Looking for Agency in the Knowledge-Based Institution

1. “The knowledge-based institution”, the title of the session of the December 2009 Epistemic Encounters meeting in Utrecht, during which this talk was presented, is an interesting and intriguing concept. It also requires clarification. What does it include and what falls out of its domain? The question appears to be legitimate, as there seems to exist no institution that would not be based on knowledge and that would not be structured and shaped by the knowledge produced, circulating and accumulating within and outside of it. Knowledge and the material practices related to it appear to constitute to a large extent what is called an institution. However, it should be clarified or at least considered what kind(s) of knowledge(s) we actually have in mind while using terms such as “knowledge production” and concepts regarding the supposed knowledge-baseness of institutions? And what would be the changes required to attain the “right” kind of a knowledge-based institution?
Knowledge is a broad, philosophically and historically saturated whilst ultimately vague concept, that is in constant need of being specified and concretized. I am certainly not embarking on an extensive lecture about epistemology, but it should be stressed that the social epistemology and the various sociologies of knowledge, from the Husserlian phenomenological school to Bourdieu and feminist as well as subaltern epistemologies, have been instrumental in rendering knowledge as socially fabricated and distributed, as traded and commodified, as specialist and arcane, or as popular and widely accessible. Indeed, accessibility and availability appear to be of utmost importance when it comes to discussing a politics of knowledge in the interest of fostering a radically democratic institution.
In societies in which “knowledge” has been moved next to “property” and “labor” as a “steering mechanism”(Nico Stehr), immaterial labor, to deploy the pertinent notion that originated in the vocabulary of post-operaismo – where it is supposed to embrace the entire field of “knowledge, information, communications, relations or even affects” (Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt) – has become the source of social and economic value production, that is, the object of exploitation and class struggle. Production and exploitation of this kind take place in social spaces and the institutions they host (and thrive on) that are as much material, physical built environments as increasingly networked, virtual architectures and infrastructures of knowledge. The contemporary knowledge-based city is structured and managed by information technology and databases. It engenders partly new technologies of power maHKUzine and modes of governance and policy – from surveillance strategies to intellectual property regulations or the legal control of network access.
The city of the “network society” (Manuel Castell) features a complex “politics of knowledge”, comprising the governmental and corporate management of biotechnological or computer programming knowledge while likewise being involved in the promotion of the cultural or “creative“ industries, from advertisement agencies to internet start-ups, from fashion designer stores to television studios, from universities to museums.
What share do the visual arts have in the knowledge-based polis?1
In what ways are they conceived and perceived as providing new knowledge and entailing new methodologies of innovation? What are the modes of exchange and encounter and what kind of communicative and thinking “styles” guide the flow of what kind of knowledge? How are artistic and other archives of the present and the recent past configurated (technologically, cognition-wise, socially)? How are knowledge spaces being organized and designed, how are “epistemic encounters” being staged and controlled?

2. Concerning artistic production and in terms of the deployment and feeding of distributed knowledge networks in the age of relational, participatory, collaborative, peer-to-peer prosumer or simply corporate aesthetics this may lead to the question what the critical effects of such changes might be – not only on the principle of individualized authorship but also, and probably even more so, on the public roles that the visual arts and their producers, curators, educators, researchers and other actors can inhabit. The knowledge-based and knowledge-producing institutions, being government-run, privately funded or self-organized, increasingly endorse the arts as vital and promising contributors of epistemic value, as potential partners in cultural (educational-economic) schemes fostering new scientific-artistic communities. Who will be granted access to these emerging transnational clusters and networks of exchange of people and knowledgeentities?
And who is going to be prepared to take critical stances?
Craig Calhoun, a historian of social movements and revolutionary struggle, recently said about the university as the quintessential knowledgebased institution that even though it does not embody “some form of perfection to be defended at all times, for all purposes, and all peoples” it would – “in some specific circumstances, certain historical periods, certain institutional configurations, and certain cultural contexts” – deserve support. Following Calhoun, such support should depend on whether universities underwrite “a critical public sphere”, albeit this commitment should not be reduced to the issue of the creation of knowledge but of the “capacity for knowledge to inform public life and the making of collective choices in society.” For Calhoun it seems “that universities gain a significant part of their claim on us from this capacity. Therefore, we ought to be judging them in terms of how well they are doing on this and judging their internal institutional set-up. And this goes for all of science. If universities are only organized so that they produce technical knowledge for experts, that is a failing.” Calhoun goes on to ask, in what is very much a Bourdieu-informed line of questioning, how individuals within a knowledge institution such as the university are more or less ready and prepared to establish links between the inner workings of the institution and the larger public sphere. He wonders if individuals can “speak without attention to their place in the institution”, since “the people the university most empowers to speak, that is, prepares best to speak by enabling them to gather the intellectual
resources necessary and gives them the most advantageous public podia to speak, are people who are, by their positions in the field, predisposed not to see some of the problems. The people who are predisposed by their positions in the field to see some of the problems do not have the podium, but also may not have the same analytical opportunity.” Pointing to a “systematic disempowering” of critical positions on and by the academic field, Calhoun stresses the conditions that really do work “to make the critical position less well-articulated, in very powerful ways, including the dispositions of those people involved. The people whose first-hand experience would most equip them for this have the hardest time finding the time to write a book, and getting access, and a publisher, and all that
kind of stuff.” Consequently, Calhoun argues, “people who would be, by choice, key participants in a larger public sphere and who would be, by experience, prepared to be really critical intellectuals in that larger
public sphere are disempowered and expelled in that larger public sphere and struggle to “make do” under considerable handicaps in a different public sphere.” He then moves on to speak about social capital, “the individual resources available for entering into various kinds of social activities or public activities” and finishes by asking “what are the implications across institutional sectors of the rise of private property fundamentalism over public good arguments?”2
I have quoted Calhoun at such length because by drawing a connection between the forces that organize and allocate the space of critique (the criticality of an institution) and the issue of public activity in relation to private property fundamentalism, he touches on a subject that usually remains invisible or, rather, invisibilized. If the positions of individual actors within an institution are less based on their respective knowledge and skills – as impossible it might be to measure them adequately – while it is predominantly social capital that renders access to speaking positions, publications, podia and cameras, the case of “knowledge production” should be reassessed along the lines of rigorous power/knowledge and field-related analyses.
As much as this may resemble a somewhat empty rhetorical gesture, as such rigor should be expected anyway, the need seems pertinent to remind oneself of the importance to assess and criticize the actual political and material boundaries and obstacles that render it difficult to develop and maintain a critical stance of dis-identification and de-legitimization within the “knowledge-based institution” – particularly under circumstances where these boundaries and obstacles are considered irrelevant or nonexistent, as is frequently the case with art schools/academies.

3. Obviously, the public/private conundrum is affecting to a large extent the institutions of art education and research, both in state-run art schools and museums, and in the emerging and/or established spaces of “new institutionalism”. It thus appears to be a necessity to analyze as specifically as possible the – imagined as well as real – freedoms and constraints of institutional and individual actors in these realms, how they are operating in the regime of the knowledge-based polis.
The obligation to cope with expectations and demands of “knowledge production” and “research” has become a common condition in the restructuring of art institutions while they are getting transformed into ever more reliable, active and contributing partners in the academic and economic networks of knowledge. Hence, some general remarks
addressing the situation of knowledge economies and policies and the issue of intellectual property in particular may be appropriate. What kind of agency or epistemic agency, if you will, is to be expected from a situation within a post-Fordist “informational paradigm” where the “appropriation of labor-power by capitalists does not result in product so much as potential”, a potential that “takes the “immaterial form” of intellectual property whose value is largely unquantifiable and is subject to the vagaries of speculative finance markets”?3 Media theorist Ned Rossiter is very clear about this. Particularly “in the case of government institutions that do not recognize an individual's intellectual property rights”, Rossiter claims, “there is nothing to “hand over” in the first instance (…) the creative potential of work, as registered in and transformed into the juridico-political form of intellectual property, is undermined by the fact that such a social relation – the hegemonic form of legitimacy – is not recognized.” According to this line of reasoning, the service of knowledge labor in the knowledge-based institution assumes “an economic value as wage labor – that is, labor, separated
from its product.” As such it does not bears any relationship to the “potential economic value generated by the exploitation of intellectual property. In effect, then, “creativity” goes right under the radar.”4
This peculiarly shady place or position of creative labor as potential complicates the issue of property and profitability, as its alienation or separation from the dimension of immediate intellectual property gains seems to open a window of opportunity, of exodus even. But going “under the radar“ should not be confused with autonomy or freedom as a condition of “creativity“ in post-Fordism. In other words, the fact that creativity-as-potential is not marketable according to copyright patterns and regulations should not lead to the assumption that it could linger freely, protected from exploitation. The abstracting transformation from practice into property always is exploitative. If only in the sense that “practice” is devalued and disempowered by the rule of marketization.
Or, as Rossiter puts it, “(...) the challenge for creative workers is (...) to create work that holds not only the maximum potential for selffulfillment and group cooperation on a project, but just as importantly, creative workers need to situate themselves in ways that close down the possibility of exploitation.”5
But how is such “closing down” to be imagined, what strategies are available and how do such deliberations relate to what Craig Calhoun remarks about the inequalities and asymmetries of actual positions within the university? Once again I would like to turn to Ned Rossiter, who is an equally valuable source of critique of the political economies of knowledge-based institutions. “(...) within a discursive regime of neoliberalism that grants hegemony to those with greater institutional, political and economic purchase – for instance industry managers, government departments and university professors”, Rossiter argues, “there remains a constitutive outside of creative and service workers with little or no political representation. Such a condition of “invisibility” is symptomatic of the dependency of capital on the commodity value of labor-power.”6

4. However, one might add that this very “condition of invisibility” also relates to the aforementioned possibility of placing/casting “creativity” outside of exploitation and the regimes of capitalist exploitation. Antonio Negri, the Italian philosopher of the “multitude” and the “immaterial” labor of those who constitute the “multitude” took this avenue in a 2003 lecture, in which he proposed a vision of labor “as something that can no longer be directly exploited” – “Unexploited labor
is creative labor, immaterial, concrete labor that is expressed as such.”7
Yet there is a problem entailed by such a view, especially for the kind of creative labor which has been linked for centuries most fervently with notions of freedom, independence, autonomy, non-exploitability etc., i.e. “art”. Time and again, “art” is rendered as to qualify almost ontologically for the role of a model to guide us into the immaterial-concrete outside/beyond of exploitation. It is this ideological premise that informs even the most radical approaches of artistic epistemology and social theory alike.
In their short preface to the pre-print of Commonwealth in the October 2009 issue of Artforum, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri explained why the “art community” might be one of the more recipient publics for their new book on the “commonwealth”, the very “powers of creation and imagination” which transcend the “purported realism” of current crisis-mongering. They claimed that “not only can art expose the norms and hierarchies of the existing social order, but it can give us the conceptual means to invent another world, making what had once seemed utterly impossible entirely realistic.” What is assumed by Negri and Hardt, therefore, is a sanguine notion of “art” as the agent of disclosure, critique and invention, “sometimes revealing the limits of our imagination and at other times fueling it.”
As flattering as this idea of art and its community may appear to the protagonists and practitioners of art themselves – it is in fact based on a certain utopianism or idealism. Fostering essentialisms across a wide array of philosophical and theoretical attitudes, from the most conservative to most self-proclaimed progressive, the notion of art as a special epistemic force carries loads of unquestioned presumptions.
As a crucial tool of legitimization, the mythological, “naturalized” liberty and incommensurability of art and artists, of their material practices and their ways of thinking, are routinely referred to and deployed in proposals for funding as well as in other processes of institutionalization. Hence art’s and artists’ apparently irreducible inventiveness and radicality is tangible in even the most official and governmental policy documents. In a recent 2009 paper on “future directions”, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), a UK funding body, proposed research into science as a system of knowledge “from an arts and humanities perspective”, investigating fundamental concepts of knowledge, discovery, creativity, innovation, imagination and curiosity. One of the objectives in this line of interrogation is including the “Creative and Performing Arts” into the always shifting research landscapes of the humanities. “Research in these areas”, the AHRC paper states, “enriches the originality, quality and significance of creative outputs in visual art, music, design, architecture, music, dance, drama, exhibition and creative writing for contemporary audiences and probes the significance of creative practices in the past. It also offers innovative practice-led methods of tackling research problems across a range of disciplines.”8
Though such emphasis on innovation and creativity is less than surprising, it is nonetheless indicative or even symptomatic of the kind of expectations associated with the arts when they are portrayed as inspiring collaborators in a pursuit of the new, of creatively “thinking
outside the box” etc., of participating in the production of knowledge.
Consciously or unconsciously, such discursive representation of the arts contributes to a discourse of “low autonomy”, i.e. a discourse in which “art’s” unique selling point becomes its “creative” participation in the kind of post-Fordist knowledge production that has been dubbed by theorists of science and research “Mode 2 Knowledge Production” and which is quite tellingly defined as “a constant flow back and forth between the fundamental and the applied, between the theoretical and the practical (...) by a shift away from the search for fundamental principles towards modes of enquiry oriented towards contextualized results.”9 Hence, how justified is after all the endorsement of art and the art community in the wider project of a politics of the common?
Which role are they supposed to play in a socio-economic environment of all-over flexibilization where the constant demand for contextualization and the bridging of theory and practice concurs with the celebration of “innovative” hybrids and assemblages by academics, policy-makers and sloganeers of the creative industries alike?

5. I have always wondered how the term “knowledge production” works in the area of the arts, for what reasons precisely it has been introduced in the curatorial and educational discourse, how it led to new formats of exhibition and display, of presenting the very act of thought and creation, to the point where “knowledge” is sanctified as a spectacular site for exhibition in its own right. Knowledge production readily connotes “knowledge economy” and “cognitive capitalism”, and its emphatic use within the art world appears problematic, to say the least. As Jean-François Lyotard wrote in his 1979 The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, “Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.” Narrowing the gap between economic and aesthetic modes of production seems to advance “economisation”; in the concept of knowledge production, the post-Fordist interchangeability of creativity and innovation, of criticality and employability, has probably found its perfect discursive emblem.
But knowledge production has also been deployed in a decidedly political and empowering sense, as the carving-out of self-organized and alternative modes of generating and disseminating knowledge(s).
Documenta11, for instance, introduced the discourse of knowledge production to a large art audience. Furnishing this concept metaphor with a far-reaching, geo-aesthetic agenda, the curators attempted to shift critical perspectives on art from the mere retinal to the epistemic, from the aesthetic to the educational. Okwui Enwezor made a claim for “new multilateral networks of knowledge production” and the reorientation toward a view of “the practice of art in the broader network of knowledge production” in a global(ized) world of post-colonialities.
In support and extension of such considerations, Sarat Maharaj solemnized the “spasmic, interdisciplinary probes, transitive, haphazard cognitive investigations of contemporary art practices”, their “dissipating interactions, imaginary archiving; epidemiological statistics, questionnaires and proceedings; ructions and commotions that are not pre-scripted.”10
These modulations of the art/knowledge compound deliberately moved the shifter, knowledge production, away from capitalist nominalism to entail the poetic (neo-Feyerabend) potentials of non-knowledge and
the refusal to explain; at the same time, such a semantic appropriation of knowledge production tends to disavow its difficult proximity to the realities of contemporary “edu-factories” and their techno-ideologies of knowledge production.
In order to gain a positive, critical sense of knowledge production which is in sync with the epistemic and educational turn performed by Documenta11’s discourse, a new kind of essentialism seems to be emerging. Art as knowledge production runs the risk of becoming an aestheticized epistemicism when portrayed solely as the production of a “good” (non)knowledge which, due to its alleged negative and and/or rhizomatic character, supposedly outperforms the “bad” modes of knowledge production operating in the realm of corporate managerialism as well as in the cultural and creative industries.
Here, a discerning, critical handling of the shifters which are used to characterize the current moves towards the epistemic in contemporary art seems more than appropriate.

6. This impression not only pertains to the sphere of curating and exhibiting art as knowledge production on a local or biennial scale, it also concerns, not entirely surprisingly and in an even more intense way, the academic field. “What matters ultimately in these festivities (of academic funding, of calls for application etc.)”, critic Chris Townsend writes in a recent article on the “spectacle of knowledge”, “is not the content of the project – its work – but the funding gained – for the instrumental measure of academic success will be the transfer of funds from one agency of the
society of the secretariat to another, not the “contribution to knowledge” – and the perpetuation of the myth that universities make such an autonomous, free, contribution rather than being cogs in the derisory named knowledge economy.”11 Townsend suggests “that thought, and intellectual endeavor, belong not in the university but in the gymnasium and the salon”, just as it has been suggested by some commentators “that the teaching of art no longer belongs within state-sanctioned art schools.” But what would be the logical outcome of such persuasion?
Doesn’t the current dynamic of endorsing the arts as knowledge producers lead to a set of standards and rules of non-institutional informalities, a sort of orthodoxy of the discursive, replacing the commodifiable “object”, while at the same time helping to support and legitimize a situation of artistic-intellectual class-less precariat as the flipside of the old school commodity art world's bling bling and celebrity?
Currently most of the actors in the academic networks of practicebase/led research in the arts tend to inhabit a kind of self-made epistemic-institutional aporia or double-bind. Artistic research has been characterized as an endeavor that exactly does the job of the cog in the machine mentioned above by Townsend, acting, that is, as a rhizomatic, decentring, counter-institutional troublemaker that purposefully fails, neglects, queers and ultimately overwrites the protocols of traditional academic assessment. The widely shared persuasion of the nonaffirmative, tinkering, hybrid and quintessential open and open-ended nature of artistic research as a particular genre of knowledge production, strongly reminds me of the description of the intentional failure that Conceptual Art was and had to be in the eyes of the British collective Art & Language. “What drove the discourse in practice”, Art & Language wrote in 2006, in hindsight of the classic period of Conceptual Art, “was no longer the need to produce the brief illusions of transparency but those recursive and dialogical processes by which the discourse itself was pursued and continued. This was a crucial moment in the establishment of what might be described as a new genre. (...) For us, if conceptual art was
to have a future, then it was not as conceptual art and, just as importantly, not as the form of institutional critique that has been named as conceptual art”s virtuous and exceptional exemplar. The narrative that has just been given supplies no positive account of distributive “democracy”, of dematerialization, or of any of the other overwrought fantasies of the conceptual art entrepreneur. It offers an account of the production of an unstable object that eventually inaugurates a sense of a new genre, but a genre that embraces a degree of hybridity and that can finally neither lay claim to material and medium specificity nor decisively rule it out.” For Art & Language, the concept of institutional critique needs to be “retheorized”, in order “to put up a critical resistance to the institution as it mutates and develops. It is in this resistance that we may find some vestige of the autonomy that was lost in the transfiguration of high modernism into expensively framed money, lost again in the trajectory from minimalist literalism to institutional critique, and lost once more in the postmodern development of conceptual art into architectural adjunct.”12
The desire to refrain and abstain from the function of adjunct and inspirational force of and within the academic architectures of funding and knowledge trading thus hits an open nerve. Certain debates that ponder the ontological place(s) of art or artistic practices conceived as pursuing and constructing a critical position toward their own institutional, political and economic entanglements and inflictions, seem to be locked in a logic of “productive” criticality, whereas the locus of this practice, also when encoded as “artistic research”, tends to be increasingly a paradoxical place that is in transition, immaterial and performative – a “manner of speaking”, as Art & Language would have it.
Hence, my question to further our discussion would be: What could be considered an effective strategy of carving out a niche where both “product” and “exodus” are deferred? By “effective” strategy I mean a strategy that doesn't turn the seemingly emancipatory and critical manoeuvres of disidentification with the political economy of the knowledge factory into a means of disempowerment. If artworks and artists in the knowledge-based institution are (self-) excluded from the processes of commodification and being transformed into intellectual property, what can be enabled by their “creativity”, their very “potential” that is assumed to be staying “under the radar”? Where and how is agency – artistic and epistemic – to be looked after?


1 The term polis has been chosen with deliberation (and referring to the deployment of this term by French sociologist Luc Boltanski) to render the deep imbrications
of material (urbanist-spatial, architectural, infrastructural etc.) and immaterial (cognitive,
psychic, social, aesthetic, cultural, legal, ethical, etc.) dimensions of urbanity; moreover, the knowledge-based polis is a
space of political conflict and contestation concerning the allocation, availability and
exploitation of "knowledge" and "human capital".

2 Michael McQuarrie Knowledge Production, Publicness, and the Structural Transformation
of the University: An Interview with Craig Calhoun, in Thesis Eleven, No. 84, February 2006

3-7 Ned Rossiter Organized Networks. Media Theory, Creative Labor, New Institutions (2006) Rotterdam: Nai Publishers

8 www.ahrc.ac.uk/About/Policy/Documents/Future%20Directions.pdf

9 Michael Gibbons et al. (eds.) The New Production of Knowledge. The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary
Societies (1994) Thousand Oaks: Sage

10 Sarat Maharaj Xeno-Epistemics:
Makeshift Kit for Sounding Visual Art as Knowledge Production and the Retinal Regimes (2002) Documenta11 Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue. Hatje Cantz.

11 Chris Townsend Knowledge as Spectacle: on Art in the Society of the Secretariat (2008) in Art Monthly

12 Art & Language Voices Off: Reflections on Conceptual Art (2006), in Critical Inquiry,
vol. 33