing on Coetzee, Spivak discusses the craft not only of writing, but of reading. As she puts it, “literary reading teaches us to learn from the singular and the unverifiable. It is not that literary reading does not generalize. It is just that those generalizations are not on evidentiary ground. In this area, what is known is proved by vyavahāya, or setting-to-work.” The knowledge is proven in practice. As the nursing theorist Gary Rolfe has argued, the kind of knowledge involved in a nursing research case can only be utilised by the skilled practitioner, and this skill in writing and reading, sensing and making takes time to develop.

So it is worth remembering that there is a reason why Humboldt’s initial Kantian conception of the German research university described both the freedom to teach (Lehrfreiheit) and the freedom to learn (Lernfreiheit). The consumer of knowledge is not a passive object, but its creator in a social world of meaning. It is the shift in perception in the learner in their social world that is the true possibility of “knowledge transfer”, it is what Spivak calls the “uncoercive rearrangement of desire.” To believe in this possibility is to fundamentally to believe in freedom.

This dynamic of a work waiting for a viewer is captured by the late Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, writing in the 1990s about seeing Roni Horn’s Gold Field for the first time:

L.A. 1990. Ross and I spent every Saturday afternoon visiting galleries, museums, thrift shops, and going on long, very long drives all around L.A., enjoying the “magic hour” when the light makes everything gold and magical in that city. It was the best and worst of times. Ross was dying right in front of my eyes. Leaving me. It was the first time in my life when I knew for sure where the money for rent was coming from. It was a time of desperation, yet of growth too.

1990, L.A. The Gold Field. How can I deal with the Gold Field? I don’t quite know. But the Gold Field was there. Ross and I entered the Museum of Contemporary Art, and without knowing the work of Roni Horn we were blown away by the heroic, gentle and horizontal presence of this gift. There it was, in a white room, all by itself, it didn’t need company, it didn’t need anything. Sitting on the floor, ever so lightly. A new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty. Waiting for the right viewer willing and needing to be moved to a place of the imagination. This piece is nothing more than a thin layer of gold. It is everything a good poem by Wallace Stevens is: precise, with no baggage, nothing extra. A poem that feels secure and dares to unravel itself, to become naked, to be enjoyed in a tactile manner, but beyond that, in an intellectual way too. Ross and I were lifted. That gesture was all we needed to rest, to think about the possibility of change. This showed the innate ability of an artist proposing to make this place a better place. How truly revolutionary.

Review of “Thinking Through Practice: Art as Research in the Academy”

“Thinking Through Practice: Art as Research in the Academy”, edited by Lesley Duxbury, Elizabeth M.Grierson and Dianne Waite. RMIT Publishing 2007

Review by Danny Butt – preprint

To appear in Second Nature: International Journal of Creative Media, issue No.1, March 2009. p140-146

In their article “The Doctorate in Fine Art: The Importance of Exemplars to the Research Culture”, Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge argue that doctoral submissions in the fine arts must be read and studied in depth in order for students and supervisors to understand how doctoral study operates in the field (p165).  However, they note, the developing literature on doctoral study remains curiously focused on research methods and protocols rather than on an elucidation of the culture through reference to what is being produced by doctoral students (156). Teachers and students in doctoral programmes know that scope and method are two of the most important questions a student faces, and that these always need to be fashioned in relation to the material of the research project. In the humanities and social sciences, the easiest way to develop an awareness of what scope and method “look like” comes from perusing other doctoral theses, but students in fine arts programmes often struggle to find appropriate documentation of other related projects. This publication of case studies directly addresses that need, featuring six artist-researchers who teach at RMIT and write about their own very diverse PhD projects. This book is one which I hope will be emulated by more teaching institutions who offer doctoral study in creative disciplines.

The general rationale for the book is most clearly articulated by David Thomas, who describes art practice as:

…a way of researching through the practice of making art. Such making is not just doing,  but is a complex informed physical, theoretical and intellectual activity where public and private worlds meet. Art practice is the outcome of intertwined objective, subjective, rational and intuitive processes. Considered in this way, art is a discipline, informed by the conceptual and linguistic conventions of its culture and history.(p.85)

However, the discipline of art after conceptualism is difficult to clearly delineate through description of specific outputs or methodologies as there are an enormous variety of approaches and materials that can exist as art. It remains easier, if not sufficient, to define art by social and institutional contexts rather than the procedures and practices themselves. The avant-garde tradition has always undermined clear statements about what art could or couldn’t be, this diversity and resistance to confinement has become characteristic of the field.

Accordingly, the book’s case studies document a wide range of different approaches to reflexive making in an academic context. If it creates an argument, it is through outlining potential directions rather than making a general argument about the possibility of thinking through practice. In this respect, despite the similarity in title, it can be sharply distinguished from the essays in Holdridge and Macleod’s landmark book Thinking through Art, and those seeking substantial theoretical justification for creative practice approaches to research will be disappointed.

The first case study by Lesley Duxbury emphasises the strengths and weaknesses of artistic practice as a form of investigation.  At first glance the chapter appears to be a somewhat ragtag collection of anecdotes about walking as it relates to her own practice and that of others. She also raises,a range of philosophical concerns which, however, are never addressed in detail. While the material outcomes are novel, the novelty is not defined in relation to an existing corpus of knowledge in the way that is standard for most non-art disciplines’ research. The links between the various strategies explored by Duxbury are not defined in advance, and the creation of the meaning is left with the reader. While this approach will undoubtedly baffle those with a background in other forms of research, it reflects the norms of artistic knowing by foregrounding the subjectivity of the knower when considering art practice as a form of “human knowledge” in the academy.

In this way, Duxbury’s project highlights a key challenge in considering artistic practice as research: the relationship between methodology and output is not always evident in studio art practice. This is why doctoral programmes in the creative sector tend to require an appropriate written component; a process many students find challenging. Text has always accompanied the visual in the arts, and some kind of record of the process is often critical for an effective dissemination of the results of a practice-based inquiry. There is also a degree to which the “backstory” of the work has always been important in the professional visual arts environment (we might think, for example, about the role of Hans Namuth’s photographs in diffusing the story of Jackson Pollock).

Throughout this book the different approaches and styles caused me to wonder what makes an exegesis or textual accompaniment a compelling read? Isn’t some of the truth in art precisely it’s capacity to arrest our imagination? The different case studies here variously emphasise methodology, method, or procedure. The implications of this are more than stylistic, they also point to disparate understandings of the purpose of the written document accompanying a practice-based project. These questions are not unique to art practice: while we often think that writing in scientific journals describes experiments and results, Sharon Traweek (1996) makes the point that it would be impossible to replicate a contemporary physics experiment based purely on the writing in journals – there is a high level of implied or tacit knowledge and convention. Scholarly writing in the sciences is less a set of instructions than a claim to significance.

The more interesting case studies in the book acknowledge this, while others remain in a procedural mode.  For Ruth Johnstone’s investigation of the 18th Century print room, the writing-up makes the project more banal than it seems that it might be in real life (or visual documentation alone) We move cautiously and rigorously through an extensive description of the procedures she undertakes in the production of her work. While this is an appropriate record that demonstrates reflexivity at one level, it also carries a curiously flat affect compared to much artwriting, and perhaps serves as a reminder why artists are not customarily the ones making the written claim to significance for their own work.

At the other end of the scale, Philip Samartzis gives concise accounts of his material outputs as a sound artist, but throughout addresses the underlying question of “What might this work mean?” rather than “What did I do?” This kind of reflective theorisation runs a different risk: it can lead to overstatement, or a potential lack of adequacy of the project in relation to the  huge questions of museological presentation strategies and states of listening being explored. In the end, though, it seems to more fully reflect the ambit of art practice as a way of seeing the world rather than simply as a set of physical procedures.

While both the above cases represent genres of project documentation that are becoming common in the artistic research literature, the most advanced and intriguing case study in the book is by Robert Baines, a goldsmith investigating issues of authenticity and the fake in jewelry production. Baines tests his questions through the production of new pieces that attempt to confound experienced assessors of archeological material. What distinguishes this project is his exploration and confrontation of an entire philosophy of material as held by curators of ancient jewelry. Here the value of creative practice as a research methodology is evident, bringing together material, sociological and philosophical investigations to provoke a new way of thinking about the historical artefact in a specific field of practice, questioning our professional and personal desires for the artefact to hold truth.

While at the beginning of the review I noted that the book is a series of case studies, it is ably introduced with an article from Grierson and Duxbury. They begin with an epigraph from Heidegger: “We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves are thinking.” (p.7) From this thesis about reflexivity and the embodiment of knowledge, the introduction quickly moves us through a range of issues relating to artistic practice as research — from the heterogeneity of the field, to the contributions of art to knowledge, the policy environment, the relationship between the work and the exegesis, and back via Heidegger to the question of ‘what is art?’

It moves through these significant questions in a couple of paragraphs each, and the feeling of important tensions being glossed over brings to mind Timothy Emlyn Jones’ lamentation on the lack of book-length engagement with the question of practice-based research. The implicit argument in Thinking Through Practice, ironically, is that there is a level of understanding that can only be activated at a particular depth of material engagement (craft, perhaps). The danger of potted summaries (whether of practice or philosophy) is in the easy links across disciplines and fields of practice that elide the significant work required to move between and create significant effects within these disciplines.

To give one example, the authors claim that:

“…thinking through practice interrupts the insistent means-end relations of the creative knowledge economy with its focus on fast capital -— financial, informational, social, et al. It is also a way of slowing down or exposing the pace of informational innovation and its demands in the so-called progressive economies and social complexities within which we live, work, and function on a daily basis.” (p.9)

Really? Such effects are certainly a potential function of reflective art and design practice, although we might also be struck by the degree to which artistic explorations may also be complicit with, or even emblematic of, the knowledge economy and its financial speculations. We also have to consider the sheer amount of work produced which fails to gain purchase in the art world, let alone the much broader social and economic structures this sentence suggests.

Such a gap between the scale of the claims made for work – philosophical, sociological, political – and the work’s measurable effectiveness in creating such changes is one of the more common issues faced in evaluating the writing of art students. These problems are not so much about the theories being incorrect, but the adequacy of the form of writing chosen to do justice to the issues raised. It is here that the book’s flaws are perhaps most evident: the gap between the ambitions to affect large conceptual frames espoused in the title/introduction and the effectiveness of the works presented in intervening in those frames.

This is less a complaint about the book than recognition that art as an academic field is still a nascent discourse and so a book like this is still working out its genre as it goes, so to speak. The gap between aspiration and delivery is symptomatic of the paucity of appropriate theoretical language to position creative practice.  Emlyn Jones suggests that “we have a great deal of knowledge about the knowledge basis of art and design, but much of our knowing about knowledge is anecdotal and undertheorised.” (2006, p237) The development of a shared language for such diverse practices will be a slow process, and it is only through the publication of books such as this that such a language has a chance of emerging.

Works Cited

Emlyn Jones, Timothy. 2006. A method of search for reality: research and research degrees in art and design. In Thinking through art : reflections on art as research, 226-240.  London ; New York: Routledge.

Macleod, Katy and Lin Holdridge. 2004. The Doctorate in Fine Art: The Importance of Exemplars to the Research Culture. The International Journal of Art & Design Education 23, no. 2: 155-168.

Traweek, Sharon. 1996. Unity, Dyads, Triads, Quads, and Complexity: Cultural Choreographies of Science. Social Text 46/47: 129-139.

Local Knowledge and New Media Theory

This book chapter appears in the Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader.

Over the last four years, and with the support of numerous people including many in the Aotearoa Digital Arts network, I have been writing articles, giving talks, editing books, producing creative works and organising events that ask what it means for new media to consider the implications of indigenous knowledge, culture, and ways of being.[1] These have all been experimental activities: they have been undertaken to create change but without certainty about what the results would be. The methods have been relatively simple: to attempt to work collaboratively with (rather than on behalf of) indigenous artists and practitioners, and to take a lead from the work of indigenous commentators and researchers in what might be important questions to explore in this engagement at what Martin Nakata calls the “cultural interface.”[2]

Given my low level of previous experience in indigenous culture and communities, it is unsurprising that this engagement has sometimes turned out to be challenging to achieve in practice. The challenges also emerge from not just my own lack of experience, but from the deficit of resources that are available to indigenous arts and artists in comparison to non-indigenous artists. However, undertaking this work has also been a great source of learning for me about what the possibilities of something called ‘digital media’ might be, and my goal is to use this learning to increase the opportunities available for indigenous and non-indigenous artists alike.

What has led me to pursue these questions?

A fundamental factor is that Aotearoa New Zealand has a distinctive social and cultural environment where indigenous issues have a high level of visibility compared to other English-speaking nations. At one level these questions are just around us on a day-to-day basis, and the sensitivities that Aotearoa fosters have something to offer the consideration of culture in other former British colonies and possibly further afield.

Secondly, my initial political and academic development occurred within the context of the feminist movement, where the politics of difference has always been a central theme. From feminist work I learnt that experience is irreducible. While it is not possible to say how a person of a particular sex/gender will or should behave, it is also true that it is clearly not possible for someone who is not a woman to experience the world as a woman. Once women’s perspectives are taken as important within a particular discussion, it becomes clear exactly how male-focussed language and structures of power are. Or as Gayatri Spivak suggests, to introduce the question of woman changes everything. This is obviously the case in a male-dominated technological media environment, and it is no surprise that some of the most interesting works in new media’s history have foregrounded issues of gender. For me, the work of cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix; designer and writer Brenda Laurel; and net artists such as Melinda Rackham were all influential, in part due to an emphasis on the politics of desire, intersubjectivity, and embodiment. In the field of science and technology studies, the work of Donna Haraway has always made me aware of how the politics of technology always carries with it questions of gender.

The other thing I learnt from feminism is that it is possible and necessary, if not straightforward, for someone from a dominant subject position to work with those from non-dominant positions on changing structures of dominance. So it seems to me that identity-related (or, I would prefer to say, experience-centred) social movements ask deep, difficult and significant questions of the political and the aesthetic in both dominant and non-dominant cultures. Feminist work is specifically useful in this problematic because sex/gender is an originary binary within the Western philosophical tradition. Feminist thinkers have done the most significant interrogation of the political effects of such binaries and this work is directly relevant to the dichotomy of coloniser and colonised.

A third reason these questions are interesting to me is because the dominant understanding of ‘the user’ in new media discourse is limited by the subjective experience and imaginations of the creators of electronic interfaces, who have for too long been dominated by a narrow demographic (almost always white and male). But there are a whole lot of other ways of being in the world. From working as an interactive designer in the commercial sector I learnt time and again that whatever you might think the user might do when engaging with a website or program, what users actually do when they engage with new media is something different. New media theory, with its overwhelming focus on the formal aspects of networks and systems rather than the people who use them, has mostly neglected the very different subjectivities of people who engage with new media outside of the dominant cultural assumptions of Europe and North America.[3] Projects of cultural self-determination by indigenous peoples offer models for reading technology outside of the narrow and specific cultural imaginaries that are too often prerequisites for participation in the new media environment. A hint of the potential can be found in the suggestion by Cheryl L’hirondelle that “the current lack of attention being paid by programmers to Indigenous communities around the world represents a missed opportunity, because our languages are eloquent, concept and process-based, and fully capable of describing various complicated technological dynamics.”[4]

A fourth prompt for pursuing this work is the centrality of colonial myths in cyberspace. The language structuring the Internet has always involved spatial metaphors – domains, multihoming, namespaces. This terminology has developed from a distinctly frontier cultural imaginary described by Cameron and Barbrook as “The California Ideology.”[5] To take a well-known example, John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace is an influential text in early web culture, which captures the epic mythology of the new online world. The text was critical in forging a collective sense of possibility in the English-speaking settler nations where web fever was catching hold. Barlow was a Wyoming cattle rancher, and for those of us working in the commercial new media industries the Californian Ideology was a Wired Magazine-sponsored rerun of the Wild West’s escape from the limits of government, and from politics.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. […]
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.[…]
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants.[…]
In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.[6]

From today’s vantage point, we can simply note that the anti-immigration provisions of Barlow’s declaration haven’t aged so well, and the cowboy’s identification as a ‘native’ seems all too resonant with the ‘Pakeha as a second indigenous culture’ trope promoted in New Zealand by some European commentators.

Virginia Eubanks highlights the problematic eloquently in her essay ‘Mythography of the New Frontier,’ which includes a discussion of historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s nineteenth century analysis of the frontier in the U.S., and Neal Stephenson’s ‘epic hacker travelogue’ Mother Earth Mother Board:

In much internet discourse, progress and conquest are suspiciously tightly coupled. When combined with the pioneer ideal of flexibility (translated for 20th century use as flexible accumulation of capital) and framed in terms of the ‘new frontier’ this mix becomes even more troubling. The concept of progress as social evolution is deeply embedded in the metaphors of the ‘new frontier.’ Turner masked the political and economic impetus and consequences of conquest in his pioneer ideal – the genocide of the Native American population, the exploitation of the natural environment, the aggression towards other nations with colonial holdings – by defining conquest as progress, discovery, the invention of new ways of life. The conquest of the frontier, for Turner, was about evolution, not aggression. This conceit is equally visible in Stephenson’s epic, and like Turner, Stephenson insists that this world-wide reach will have a naturally democratising and egalitarian effect.[7]

Deconstructing and reconstructing the binary

So, four impulses: a local context; the need to consider feminism and the politics of experience; the need for a culturally diversified theory of the user and the need for a decolonising of the cyberspace imaginary. Looking back at the itinerary of these interests, I can see them emerging from my experience of the cultural environment of Aotearoa New Zealand, with its unique mix of Pacific, Asian and European peoples. These cultures meet in a nation-state straining under the pressure of the two cultural systems joined in the Treaty of Waitangi. The Treaty’s bicameral approach to legal administration could give us a clue on how to rethink new media protocols in a more diverse way. The work of both feminist and postcolonial theorists testifies to the power of this binary in thinking freedom from dominant assumptions.

Internet culture often reflects a distinctly European history of social thought, which begins with the concept of the individual subject, and extrapolates to that larger collection of individuals which is the ‘public.’ We can draw an analogy here to how the singular identity promoted under cultural nationalism (that of the ‘New Zealander’) becomes the basis for the pluralism of the multicultural state (it is this singular culture which defines the acceptable relationships between ‘multi’ cultures). Multiculturalism or liberal pluralism is a different way of thinking than the host-visitor model (tangata whenua – manuhiri) which is common to Pacific cultures. Of course, a host-visitor model can admit many – but a visitor will always exist in relation to the host. There is a dyad.

Psychoanalytically-inflected feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray show that to think in terms of this ‘two’ is to raise a very different type of ethical relationship than to think either the individual or the many, which have been more common social structures in European thought.[8] This relation to an Other calls subjectivity into question in powerful ways, questions we cannot hide from as we can in either the singular concept of ‘identity’ (where we are self-determining) or broader notions of the ‘social’ (where we can disavow our subjectivity). Irigaray’s metaphor of two lips joined in one organ suggests this alternative, perhaps allowing us to attend to the flipside of the colonial history embedded in new media’s dominant discourses. The colonial moment is, as Frantz Fanon made clear, a dyad, a relationship between coloniser and colonised which has a binary logic. The binary relation of zeroes and ones, on and off, forms the very basis of the digital. Perhaps critical engagement with this binary, linked and mutually descriptive, offers potential to achieve the Internet’s original promise of an international, inclusive, and democratic environment?

It goes without saying that as a foundation for research, these questions do not lend themselves to simple solutions and settled theories. However, they have raised some new issues in my thinking about new media that I believe are worthy of further investigation, which I’d like to outline here in the hope of joining others who are also interested in pursuing such work.

1) Is new media a good thing, just because it happens to be good for us?

This first question is a formulation taken from Scott Lash: how do we live in a medium which enables not just the flow of goods, but the flow of bads?[9] New media theory has brought with it an ethic of circulation, exemplified by Stewart Brand’s famous comment that ‘information wants to be free’, emphasising the benefits of sharing knowledge and opposing restrictions on the free movement of information. However, the experience of indigenous peoples with respect to unauthorised circulation of customary knowledge has been one case among many that suggests the circulation of information does not always result in positive outcomes for all.[10] Saskia Sassen notes that informationalisation tends to bring about a centralisation of control activities and a dispersal of routine tasks.[11] The dream of millions of cottage industries engaged in telework has not quite eventuated, and instead we have a consolidation of capital in the urban environment and a removal of managerial and coordinating functions from non-urban areas. Geographical studies on the impact of communications on small towns offer a parallel example: building transportation and communication networks is an investment which allows resources to flow out of or through that place. The net effect may even be the extinguishing of an entire productive sector of the economy in that location as consolidation occurs.[12]

Can we push for the development of new media and the attendant focus on development of the digital economy as a necessity, when this medium might be responsible for the deepening inequalities that are well documented in heavily informational economies?

2) Can we think the network via the nodes?

Network theory, in its suppression of the human subject, tends to make a number of implicit assumptions about what kind of a person is on the end of a network. Vine Deloria noted that “Western European peoples have never learned to consider the nature of the world discerned from a spatial point of view.”[13] Instead of assuming that there is a neutral space from which we can view the network, perhaps we can instead highlight each specific experience and the kinds of network connections such a position allows and disallows. Here we do not to automatically think the connections others have to the networks are the same as ours.

Spivak points out the dangers of bureaucratic egalitarianism when not supplemented by other kinds of thinking:

Cultural difference is spoken of but, by enthusiasm or convenience, a common human essence is assumed which denies the procedural importance of the difference. There is a related assumption: that the history of a sharing of the public and the private is the same among all groups of men and women as the one that follows through in terms of northwestern Europe or sometimes even Britain. This is the problem it seems to me. It’s not so much a universalisation as seeing one history as the inevitable telos as well as the inevitable origin and past of all men and women everywhere.[14]

3) How do we think what is not connected?

We can also begin to identify networks more accurately by observing not what they connect together but what they fail to connect. A positivist mindset assumes that an example can generally be replicated by other examples – in other words, a model of a process can be applied in every situation with appropriate customisation to the environment. This positivist mindset implies that global diffusion of the Internet and its models is inevitable. However, while Internet networks are theoretically ‘global’ there is never an actual globality, and the technocratic new media discourse is generally less eloquent on the reasons why theoretical globality fails to be achieved in practice. As Kerry Macnamara points out when talking about Information and Communication Technology for development:

Despite a proliferation of reports, initiatives, and pilot projects in the past several years, we still have little rigorous knowledge about ‘what works.’ There are abundant ‘success stories,’ but few of these have yet been subjected to detailed evaluation.[15]

Immanent methodologies are not sufficient to understand new media networks, we have to supplement them with experiences outside our networks to sensitise ourselves to their limits.

4) What systems are unknowable to us?

While the previous point might be seen to support anthropological or ethnographic methodologies (encountering the Other in order to understand our own issues), there are also genuine aporia or unbridgeable differences between our ways of being and those of others, which mean that any connection we seek is always deferred and never quite achieved. How does someone with experiences we cannot have (for example, those native to other language groups) think the network? Here is where the value of dialogue and intercultural conversation comes into play, where instead of smoothing over differences in the name of standardisation, we can foster multiple protocols for engaging with new media content. As poet and librarian Robert Sullivan suggests, such questions of protocol and holistic context are integral to indigenous cultural maintenance:

How do we send a message that strengthens the holistic context of each cultural item and collection? How do we ensure that both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples receive the message? How do we digitise material taking into account its metaphysical as well as its digital life?[16]

5) How will the philosophical underpinnings of new media theory be tested?

The construction of hardware and software packages requires a particular kind of test to be made of the developer’s capabilities – the result either works or it doesn’t. As we move into knowledge about the new media field and its social implications, we can no longer test our theoretical constructions so thoroughly, even though there is a tendency to analogise from the processes of software development to the social relationships that users engage in through new media tools. One of the best-known examples of this thinking is the Creative Commons, a form of intellectual property rights management for digital content drawing its inspiration from the GNU General Public License, a licence traditionally applied to software in the Open Source movement. The rigor of evaluation which operates in software development is however rarely present in the analogous social theories which spring from it.

This leads to the question of how we test a knowledge system. In the worlds of philosophy and social theory, the emphasis is usually placed on evaluating conceptual or descriptive work in relation to previous methods and concepts. In more applied forms (say the visual arts, or politics) we tend to look to circulation and effects to prove a concept. One of the questions that continues to haunt interdisciplinary work (not just in new media, but also in fields such as cultural studies) is that centering the community of knowledge around the object of study rather than the methods of inquiry tends to result in a lack of interest in or knowledge of precursors from times before that object came into being. To name one example, new media thinkers tend to valorise participatory models (such as ‘citizen journalism’) without reference to the investigations of the limits to citizenship and participation in pre-Internet media. This ethic reflects a particular instance of what Stephen Turner calls “settler futurism” and Barthes called “neomania”, a focus on “making over and moving on” that is incompatible with cultural systems based on a different sense of time.[17]

Where could these questions take new media and its future? There is no endpoint I can visualise – in fact, this approach to new media is oriented against a philosophy that takes development as a given. My questions are part of a search for an ethic of new media that can make the openness and diversity of Internet content manifest in its interactions and structure. The Internet has been described as a series of diverse monocultures, but our skills in working with other knowledge systems will have to improve as the demographic base of the Internet expands. Against tropes of speed, connection and movement that are so common in Internet discourse, this ethic could emerge from a focus on gaps, nodes, difference and incompatibility – spaces of unsettlement and possibility. Such a development of the imagination is surely the role of the arts – to imagine outside of the given, the instrumental and the immediately useful.

1 Examples include the Cultural Futures event co-organised with Jon Bywater and Nova Paul, and the edited collection PLACE: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice currently in press with Cambridge Scholars Publishing. http://culturalfutures.place.net.nz Other works are available at http://acp.dannybutt.net
2 Nakata, “Indigenous Knowledge and the Cultural Interface,” 281-91.
3 Nakamura, Cybertypes.
4 L’Hirondelle, “Sub-rosa.” http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/tell.php?is=17&file=0&tlang=0
5 Barbrook, and Cameron. The Californian Ideology. http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-californianideology-main.html.
6 Barlow, Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.
7 Eubanks, “The Mythography of the ‘New’ Frontier,” http://web.mit. edu/mit/articles/index_eubanks.html.
8 This point is based on Spivak’s reading of Irigaray in Spivak, “French Feminism Revisited,” 141-172.
9 Lash, Critique of Information.
10 Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art.
11 Sassen, The Global City.
12 Daniels, Service Industries.
13 Deloria, God Is Red, 63.
14 Spivak and Sharpe, “A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” 617.
15 McNamara, “Information and Communication Technologies.” http://infodev.org/en/Document.17.aspx.
16 Sullivan, “Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights – A Digital Library Context.” http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may02/sullivan/05sullivan.html
17 Turner, “Aotearoa/New Zealand: The Homeland of Make-over Culture.”

Reflections on the Politics of Practicality: Evaluating ICT for community development

From 3C Media: Journal of Community, Citizen’s and Third Sector Media and Communication
http://www.cbonline.org.au
Issue 4 (August) 2008

The issue of evaluation is far from the sexiest topic for a journal issue on community technology. It brings to mind the endless forms and responses required by funders, or writing proposals with a detailed evaluation methodology when one is sitting there thinking ‘If you don’t give me any money there won’t be a damn project to evaluate!’ The word evaluation just innately conjures negative affect. Say it and see how it rolls around on your tongue: ‘project evaluation’. Compare it to ‘Web 2.0’ or ‘information superhighway’. It just doesn’t sound like fun.

While my own tawdry presentation skills likely played a role, there’s no doubt that the lukewarm reception my talk received at the 2007 Making Links conference in Sydney, Australia, had something to do with focusing on a topic that is the community media worker’s equivalent of going to the dentist. No inspirational success stories, no rousing polemic about the need to get with the future programme, no fancy technologies, no ideas for new programmes. Maybe that’s what the sector is about? Maybe I’d misjudged my audience completely, I thought? Maybe I am just interested in arcane bureaucratic nonsense for my own reasons and this doesn’t offer anything useful to anyone?

I was fortunate at dinner that night to be slightly relieved when the director of a well- established NGO looked me over with a suspicious eye and asked me why I didn’t talk about any of my projects. I replied that I wasn’t really a practitioner, just a consultant and academic. She wasn’t having any of it. ‘But everything you talked about are the issues we deal with on the ground – it was obvious you’d dealt with them, but the projects themselves weren’t there.’ I admitted that I do actually work on projects, but I don’t like to talk about them. Partially because the projects are long-term and small scale and unsuited to conference presentations, but also because I just don’t know if talking about them helps the projects (Spivak and Sharpe 2002: 623), and it also introduces the risk of obscuring the more important issues that structure practice but are not drawn from it. Evaluation is one of those topics whose unavoidable importance has not generally been asserted by those working on the ground. It emerges from an international discourse that, I offer, urgently needs to be transformed by those with on-the-ground experience. But in order to change that we have to focus on this discourse and where it comes from, testing it against our experience and making interventions back at that level, rather than expecting that our realities will be understood by those setting the terms of reference for our projects. In this paper I want to highlight some of the challenges to effective evaluation in the sector; look at the lessons drawn from the international discourse on evaluation; and suggest some pragmatic responses that can be made by project workers.

This approach seems appropriate to both my current role as a consultant/academic and my experience in the sector. My masters study initially looked at rural community development through ICT, but ended up in social theory, once I realised that the structuring concepts around the ‘digital divide’ that constrained development possibilities where I lived were not local issues, though they had local impacts. Perhaps more accurately, I realised it was at the definitional level where I could contribute most and where change seemed most urgent, and those wouldn’t be accessed through local interventions when the connecting discourses in the institutional support were inadequate. While I still regard the community impacts as the test of my work, it has proven useful to venture into the wild jungles of international policy and development agencies in order to better understand why different local experiences seem to struggle with the same issues.

Since then, I’ve been fortunate to be involved in a number of Asia Pacific ICT-for- development (ICT4D) initiatives where I see the results of the work of many projects. If I were to summarise my experience of the community sector, it would mostly be based on two observations:

Firstly, community sector ICT workers are dealing with a huge range of competing demands, and compared to their larger organisational colleagues they have to assume many more roles. The upside of this is the level of flexibility and an ability to ‘get things done’ with minimal bureaucracy. However the downside is time-poverty, where blocks of time allocated to strategic planning evaporate in the face of urgent demands such as keeping the website up or the email working.

The second is the chronic undercapitalisation which affects many community projects. On one telecentre project described by the late Steve Cisler (2007), USAID staff responded to problems by extending the project life cycle and pumped some more money into lab maintenance while demanding that the project be ‘self-sustaining by month 18.’ What does it mean to talk about ‘sustainability’ in a setting where there’s little money available to the administration or any of the users and where costs of fuel, paper, staff time, Internet access, and electricity were/are very high? Yet without such an impossible exit strategy for the donor, no money will be forthcoming for the project, and it would be a brave or foolhardy person who would decide to not just keep their mouth shut and say all the right things, knowing that communities are in desperate need of resources, and pandering to unrealistic expectations of funders is a small price to pay. But is it a small price to pay to have a funding environment that evaluates projects according to fantasy? That becomes a decision only the practitioner can make.

What these two issues suggest to me is that one of the most important determinants of the ‘practical’ possibilities is precisely in the political dimensions of our organisations. Technical workers are historically not very interested in politics; or more correctly, they prefer not to discuss the political aspects of their practices. However, a recent Australian study (Department of Communications Information Technology and the Arts 2005) highlights three critical factors in realising benefits from a range of ICT projects:

1. Being ICT Aware
2. Being open to Organisational Transformation
3. Being persistent through the time lag.

These are all political issues! As the French saying goes, ‘those who don’t do politics get done in by politics’.

Evaluation in the ICT4D Imaginary

If I sound cynical, it is only because in 15 years of work with technology projects I have too often seen convenient fantasies of results manufactured that serve the short-term interests of projects, but eventually leave community workers disillusioned and funders dissatisfied when these results cannot be measured or achieved.

Let me take an example: Throughout the Asia Pacific, the theme of ‘universal access’ drives ICT4D policy; policy initiatives are given ambitious titles such as ‘Computers for all’ or ‘One laptop per child’. These are worthy ideals but in the policy setting they become problematic as they are never finally achievable and provide little guidance for the tough decision-making that is required to support the use of ICTs where basic poverty issues such as access to food, water, and basic healthcare remain unsolved.

These ideals are part of what Iris Marion Young (1990: 18) calls a ‘distributive paradigm’ that ‘defines social justice as the morally proper distribution of social benefits and burdens among society’s members.’ Virginia Eubanks (2007) notes that this paradigm is at the heart of much work in the community informatics sector, but that it restricts the scope of an equity agenda because, among other things, its demographic cast cannot account for the complex inequalities of the information economy. As ICT4D matures as a field, a number of reviews of ICT4D literature are beginning to appear (Wilson 2003; Ekdahl and Trojer 2002). They find recurrent features in ICT4D reports which are in tension with findings in other parts of the development sector.

Firstly, the ICT4D literature’s metaphors of catch-up, progress and leap-frogging present development as a linear pathway and ICT as a positive, or at least neutral development. As Eubanks suggests, when technology is framed as a commodity to be received, rather than a complex field to enter, we are unable to account for the gap between the normative solutions we seek and the lived experience of unintended effects of technological systems in communities.

Secondly, there are common demands for urgency and the need to act quickly on ICT4D in order to not be excluded from fast-paced developments – even though national human development indicators listed in the United Nations’ Human Development Reports remain remarkably stable over time. I am certain that anyone who works in the community technology sector has used this rhetoric, as the discourses of speed and paradigm-shift are fundamental to how we understand technology in the West.

Thirdly, assumptions are made about what kinds of information are valuable for development, and a category of information-poor peoples are implicitly compared to the knowledge-holders of the developed world, rather than looked at in terms of reference drawn from the context of their life. We are cast in the role of missionary, bringing the new religion to the people. Or perhaps, if we are more cautious, we are bringing people an understanding of a new power system and structure (ICTs) that they will need to learn to navigate.

It is worth taking a sceptical approach to these ‘articles of faith’ in ICT-enabled development, because as Kerry McNamara points out, there is still a significant gap in evaluation:

Despite a proliferation of reports, initiatives, and pilot projects in the past several years, we still have little rigorous knowledge about ‘what works.’ There are abundant ‘success stories,’ but few of these have yet been subjected to detailed evaluation. There is a growing amount of data about the spread of ICTs in developing countries and the differential rates of that spread, but little hard evidence about the sustained impact of these ICTs on poverty reduction and economic growth in those countries. (McNamara 2003: 1)

The point is not that these articles of faith are wrong per se. It is that they exist within a distributive paradigm which suits the ICT industry – including the ICT4D industry – more than it suits the long-term needs of communities. Now in Australasia many in the community sector are not dealing with such a huge gap between the basic life conditions of ourselves and those benefiting from our work, but I would say that this still generally holds true: much of the time projects occur because one of us thinks it’s a good idea or we know resourcing might be available for these projects, rather than coming from detailed experiences of project success.

We have to more rigorously question this paradigm for our work if we are to learn from the work of others and not simply promote what ethnographer Eric Michaels (1994) termed ‘well-meaning but ineffective advancement projects, the discarded skeletons of which litter the countryside.’ This paradigm puts us in the producer role and our communities in the consumer role, and causes funders to evaluate development as a product rather than as a relationship. The currency of international ICT4D is the photograph of the rural woman (preferably with child nearby) in front of a computer. The photograph will probably not be taken by a member of the woman’s community, but by an external consultant who is initiating or evaluating the project. The photograph will appear in a project report (or, if it is a good photograph, the funder’s annual report), and the fantasies of rural women entering the information economy will be complete. At this point, the project has been a success for the funder, and their future programme budgets are made more secure. If the community worker remains to try and consolidate this initial success into the fabric of the community in a positive way, they will soon realise that the support that is required may not dovetail smoothly with the need to produce success stories – they might find that the cycle of intervention and evaluation takes longer. They will then fall out of favour with an evaluation cycle whose political exigencies require faster results. The community worker might move to a new job or sector to regain their enthusiasm, the funder might shift their program budgets, and the communities who were promised the dream of the ICT panacea will wait until the next person who comes along who sees the ‘potential’ in a ‘project.’

This might be considered a harsh assessment, but it is one that I think is congruent with the experience of many who have worked in this sector for some time. This does not mean that I don’t think anything good comes out of community technology projects, but it does mean that I believe it is vital to begin shifting the terms by which we evaluate projects. This is why I want to focus on evaluation, because to me it is one of the key battlegrounds for the political dimensions of ICT projects in the community sector. My hope is that this discussion will not just shift the way you think about evaluating work for your own purposes, but that it helps those who work with funders, donors, and budgets gain more traction in the realpolitik of resource allocation.

Evaluation is no panacea€”it is often an instrument of control and this is the way that those working in the community technology sector generally experience it. Niles Norris vividly captures the perspective of those who receive evaluation criteria from above:

‘Mostly executive decision makers do not want to be told that things are complex and open to different interpretations and valuing; they know that. It is the way out of or around the complexity and the plurality of interests and values that they want help with. They want to use evaluation as a resource to solve problems, not pose or redefine them. Some of the problems they want to address are social problems. Other problems are creatures of the politics of government: avoiding embarrassment, displacing blame, deflecting criticism, maintaining reputation, legitimating action or inaction, reordering priorities, justifying budgets. To the governmental frame of mind, beset with accountability, other people’s autonomy is a problem. It is a source of contingency, ambiguity, and unpredictability and a potential for loose cannons. The increasing tendency of governments to prespecify the characteristics of good evaluation by providing guidelines and standards stems from an understandable desire for greater predictability and control over the content and process of evaluation. It is a kind of security blanket.’ (Norris 2005: 584)

However, as I have discussed in the previous section, it is not only governments and funders who could use evaluation criteria to secure their projects. It can also be a powerful tool for deconstructing the assumptions we might hold working on the ground, particularly if we make the formulation of these criteria a collaborative exercise with our communities. In all such cases, it is important to identify the cultural assumptions embedded in the way they describe projects. There is a practical reason for this, which is that it helps avoid the unintended consequences that come from using a shared language (‘technology’, ‘development’) but having different understandings and intentions.

Unintended Consequences

Unintended consequences are central to the rationale for evaluation, and there are three stories about them I’d like to share.

The first comes from Ramsay Taum, a Native Hawaiian leader from the University of Hawai’i I was fortunate to work with in 2006. He tells the story of a fish and a monkey who had become good friends. The monkey would stand at the edge of the stream and talk to the fish everyday. One day, the fish came along and said to the monkey, ‘Friend, I need your help’. The monkey replied, ‘Sure!’ and pulled the fish out of the stream, placed it in the most bountiful tree in the forest, and walked off feeling proud of his generosity. That is probably my favourite story about development.

The second concerns the unintended (or perhaps semi-intended) consequences of eGovernment projects in India. According to the World Bank, the government of Andhra Pradesh developed a land registration system where the land owner can enter details of their property (location, dimensions and other factors) and the system then calculates the value. Prior to the system, land valuation was performed in an entirely non- transparent system by assessors and agents, was fraught with corruption, and often required weeks and sometimes additional payments. After the implementation of the new system, land registration can be completed in a few hours where earlier it took 7-15 days (Parks 2005: 6). However, researcher Solomon Benjamin (2005) has found that such new land regimes might have very uneven effects. In Bangalore, the reduction of complexity in titles and centralization has made land much more open to larger purchasers and more competitive for local investors who are unable to compete. ‘This has allowed very large real estate companies catering to the IT industry to access land in Bangalore, resulting in dramatic changes in land markets’ (Benjamin 2005: 8). Gentrification makes the rights of the poor more tenuous when ICT enables companies and politicians to collaborate on larger ‘real estate development projects’, which may be good for a region’s overall economy but which result in the transfer of security away from the poor to the benefit of the wealthy.

A third, more academic story comes from Jonathan Morell (2005) who completed a substantial academic review of the research on unintended consequences. He notes that explanations of unintended consequences discuss the complex nature of systems: multiple cross-linked processes, non-linear interactions, long feedback loops, sensitivity to initial conditions, and the inability to completely specify all relevant variables, among others. He suggests that a lack of information about the environment we are trying to affect is chronic rather than exceptional, and that we often lack vigilance in scouting for environmental changes that would be tell-tale signs that things will not unfold as we expect. Complicating this further is that ‘the nature of planning is such that opportunity for powerful intervention and change exists at only limited times in the life cycle of a policy or a program.’ (445)

Morell distinguishes unforeseen consequences as those that emerge from ‘the weak application of analytical frameworks and from failure to capture the experience of past research.’ Unforeseeable consequences, on the other hand, ‘stem from the uncertainties of changing environments combined with competition among programs occupying the same ecological niche.’ (446) Morell suggests a range of remedies which are too extensive to list here, but which should be read by anyone involved in planning or evaluating projects. They generally involve more rigorous pre-programme evaluation of similar projects, diversifying inputs, and maintaining flexibility in programme direction in response to shifting circumstance.

Evaluation in ICT4D Projects

Regardless of whether one believes in the value of evaluation for programme practitioners, there is a degree to which it is now an unavoidable fact of life in the community technology sector. In a time where the ongoing maintenance costs of technology are rising, and it gets harder to gain support for new initiatives, we need a different mindset from the philosophies that served us during the dotcom era. I’d like to finish by offering some personal observations on what I see as being useful considerations for practitioners in evaluating their own projects.

Firstly, there are three imperatives that are oriented toward funders and donors:

1. Distinguish what should and shouldn’t be measured, how, and when, before your funder does. This is not always possible, but it is often possible to set evaluation measures around phenomena which you know are real, while also giving a funder something like what they want. For example, a programme which aims to increase educational opportunities for target groups could be measured in educational participation of participants over a number of years. But if your evaluation cycle is shorter, you don’t want to get sucked into measuring large-scale behaviour change when this might not always be visible immediately. Instead, one can evaluate attitudinal changes, confidence levels, or other behaviour which will influence later outcomes the project is trying to achieve.

2. Build in a Quick Win. For example, when instituting a content management system or a blogging platform, ensure that there is a voice in the community that can contribute immediately. It is often especially successful to schedule an event-related initiative early in the project. Small, carefully focussed, time-bounded projects are underrated and have the advantage of gaining visibility when documented well, yet have much more predictable resource demands than ongoing projects.

3. Communicate the Results. Simply: be proactive about setting your own measures for success that are appropriate to the communities you work with (preferably developed in collaboration with them) and continually communicate these to all stakeholders. This is easier said than done under the day-to-day grind of keeping projects on track, but it helps bring upcoming problems into view earlier.

Evaluating the user relationship

There are three other criteria that I use to think about projects in how they relate to communities of users.

1. Is the project giving key users what they want? It sounds simple but a surprising number of projects treat their outcomes as a self-evident universal good. Meanwhile, key users battle low motivation as their goals are not those of the project, but they hope to achieve their goals through their participation in the project. It is important to remain sceptical of our own knowledge of what users want, even when they tell us. User communities may not understand all the implications of their desires and an important role for project workers is to help them clarify their goals in ways which are true to their impulses yet also achievable.

2. Is the project going through the channels the user expects? The build it and they will come era is over. Channels have matured and have more specific genre constraints on the kind of content that fits in a particular format. Channels that we can consider include not just email and the web, but SMS, YouTube, Facebook, RSS, Google. If the channel isn’t under your control, partnering might be required. Many projects have tried to build entirely new platforms (e.g. a ‘local YouTube’) whose sustainability is predicated on participation by a much larger community of users than the initial project participants. This is a very risky strategy and ultimately, a potential waste of valuable resources when existing platforms are often available and such funds can go into developing user capabilities to navigate and critically assess those platforms.

3. Is it building future capability and flexibility? Whatever we know about technological platforms, we know that they will be different in the future. It is important to ensure flexibility in platforms and content that are generated, and to increase the skills and capacity of communities to adapt to change.

Conclusion

Over time I’ve come to believe that our core skill is not so much our technological expertise, which is rapidly becoming commoditised by web 2.0 platforms, even if it often prompted our entry into the sector in the first place. It’s our understanding of our stakeholders, our ability to visualise the way they use the internet, to empathise with their needs and to bring our related organisations around to support it. Increasingly, this probably requires less of the skills of the technologist and marketer, and more the skills of the anthropologist and facilitator. The debates on anthropological method are asking critical questions about the value for communities of projects whose benefits were previously seen to be self-evident. I suggest that evaluation methodology is one place where we can productively bring some of these insights to our own work, to step outside of technological fantasies and increase our value for the communities we represent.


References

Benjamin, Solomon. 2006. Analogue To Digital: Re-Living Big Business’s Nightmare In New Hydras. Impressum: Institut für Neue Kulturtechnologien/t0, November 20 2005 [cited 6 December 2006]. Available from http://static.world- information.org/infopaper/wi_ipcityedition.pdf

Cisler, Steve. 2007. Re: OLPC presentation in Norway. incom mailing list, http://mail.kein.org/pipermail/incom-l/2007-February/001592.html.

Department of Communications Information Technology and the Arts. 2005. Achieving Value from ICT: Key Management strategies. Place Published: Australian Government. http://www.dcita.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/25466/Achieving_value.pdf (accessed October 2, 2007).

Ekdahl, Peter , and Lena Trojer. 2002. ‘Digital Divide: Catch up for What?’ Gender, Technology and Development 6 (1):20.

Eubanks, Virginia. 2007. ‘Trapped in the Digital Divide: The Distributive Paradigm in Community Informatics’ The Journal of Community Informatics 3 (2).

McNamara, Kerry. 2003. ‘Information and Communication Technologies, Poverty and Development: Learning from Experience’. In infoDev Annual Symposium. Geneva, Switzerland: infoDev.

Michaels, Eric. 1994. Bad Aboriginal art : tradition, media and technological horizons. St. Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin.

Morell, Jonathan A. 2005. ‘Why Are There Unintended Consequences of Program Action, and What Are the Implications for Doing Evaluation?’American Journal of Evaluation 26 (4):444-463.

Norris, Niles. 2005. ‘The Politics of Evaluation and the Methodological Imagination.’ American Journal of Evaluation 26 (4):584-586.

Parks, Thomas. 2007. A Few Misconceptions about eGovernment 2005 [cited February 2, 2007]. Available from http://www.asiafoundation.org/pdf/ICT_eGov.pdf.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, and Jenny Sharpe. 2002. A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Politics and the Imagination Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (2):609-625.

Wilson, Merridy. 2003. ‘Understanding the International ICT and Development Discourse: Assumptions and implications.’ The Southern African Journal of Information and Communication 3.

Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Pakeha / Tauiwi and Tino Rangatiratanga

Introduction to panel on Tauiwi and Tino Rangatiratanga
Parihaka International Peace Festival, January 6 2007
Danny Butt – https://dannybutt.net

Tena koutou katoa and welcome to the panel “Pakeha/Tauiwi and Tino Rangatiratanga: A possibility for peace or a contradiction in terms?” I’d like to give thanks to Te Miringa Hohaia for inviting me to speak at the forum; to the superb forum organisers Jos, Te Aroha, Hinerangi and their team; to the people of Parihaka for their hospitality and inspiration, and to the panellists for supporting this kaupapa. We’re all a bit nervous but also greatly honoured to be presenting here.

It will be obvious to most of you that if, as a white Australian, I was delivering these opening remarks in te reo Maori that it would signal that New Zealand was a different cultural environment than it is today. I’ve been fortunate to work with a number of indigenous cultural practitioners across the world, and one of the ironies of this international work is that people are so often working to overcome colonisation using colonial language, and this is frustrating because language comes with built-in assumptions abut how people exist in the world, it shapes how we think. I believe that the development of Maori language education is creating a sea-change in the cultural politics of this country.

I regularly give myself a hard time for not keeping up with my language education as much as I should – mostly because I am too often overseas – and I used to cut myself some slack with the fact that I grew up in Australia. But then 18 months ago I was at a conference in Christchurch with Teresia Teaiwa, the Pacific Studies scholar based in Wellington. She opened her talk with a mihi that included a couple of minutes of remarks in Te Reo Maori, and I think she’s lived in New Zealand for half the time that I have. So no excuses after that.

But Teresia said something very interesting in her talk that has stayed with me. Like many successful people of Native Pacific ancestry, she is often asked to represent the Pacific in largely European institutions on account of her “Pacific identity.” And this caused her to think that being born in Hawai’i, from Kiribati and Banaban descent, and having long periods of her life in Fiji, Santa Cruz, and now Aotearoa, that her Pacific identity was never quite “Native” to any of those places. A “Pacific identity” was less important to her than a Pacific *identification* – it was an active process for her to wake up every day and decide to identify with the Pacific. And her way of doing that in Aotearoa was to learn the language and customs of her Maori cousins in the place where she lives.

That resonated with me because my identification with international indigenous political struggles is obviously not based in my identity as a Pakeha. My identification is a choice that I have to take responsibility for, though my European heritage from England, Wales and Norway via Australia means that it is only appropriate for me to take some roles and not others in support of this struggle.

The indigenous political agenda is not one social justice struggle among many, as it is sometimes characterised among the white left, who constantly ask others to suspend their lived experience in favour of a “larger” political agenda like anti-capitalism. (And I think the exchange after Jane Kelsey’s presentation shows us that sometimes the global issues, while important, are only changeable through local situations and local people.) Why would I be interested in supporting indigenous self-determination? Well, from Maori I’ve learnt values such as whakawhanaungatanga, manaakitanga, and kaitiakitanga which – despite my very limited understanding of their true historical function – have become central to how I think about my life. And through my work with Maori I’ve developed working relationships with tangata whenua in the places I was born in Newcastle, Australia, in Awabakal country; and where I grew up, in Gombemberri country on Queensland’s Gold Coast. As I’ve developed all these relationships I’ve learnt more about what it means to live in a place.

So indigenous development and self-determination represents my preferred future at a personal level. It reflects the suggestion to white Australia by the Aboriginal activist Lilla Watson, who said, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

However, for many Pakeha the prospect of Maori self-determination is not so appealing. I came to writing about these issues from teaching in an art school, noticing that when the discussion shifted from European modernism to issues of cultural identity, cultural politics, and appropriation of cultural property the Maori and Pacific students, who were usually very quiet, would become active in the discussions. The Pakeha students, who I often couldn’t get to shut up, would become very quiet or defensive. They felt that anything they said would be wrong, as if somehow that culture belonged to the brown people. They had a lot of anxiety, and it made me sad.

The feminist science studies scholar Sharon Traweek did some anthropological studies of strange tribes of largely male high-energy physicists. She described them as having a “culture of no culture”, which is a great phrase. They had a culture that required that knowledge could not have a place or knower. The idea that what we know might be affected by our social or cultural position was a massive threat to the entire system of hard science, and had to be avoided at all costs. European knowledge systems are often committed to describing the entire world, in their own image, with no exceptions. That’s why the Martinique-born writer Frantz Fanon suggested that in the battle between coloniser and colonised, the only outcome was the wrecking of colonial culture, rather than a happy bicultural accommodation. And when I think about stories like Parihaka, or the recent Foreshore and Seabed legislation, I think his pessimism was warranted.

It’s one thing to analyse the differences between Maori and Pakeha perspectives, and another to know what to do about it. For Maori, despite the long and complex struggle for survival, it is very simple to strike fear into the hearts of the ruling elite. To simply survive and grow while identifying as Maori, rather than only a “New Zealander”, is a political act. It gets Pakeha worried, and Hazel Riseborough’s presentation on Parihaka’s history showed how colonial cultures respond when they feel threatened.

But for we Pakeha and Tauiwi, natives of the “culture of no culture”, how to act in this political field is not so straightforward, because if I’m working with you, my own cultural power might be the problem in our work together, reflecting my culture’s dominance. Cultural power is a funny thing. I can’t put my cultural power on the table like a cake and divide it equally among us, and have everyone walk away with the same amount. No matter how much I want to give it away, I still have it. If it was a question of my land or money (if I had those :) ), it would be a different story.

I’m very skeptical of people who think these issues of cultural power aren’t important, that the imbalance can be easily fixed through goodwill or the right organisational structure. I’ve seen too many organisations committed to indigenous development where European workers or funders end up setting agendas through very subtle ways. Sometimes assuming positions of guilt or feigning a refusal of power is a way of getting these power imbalances off the table where they end up sneaking in through the back door. In any case, political struggle requires resources, so for Pakeha to marginalise themselves doesn’t necessarily help when we could be amassing more resources to support the self-determination movement. The activist-critic-philosopher Gayatri Spivak says that she “refuses to marginalise herself in order to gain sympathy from those who are genuinely marginalised”, which is a position which I think is important for activism generally.

So for us there is a constant shuffling between on the one hand, holding on to the utopian ideal that we can live together in peace and freedom no matter what our cultural background; and on the other being constantly aware of the constraints our lived experiences place on what we can practically do together. It’s a delicate balance and there aren’t really many guidebooks. So I thought that rather than you listening to me I’d try and bring together people doing this work around the country, and these people have responded to the call.

We have three panellists – Margaret Smith, Jakob Otter and Poneke 171, and Suzanne Menzies-Culling from Freedom Roadworks / Tauiwi Solutions who will each speak for about 10-15 minutes, and I’m hoping to keep them to time so that we can leave room for the experiences of both Maori and Tauiwi in the audience. No reira, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena tatou katoa.

Craft, Context and Method: The Creative Industries and “Alternative Models”


To appear in MyCreativity Reader, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2007.

Danny Butt – https://dannybutt.net

This paper emerged from an invitation to join a panel for myCreativity on alternative business and organisational models, which I accepted because I was excited to participate in such a convivial environment with friends I knew well, and wanted the opportunity to meet others at the event whose work I’ve admired. I can see why on the surface I might have seemed like a good choice for such a panel. I’ve worked as a contractor inside a few different kinds of organisations – from commercial web shops in the 90s, advertising agencies, cultural institutions, and academia. As well, I’ve participated in many not-for profit groups and collectives of various types. Now, as a consultant, I am lucky enough to get to see the inside of many different kinds of firms and engage with their business models (and, of course, our own professional services firm has its own distinctive model). Finally, through work in the field of Internet Governance, I have spent time formally researching and assessing different kinds of models that exist in intergovernmental organisations and NGOs – attempts to support diverse and ethical mechanisms for collectivity and organisation.

However, after all of these experiences, I am less comfortable about proposing alternatives ‘outside state subsidies and hyped markets’, as the framing for the panel suggested. That seems like an odd thing to say given that I have, for as long as I can remember, anxiously sought alternatives to the status quo. However, while I still value where that search has taken me, and still believe in the need for alternatives, I can’t shake the feeling that the levels of alternative platform/model sustainability are mostly low, and that Spivak is correct in her suggestion that it is sometimes better to ‘sabotage what is inexorably to hand, than to invent a tool that no one will test.'[1]

There are three reasons that have led me to this point of view. Firstly, alternatives are easy to propose and difficult to sustain. The need for better alternatives is a ‘mom and apple pie’ discussion in activist communities, and there is a moral flavour to the valorisation of the ‘alternative’ which overrides any true evaluation of one’s actual political effectiveness. Are we prepared to test the impact of our alternatives against the value of efforts at reforming existing organisations and institutions? Personally, I am not suffering for lack of potential new places to put my energy. What I struggle to find are situations where this energy can make meaningful change and such situations are usually attached to availability of resources. Resources exist in organisations and institutions, and I think that it is characteristic of new media and the creative sector to underestimate the resources required for projects: there is a feeling that if we could agree on the priorities for change that these changes would somehow happen ‘immaterially.’ However, without resources we are usually in the sphere of sacrificial labour, as Ross terms it[2]. The martyr streak runs strong in activist culture. The continuing Western European popularity of Mauss’ concept of the ‘gift'[3], idealised and decontextualised from the Pacific cultures which provided the concept for him, perhaps indicates the value that a postcolonial sensibility may bring in deconstructing a philosophical imaginary predicated on a utopian past which never existed, and allowing us a more nuanced view of ethical praxis.

Secondly, outside of the sustainability of alternatives, my ethical sense is that the important political work for those with cultural capital (those of us reading this book) is in precisely orienting our efforts to institutional reform, rather than looking around for emergent forms to appropriate. We have the capability to effect change in existing organisations and institutions, precisely because we have the capacity to critique them. Many others don’t. My interest is in clearing institutional openings to allow the non-dominant to assume their role of the emergent with the support of organisational resources that exist. This will entail us learning to have a dialogue with the agenda/context of the emergent. However, this learning must always be wary of reading the emergent agenda in terms of our own, as such appropriations result in the destruction of the difference.

In other words, we have to accept our cultural dominance in our textual work. We can only claim to be marginal within a very small proportion of the world, and I believe there is the opportunity to expand the field within which we see oppositions between dominant and alternative taking place. Here I would gesture toward, say, the various indigenous language education movements internationally, that perform an inspirational and practical critique of colonial education systems. I’m not quite sure what the lessons from those are for us in the West, and I suspect it is a personal and subjective encounter. But I do know that when I talk with people working in these initiatives I routinely feel refreshed and empowered to create change, which has to be a good thing.

Thirdly, when alternatives are proposed – and almost every meeting/gathering proposes an alternative network or a group as as an ‘action item’, morally opposed to the ‘talkfest’ – I rarely have confidence that they will raise a response from those in non-dominant cultural sectors. As suggested above, these are the sectors who I think have the most to offer by way of alternatives. I think Creative Commons is a perfect example of how the political economy of the creative sector all too easily becomes about the expressive capability of the Euro-American middle classes, which is a too-limited scope for discussion in the face of the financialisation of the planet under transnational capital. Despite the efforts of people like Lawrence Liang, we still have the Creative Commons leader Larry Lessig essentially describing Asia as a centre of piracy and implicitly morally defective[4]. This is not likely to bring residents of Asia on board the political movement of open content, and this is where I believe the most creative approaches to authorship and intellectual property are to be found.

If such responses sound mundane and sociological, they nevertheless for me reflect a vivid social context that is too-little discussed within the new media sector. During their presentation at MyCreativity, Rosalind Gill and Danielle van Diemen described a Surinamese new media worker who remarked on their experience of Dutch firms where the designers were all blond haired and blue eyed, and the service workers were all black. It was a poignant moment, as looking around it was easy to see that who was in our conference didn’t look like who is outside in the street, demographically. I know next to nothing about Suriname other than a schematic of its history as a South American Dutch colony, but I do know for sure that it is a place whose resources are intimately connected with the ability of the Dutch to have an advanced capitalist economy that can set policy around ‘the creative’, just as I know that the material basis of my own settler culture in Australia and New Zealand is based on the appropriation of indigenous resources here. We can only pretend to not be connected to those who are not in the room, even if the questions of how to engage are complex.

It’s difficult to know exactly how to respond to these suspicions of the ‘alternative’, but I would like to attempt some displacements of the alternative through the example of my own trajectory through the Creative Industries. For Judith Butler, ‘giving an account of oneself’ can be a way of exploring the limits of one’s experience as sufficient data upon which one can propose a model for change. The autobiographical mode of address implies the experience of another (you the reader) for whom I must attempt to make myself substitutable in this story – for the story to work you must believe that you potentially could imagine yourself within parts of this narrative. Where my self-presentation does not reflect your experience of yourself, is where we find the limits of our shared agenda, but also, paradoxically, opportunities for dialogue. As Butler suggests, ‘it may be that a certain ability to affirm what is contingent and incoherent in identity allows one to affirm others who may or may not “mirror” one’s own constitution'[5] and it is in this ‘impossible intimacy of the ethical'[6] that I have found value in work within diverse fields including deconstruction, Pacific cultures and my own work within the management consulting field. However, as Butler points out, this is not just a personal process: the terms by which I tell my story are not of my own choosing, and so there is also a larger social structure embedded in the language and terms of the story which I am not in control of, and therefore parts of my experience that remain opaque even to me. Every autobiography is also an auto-ethnography. As Octavia Butler’s character Lillith puts it in the sci-fi novel Dawn: ‘I suppose I could think about this as field work, but how the hell do I get out of the field?'[7]

The mode of the personal story is one which seems fraudulent or self-indulgent within the terms of reference of classical political analysis, but I wish to suggest that there is a resolutely pragmatic character to such stories , if one believes that the most urgent priority right now is to establish more effectively global intellectual platforms against international exploitation. There are two main themes in my story of creative industries practice that structure how I approach creative and intellectual labour: craft, and context.

CRAFT

I had my first real job of longer than a few months’ duration just before I turned 29, as a design lecturer. (I don’t count running a business as a job). Before that I lived a fairly typical creative industries itinerary. I finished high school with no idea that I would be a ‘creative’, as this was before the explosion in art/design/music programmes and the widespread marketing of the university in Australia, and in any case I couldn’t draw so was discouraged from studying art at school. After a year, I dropped out of my sociology degree to play punk rock in Sydney. I was also writing a fanzine on experimental music, and those connections eventually took me to New Zealand. In a way, even before the arrival of the web, I was used to the idea of my imagined community of peers being outside the local environment.[8]

When I arrived in New Zealand in 1993 I was able to turn my fanzine experience and music connections into a writing gig for the local student radio magazine SPeC, and this in turn got me an art-writing gig with the local daily newspaper. Later, I edited the magazine, all the while making music with the people who were some of my favourite musicians in the world at that time. I was developing two parallel crafts, in music and writing. I was also beginning to learn graphic design from a friend who was SPeC’s designer, and I was also writing and exhibiting in the contemporary art context, as some of my main music collaborators were also working in this field, and it turned out to be the place I felt most comfortable.

During 1993 I also discovered the Internet and that new thing called the World Wide Web, and along with some friends we decided to do a free newspaper/magazine about it during a festival in Wellington. The web, as you’ll remember, was a new interdisciplinary context which in the early days was very much the domain of the settler individual (almost uniformly white and male) who was required to integrate technological, design and editorial prowess. Through projects for both various independent media and art initiatives I taught myself interaction design in this environment, and this seemed to be something I was good at.

I was also reading a lot of philosophy and cultural studies on the side. By the time I was 27, I had pretty much done the equivalent of what I now see as two art/media/design degrees, but outside of formal academic institutions, if occasionally supported by New Zealand’s generous social welfare system. I had developed four or five of different craft bases which I could use with some facility, if not to a high level. But all of these had been deployed in organisational contexts which were largely self-directed, and where client work was involved it usually came about through personal connections. Overall, like the average graduate, I was more interested in the process of learning to make than what the effects were, and I was a bit naive and overambitious about the true impact of my work.

So far, not a completely uncommon story for a number of young white middle-class men from the suburbs. The explosion of the Internet and the dot-com boom during the 1990s provided an opportunity for self-styled media revolutionaries such as myself to ply their wares to larger media companies, and New Zealand in 1996/7 was no exception. A friend was working as a Photoshop artist for ad agencies, and it became clear that those agencies were not getting the input they wanted from ‘web companies’ that were primarily set up by people from a technical background, and whose whose understanding of how normal people communicated was a bit skewed. So we set ourselves up to do web development for this market, and suddenly I was not quite in control of the context where my work was being created and received.

CONTEXT

Working in advertising (firstly as an external contractor, then based inside the agency) was the first time I had really worked for a sustained period to a contextual/cultural script that was not my own. The values, methods, and temporalities in the agency environment were quite contrary to mine. My work motivators are essentially intellectual and political – projects have to be interesting or doing good, and preferably both. My working style is process-oriented – I prefer to do things with all the relevant information at hand, and to document processes so that next time around I do it better. The agency field, on the other hand is success-oriented, and personality-based. ‘Quality’ is very situational, individualised. Sarah Thornton, in her excellent ethnography of adland, describes the criteria implicit in her job interview perfectly:

Although ideas about advertising were at issue, the questions that seemed to loom largest were: Do I like this person? Will others in the team like her? Is she or can she be one of us? While it would be considered an inappropriate official criterion for working in an academic post, personality is a legitimate concern in a business where working in teams and pleasing clients are essential.[9]

Working in advertising taught me that context itself is different than craft. One might have a certain set of craft skills (say, graphic design) that are theoretically applicable to a particular domain (such as advertising), but in practice they are not because those craft skills have been learnt within another context (say, contemporary art) that turns out to be incommensurable. It’s an experience of not fitting in, where even one’s body seems to give oneself away constantly. It’s not that I didn’t understand how advertising worked. I was an assiduous student and rapidly learnt more than many seasoned professionals about the structure of the industry. But in fact, my very hunger to learn the structure of it gave me away as someone who couldn’t be effective in it. My suggestions never seemed to quite get taken up; my ability to articulate areas of risk or likely error for projects – even when couched in the correct terminology – would be seen as ‘unhelpful’. I gave it my best shot, but in retrospect it was clear to all concerned that I was not ‘one of us,’ and after 6 months working inside Saatchi New Zealand I left for academia.

I’d done some design teaching on the side when we were running our business in Auckland and enjoyed it, and was able to got a real job teaching undergraduate design students on the basis of my professional experience. Teaching in a design school also required me to get my own academic qualifications, and so I enrolled in an MA under McKenzie Wark, ostensibly to look at rural Digital Divide issues (I was living in the countryside), and ending up studying class theory which is where the structuring questions for those concerns seemed to be housed. The academic world also, at last, provided a context for my own writing. Writing is probably the craft I am best at, but it had not had much of a run during my time in the new media design world, and my art and music writing always felt limited by the constraints of formal aesthetic explication which was central to those genres, and in which I had no formal training.

However, while most people now see me as a natural academic, the organisational environment of academia has never been a natural home for me, and I had to work hard to understand it. No one in my family had been to a university, and I didn’t even really have a sense about the social function of the institution. Coming from a small business environment, then through advertising, the sheer scale and immovability of the organisational structures made the academic institution a frustrating place to work, impervious to the rhythms I was used to. I come from the white colonies – we work fast and like to see results fast. Looking back I see that I gained success quickly, probably too quickly, and made some decisions that were also made too hastily, which I regret. However, once again, adapting to this environment/context, doing what it took to gain recognition within the academy, was a learning experience of a different order from learning a new craft skill. Shifting contexts is a test of one’s most basic drives, desires and consciousness – one needs patience and, I think most crucially, an ability to seek out good teachers and guides.

I always kept my hand in the commercial arena. My business partner and I were doing consulting work in the new media industries: assisting with strategic planning, business case development, new venture development, facilitation, competitive research and analysis. I think we ended up in consulting because as those of you who work in the design sector know, design is an integrative discipline that, at its core, has strong overlaps with organisational strategy. In design, one is really grappling with how the core aims of the organisation are embedded in product and service delivery. And during the dotcom era there was an unprecedented discussion about value chains, business models, and how businesses work, which we were really interested in – more so than what looked good or what was technologically possible, concerns which were more common for visual designers and technologists in the new media field.

I can also see that there were aspects to my own upbringing that made me suitable for this kind of work: my stepfather, who I grew up with, was a successful entrepreneur who turned a one-person surf shop into a 50-person business. My father started his work career as an electrician, worked for one coal company his entire life, moved eventually into a personnel role and then acted as a kind of internal consultant, receiving the very creative industries title ‘Methods Analyst’ in the 80s and being a kind of bridge between the shop floor and management, while not fitting into either. I find myself regularly bemused at the degree to which his dinner-table work conversations are reflected in my thinking. Further to that, I usually score INFJ on the Kiersey/MBTI personality tests and this puts me into the archetype of ‘Counsellor’. The old joke is that consulting is 70% therapy, 20% philosophy and 10% artistry and that’s probably about right. Clients are usually people whose institutional environment is driving them crazy. From my mother I gained some empathetic skills that are critical in that kind of work.

Eventually I grew tired of the particular academic institution I was in and wanted to further my research on settler-indigenous relations, which seemed like the most complex and critical social issue where I live, and one which has many resonances with my other research interests. I also wanted to have more diverse work, and my father had been unwell so it felt important to have some time to attend to family. So for the last eighteen months, I’ve been running a company with my business partner based in Australia. While academics often suggest that I’m ‘brave’ for having left academia for ‘life outside’, I don’t see it that way. Working in the private sector doesn’t make one autonomous – if anything, I am now more dependent on the financial variations of our academic clients than I was when I was employed by them. This is why I’m most likely to end up back in academia if I find the right gig – the freedom from business pressure inside the academy, despite the complaints of the natives about commercialisation, is significant, and I’m not really driven enough to be good at business development. But that’s another story.

The beauty of the experience of consulting is that it has allowed me to see the inside of a further range of organisations than I knew before: broadcasters, NGOs, government agencies, the UN system. So I’ve had to formalise my methods of adapting to new contexts. This is where the ability to conceptualise difference than I’ve learnt from feminist and postcolonial work, and from deconstruction, is constantly put to use. When entering a new context of practice, I need to make a subtle reading of cultural scripts that are operating, and learn the operational languages, if I am going to make interventions that elicit a response from those contexts.

Note the methodology embedded in this language. It is not about learning to read a situation in order to make a commentary elsewhere (standard academic social sciences technique: I study something in order to talk about it at a conference). Nor is it about learning to read a situation in order to make a recommendation which has an impact (instrumental consulting technique: I propose a solution which fits your situation). It is about trying to enter the fabric of a context and make a contribution which will be seen by that context as an impetus for change. Spivak [10] calls this the ‘uncoercive rearrangement of desire’, which is a great phrase. It’s a very tough thing to do, an impossibility. But an urgent impossibility that is the hallmark of the consultant’s work (we constantly fight our desire for control which we have no authority to take), and of course, work in teaching the humanities. If our goal with political action is to be more broadly inclusive in our work, I am convinced that a methodology for negotiating difference is critical to enabling effective change.

FIBRE

Reflecting on the trajectory of my work, I can see the range of craft skills and contextual understandings that led to my current interests, even though I had no idea how they would become integrated at the times I was learning them. It’s because I can speak the various associated languages of these crafts and contexts that I can be ‘interdisciplinary’ – interdisciplinarity is not newly divorced from any of threads of craft/context, but is precisely woven from these threads. Like a length of rope spun from off-cuts, there are no clear points where it is easy to say ‘this colour starts here’, even though not all fibres travel the entire length of the rope. And neither are all the fibres fused into an amorphous mass – under close analysis all of the different filaments are visible as distinct entities, and are largely non-substitutable. The specific colours of threads in our various yarns, perhaps, is what makes our creative identities unique.

I surface this fabric/sewing metaphor – with echoes of the Pacific and the interrogation of metaphors in Traweek and Haraway’s work in science studies) because it illuminates what for me is the critical question in the practice of political change. What craft skills can I learn, or am I prepared to learn? These crafts take time, experience and teachers to develop. Perhaps more significantly, what specific contexts of practice am I prepared to participate in, where I can actually use my craft skills in a way which draws a response from that domain of practice? I have a number of connections to contexts where I essentially have no authority and capability to make a significant impact on the political agenda – how do I conduct myself in these?

These questions ask me to reconsider the relationship between theory and practice in particular contexts. If I write academic work in English, that is because that is what I can or am doing, and being able to do it means I might not be able to do other things – or at least, I cannot necessarily do all of the political things I might wish to within the context of theory. The ‘global’ is not accessible to me through theoretical work – instead my own practices of reading and writing are constrained by limitations of language, craft and contextual understanding. Following Butler above, it has proven useful to me to evaluate my own writing and political practices sociologically, to better understand who I develop intellectual relationships with, and in which contexts my work can be effectively made use of by others. In this way, I can also evaluate who is not in the economy of my textual circulation.

This sociological perspective leads me to a level of frustration when encountering theoretical work which seeks a ‘totality’ which remains uninfluenced by the critical literature from the new social movements in ecology, peace, ethnicity, anti-colonialism, gender and sexuality that primarily identify outside classical Marxist terminology, and which have been most influential on my own intellectual and political development. This is not because such totalising categories are not useful – after all, there are international systems which must be described, and this is why I value Marx still – but because their value for the dispossessed can only be activated through resonance with specific social contexts, and the world is bigger than 19th century Europe could conceive [11].

Whenever I attend conferences such as MyCreativity which attempt to engage the question of political change, I feel very aware of the limited capacities we have to identify ‘the political’, and also the limited scope of ‘the political’ that is customary in English-speaking new media discourse. Overall, we are more comfortable talking about something ‘political, out there’ (capitalism, war, or technology) than the openness of our hearts and imaginations to other possibilities which might be excluded from the room we are in. Yet, my suggestion is that it is through our elaboration of our own subjectivity and position that we can connect to others who can help us in our work, rather than limiting our connections to those who already share our ways of making sense of the ‘world.’

So it feels more critical than ever to pull apart narrowly shared understandings of the ‘political’ and to narrate the politics of how we come to these understandings. These politics are, simply, our own stories, our ability to listen to the stories of others, to allow the stories of others to transform our own, and to understand the limits of our ability to tell, limits that are inextricable from the social/economic/cultural locations we inhabit. These limits are, of course, constructed by ‘big issues’ and ‘global themes,’ but whose big issues, from when? The geopolitics of significance in our political imaginary seems unbalanced, when I know more about the history of the political environment in Paris leading up to May 1968, than I do about that in any African nation on its path to decolonisation – let alone the Pacific region I live in today.

Exploring a more global sense of accountability for my writing and work has not been so much about travel to new physical locations, but recognising that a shift in consciousness can take place in the imagination. This is the lesson from feminist theory: the movement that is required is not of ourselves as subjects within the world, but to allow the nature of ourselves as subjects to be moved by the presence of another subject. If there is one thing I’ve learnt from working in the creative sector, it’s that the affective dimensions of our practices, where we feel ourselves changed emotionally, that build solidarity and motivate our engagement at both the practical and aesthetic level. In seeking analogues in the theoretical/philosophical domain I return to Irigaray’s fundamental understanding of the importance of openness and receptivity in the ethical subject – where we are at risk of change from the touch of the other. To write ‘I’ and ‘you’, as Irigaray does, is not to write ‘he’ and ‘she’ – the subjects in the I/you question are not substitutable, or able to be easily instrumentalised in systems thinking [12]. It’s through the sociology of our imagination, perhaps, that we find the structural boundaries that are most in need of transformation in ourselves, and a possibility for a utopian politics which constitutes itself in the ethics of our encounters.

From identity-based social movements, as from craft, we learn the limits of elasticity in our thought: our ability to transform ourselves is much less than we think, and our identities, even under extreme pressure, will probably not turn themselves to something unrecognisable from who we are now. Here is where the value of the imagined ‘alternative’ system becomes less useful, or at least, we have to envisage alternatives in terms which are not available for us to invent, but are precisely constituted in our relationships with each other. This is not a disabling sensibility. In Undoing Gender, Butler considers the possibilities for transgender and intersex recognition in a binary gendered system, one where the subjects move toward and between alternative genres of life which are already overdetermined by binarisitic social discourse [13]. There is no possibility of flight from the gendered binary, and yet utopian impulses play a critical role even when there is persistent failure to achieve them:

Not only does one need the social world to be a certain way in order to lay claim to what is one’s own, but it turns out that what is one’s own is always from the start dependent on what is not one’s own, the social conditions by which autonomy is, strangely, dispossessed and undone.

In this sense, we must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are. This is surely the paradox of autonomy […] Until those social conditions are radically changed, freedom will require unfreedom, and autonomy is implicated in subjection. If the social world… must change in order for autonomy to become possible, then individual choice will prove to be dependent from the start on conditions that none of us author at will, and no individual will be able to choose outside the context of a radically altered social world. That alteration comes from an increment of acts, collective and diffuse, belonging to no single subject, and yet one effect of these alterations is to make acting like a subject possible.[14]

Notes

1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999, p.9.
2 Andrew Ross, ‘The Mental Labor Problem,’ Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000).
3 Marcel Mauss, The Gift : Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies ,London: Cohen and West, 1970.
4 Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture : How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, New York: Penguin Press, 2004, Ch. 5.
5 Judith Butler, ‘Giving an Account of Oneself,’ diacritics 31, no. 4 (2001): p.27.
6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited,’ in Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge, 1993, p.171.
7 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, New York: Routledge, 1989, p. 382.
8 Danny Butt, ‘Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and the Creative Industries,’ The Creativity, November 2006.
9 Sarah Thornton, ‘An Academic Alice in Adland: Ethnography and the Commercial World,’ Critical Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1999): 61.
10 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, 101.
11 See, for example, Blaut’s critiques of Euro-Marxist diffusionism and the Asiatic Mode of Production. J.M. Blaut, ‘Marxism and Eurocentric Diffusionism.’ ed. Ronald Chilcote Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999.
12 Cecilia Sjöholm, ‘Crossing Lovers: Luce Irigaray’s Elemental Passions’ Hypatia 15, no. 3 (2000).
13 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge, 2004.
14 Butler, Undoing Gender, 100-01.

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