03 2011

Art and Knowledge: Towards a Decolonial Perspective

Therese Kaufmann

Translated by Aileen Derieg

In societies and under economic conditions of which the developments and transformations in recent years have been principally described as knowledge-based, a role is attributed to art and its production, which seems to be directly involved in what is covered by the term cognitive capitalism. At least from the perspective of the global north, but also of some emerging economies, a series of functions are ascribed to artistic production, training to be an artist, making a living from art, and the subjectivities linked with being a cultural producer. These functions inscribe them directly into today’s capitalism in the era of postfordism. According to theorists of cognitive capitalism, such as Antonio Negri, this is defined by, among other things, “immaterial labor”, meaning that value is created through intellectual, communicative, relational and affective activities, because the “form in which we act to produce goods and to engender the world”[1] is dematerialized. Knowledge is central to this process in the sense that, as Antonella Corsani summarizes, cognitive capitalism aims “to turn all kinds of knowledge, whether artistic, philosophical, cultural, linguistic or scientific, into a commodity”.[2]

What then does art production mean in the context of an understanding of “production”, in which the increasing commodity character of knowledge, “the subordinating relation between the sphere of knowledge production and that of commodity production”, is so altered or actually inverted that knowledge production takes on an existence of its own, leading to a “merging of the two spheres”?[3] What does it mean that art, in its “constantly expanding forms of practice”[4] between knowledge production, research, education and self-formation, is to be seen not only in immediate proximity to the development of knowledge economies, but is itself formulated as a site of the production of knowledge?[5] What does this mean for art education as part of the general commercialization of education in control societies?

Most of all, however, which knowledge is at stake here, and which historical-political power relations become visible in it? At the end of this essay, which is intended to provide an overview of several aspects of the intertwining of art and knowledge in cognitive capitalism, I would like to conjoin this question with a theoretical approach that also starts from the idea of “knowledge” as a central category of analysis, but one that is rarely viewed in this context: specifically the (de-)coloniality of knowledge. This opens up a perspective, from which several lines for rethinking the issue may be developed in terms of the ambivalences of art and knowledge production in current capitalism.

 
Ambivalences and Omissions

The direct involvement, the position “in the midst of it”, of art production in the capitalist regime of postfordism can be read as principally ambivalent. First of all, a number of symptoms can be referred to, which are invoked equally by neoliberal politicians and their advisers in funding programs, and which have generated a separate critical discourse within art and theory: the artist-subject, formerly seen outside of classic waged labor, becomes the model of a new form of production,[6] and artistic production alternates between art in public space, design and communication at the intersections of creative economy, urban development and city marketing. It becomes part of a general discourse revolving around creativity, whereby creativity, alongside the “raw material” of knowledge, is expected to be a substantial carrier of economic innovation and thus a motor for growth in global competition. With the use of diversity concepts and the economic utilization of “cultural difference”[7], the requisite “openness” is to be established, and crossing disciplinary limitations and national borders is to be facilitated.

In the European Union, culture and education policies are subordinated (although in different dimensions and to different extents) to the self-prescribed goal of making Europe the strongest knowledge-based economy.[8] Structural parallels between cultural and knowledge economies can also be recognized in phenomena such as the emergence of so-called excellence clusters, in gentrification processes in urban space, where local populations of migrant working class are driven out, or in the growing gap among the actors involved between the formation of elites and increasing precarisation.

What tends to remain unseen, however, are the geopolitical constraints and the lacunae that most descriptions of these forms of labor and production in terms of new and old hierarchizations or exclusion allow to emerge along the lines of gender, border and migration. To put it somewhat schematically, in the neoliberal formations of global knowledge economies and creative work, as they are posed for discussion in theories of “cognitive capitalism”, an “international division of labor”[9] becomes manifest between North and South, which has shifted certain forms of production, specifically industrial and manual production, quasi to its “outside”, its “exteriority”[10]. As George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici note, analyses of cognitive capitalism tend to obscure the ongoing significance of manual production for the accumulation process, which is often carried out under inhumane conditions. Reproductive tasks, home and care work, especially in relation to so-called “affective work”, are still found at the lowest edge of perception.[11] The value hierarchy that arises between various forms of labor, but also of knowledge, whereby “value” is certainly to be understood here in the sense of its materiality, corresponds with what has been called the biopolitical quality of affective labor, such as that of domestic workers.[12] What is also relatively rarely investigated in this context are phenomena such as the racialization of artistic subjectivities in the so-called creative cities[13], the extensive exclusion of entire population groups from education in general and art education in particular, or specific forms of a racist division of labor in the corporate universities of globalized knowledge economies.[14]

 
Art Education in Control Society

In an essay in 2006 Simon Sheikh noted the transformations from fordism to postfordism under the paradigm of the commodification of knowledge specifically in education at art academies. In this article he related the structural changes in art academy education to the paradigm of the control society as a central element in the analysis of current socio-political conditions. This paradigm no longer involves securing influence on the (industrial) sites of production, but focuses instead on creating knowledge, administering and controlling the cycles of knowledge and the development of learning processes, but most of all on securing and regulating access to them. Sheikh describes new test methods, seminar modules and internationalization, increasing efficiency, etc. in the academies as part of a larger process of transforming the traditional educational institutions of the disciplinary system into those of the control system, which continues from art training into the modes of art production.[15]

The training of the artist-subject in a double sense, namely the generation, formation, in other words “production” of the artist-subject, but also the training and education within the institution of the art academy and thus the artist-subject’s “orientation” to the art scene become part of the transition that Gilles Deleuze vividly describes in “Postscript on Control Societies”.[16] In this essay Deleuze summarizes Foucault’s theses that the disciplinary societies of the 18th and 19th century reached their height at the outset of the 20th century in the major sites of confinement of the family, school, barracks and factory. The crisis of these places in the mid-20th century also signified the transformation to the paradigm of control.

Unlike historical situations, in which various critical or avant-garde art movements constituted themselves outside the academy or had to leave it (although the mechanisms of exclusion in effect in these movements themselves should not be forgotten here), within the control regime the art academy, as Sheikh notes, assumes something like a hegemonic position, which also anticipates incorporation into the knowledge economies at the same time. This has led to “a merger between the academy, critical theories and discourses, museal representations and the market”[17], which in turn influence the general system of state, society and economy. Naturally this merger, as Sheikh himself remarks, is also to be seen as inherently contradictory, but most of all, it would be too simplistic to assume a purely temporal sequence of discipline and control. Neither has the (male) genius artist ceased to exist altogether, nor have the elements of “confinement” and concentration of power entirely vanished from the academy. Gerald Raunig, in his analysis of the universities as “knowledge factories” and of the imperative of life-long learning, points out that discipline and control are rather to be understood as mutually intertwined and concurrent principles, as an “accumulation”: “[…] forced adaptation in the institutional ‘internment’ is accompanied by new modes of self-government in a totally transparent, open milieu, and discipline through personal surveillance and punishment couples with the liberal visage of control as voluntary self-control.”[18]

Deleuze’s concept of modulation is continued here to cover control and discipline in their simultaneity and interaction. However, it can still be further extended, specifically to the “possibility conditions of resistance in the mode of modulation”. This means that the universities are to be understood not only as sites of the commodification of knowledge and the exploitation of the subjectivity of all the actors, but also as sites of “new forms of conflict”.[19] Starting from this approach, I would like to continue the idea of how knowledge itself can become this kind of site of conflictual engagement, and how this could be envisioned in terms of its historical and geopolitical dimension as well.

 
Artistic Research and Struggles

It is not in spite of, but rather specifically because of its entanglement in the socio-economic transformations of the knowledge society, in the most diverse forms of neoliberal appropriation and control, and because it is situated within a discursive framework that threatens to obscure its own exclusions that the field of art is seen as a site of resistance to exactly those conditions. In this field, an uprising, a change of perspective, and thus also a change of hegemonic views are to be made possible. At least it can be presumed that art’s position within the described system of cognitive capitalism has not been unequivocally decided. In an essay on the critique of the creative industries, Marion von Osten suggests reading this direct involvement in the transformations of postfordism in terms of an inherent potential for change as well: “What I suggest is to reflect our discourse, as I believe we are in the middle of all of that, which does mean that there is still space to influence and change the discourse, even our own.”[20]

In the carousel of generating, distributing and exploiting knowledge, which seems to be spinning faster and faster, as becomes evident in, among others, the educational turn[21] in curatorial practice, or also in the new academic discipline of artistic research, a field of hegemonic forces and thus also of struggles comes into view. The description as a “field of alternatives, proposals and models”[22] should therefore not obscure the extent to which artistic research has become part of the general academicization of art training, to which the new curricula and new artistic-academic degrees adhere, and which must therefore be read in the sense of a normative practice of the discipline: “Under the buzzword of an ‘artistic research’, currently many things resurface in a canonized format that former generations of artists had fought for as principles of self-empowerment: to do research on your own account, without having to justify your doings in the face of Academia and its limitations.”[23]

While the claim to a space of critical analysis and reflection, of generating critical public spheres and formulating marginalized positions is still being defended, we see a highly explicit translation of artistic research into commodity production in the sense of an immediate utilization logic in educational structures and study courses.[24] The neoliberal zones of proximity between art and “knowledge production” remain neither unanalyzed nor uncontradicted[25], often in connection with the urgent need for free spaces in education, for new collectivization and self-education, leading into the resistance that has formed within all the different protest movements in universities and art academies against processes of restructuring in the course of the so-called Bologna Process and a general economicization of education.

Hito Steyerl has developed a perspective of artistic research here in terms of a long and far-reaching history of artistic practices, which is determined by conflict and political resistance, and in which aesthetic and epistemic innovation has always also been part of a social struggle.[26] A pertinent example relating to the historicity of artistic research as part of a complex genealogy between struggles and appropriation is also described in Tom Holert’s portrayal of the student revolts of 1968 at Hornsey College of Art in London. The students who occupied the college questioned the strict division of art and theory in artistic engagement and demanded that research must be a central, “organic” component of the educational process in the form of critical self-reflection.[27]

 
Decolonial Perspectives

At this point, I would like to return to the aforementioned article by Simon Sheikh and its core issue, specifically the call for a distinction between knowledge and thinking. According to Sheikh, the former is determined by normative practices and disciplines, whereas the concept of thinking refers to the non-disciplinary, to possibilities for opposing normativity with something else, which indeed requires separate spaces: “We have to move beyond knowledge production into what we can term spaces for thinking. […] Thinking is here meant to imply networks of indiscipline, lines of flight and utopian questionings.”[28] What interests me about Sheikh’s critique of knowledge is that he does not assail only its commodity status, but also its “disciplinedness” and the concomitant constraints and limitations. He also refers to the emancipatory potential, which is usually automatically linked with the concept of knowledge, but problematizes this at the same time by emphasizing its limitations. As he writes, knowledge is “something that holds you back, that inscribes you within tradition, within certain parameters of the possible”[29]. In this way, it always also produces a series of eliminations in relation to possibilities of thinking and imagining – artistically, politically, sexually and socially.

This objection leads in two directions that seem important to me for the present analysis: on the one hand Sheikh implicitly questions the conventional assumption of a fundamentally emancipatory potential of knowledge (and thus of education); on the other he opens up a critical frame of reference that problematizes “knowledge” as a virtually fixed, unquestioned category and with that its cognition character. This results in a number of complex issues in relation to the power of definition over “knowledge” in its geopolitical, historical, social and economic dimension. I would like to propose continuing the idea of Sheikh’s objection in the direction of a theoretical approach that could be useful as a critical tool, but has hardly been considered in conjunction with a critique of cognitive capitalism, namely the “coloniality” of knowledge.

This is an approach that has been developed especially in Latin American contexts, which grasps knowledge – and thus also cognition – as a central element of colonization, analyses it in its aftereffects, its lines of tradition, and its re-formulations today, deriving from this the call for a “decolonization”.[30] This approach is based on, among others, the concept of the “Coloniality of Power” developed by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano[31], which includes not only the economic, political and military dimensions of colonialism, but also its epistemic qualities and the question of how hegemonic Western orders of knowledge are based on them. The “logic of coloniality” is inseparably linked here with the formulation of European modernity since the 15th century, the universality paradigm of progress propagated by it, and thus also an epistemic self-understanding of Europe. For this reason, Enrique Dussel speaks of “coloniality” as the “underside of modernity” and coined the term of transmodernity[32] to comprehend the history of modernity in its global, colonial manifestation, how different “divided histories”, although characterized by different power relations, are interwoven.[33]

At this point, reference must be made to the fact, frequently treated in post-colonial theory, that colonialism was in manifold ways and to a vast extent a project of knowledge generation as well as a pedagogical project, of which traces are still to be found in all areas of art history and science history, but also in implementations of worldwide educational systems and canons. Authors like Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said have called attention to epistemic violence[34], which makes knowledge an instrument of domination as well as of the justification and legitimization of domination, and how this has in turn marked European orders of knowledge as a product of colonialism.[35] For this reason, John Willinsky calls for an investigation of the legacy of this “educational project”, which must itself inherently be a learning process in the sense of questioning the knowledge, by means of which we “understand the world”: “We need to learn again how five centuries of studying, classifying, and ordering humanity within an imperial context gave rise to peculiar and powerful ideas of race, culture and nation that were, in effect, conceptual instruments that the West used both to divide up and to educate the world.”[36]

In reference to current orders of knowledge and today’s Western knowledge business, Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez in turn criticizes the “postcolonial rhetoric” that determines today’s university operations, in which Postcolonial Studies has itself become an object of university marketing, and which constantly produces exclusions of its own. Because knowledge production is so closely tied to social conditions, but also to the political struggles, under which and from which knowledge emerges, it cannot be separated from its ontological dimension. The “materiality of knowledge”[37], which literally inscribes itself in the bodies of its actors, corresponds to a lived experience, which elucidates the difference – beyond identitary concepts – of different positions within so-called immaterial labor. Onur Suzan Kömürcü, in her investigation of the situating of German-Turkish artists in Berlin in the context of creative industries and policies of cultural diversity, therefore emphasizes: “Immaterial and affective labourers are not merely ‘cognitive’ ghosts, brains and souls, ratio and emotion, detached from their bodies. Immaterial and affective labour is corporeal.”[38] She speaks of the racialized spaces of cultural production and of a racialization of the body, which is put to use in affective, creative and intellectual labor.

 
“Creating Worlds”

A decolonial perspective of the way knowledge and labor are entangled in cognitive capitalism, which investigates the continuities and impacts of their “coloniality”, thus relates not only to the level of epistemology, but always also to being and thus also to the world, in which it is. This is where a specific topos in the analysis of knowledge production and productive creativity as the central elements of capitalist production comes into view: the topos of creating worlds. As Maurizio Lazzarato writes, today it is less a matter of producing consumer goods or subjects like those of the worker or the consumer, but rather the world, in which these exist.[39] Here it would seem obvious to think of the creative force of the artist, of the specific potential of productive creativity, which everyone today is to take up as far as possible under the neoliberal pressure of the requirement of life-long learning.

Historically the figure of the creator-artist – and thus also of the researcher – is profoundly intertwined with the development of European modernity and the image it has created of itself. This is why Marion von Osten, in her article about the creative industries, notes: “The culturalization of labor and production is therefore based on Eurocentric discourses on ‘creation’ as well as on forms of image production that refer to a specific regime of gaze.”[40] These developed not only within institutional frameworks like museums and were located in the context of central cultural discourses of the nation-state in the 19th century, but also refer to the “educational and research project” of colonialism. This project involved not only discovering “new worlds” using all available skills of surveying and classifying or applying techniques such as cartography, painting and photography, but always also making worlds on the basis of a presumed as well as a literally (and forcefully) engendered terra nullius without history, which was denied its own history and its own language, as manifested, not least of all, in the establishment of powerful education systems.[41] It is not by chance that Spivak speaks of worlding as a process of both oppression and the production of the so-called Third World.[42]

Yet perhaps this topos of creating worlds may be taken even further in the direction of resistance and struggles, which come into effect in relation to the worldwide protests at the universities, the lines of connection between art, research and political conflicts, and a decolonial perspective that is inseparably linked with political decolonization movements in Latin America, Asia and Africa. If we again take up the “possibility conditions for resistance in the mode of modulation”[43], then the idea of creating worlds could be newly “charged” in its ambivalence – in the sense of new possibilities for thinking and imagining, of new political dimensions and possibilities of existence, in a world that must be fought for.

A decolonial perspective breaks through dominant discourses to point out the contingency and violence of their claims to truth. It elucidates how they are intertwined in the conditions of historical colonialism and its continuities up to the present, it treats the manifold forms of gendered and racialized situations, exclusions, limitations and definitions. For this reason, Encarnción Gutiérrez-Rodriguez, for example, calls for the development of a “decolonial feminist-queer epistemology”[44] as a possibility for understanding the complexities, multi-dimensionality and the uncertainties of contemporary, postcolonial and migrant societies. However, the development of this kind of epistemology is always also to be seen relation to queer, feminist and decolonial struggles, which have often been the basis for toppling hegemonic knowledge systems. Establishing these lines of connection to these new struggles for new worlds also applies to art, if it is to be a “shredder for prescribed theories – a détournement of knowledge systems”, if it is to be charged with asking what traditional knowledge systems do not ask and inventing a “different form of thinking and knowing – different epistemic machines”[45].

 
I would like to thank my colleagues Lina Dokuzovic, Raimund Minichbauer, Radostina Patulova and Gerald Raunig for their suggestions and critical commentaries.