Abstract
Reading the reviews of Laura Mitchel and Luc Peters, I was glad to see the different, nearly opposing positions. Just like in the various positions in Dialogues between art and business, it produces a situation. Lauren Berlant (2011) describes a situation as a ‘genre of social time and practice in which a relation of persons and worlds is sensed to be changing but the rules for habitation and the genres of storytelling about it are unstable’ (p. 6). It is not necessarily an event, a shock, a world-changing incident, but it demands engaging with the own position, negotiating relations and thinking about how to respond.
We have a situation here that entails the difficulty to respond to arguments that on one hand are situated in models of thinking aimed at addressing ‘bigger structures’ or generalizable categories and on the other to engage with a reading that is very close to the way this book is methodologically crafted.
Having a situation necessitates trying to figure out what is going on, responding and navigating. It is a notion of unforeclosed experience.
Hence, situating my response in-between, this response tries to highlight on one hand what this study ‘does instead’ and on the other what it ‘does also’ – without claiming to be comprehensive.
The book is not set out to deal with totalised systems – like neoliberalism or capitalism. Being highly sceptic of such broad notions, it instead deals with situations that show particular tendencies or undercurrent shifts that affect and restructure the relationships – or better the possibilities for relationships – between the realms of art and of business in a particular way. As such, the study is radically situated in that it addresses the relational dynamics that were present during a particular time – early 2000 – and a particular place that is, Berlin. While today, the relationship to the artistic sphere has been re-territorialised by the business sphere in notions like creativity, in early 2000 Berlin, there was no protocol for this collaboration between business organisation members and artists, only a desire for experimenting that artists shared with public funding bodies and corporate leaders alike. Whatever their very different motivations, agendas and hopes, it was this atmosphere, this sense of possibility that also entailed a chance for dialogic encounters.
Dialogues between art and business shifts the focus from entities to relations; assuming that it is relations that are potent, not entities themselves. This basic assumption is not necessarily Deleuze-Guattarian only but can be found in the work of a wide variety of writers across diverse fields, such as Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, writers using Actor-Network-Theory and so on.
Although more implicitly addressed, relations do not only become powerful among human actors. As Luc Peters notices, also (absent) sausages have agency but what I find even more worth noting is that they do so, because they were part of a particular situation – a rejected plan to occupy an organisational space.
Hence, the power discrepancies between artists and business organisation members that Laura Mitchell has identified throughout the book were less pre-defined and fixed but constantly shifting. Similar to what Herbert Blumer has realised (although for a different setting), power was ‘the result of the situation rather than the situation being the result of their respective power positions’ (quoted by Hall, 1997: 405). And both, artists and business organisation members were, unconsciously or not, constantly engaged in such situational strategies.
Using the terms art and business has a tendency to think in binaries. Yet, as Luc Peters rightly remarked, both are already and probably have always been entangled. A bridge connects, but the problem is that once it is installed, it shapes not only the way we connect but also what kinds of connection could be possible besides the ones so ready at hand. Having a bridge set in place makes it difficult not to cross it – in a particular way – but to think about other ways of negotiating the in-between. A bridge institutionalises relations and practices of crossing. It possesses gravitating force. This creates the challenge of addressing different ways of bridging as it always territorialises these processes and tends to lock them up. (For instance, it makes thinking about cable cars seem to be unnecessary).
Using Deleuze and Parnet’s notion of dialogue as a sensitisit that direct one’s engagement with practises of bridging without pre-defining its path allows for a particular kind of fluidity while preserving a notion of the structural that is so embedded in social science research. It thus works, as Marcus and Saka (2006) note with regards to the related concept of assemblage, in that it ‘seems structural, an object with the materiality and stability of the classic metaphors of structure, but the intent in its aesthetic uses is precisely to undermine such ideas of structure’ (p. 102). In contrast to assemblage, the notion of dialogue emphasises the operative level of relating. Attending to the in-between is one albeit crucial focus of the book. The other side is showing the multiple moments of re-territorialisation – for instance, by attempting to ensure relevancy across disciplines before the start of the experiment – that create but also cut or prevent particular connections. In all that language is not neutral, as well as space is not innocent. To name something by using particular corporate terms to build bridges into the business sphere, performs a particular reality of that very something. In the same way, meeting in an art space creates a very different situation to meeting in the premises of a business organisation. Similarly, method, too, is performative. Trying to refrain from territorialising the flow of becoming by fixing or fitting it onto pre-existing categories, two rather poetic figures – the dancing witch and the happy amateur – are introduced to point towards positions that cannot be considered subjectivities. They might be considered half-subjectivities, temporary subjectivities without fixing them but emphasising their fragility and ephemeral character. They are not as visible or forceful as the monstrous suggests but powerful in a much more humble way, a power that lies in its invisibility and temporariness, a power to make space, to de-territorialise within a highly territorialised, highly stratified context.
‘It was never beautiful’, stated one of the organising artists – and with beautiful, he meant the clarity of a concept or an idea of a Modernist artwork. But what seems to me more problematic than the messiness of a project is the desire for clarity, for purity, for reconciliation that need practices of sanitising – of distinguishing and separating. This desire also fuels so many arguments within the research community that, as Steve Linstead remarks with regards to Kathleen Stewart (2007), prefer to kill the liveliness of a reeling present with immobilising typifications, instead of engaging with the messiness of it.
We have a situation here: it seems that over the increasingly refined sanitising practises, which we have developed, we are losing our capacity to engage with the mess and this is what causes problems. The constant need to re-negotiate and re-locate one’s position to be with, to think with one another is everything but efficient. The messiness of the in-between is difficult. But it is lively.
Dialogue – this messy, lively encounter – never happens in the spotlight of clear-cut categories and means of justification. Today’s world needs more (back-)spaces for messiness. And we should nurture them to counter the hegemony of knowledge, of designation, of judgement. We should relate to these spaces of messineess in ways that values them more openly instead of hiding our needs to engage in practices of not-knowing, of experimenting, of suspending as the dirty part of our work that apparently needs some cleaning up.