How to be Both

I suppose, in many ways, this thesis was born out of necessity as a means to quieten a pounding spiritual tinnitus I felt as both an academic and a performer. During the day I could be one, offering analytic detachment and theoretical helixes. During the evening, on the cusp of performance, of presentation, these aspects of my being had to be jettisoned: if I indulged them while performing, the performance would fall apart under its own weight. I found I was occupied to two opposing drives: academic particularity, and musical openness and creativity. Whether or not it is or was truly the case, in my experience the impulse of criticism, of the world I inhabited daily, was clarification and specificity. Definitions, citations, solidity.

Conversely, my performance self was starved by such directness, and thrived in uncertainty, improvisation, the “moment”. It may perhaps seem either glib or nonsensical to elaborate these oppositions, but I found them crippling. I felt an inability to secede one for the other, or fluctuate between them. I had in my head the notion that I simply could not be anything but an individual; I had been so immured by my educational biases that the hegemonic of stark, quasi-Randian individualistic materialism had mutated its way into me. Reading Franco Berardi for fun did not help matters.

Each – the Academic and the Musician – was an Otherness transversing its own opposition. Their mutual approach resulted in a mutual eclipsing, an internal radical otherness that fed-back into its own impotent inactivity. How could resolve this tension? My solution, which I hope will aid others on the difficult path I have traversed, is what I call Optimistic Criticism.  

I will pause here for a brief caveat, or cop out: I am still – as of May 2019, with OC percolating for about eight months – unable to clearly and actively define what OC is. I am, however, getting much better at practicing it. Whether this is a boon or a flaw, I am yet to discover. At the current time, it seems fitting that a system which deliberately resists criticism has so far woven its web so as to be ever out of reach. If you peel back the layers of an onion to find its core, you will be left with nothing. So that OC is just like an onion, since anywhere one strives to nail it down into definitive clarity will always-already miss the totality. That and it has made me cry more than I care to admit.

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Assumption: Dominant discourses aim to consolidate knowledge, through clarification and taxonomy.

Again, whether or not you agree with me here is moot, because its where I started. Reacting against this assumption, OC aims at challenging and creatively changing knowledge. This is done primarily by upending endings, refusing teleology, and revelling in complexity and uncertainty. It is a bastion of the excess of meaning, as applied to absolutely everything. A theory is a wonderful thing to abstract and examine and contemplate, but place it into the wild vagaries of the real world and it will inevitably shatter. For Reality is a fickle being that cares only for itself, something only Zen masters, I feel, can truly come to terms with.

Assumption two: people living are just trying to live their best way. There is no grand narrative, no manipulative undercurrents. People wish to do their best and be loved at the end of the day. They are more than their achievements, more than their material goods. Unfortunately, we have developed an educational and social system which continually enforces the opposite.

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OC shares some lineage with Artistic Research, yet they are not the same.[1] AR is a conceptual means which requires OC to justify itself, in its own futile way, to epistemic system from which it is excluding. AR’s growth is led by a borrowing, a negotiating, ideas sparked by “external” disciplines transferred onto an artistic path and followed to expand AR’s perspective.[2] OC, however, holds faiths absolutely in the subject, the reader and the author.

Assumption three: authenticity is impossible.

At the root of all philosophy is something quite simple: someone having an idea. Just that. It is a profound and rootless practice, which holds itself over a canyon in case it falls emptily into the void. A strange image, for the void is to be embrace. Western philosophical diktats strain towards the One, towards that clarity of Self, of Being of Things… OC, conversely, proceeds from it. This is not a dialectic reversal, for such a position is again self-defeating. It is an oscillation. I hope to reach out from a position of singularity and explore ever more curiously outwards. The simple inversion means barely one thing: I can have no ultimate endpoint, or goal. I am not here to prove anything, but to explore. To embrace OC is to dismiss the worry of (mis)appropriating something one knows little about, the “borrowing” upon which AR is so reliant sheds its worrisome burden. The researcher in AR is central, so why push them aside with reference to previous thinkers? Does it matter how AR arrived at its thoughts? Now, crucially, I am not suggesting the elimination of citation or credit of inspiration, but the move toward obliterating the apparent necessity of justification. That someone long dead articulated a thought you had been holding in a particular way does not invalidate that thought, or render it unoriginal.

There is no need, I posit, to historicise. The conceptual anchor, from anywhere, is shared and always-already speculative; any (re)appropriation of theory always is. Authenticity as a concept is impossible. Misappropriation is an impossibility rendered negative by zealous media narratives, which has resulted in the dangerous obfuscation between disrespect and appropriation. Even to the originators, the great minds of reference who are permitted ideas, concepts shift, authenticity changes. “External” theories are not monolithic pillars, the black immobility of 2001: A Space Odyssey we apes dance around, but less than a fluid. They do not just fill the space into which they are poured, but are gaseous: everywhere, nowhere: one only needs to know what one is seeking. OC is not a theory, or practice, or dogma, but – at best – a perspective, a thing to consider when encountering the innumerable actants within AR, philosophy and life in general.

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To be both is to accept the dearth of solidity of the Self, and to dance in the magnitude of Being.