“If you’re trapped in the dream of the other, you’re fucked.” ― Gilles Deleuze
Many of our institutions in education, technology and the media are remarkably exclusive in terms of the culture, people and ideologies they produce. On one level its quite disturbing how so few voices can permeate our culture and ideas in such a holistic and totalising way. Yet we accept these ideas as if they were common sense. As if they were our own.
The arts and humanities, within the academy, has a remarkable way of dealing with this contradiction. It speaks as if it can imagine a world where inequality should not be so. It speaks against neoliberalism and contemporary servitude. It speaks against hierarchy and the formidable consequences of global capital and the political economy.
Yet its actions, and I’m talking about how the Arts and Humanities has positioned itself in contemporary Universities, often creates the opposite. While addressing, critiquing and analysing the practices of others, it forgets to look inwards and question its own practices, its own hierarchy and function in maintaining power structures.
Rather than becoming an alternative space for asking important questions and bringing about progressive change it actually ends up doing the opposite: keeping things the same. Its an illusion. Its a veil that conceals a rather empty and false reality. Its vein and individualistic. Its a world that I dont want to live in.
For me, because of this contradiction, academic critique, in many of the forms that it has taken for hundreds of years, just isn’t capable of working effectively anymore. The shelves of journals just gather dust as we wallow in the quagmire of an ‘ideal of theory’ from a bygone age.
I believe that in order to ask important questions around cultural and social justice that we need to be active in reproducing structures, forms and possibilities that can speak for themselves. We should not separate theory from practice, the linguistic from the embodied. We should not need to textualise and territorialise everything into our domain.
That is why I refuse to create work in ways that stop others from accessing it. I refuse to exclusively tie my work into the expensive journals that have bastardised our important work into insignificance, I refuse to exclusively tie myself into the media institutions that do not share my open ethics.
I will do all I can to be open with my work and practice and I will help others to do the same.
I will not be trapped in the dream of the other. I will not be fucked.
Although I will probably be fired.
