Liberatory Heuristics
Liberatory Heuristics: Panel discussion at the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I was in my car--heading home from an empty classroom I’d spent hours painting white this past Summer so student artwork won’t clash with the institutional greens and oranges I spent gallons of primer and some cash covering--and jamming to a Spotify playlist my youngest suggested a day earlier.
I love hip-hop. There’s the emotional immediacy of music; the authenticity with which so many hip-hop artists relate their subjectivity’s emotional, material, and historical circumstances. And at times, authenticity is crystallized and relayed with an efficiency I envy as both teacher and artist.
I was keeping time, but barely absorbing Freddie Gibbs’ “God Is Perfect” from his critically acclaimed album, Alfredo--the Alchemist’s production offered an accessible bottom beat accompanied by the polyrhythmic vocal contributions of Gibbs’ mellifluous bass, and the song’s soft coda further lulled me away from attending the track--when Gil Scott-Heron’s baritone grabbed what was errant of my attention.
I’ll play you the last 30s from m3:28:
This sample from Skip Blumberg’s 1989 interview with Gil Scott-Heron shook me. It offered a eureka moment, a moment of meaning I generated with the aid of a heuristic device, nearly buried, in this Scott-Heron, Blumberg, Gibbs, and the Alchemist’s temporally distended collaboration. In the original interview, video artist Skip Blumberg asks Scott-Heron, “So..the Revolution wasn’t televised in the ’60s. Is it going to be televised in the ’90s?” And Scott-Heron reveals that the ‘catch-phrase’ ‘The Revolution Will Not be Televised’ “...was about the fact that the first change that takes place is in your mind.” The legendary poet and musician further clarified, “that the thing that’s going to change people is something that can never be captured on film.”
But for me, hearing the shortened version in the context of a work of art, the track, ‘God Is Perfect,’ I understood Gil Scott-Heron’s description of a first blush of liberatory consciousness as simultaneously describing the work of art that could offer a heuristics to quicken that enlightenment experience.
I have been working as a teacher, artist and writer on a series of projects meant to offer expedient means for liberation from anti-black material life. It has become important that this work make its overtures subtly.
For my art, there is an awful tension between producing work that offers heuristic opportunities for engaging the liberatory discourse I know art can meaningfully organize and support versus didactic encounters, that ‘hit-over-the-head’ or more candidly, upset the sensibilities of cultural consumers, whether, audience, institution, or student, with its identity politics, ie the selfsame call for liberation from those most in touch with the effects of anti-blackness demand.
The next three slides document respectively: an interactive wooden sculpture I refer to as a Mahayana Analog Relational Database; installation instructions for upcoming exhibition of work that allows for performative text messaging between myself and audience; and documentation of another Mahayana Analog Relational Database, this one a wax encaustic of DNA electrophoresis gel, alongside performance documentation of text exchanges with audience.
They, like other recent work, represent a range of heuristic approaches for putting critical geography, critical race theory, and as shoehorn, information management models in conversation with Mahayana, most often Zen, Buddhism.
The digital relational database and associated theory have shaped modern life by making quick work of storing and retrieving vast amounts of information. It, and the more robust database models deployed by the likes of Facebook and Google, rely on ideas that parallel and that can be put in heuristic relation to dialectical analyses offered by critical studies and Zen.
For example: for the sake of efficiency, each record in a database must be unique, but also work in relation to other records to describe discrete, albeit larger/more complex objects. This is typified by the way student and teacher records describe a school’s database, and in a very real sense, the school. Databases can also be queried by their users, who, through specialized language are able to produce new relations specific to individual needs.
Perhaps, put into relation with anti-oppresive discourses as heuristic, this ubiquitous database object might remind us of the possibilities, individually and collectively, to produce new, material and liberatory space for a range of identities. The specialized language needed to query our contemporary conditions is emergent and available through the incisive theory being
produced by liberatory scholarship, especially critical race studies. And our interdependence, as complex as our material-social relations are, made experiential, as Buddhists would have us realize, through direct encounter.
The ‘end-user’ of this specific sculptural object, then, I hope, has the opportunity to co-create the work by querying its articulations and engaging--through touch, sitting, pulling and reconfiguring--with an aesthetics that hew to a largely ignored, subaltern, tradition of lounge chair design found widely in East, Central and West Africa. The moment of audience engagement opening new possibility for understanding and co-creating space and identity.
In an NYT op-ed written in 2016, philosophers Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden offered a hearty reprimand of US philosophy departments, first highlighting that, “...of the top 50 philosophy doctoral programs in the English-speaking world, only 15 percent have any regular faculty members who teach any non-Western philosophy.” The two go on to outline the frustration of discourse in the discipline around issues of white supremacy (my paraphrase), whether the representation of faculty and students, or content. But a feature of their argument that stood out for me, was their recounting, “..Some of our colleagues defend this orientation on the grounds that non-European philosophy belongs only in “area studies” departments, like Asian Studies, African Studies or Latin American Studies.” So much of the ontological and epistemological weight of the humanities rests on philosophy, and especially the European canon.
The Garfield and Van Norden piece famously organized a great deal of debate and its timing coincided with a reinvigoration of similar debates around the 2016 presidential election. I’d just begun an MFA program where readings and conversations took up this postmodern crisis of identity, often settling in a sort of middle ground of Borriaud and Glissant inspired relationality. I believe the most common takeaway represents a kind of political de rigeur in art to universalize politics away from the identitarian.
Just this week Vice President Kamala Harris conceded a point to Senator Tim Scott that America is not a racist country. The Vice President would go on to encourage a reconciling with past and current racism, which we must disambiguate from the national identity.
I’ve had a number of conversations about the role of identity and identity politics in art. I was asked recently to consider their role against an interview, conducted by Folasade Ologundudu, with the celebrated art historian Darby English and subtitled, ‘Why the New Black Renaissance Might Actually Represent a Step Backwards.’ This New Black Renaissance refers to the corrective efforts of some galleries and museums to offer space to Black artists whose work represents unambiguous discourse of Black humanity, intersectional anti-racism and formally, black figuration.
Ologundudu reminds, “...English’s work on African American art history and thought challenges us to remember the capacity art has to change not only our lives but the ways in which we see ourselves and the world at large.” After asking English about an issue in art historiography with generalizing of Black art and artists, English responded:
Assessments of what Black artists do overwhelmingly boil down to one or two things: they show us things about ourselves or they show others things about us. Once upon a time, this discursive bondage, this limitation, was externally imposed: it was a way for anti-Black racism to keep the conceptual and practical ranges as narrow as possible. Today we produce it internally, replicating in our own image a situation where the range of subjects Black artists can speak to is shockingly narrow—far narrower than their actual engagements indicate—and we discuss practitioners as though they were interchangeable with one another.
English’s point is a welcome one and steeped in a recognition and advocacy on behalf of the individual experiences and voices of these artists. But I’d been asked to consider whether the article served as evidence of having moved beyond the time for identity politics in contemporary art.
If the project of art--and it is for my work--didactically, or in relation to society, to offer something to liberatory discourses, both theory and practice, then the answer is complicated.
In her book Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex and Science in the 19th century, Kyla Schuller, considers the emergent language of white fragility in the context of the national racial politics of the 2016 election, reaffirming the scholarship of many, that “...white emotional well-being is produced in part by the ritualized entertainments of the security state, which hinge on the regularized death of black people.” Schuller’s book considers the ontological and epistemological history of 19th century sentimentalism in the formation of racialized ideas of gender, especially notions of, epigentically and through the material experience of environment, shaping the hereditable characteristics of so-called races of people. For example, a 19th century sentamentalist’s intervention includes the aesthetic education of ‘primitive peoples’ towards increasing greater sensitivity to, especially civil society, in later generations.
Schuller cautions, “Today, models of human and nonhuman materiality that emphasize the impact of experience on hereditary material are once again accepted by the scientific mainstream, and a range of critical theories have reopened the idea of lively matter.”
The DNA in the work pictured here, and the accompanying text-based performance offered up
a consideration of an epistemological issue I ran across in a paper that looked at epigenetic alterations in the oxytocin receptor gene. Oxytocin, the love hormone, here was being considered in relation to obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I found the epistemological rub in the study’s description of having, “... investigated the association between OXTR DNA methylation [a natural and somatically occuring epigenetic process] and the OCD status of a Korean population.” The study also looked at age, and educational achievement. I have become concerned that an epistemologival framework in something as ontologically fraught as contemporary epigenetics is willing to consider ethnicity.
What if some researcher considers the genetic capacity for ‘love’ in young, Black people?
This is installation and performance documentation of an ongoing graphic novel project called Laocoon. The wall text pictured here reads:
The US crack epidemic—hereafter The Crack Wars—marks a nadir in federal efforts to combat illicit drug distribution and consumption that is the War on Drugs. America’s ghettoized urban, suburban and even exurban African-American populations suffered disproportionately under the brutalities of an invigorated coke industry and draconian attempts by their government at prohibition. In 1996, Gary Webb’s San Jose Mercury News series ‘Dark Alliance’ captured national attention charging the CIA with some measure of complicity in the wholesale importing of cocaine (as part of its anti-communist interventions in Latin America), expressly for the industrial production and distribution of crack. This multimedia graphic novel will interrogate, in Rashomon-like manner: popular histories, social geographies, material landscapes, Zen dialectics and autobiographical narrative situated in a psychoanalytic framework, in an effort to offer competitive models against prevailing Crack Wars propaganda for
understanding this episode of violently erupting American underworld.
It also informed audience members that the accompanying iPad and custom software allowed access the graphic novel’s script, a montage of transportation, communication and security infrastructure pointing at the material, geographic history of the Crack Wars and a Buddhist performative intervention, here shown where the audience member sees me and listens to a koan my Korean Zen teacher has allowed me to offer others.
I gave a talk on Trevor Paglen’s work at SAIC. Paglen is an artist, critical geographer, and recent MacArthur winner, whose artwork often involves the employ of volunteers, especially amateurs, in projects that illustrate our collective agency, often from within the material and social conditions of oppression and especially surveillance.
My talk on Paglen’s work was titled, ‘Trevor Paglen Has a Plan: A Formal Heuristics for Liberation’ and I offered a notion of a ‘heuristics of liberation’ borrowed in part from critical and Marxist geography, one of the central interests of my practice.
Specifically, I became interested in the geographer’s study of the relationships that make up--and the following phrase is important--the organic totality of existence described by the interface, or dialectics between material and social relations, like labor and the environment. Or the relationships between technology and production, distribution, and consumption. I enjoyed the descriptions geographers like Paglen offered for understanding existence in his essay, ‘Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space’ where he offered:
That geography [I’m paraphrasing here] is one, a transdisciplinary field
and is held up by two fundamental tenets: materialism [aka, existence is made up of matter/stuff] and two the production of space. In a nutshell, the production of space says that humans create the world around them and that humans are, in turn, created by the world around them. In other words, the human condition is characterized by a feedback loop between human activity and our material surroundings. In this view, space is not a container for human activities to take place within but is actively “produced” through human activity. The spaces humans produce, in turn, set powerful constraints upon subsequent activity.
Paglen goes on to define what he means by ‘experimental geography’, that cultural and intellectual practices produce space, even at the scale of the individual, whether geographer, artist, teacher, student, who might act now to produce liberatory space.
My assertion was that Paglen offers a heuristic approach to meaning-making and practice.
The subtly in his work, and that I feel is required of my writing, speaking and art, is one that offers opportunities for audiences to put subjects into relation without much in the way of explication. Audience participation, especially materially, might allow for the production of space for a more contemporary and democractic discourse.
I explained that I was also, in thinking about a heuristics of liberation, interested in a dialectic between the Mahayana tradition and especially Zen Buddhism of India, China, Korea, and Japan.
Slide 5
What is profoundly interesting to me is the correlation between geography’s materialist dialectic as driving force of history and the Zen Buddhist ontological proposition that, as Dogen Zenji wrote in the essay Uji from his magnum opus the Shobogenzo:
We should learn in practice that...the whole earth includes myriad phenomena and hundreds of things, and each phenomenon and each thing exists in the whole earth...When we arrive in the field of the ineffable, there is just one [concrete] thing and one [concrete] phenomenon, here and now...
An implication, perhaps familiar from popular notions of Buddhism and contemplative studies, is to act now in ways that expect any notions of liberation in the future.
Perhaps, if we take up new dialectical relationships, this here and now might emerge realized more fully--possibly a material, liberating, experience--especially for those myriad phenomena of the whole earth whose identities are understood poorly and out of sync with a larger, more complicated context.
Thomas Cleary writes in the forward of his translation of the Shobogenzo that Dogen’s writing, and I would add the word heuristically here, “Acting forcefully on the inertia of routine thought, [the Shobogenzo] demonstrates how the mind is used in working Zen and how literature can be used to foster and direct the Zen use of the mind.”
Clearly further explains:
Dogen’s magnum opus Shobogenzo, "Treasury of the Eye of True Teaching; is the first major Buddhist text to have been composed in the Japanese language,
written in a time when classical Chinese was considered the preferred medium for religious literature in Japan much in the same way that Latin and Arabic were the standard languages for philosophical discourse in medieval Europe. Shobogenzo contains many passages and phrases in Chinese embedded in the Japanese matrix of the text and manipulated with striking effect, producing an intense style which demands a great deal of concentration on the part of the reader. It may be said that the form as well as the content of the compositions in Shobogenzo is instrumental, in that it provokes definite effects on the attention and stream of consciousness of the reader.
These images of recent work document a performative 3D-printed action figure and playset after the work Akira Kurosawa and Jacob Lawrence. I have been traveling with it, documenting my engagement with environment, the work and related histories of the Great Migration and Buddhism in the Japanese cultural context. And I am hopeful of producing a moment, through writing, performance, or maybe subtle teaching, that works to bring my reader’s attention to and movement to work against oppressive conditions saddling the material experiences across a range of identities.
Cleary, Thomas, trans. “Shōbōgenzō, Zen Essays by Dogen.” Digitized by the Internet Archive, University of Hawaii Press, 1986, 140.
“Experimental Geography - Exhibitions - Independent Curators International.” Accessed April 30, 2021. https://curatorsintl.org/exhibitions/experimental_geography.
Garfield, Jay L., and Bryan W. Van Norden. “Opinion | If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is.” The New York Times, May 11, 2016, sec. Opinion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/if-philosophy-wont-diversify-lets-call-it what-it-really-is.html.
Gibbs, Freddie, and The Alchemist. Freddie Gibbs: God Is Perfect. Digital Recording. Accessed April 29, 2021. https://open.spotify.com/.
Ologundudu, Folasade, February 26, and 2021. “Art Historian Darby English on Why the New Black Renaissance Might Actually Represent a Step Backwards.” Artnet News, February 26, 2021. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/darby-english-1947080.
Paglen, Trevor. “Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space.” The Brooklyn Rail, March 6, 2009.
https://brooklynrail.org/2009/03/express/experimental-geography-from-cultural-product ion-to-the-production-of-space.
Park, Chun Il, Hae Won Kim, Sumoa Jeon, Jee In Kang, and Se Joo Kim. “Reduced DNA Methylation of the Oxytocin Receptor Gene Is Associated with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.” Clinical Epigenetics 12, no. 1 (December 2020): 101.
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13148-020-00890-w.
Schuller, Kyla. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Anima. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Scott-Heron, Gil. Skip Blumberg interview with Gil Scott-Heron: [The 90’s raw: Gil Scott-Heron] - Media Burn Archive. Interview by Skip Blumberg. VHS Tape, January 1, 1989. https://mediaburn.org/video/the-90s-raw-gil-scott-heron/.
