Forms of Thinking about your Forms of Making
Modes and Methods of Analysis
The questions around analysis, interpretation are many, they comprise philosophical, theoretical, political, practical questions of method and the relation of subject and object, interpeter and interpreted.
But to just begin to think about these questions here, we can point out that our “studies” purposefuly engaged in material, and conceptual investigations but without worrying to much about specifically what they might ‘mean.’ At the “study” stage we are trying to foster an experimental studio process, involving working through materials, images, etc. as well as ideas. To continue the elaboration of a studio practice we could posit that there is also a stage in developing a project, where one reflects on activities (such as the studies you have just made) in a more analytical way.
One could analyze an object in relation to its formal qualities or to its art historical references. Or as Joseph Kosuth, leading an articulation of Conceptual Art or art as idea, art as concept, articulates art as an ongoing analysis of the conditions of art itself. His essay “Art After Philosophy” is here: http://www.ubu.com/papers/kosuth_philosophy.html
However, we often use “Critical Theory” as a methodology when considering contemporary art. Critical Theory in a general sense has a goal of understanding the conditions which produce cultural, political, subjective situations, can include a blend of historical Analysis, Marxist Analysis, Psychoanalysis, Semiotics, and also perhaps less systematic perspectives, such as Feminism, Post Colonial Theory, Post Structuralism, Deconstruction, Foucauldian Geneaology, etc. However, many of these methods/theories/fields of enquiry also stand on their own right or even find points of opposition with aspects of Marxist derived Critical Theory. The Stanford Encyclopedia starts its definition of Critical Theory like this,
“Critical Theory has a narrow and a broad meaning in philosophy and in the history of the social sciences. “Critical Theory” in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a “critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human emancipation, “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer 1982, 244). Because such theories aim to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many “critical theories” in the broader sense have been developed. They have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies. In both the broad and the narrow senses, however, a critical theory provides the descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasing freedom in all their forms.”
Here is Marxist Literary Critic Terry Eagleton’s description of a “theorist” from “The Significance of Literary Theory”
“Imagine a group of people trapped, Bunel-like in a room, discussion possible ways of getting out. A new person enters…After a while it occurs to her that though some of the talk indeed constructive, much of it is more of a symptom of the situation than a strategic response to it. Perhaps these people are actually fearful of leaving the room, and their wranglings are to this extent of a form of displacement. The newly arrived member of te group is then faced with a problem. What she needs to do is fashion a form of discursive intervention which will somehow succeed in illuminating the relation between the talk and the situation; she must find some ‘meta-discourse’ Which may only be such for these particular purposes) whcih will persuade her trapped fellows to grasp their talk as bound up with their material conditions rather than simply as a potential solution to them…This newly arrived individual, note, does not need to be ‘disinterested’, and indeed cannot possibly be so: why then would she be anxious to interven? It is not necessarily that she is in possession of some superior knowledge; it is just that she is following a different rule from the others, a rule which includes the injunction: ‘always listen to discourse as at least in part symptomatic of the material conditions within which it goes on, rather than as a thing in itself.’ In this situation, the new individual is the theorist, and the ones already int he room are the ideologues. Those radicals or liberals who feel somewhat uncomfortable about such an example because it seems to suggest that the theorist is ‘superior’ to the rest should remember that the corollary of rejecting a title ever to tell anyone else anything helpful is rejecting ever being told.” (The Significance of Theory)
One of the primary structures or modes of thought used in Critical Theory, is “Dialectical Thinking” , this way of thinking which in trying to escape “identity thinking” can be considered a kind of “movement” “form” or “event” of thought, can be very helpful for artists, in fact many works of art could be said to employ negation (an aspect of the dialectic) or dialectical form. A post about Dialectic forms of thought here: http://www.judyradul.com/courses/?p=708
There are also recent objections, new methods which try to avoid some of the limitations of “critique”
For instance, Deleuze scholar Brian Massumi: “ On Critique.” from Inflexions, “Transversal Fields of Experience”(December 2010). 337-340. www.inflexions.org
…Deleuze’s assertion that critique, if it is to be eventful, must be an “immanent” critique [from within, rather than transcendental, that is coming from a metaphysical ‘outside’ place]. One of things this means is that everything that enters the interaction must do so actively, not by proxy, as represented, simply spoken for, or even transmitted (in short, not asan already constituted content). It must become equal to the coming event byperforming itself in and for that particular assembly, so it enters actively into theconstitution of what happens as a co-creative factor. Its “critique” is then not theopinions or judgements we have of it. It takes place on an entirely differentplane. The critique is not an opinion or a judgment but a dynamic “evaluation”that is lived out in situation. It concerns the tendencies that the introduction ofthat factor actively brings into the situation. It is the actual, eventfulconsequences of how that factor plays out, relationally with any number of otherfactors that also activate tendentially, and in a way that is utterly singular,specific to those situated co-expressions. That is why Deleuze speaks of critiqueas a “clinical” practice: it is the diagnostic art of following the dynamic signs ofthese unfoldings, which can then be actively modulated from within thesituation, immanent to it. The modulation can take be augmenting (taking acertain tendency to the limit), diverting (deflecting it into a different tendency),transmutational (interacting with other tendencies in a way that invents a wholenew direction as a kind of surplus-value of interaction) – or, it can lead to a clashthat stops the process. Any furtherance, convergence, becoming or blockage thathappens, actually happens: it’s an event. This kind of eventful, affirmativecritique is very different from criticism, or what I would call negative critique. Ina negative “critical” situation, rather than asking the factors entering thesituation to be “true” to the coming event (asking that they actually take the riskof putting themselves into play, accepting that they may exit the event havingfundamentally changed), it is the people entering the situation who are asked tobe true to what they represent – their preexisting positionings, as encapsulated inalready arrived-at opinion and judgment. These necessarily enter the situation asgeneralities, because their pre-encapsulation prepares them for representation inany similar situation and not just the one at hand. The only singularity is the way in which the legitimacy of the general representation in question is performed. In other words, the only difference affirmed is rhetorical, and what it fundamentally asserts is the personal prowess, in that situation, of the defender.It’s all about legitimation and ascendancy. This leads, in the best of scenarios, to blockage. Blockage is the best of all because the interaction is formulated a priori(if only “humorously”) in terms of a war of position assuming an enemy-friend distinction the playing out of which takes the form of a victory or defeat. If thereis no blockage, it means that one set of positions has “won” and another has been disarmed or annihilated. It’s a war of “disqualification” in Isabelle’s terms. And whichever way it goes, it is a non-event, because the most that might change is areversal of fortunes within a pregiven positional structure. Deleuze’s belief thatdebate and conversation are anathema to thought, to the extent that thoughtallies itself with emergence and becoming, I think relates to this.
From Brian Massumi “On Critique” http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_4/n4_t_massumi.html