Experimental Research Methods After Critique

The Example

The method I have used to analyze Jeremijenko’s work is a case study approach, which I have extended by incorporating the notion of “the example.” I want to suggest that elaborating more carefully a theoretical understanding for focusing on a single case is important because it differs from the traditional use of case studies in the social sciences. One might think of case studies as having an “applied” approach. But for Brian Massumi, the use of “application” can be an attempt to master and to control, rather than to invent, and he recommends using the “exemplary” model. He notes Giorgio Agamben’s thought that the example draws on the idea of singularity, and its capacity for standing for more than an individual case. He argues that it “. . . holds for all cases of the same type, and, at the same time, is included in these. It is one singularity among others, which, however, stands for each of them and serves for all.” (Massumi, 2002, pp. 17-18) This suggests that the example is neither general nor particular, but singular—unique unto itself. While sociologists are often concerned with generalizability, the example allows instead for “extendability.” As singularity, it is “a belonging to itself that is simultaneously an extendibility to everything else with which it might be connected.” (Massumi, 2002, p. 18) The “example” then, is also compatible with Gilles Deleuze’s (1987) notion of transcendental empiricism, for it must be related to other objects and ideas through the connector “AND,” refusing a universalizing tendency yet still having the capacity to extend beyond itself. Massumi (2002) notes that in the writing process, the use of the example as invention “activates detail.” That is, in such a close reading, one is required to follow the minute details.

For Agamben (2002), the use of a paradigm or example is a valid methodological approach. Foucault’s use of the “Panopticon” is his prime example. As is well known, Foucault takes Jeremy Bentham’s architectural drawing for a prison, and shows how it exemplifies the relations of power and knowledge through a deployment of the technology of vision. Agamben describes Thomas Kuhn’s two definitions of paradigm: it designates what the members of a certain scientific community have in common, and it is a single element of a whole. Thus, the paradigm is an example, a single event unique unto itself, a singularity. In the case of the Panopticon he explains, the architectural drawing itself is a concrete singular historical phenomenon. But Foucault named it as “panoptism,” extending it beyond its concrete history as an architectural rendering. In this way, it functions as an example, or paradigm, that defines the “intelligibility of the set to which it belongs and at the same time, which it constitutes.” Similarly, Agamben states that “the paradigm does not move from the particular to the universal, nor from the universal to the particular, but from the particular to the particular.” He continues, asserting that one must “neutralize traditional philosophical oppositions such as universal and particular, general and individual, and even form and content. The paradigm analogy is depolar and not dichotomic, it is tensional and not oppositional.” Singularities produce a new ontological context in which resides the tension of the continuum or field between what have historically been distinct and separate ends. More radically, and with even greater potential, “the specificity of the paradigm resides precisely in the suspension of its immediate factual reference and in the exhibition of its intelligibility as such in order to give life to a new problematic context” (Agamben, 2002).

Affirmative Methods

In an information society the speed at which images and information are encountered increasingly bypasses the possibility for political critique. (Lash, 2002; Terranova, 2004) Amid these changes, critics have questioned wherein lie the locus, impetus, and framework for criticism. Brian Massumi (2002) writes:

“Critical thinking disavows its own inventiveness as much as possible. Because it sees itself as uncovering something it claims was hidden or as debunking something it desires to subtract from the world, it clings to a basically descriptive and justificatory modus operandi. However strenuously it might debunk concepts, it carries on as if it mirrored something outside itself with which it had no complicity, no unmediated processual involvement, and thus could justifiably oppose. (p. 12)

Massumi as well as Isabelle Stengers suggest that we must instead engage “affirmative” methods and techniques. Stengers (2000) has given a more recent treatment to the potential of “interest,” humor, and laughter as ethical responses or sites of productivity for science, and Elizabeth A. Wilson (2000) has framed these as the “positive affective affiliation” of interest and enjoyment. (pp. 38-40) Stengers (2000) notes the risk involved in this for scientists; by giving up the stance of objective judge of scientific truth, one risks being “interested” and thus engaged and involved. In “Another Look: Relearning to Laugh” she opens by lamenting the loss of laughter in science: “No longer do our speculations explore those limit points where theories lose the gravitas of their familiar power. Instead, they judge the world in the name of the power of theory.” (p. 41) She suggests that this is not surprising, and I would add that it is also understandable, for as we have seen atrocities committed in science’s name, we have lost faith in reason and turned to critique. However, Stengers says that she chooses not to be involved solely in denouncing crimes, but rather she finds possibility in “endeavor[ing] to relearn how to laugh.” (p. 42) This laughter is not from the sidelines, it is not distant or uninvolved, it wants also to intervene and to provoke. Along with rejecting denunciation, she avows that learning how to laugh requires avoiding systematic derision (p. 42). As it is, science is already involved in constant “reinvention.” She questions, “What if interest in the world were to be our prime motivator? What if science was a matter of “speculating about what could possibly be?” Thus, she validates the affective as a site for further understanding. She also, however, recognizes that the risk in interest, engagement, or enjoyment is that it coincides with an attempt to understand and appreciate without the security of speaking from an objective position. Stengers is claiming that we might heed affective experience, and so in considering what Jeremijenko’s artwork may be doing, and in assessing what an artist is creating and producing we might pay attention to how an artists’ work manages to surprise, to shock, to produce laughter, and to provoke questions, beyond what it attempts to critique.

In her willingness to read and transform the writings of philosophers and scientists who have traditionally been eschewed by feminists, Elizabeth Grosz also offers a model that is particularly useful in advanced capitalist control societies in which new forms of technology proliferate. In order to further feminist philosophy, she reads Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze, and Freud, philosophers who have received extensive and often legitimate criticism from feminist theorists (Clough. 2005). Grosz (2005) argues that,

“A more open feminist inquiry into the value and relevance of any discourse . . . involves not only feminist critique, not simply inspection for errors and points of contention, but more passively and thus dangerously, a preparedness to provisionally accept the framework and guiding principles of that discourse or position in order to access, understand, and possibly transform it, even knowing that it may remain problematic in many of its assumptions and claims. One must risk the seductive appeals of the key discourses . . . even those that may appear hostile or antithetical to feminist concerns, in order to be able to use them rather than simply criticize them or seek to avoid them.” (pp. 27-29)

In this sense, Grosz recognizes the possibility that a new model might come from within a larger troubling schema, rather than from an outside that claims to be absent complicity.

Making Connections

While social science methods are varied and many, a dominant narrative that seems continuous is the notion of “rigor.” Against that notion, the idea of making connections or links within research might seem difficult to hold up. And though interdisciplinary research and making connections across disciplines is widely accepted, there are limits to its acceptance as well. Massumi notes the risk of linking across disciplines, in his case that he foregrounds math and science models in Parables of the Virtual (2002). He struggles with claims that the Humanities are “poaching” concepts from the sciences and that these concepts are being put to questionable use. This, he suggests, is a problem of “application,” which he is not as interested in. Rather the “shameless poaching,” as he names it, that he would advocate, is the use of concepts such that their affects transfer across disciplinary boundaries. As he argues,

When you uproot a concept from its network of systemic connections with other concepts, you still have its connectibility. You have a systemic connectibility without the system . . . the concept carries a certain residue of activity from its former role. (p. 20)

He suggests, following Deleuze, that experimental practices can invent concepts and connections between concepts. Massumi’s proposal is made so that one might avoid what he describes as “application.” Applying concepts to some given material is an attempt to change the material, rather than to change the concepts.

It is partially a Deleuzian understanding of sociality which allows one to “make sense” of the potential connections among the images. For as John Rajchman (2000) reminds us, “Making connections involves a logic of a peculiar sort” (p. 8). Analysis can remain stuck when one is forced to choose between a universalist reading of the relations of nature and technology, women and objects, or on the other hand a determined discussion of race and the body. The researcher must recognize that they exist in a “zone of indetermination” in which as Rajchman suggests, “‘the being of sensation” that one extracts from common perceptions and personalized affects, or from the space of representation and the reidentification of objects, leads not to an intersubjective orientation in the world . . . ” (p. 9) but also to an indeterminate zone. In fact it is in this arrangement that the possibilities begin to emerge. For even in attempts to determine ourselves, indeterminations are created, “indetermination[s] with respect to our individualizations as persons, sexes or genders, classes or strata, even as members of the human species.” (p. 12)

Elizabeth Grosz is also willing to engage indeterminacy and the unknown and uncertainty of the future. By cloning trees, Jeremijenko has risked engaging with a technoscience whose ethico-political future is uncertain. Yet OneTree shows the dynamism that already exists at the genetic level. Rather than the environment the trees are planted in being the sole influence of their morphology, even trees planted next to one another develop into differentiated shapes. The trees make evident the dynamism they contain at the molecular level. It is possible to clone one tree, and produce tens of non-identical trees with the same genetic material.

Ethico-Politics

It is with an ethico-political framework that one can best engage the affirmative methods put forth by Stengers, Massumi and Grosz, and this is illustrated through Jeremijenko’s OneTree art-experiment. If ethics as it has been practiced throughout Western philosophy has been understood to be the “science of morals,” the department of study concerned with the principles of “human duty,” or the “moral principles by which a person is guided” then the notion of ethics I use here draws instead from Spinoza’s amoral ethics, in which the transmission and reception of affects is emphasized over a moral good or end. The ethico of ethico-politics engages the potential of often preconscious previndividual affects of interest, humor, surprise, and enjoyment. Yet ethico-remains joined with the political, retaining a link to collectives and populations, a sociality beyond the individual. The two are joined here to reflect the movement of each term toward the other, yet meeting in a new assemblage beyond critique. An ethico-political framework also recognizes that under advanced global capitalism, and with the expanded influence of information, biological, digital and nanotechnologies, possibilities for transformation will come from within. And while her stated political aims may be more aligned with giving the public access to information and resisting corporate technoscience, Jeremijenko’s projects, and OneTree in particular, contain the germ of new sources for ethics and politics.

In the gap between her stated political or critical aims which are of the epistemological realm, and that of the ontological dynamism that is evidenced at the genetic level of OneTree, is an uneasy space. Grosz identifies the “unease” of this space between the two as “the condition of life’s ongoing capacity to astonish, to invent, to transform.” As she avows, a politics that is willing to address the realm of ontology, even willing to move beyond “rights and equalities” while still consonant with them, would be open to the transformative processes of indeterminacy and revision. “It opens up feminist and other political struggles to what is beyond current comprehension and control, to becoming unrecognizable, becoming other, becoming artistic.” (5) (Italics mine) Grosz connects this to politics, that we might “speculate on the becoming-art of politics,” . . . ”advocating a politics of surprise, a politics that cannot be mapped out in advance, a politics linked to invention, directed more at experimentation in ways of living than in policy and step-by-step directed change . . . ” (2) And in the maintaining the link to affect, I am suggesting an ethico-politics.

In the work of art I have discussed here, one finds an ethico-political response to the social implications of new technologies. In response to the limits of the social constructivism that so many scholars had noted, Grosz has suggested a future of ethics and politics, an ethico-politics rooted in the inventive and experimental that remains open to the unknown. Grosz names this “becoming artistic.” By “becoming-artistic,” Grosz means that political struggles might be opened up to the future, to “becoming unrecognizable” and “becoming other.” This politics is linked to surprise and invention, to the experimental; it is not a politics of resistance. Olkowski (1999) similarly calls for politics that draw on resources of creativity and the “creative surface of thought.”

Becoming-artistic addresses ethico-politics. It works at the far edge of and just beyond critique as Thacker (2004) has described it. He suggests following Foucault that critique is not just the “negative” work that must be done so that a “positive” resolution may follow. Critique is a generative practice at precisely the moment of its negativity that “provides openings, pathways, and alternatives that were previously foreclosed by the structure of a discourse” (p. 178). However, those concerned with cultural criticism are now working in a space in which direct critique seems to have lost effectiveness, yet simply claiming the impossibility of a political position is not an option. Terranova’s response to the difficulty of critique in control societies is to suggest that political responses in information societies require more than producing counter information, but also “opening up channels, selective targeting, making transversal connections, [or] using informational guerrilla tactics” (p. 54).

The ethico-politics of Jeremijenko deploy from this ethico-politics that is at the joint relation of ethics and politics beyond the edge of critique. The joint term of ethico-politics is necessary because it is politics that has historically designated the social body beyond the relations between just one and an Other, but also extending to populations and collectivities. Ethico-politics raises questions, is willing to experiment, and provokes affective responses such as thought, laughter, surprise, shock, and anger. Ethico-politics recognizes that the affective, the preconscious and the molecular cross these two frames of ethics and politics. It does not desire to govern the conduct of individuals for particular political purposes. Ethico-politics can and should “validate diverse ethical criteria and encourage all to develop and refine their practical and experimental arts of existence . . . and value the conscious fabrication of particular styles or arts of living.” A discourse of ethics that does not attempt to frame issues in objective, scientific, or rational/uncontestable terms, that does not moralize oppositions of the normal and the pathological, natural and unnatural, feminist and patriarchal, or oppressive and liberatory needs to be welcomed into politics, yet in emphasizing the ethical one must take care that it does not participate in new coding for moralizing, and disciplining modes of conduct.

Experimenting With Methods

In the final paragraphs of the conclusion to End(s) of Ethnography, after having explained that much of the purpose of End(s)’ work was to bring to light in the tradition of Foucault, the unconscious forces shaping sociology, Clough (1998) says this:

The opposition of private and public that has allowed sociology [and by extension traditional methods] to enhance its authority by making public what is first described as private is an opposition that can no longer ground social criticism. The vulnerabilities of observation become the vulnerabilities of a rereading that, rather than being displaced onto the observed, are returned to the reader and writer. And this is not a matter of urging a fixed identity between reader and writer—only women writing about women, for example—although this corrective is to be expected. Rather, it is to urge a reconsideration of the privilege given observation and “factual” descriptions as the basis of criticism. It is to urge a social criticism that gives up on data collection and instead offers rereadings of representations in every form of information processing, empirical science, literature, film, television, and computer simulation. (brackets and italics mine) (p. 137).

Since writing that statement, Clough (2010) has come to rethink this notion of “rereading representation,” and instead challenged sociology and social criticism to take up new methods:

rethink[ing] the sociological imagination means creating methodologies that are neither subjective nor objective . . . The screens, machines and makers of dreams need interrogation as we are confronted with a technology or a new media technology that has reformulated presentational style or performativity and has done so as other media technologies have done in the past, each in its own way by deploying a literary realism (p. 6).

She extends her earlier argument to suggest that we take up the affective experiences and affectivities of information processing, empirical science, literature, film, television, and the digital. This is what I have attempted to do with visual art.

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The experiment, as in the “science experiment,” is the basis for all of modern accumulated knowledge. It is the method of experimentation that physics, biology and chemistry, psychology, sociology and anthropology have relied on since Descartes on through the Enlightenment. Rhetoric and Humanities based disciplines are just as influenced by the experiment and scientific method. Scholarly research in general is dependent on notions of “rigor,” “systematizing,” and “methodology,” each of which use the scientific method and experimentation as a referent from varying distances. This is as true for literature, history, and poetry as it is for the social, natural, and physical sciences. While Clough demanded that sociology give up on data collection, and as many symbolic interactionist and theoretical sociologists sympathetic to science studies, cultural studies, media studies, and performance studies have already done, I would add that if it wishes to continue with data collection, sociology ought to acknowledge more readily that so-called alternative methods are simply methods. If Science Studies has brought to sociology a deconstruction of scientific method, Deleuze and scholars such as Clough, Grosz, and Olkowski have brought the conception of “experiment” back from a living death. Yet the affirmative roles of dynamism, chance, and invention have been excluded from most discussions especially in the social sciences, in the attempt to live up to scientific method’s perceived objective systematization. The social sciences might attend to Stengers’ openness to “interest” and questioning.

If sociology has been about the study of “society” and “human interaction,” Deleuze’s writing has fortuitously, though not coincidentally, collided with the ends of liberal humanist thought in time to suggest how we might continue to understand and explicate the social after these ends. We might recognize for instance, that the expansion and contraction between levels of social analysis is simply a movement between, from, or among the molecular and the population or collectivity, in which the molecular may consist of forces pre-individual, and the macro be constructed of the relations of any or all parts in between. For Deleuze this would not be to suggest that all thought is the same, but instead simply to contest the rigidity of the containment and measurement of levels of social analysis. As Rajchman articulates, while Deleuze’s empiricism might be against schools and their methods, his empiricism “nevertheless calls for a rigor or logic of another kind, even if it is that of a method that orders in advance, and involves a kind of selection. It is not at all a matter of anything goes” (p. 24). In What is Philosophy? Deleuze imparts the distinctions between art, science, and philosophy from one another. He argues that the three attend to different types of problems, though one might not always know from the beginning to which realm a problem belongs. As Rajchmann puts it, “such problems and ‘problematizations’ require that one think where one cannot know with scientific assurance, and yet they are not irrational, illogical, or unscientific; rather they have their own consistency, and are best connected with that element of the unknown which the growth of science always carries with it and the kinds of ‘sensations’ that the arts keep extracting from recognizable things and the mental habits associated with them” (p. 47). Thus we might acknowledge the rigor of the “experimental,” and the chance within “experiments.”

Art in particular is suited to this philosophical approach. Both making art and experiencing it require taking part in an openness to the future. In working with materials that hold their own dynamism, as well as a process and method that can never be entirely controlled, one encounters dynamism and chance. Encountering art as a viewer is simply a different version of this potential and both of these relationships are ethico-political ones.

For Deleuze (1994), philosophy, science and art “bring back from chaos” different varieties: reconnections through a zone of indistinction in a concept, the slowing down and elimination of variables to produce determinate relationships, and a being of sensation that restores the infinite, respectively. (pp. 202-203) Each of these fields engages with chaos.

We receive sudden jolts that beat like arteries. We constantly lose our ideas. That is why we want to hang on to fixed opinions so much . . . All that the association of ideas has ever meant is providing us with these protective rules—resemblance, contiguity, causality—which enable us to put some order into ideas, preventing our ‘fantasy’ (delirium, madness) from crossing the universe in an instant, producing winged horses and dragons breathing fire . . . [A]t the meeting point of things and thought, the sensation must recur . . . as proof or evidence of their agreement with our bodily organs that do not perceive the present without imposing on it a conformity with the past. This is all that we ask for in order to make an opinion for ourselves, like a sort of “umbrella” which protects us from chaos. (pp. 201-202)

As he goes on to put it, art makes a slit in the umbrella of opinion, and allows some of the chaos to seep through.