Maybe I can contribute by looping back to Clive Roberston's comments
about Stuart Hall in relation to what the network is or was.

'So while Hall acknowledges that cultural studies as a project is open-ended, “always open to that which it does not know yet, to that which it can’t yet name,” he also argues against pluralism and for the stakes (something at stake) of cultural studies.'

As someone who still thinks of what they do in relation to various
networks and curatorial activities as coming out of the history of
cultural studies, at least in part (although my work these days has
moved away from that, and I suspect is probably now unrecognisable to
most in the field as cultural studies, and more or less deliberately so,
for reasons I'm about to hint at), there are a couple of things that
interest me about Hall's 'Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies'
essay.

1) First, there's Hall’s acknowledgment in the same essay that the
boundary line he is attempting to mark out around cultural studies by
means of its politics is an 'arbitrary' one. 'I don't believe knowledge
is closed', he writes, 'but I do believe politics is impossible without
what I have called the "arbitrary closure".'

2) And second, the way there's a risk in Hall’s use of the word
‘tension’ when describing these two aspects of cultural studies (what
he's thinking here in terms of it's theoretical and political projects)
of implying that each side in this relationship retains a more or less
unified and stable identity which is equally valid; or that
'intellectual theoretical work' and politics exist in some kind of
dialectic. Whereas I wonder if a more interesting way of seeing this
relation is not as one of mutual transformation, where notions of
‘theory’ and ‘politics’ (and indeed ‘cultural studies’) are pushed
beyond their traditional delimitations and forced to rework their
relationship with one another.

If so, then it seems to me that we can’t say, as Hall did at the 2007
‘Cultural Studies Now’ conference at the University of East London, that
cultural studies is capable of questioning everything… except the
relation to the social formation; that what cultural studies does is
analyse culture in relation to its connection to the wider social
formation and that this connection is therefore sacrosanct. For Hall,
theory is a detour from a larger question in this respect, which
concerns rethinking the role of culture and its articulation with other
structures and processes in each time and place, each conjuncture. This,
for him, is cultural studies’ real connection with politics, its
political mission or 'common disposition of energy and direction'
(Williams).

(Can we see a similar 'arbitrary closure' at work in the way that the
intellectual theoretical work that is most acceptable and feted today
is often quite materialist in tenor?)

Moreover, if, to quote Clive quoting Filliou, '“Research is not the
domain of those who know; on the contrary it is the domain of those who
do not know, ”' I wonder if we can't also say the same of politics. In
which case the trick, perhaps, would be to find ways of actually
assuming what this means when it comes to politics and being 'political'.

Hope this helps.

Gary



On 11/02/2013 13:13, Clive Robertson wrote:
> In considering what the network is or was – even before calling its project organizing an “artwork” (and what is the hoped for gain of this description – for whom is it being described as such: for artists, critics, research funders, taxpayers, etc.?) it might be good to admit that Filliou’s concept of a an artists network as it gained popularity always looked different from the time and place of observation. Its signification was predictably altered by cultural change and by institutionalization. That is only to suggest that it meant something different for Brecht and Filliou, a lot of different things when employed by Filliou-inspired artist collectives and spaces of the 1970s, and so on along its paths to “re-discovery” and/or recapturing in the 21st century.
> For me it matters that Filliou’s statements came prefaced with what amounts to a social critique. So when Roddy quotes Filliou saying, “Everytime we turn our attention to what we don’t know, we are doing research” the statement is missing its preface which is, “Research is not the domain of those who know; on the contrary it is the domain of those who do not know.” Was Filliou poking at scholarly specialists (that now includes many of us as respondents) ? Probably. The set-up for announcing the Eternal Network/La Fete est Permanent is similar. “There is always someone making a fortune, someone going bankrupt – we in particular.” Does this suggest that artist poverty or precarity is a pre-condition for being a network member? Of course not. Filliou wrote, “As you can see, we included the fact of our being bankrupt as part of La Fete Permanente. To us, this an important element of the Eternal Network: including in it the harmful, painful or disagreeable things in life, as well as the pleasant, profitable ones.” (Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, Verlag Gebr,Konig, Koln, 1970) It was (he writes) supposed to help wean artists off of their allotted competitiveness. But was it what we would now call a “safe space?” Was the network brought into being with any socially operational effects in mind? Think of Facebook, not as a corporate string pulling, but how we try to use it with our “friends.” What works and doesn’t work when we try to interact? We have some general sense of what gets approval in our specific node but not much else. Do we describe our earliest use of FB an “artwork?”
> Speaking of and to the history of the network, I now want to detour via what Stuart Hall (co-founder of British Cultural Studies) wrote about that project’s history and the “will to connect” (“Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies,” 1992 ). (This was v. useful for me when I was seeking a way to trouble my view of the history of artist spaces as a doctoral project.)
> So while Hall acknowledges that cultural studies as a project is open-ended, “always open to that which it does not know yet, to that which it can’t yet name,” he also argues against pluralism and for the stakes (something at stake) of cultural studies. It will probably take a second post to get to the core of what I think the stakes of an collective artist practice could / might be in relation to a network and that has something to do with a present that appears to accept that the merging of functions of artist, curator, critic, and patron works out for the best of all involved. That collegial management is perhaps the only way forward for a brighter future?
> Like our view of art (on good days) Hall reviews c.s. as “a serious project, that is inscribed in what is sometimes called the “political” aspect of cultural studies,” not he adds, “ that there’s one politics inscribed within it.” The tension, Hall says, is “between a refusal to close the field, to police it, and fluency.”
> So what if any is the significance of artists formulating and maintaining a network? Hall cites Raymond Williams who wrote that “the relation between a project and a (discursive) formation is always decisive because they are different ways of materializing…and then describing a common disposition of energy and direction.” (Raymond Williams, “The Future of Cultural Studies, 1989).
> So I guess from this follows a question of whether or not (or at least in what sense) in this discussion are we bothered whether the “discursive formation” we are hailing is about “art” or “artists?” And in its vagueness, does it matter if the network had / has a “common direction” that in any way, shape or form might be called ‘political’ ?
>


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Gary Hall
Research Professor of Media and Performing Arts
Director of the Centre for Disruptive Media
School of Art and Design, Coventry University
Co-editor of Culture Machine
http://www.culturemachine.net
Co-founder of the Open Humanities Press
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
Website http://www.garyhall.info