The Live Art of Sociology 9781138932326, 9781315679341

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This is a wonderful, lucid and scholarly exploration of the new opportunities for the conduct of an artful sociology that is vital and publicly engaged. The way Lambert links live sociology with debates about performativity and the queering of live sociology is brilliant and really pushes this cluster of methodological practices and ideas into new and exciting directions. Les Back, Professor, Sociology Department, Goldsmiths University of London, UK Cath Lambert has given us a treasure trove in The Live Art of Sociology, brimming as it is with intellectual resources and real-­world examples that breathe fresh life into sociological aesthetics. By encouraging us to recognise and stay with the discomfort that comes from uncertainty and not-­knowing, this beautifully written and generative work opens sociological thinking and methodology to the affective, haptic and other sensual registers of the social world. With queer feminist politics at its beating heart, The Live Art of Sociology is the book so many of us have been waiting for. An animated, insightful, witty and ethically provocative companion. Yasmin Gunaratnam, Reader, Sociology Department, Goldsmiths University of London, UK

The Live Art of Sociology

The Live Art of Sociology attends to the importance of ‘the live’ in contemporary social and political life. Taking existing work in live sociology as a starting point, this book considers some of its aspirations through unique empirical investigations. Queer and feminist theory and methods are also employed in exploring the challenges of researching live experiences and temporalities. With case study examples ranging from the work of live body artists to experiments in curating sociological research, Lambert successfully demonstrates the diverse ways in which art can provide the aesthetic and affective conditions for social and political disruption. By emphasising the political importance of how people, knowledges, materials, emotions and senses are configured and reconfigured, The Live Art of Sociology asserts a creative and vital role for sociology in not only representing but also generating social realities and political possibilities. Putting aesthetics at the heart of contemporary sociology and making a strong case for a renewed sociological aesthetics, this volume will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as postdoctoral researchers and academics interested in fields such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, Art and Visual Culture, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Leisure Studies. It will also be of interest to creative practitioners. Cath Lambert is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK.

Routledge Advances in Sociology

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/ SE0511 231 Child Figures, Literature, and Science Fragile Subjects Edited by Jutta Ahlbeck, Päivi Lappalainen, Kati Launis and Kirsi Tuohela 232 Mass Shootings in Comparative Perspective Communities and Shared Experiences in the Aftermath Johanna Nurmi 233 Mega-­E vents as Economies of the Imagination Creating Atmospheres for Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 Rodanthi Tzanelli 234 Senses In Cities Experiences of Urban Settings Edited by Kelvin E.Y. Low and Devorah Kalekin-­F ishman 235 Shared Housing, Shared Lives Everyday Experiences Across the Lifecourse Sue Heath, Katherine Davies, Gemma Edwards and Rachael M. Scicluna

236 ‘Helicopter Parenting’ and ‘Boomerang Children’ How Parents Support and Relate to Their Student and Co-­R esident Graduate Children Anne West and Jane Lewis 237 New Directions in Elite Studies Edited by Johan Heilbron, Felix Bühlmann, Johs. Hjellbrekke, Olav Korsnes and Mike Savage 238 Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements History’s Schools Edited by Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally 239 Social Generativity A Relational Paradigm for Social Change Edited by Mauro Magatti 240 The Live Art of Sociology Cath Lambert

The Live Art of Sociology

Cath Lambert

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Cath Lambert The right of Cath Lambert to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-93232-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-67934-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

For Tobias and Alexandra

Contents



List of figures Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: political aesthetics, cultural studies, queer and reparative theory and method

x xi

1

2 Politics and praxis of live art

32

3 Live sociology: generative and uncertain methodologies in action

58

4 Fierce pedagogies: producing dissensual knowledges and subjects

94

5 Bodies and embodied encounters in live practice

125

6 The im/possibilities of live time

153

7 Conclusions: towards a hopeful art

190



207

Index

Figures

Unless otherwise credited, all photographic images have been produced by the author. 3.1 Sociologists Talking, University of Warwick (2009) 3.2 Artwork produced by participants in Fun with Cancer Patients (2013) 3.3 Live Art Research Hub in Fun with Cancer Patients exhibition (2013) 3.4 Visitor responses to the creative methods that formed the basis of Jess’s poem, Fun with Cancer Patients (2013) 4.1 Table at Vincent Dance Theatre Art and Engagement workshop, Warwick Arts Centre (2015) 4.2 ‘Fertility works’, Vincent Dance Theatre Art and Engagement, Warwick Arts Centre (2015) 4.3 ‘Fertility works’, Vincent Dance Theatre Art and Engagement, Warwick Arts Centre (2015) 4.4 ‘Fertility works’, Vincent Dance Theatre Art and Engagement, Warwick Arts Centre (2015) 4.5 Open Barbers cutting hair, as seen through the mirrors in Queer Salon, Reinvention Centre, University of Warwick (2013)  4.6 FAAB perform My Old VC, Gender and Education Association conference, Cardiff (2005) 4.7 FAAB perform The Class Sketch, American Educational Research Association conference, San Francisco (2006) 6.1 Graeme Miller’s Track, Fierce festival, Birmingham (2012) 6.2 Graeme Miller’s Track, Fierce festival, Birmingham (2012) 6.3 View from Graeme Miller’s Track, Fierce festival, Birmingham (2012) 6.4 Peeping into archive boxes at What Happens at the Festival Stays at the Festival, Fierce festival, Article Gallery, Birmingham (2013)

65 76 82 88 103 106 107 108 111 113 116 166 167 168 181

Acknowledgements

This book draws on research, thinking, conversations, encounters and adventures spanning over a decade. It is therefore safe to say that all good friends and colleagues have played a part somewhere along the way: there are too many people in this category to name here, but I give a generalised note of gratitude and will thank you all properly (that is, with sparkling wine and samosas, of course) in the course of time. I am grateful to the collective of feminist academics who helped nurture and sustain my creativity and sanity in the latter stages of my PhD and the early days of my academic career. They are Louise Archer, Jacky Brine, Carole Leathwood, Diane Reay and Valerine Hey. Through our singing, satire, poetry and generally subversive performative interventions as FAAB, I learnt it was not only possible but also (sometimes) necessary to do academia differently. During this time I  also benefitted from the generous intellectual spirit and friendship of Analía Meo. Some of the earlier experimental practices discussed in this book were developed under the auspices of the Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research. The Reinvention Centre was a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning that ran for five years (2005–2010) between the Universities of Warwick and Oxford Brookes. The team I was lucky to work with at Warwick provided supportive, scholarly space for working against the grain of hegemonic knowledge production in higher education. Sociologists Talking (2008, 2009) and The Idea of a University (2010) exhibitions and the Reinvention Centre at Westwood room would not have happened without the spirit of collegiality, risk-­ taking and intellectual adventure that characterised the Reinvention Centre. I am particularly grateful to Mike Neary, Elisabeth Simbuerger, Adam Cartwright, Danny Wilding, Caroline Gibson and Paul Taylor. I owe a special thanks to the festival directors, artists and curators who have let me research alongside them and whose words and outputs feature in this  book. Harun Morrison and Laura McDermott, Fierce artistic directors between 2009 and 2016, shared their ideas and visions, provided access to artists, and generally carried on as though a sociologist in your midst was usual business (bearing in mind there is no such thing as usual business at Fierce). I

xii   Acknowledgements

am particularly grateful to the artists whose work and words I draw on in the book, especially Brian Lobel for having me along for Fun with Cancer Patients, and Charlotte Vincent and all the VDT team for the warm welcome and exciting discussions. I have benefitted from the support and encouragement of former and current colleagues and students from the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. There are many: thanks to you all, particularly the current head of department, John Solomos. A number of kind souls have given their time to read and comment on drafts of chapters, and I owe especially large drinks to Carol Wolkowitz, Carole Leathwood, Hannah Jones and Simone Helleren. Les Back provided thoughtful and generous comments on the whole book, for which I am extremely grateful. Writing a book and parenting young children have proved to be pretty incompatible tasks. ‘The book’ and ‘the kids’ have nonetheless, through their struggles for my attention and intermingling in my efforts to do both in similar and sometimes overlapping time-­frames, touched and doubtless shaped each other. In this context, I am grateful to friends and family for their practical and emotional support. To all the Kings Heath crew: thank you. Louise Lambert and Des Sharples: thank you. Marie and Norman Lambert: thank you. Matthew Lambert: thank you. John Lambert and Amber Deakin: thank you. Matt Metherell: thank you. To our child whisperer Lotte Jackson: thank you. Ella Jackson, Mark Jackson, Jackie Hodgson: thank you. It seems a trope of acknowledgements that it is hardly possible to thank partners enough: those who live in close proximity to an emerging book and its author, close enough to see, hear and feel the anxieties and exhilarations; those who are unwillingly implicated in the anti-­social labour patterns of writing to deadlines. My partner Lisa Metherell has been part of some of the adventures the book tells of, bringing her artistic knowledge and experience to help shape my fumbling ambitions and ideas. Her own research and practice have provoked and inspired me, and conversations with her have helped me out of disciplinary corners many times. In the latter stages of writing, she also took on the lion’s share of domestic and parenting labour. She has shared the disturbing spatio-­ temporalities that sleepless children and overdue manuscripts induce with invaluable good humour and perspective. Needless to say, I cannot thank her enough. The research and writing of this book have been made possible by the following allowances of time and resources. Research on Fierce’s archive received support from the University of Warwick’s Research Development Fund. Work with Brian Lobel on Fun with Cancer Patients received funding from the AHRC (ref AH/L005042/1). I have benefitted from generous study leave granted by the University of Warwick and from an Academic Returner’s Fellowship, a scheme that enables academics to ‘catch up’ with research following parental leave. I am indebted to the University and to the Department of Sociology for these periods of time that have enabled me to write this book. I could not have completed it without them.

Acknowledgements   xiii

I am grateful for the permission from Trentham Books to reprint the poem in Chapter 7, which was published in Lambert, C (2005) ‘Moving On’: A FAAB Poem, in J Satterwaite and E Atkinson (eds) Discourses of Education in the Age of New Imperialism, Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, pp. 183–188. This book is dedicated to my fabulous kids, Tobias and Alexandra, hinderers extraordinaire and insatiable in practising the art of life.

Chapter 1

Introduction Political aesthetics, cultural studies, queer and reparative theory and method

Blindfolded, my ears muffled, I relinquish my own capacities of sight and sound and follow the voice coming through my headphones which tells me when to move, how to move, what to ‘look’ for. The light touch of a stranger’s hand guides me as I tentatively bend down, reach out, feel texture beneath my hands, warmth on my skin. Once I am able to trust and let go of the desire to re-­orient myself in the ‘real world’ of my own senses, I allow myself to experience an alternative reality, a displacement of space and time (Lundl and Seitl, Symphony of a Missing Room 2011). I have my hair cut, and I pay for it with conversation (The Hair Cut Before the Party 2012). I witness a human being set alight (Cassils, Inextinguishable Fire 2016). I lie supine on a slow-­ moving track from which I encounter the underbelly of Birmingham’s ‘Spaghetti Junction’ road interchange (Graeme Miller, Track 2012). Seven girls and a female artist take apart a Nissan Sunny car in an oily garage in Digbeth, Birmingham (UK). I watch their slow, absorbed labour, and the ways their bodies navigate around the car and each other (Dina Rončević, Car Deconstructions 2014). I walk slowly along a line of about twenty metres in a car park over the course of two hours, watching, hearing, feeling the city around me race by (Hamish Fulton, Slow Walk 2012). I take a tour of Berlin in the streets of Birmingham (Playgroup, Berlin Love Tour 2012). Sitting in a library facing imminent demolition, I look out over the rooftops of the city I love and listen to Oscar Wilde’s The Unhappy Prince. At the end I shut my eyes to stop the tears, for I feel like a child again (Mette Edvardsen, Time has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine 2012). Squinting at the sun through the leaves of a sycamore, I lie on damp grass with headphones on. I have just died, or my dead body has just been laid out in this peaceful location. In a curiously calming and informative way a voice tells me what is happening to my body as, over the course of time, it rots and decompose (French and Mottershead, Woodland 2017).

These experiences describe a few of my encounters with live art. Live art includes performance, happenings: site-­specific, digital and experimental work in which the art is created or happens in space and time and in the presence of the audience.1 I am drawn to sociology and live art for the same reasons. At their best, they can be provocative and troubling; endlessly

2   Introduction

curious, they ask so what? questions, seeking answers in different ways. They can both engage the big stuff of life through explorations of the quotidian, wherever it seems to manifest. They are both of life, and yet stand apart, askance. The materials with which they work are individuals, communities, dialogue, situations, dissensus, and relations between people and objects in specific spatial and temporal contexts. Much live art occupies a counter-­ hegemonic register in relation to dominant forms of politics, economics, and social and personal relations. Radically different forms of knowledge, ways of knowing, and modes of knowledge generation and exchange often characterise live art practices in ways that both resonate with, and offer challenges to, debates within the social sciences. In an essay documenting some of the dominant themes of live art, Adrian Heathfield (2004: 7, original emphasis) notes that there has been ‘a profound impetus in contemporary art and culture towards the immediate, the immersive and the interactive: a shift to the live’. The analysis here seizes upon this shift. It makes connections between the live in art theory and practice with ‘live sociology’ (Back 2007). Live art shares some conceptual, methodological and ethical concerns with live sociology, but a sociological attentiveness to live artistic processes also brings new questions and provocations that, I argue, trouble, enhance and enliven sociological enquiry. Key to this attentiveness is recognition of the value of aesthetics to sociological enquiry. This value needs to be stated, as within the history of the discipline there is evidence of neglect of, and opposition to, aesthetics (for discussion see Wolff 1993; Bielby and Bielby 2004; Inglis 2005; de la Fuente 2007). One explanation for this rests on divergent definitions of what ‘aesthetics’ refers to. Eduardo de la Fuente (2007: 94) notes that The sociological suspicion of aesthetics is founded on the following two assumptions: firstly, that aesthetic discourse is historically specific and connected, at least in Western modernity, to the emergence of institutions of high culture; and, secondly, that the discourse of aesthetics conceals a class-­ specific ‘regime of value’ that prioritizes contemplation over embodied action. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984/2010) Distinction exemplifies such a critique. What Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) might refer to as a ‘paranoid reading’ of aesthetics within sociology has minimised alternative readings. Despite this, Georg Simmel coined the term ‘sociological aesthetics’ with an essay of that name in 1968, and it is possible to detect ideas prefiguring live sociology in Simmel’s (1968: 69) insistence that all phenomena be subject to an aesthetic gaze and that sociologists ‘involve ourselves deeply and lovingly with even the most common product’. Recognition of the aestheticisation of economic re/production in post-­ Fordist capitalism (Lash and Urry 1994) and attention to the aesthetics of ‘everyday life’ by Mike Featherstone (2007) have, amongst other work, kept

Introduction   3

aesthetics alive as a conceptual tool in sociological debate. With a shift from use- to sign-­value of commodities, the critical reach of aesthetics has expanded. Within the social sciences and humanities more generally, there have been real developments recognising the value and centrality of aesthetics in relation to our experience and understanding of contemporary social forms. A move away from understanding aesthetics in terms of ‘beauty’ or high culture in favour of the earlier etymology of the term from the Greek aisthētikos (perception by the senses) has opened up the field of aesthetics. In more recent years the concept has been subjected to rehabilitation and redefinition, not least due to Jacques Rancière (2004) and his work on the politics of aesthetics. For Rancière (2004: 13), aesthetic acts configure experiences and in so doing generate new forms of sense perception and of political subjectivity: aesthetics can be understood … as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. As I have discussed elsewhere (see Lambert 2012), this operationalisation of aesthetics as political has been taken up across and between disciplinary fields. Although Rancière has much to say about art (see Rancière 2009), he is clear that the arts do not constitute a superior or separate regime: The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible. (Rancière 2004: 19) My attention to live art proceeds in this spirit. I do not suggest that (live) art works with any different materials than are found in any other aspect of social life. However, as I go on to demonstrate, there are interesting and generative possibilities to the kinds of vitality and critical engagement that some live art practices enact. This provides, for the development of live sociology, an enticing resource. I hope by the end of this book to have put aesthetics at the heart of live sociology and in so doing to have made a strong case for a renewed sociological aesthetics. Although the discussion here represents a serious and critical engagement with the politico-­aesthetic resources of live art, I do not seek to undertake a sociological analysis of live art, and the relationship that my research encounters with live art and artists attempt to generate and sustain is additive and collaborative.

4   Introduction

Nonetheless, the discussion does, I hope, contribute something to a wider understanding and appreciation of the social and political value of contemporary art (see Silva 2008; Bell 2012, 2014). It remains the case that there has been little in-­depth scholarly, let alone sociological, research on contemporary live art and its wider value to society (see Heathfield 2004; Heddon and Klein 2012; Jones and Heathfield 2012; Doyle 2013; Johnson 2015). It is worth considering possible reasons for this neglect. In a blog post for the Cultural Value Network, Patrycja Kaszynska (2014: nd) notes that explaining the value of art has been a bit of a struggle for sociology … on the one hand, the alleged resistance of art to subject itself to empirical, social scrutiny on pain of losing its aura of mystique; on the other, the inability of sociology to deal with the value of art experiences qua artistic values, without reducing these experiences to a set of social determinants. The discussion here addresses these concerns, both by subjecting selected examples of live art and its affects to empirical analysis and by finding new ways to articulate art’s vital role in social and political becomings. In addition to the suggested difficulties of researching art, whether down to art’s ‘resistance’ or a sociological fear of researching something so passing, abstract and ‘unrepresentational’, live art can be challenging intellectually and emotionally. Jennifer Doyle (2013: 7) focuses on what she calls ‘difficult’ live art, pointing out that experiencing such work can be harder than engaging with other cultural forms that make similar emotional demands, such as accounts of trauma and suffering in books or films. Despite this, I agree with Dominic Johnson’s (2013: 12) invocation that ‘we should search for the bite, the flinch, and the grimace of one’s confusion in the face of Live Art, and never settle for anything less, despite the consolations that more convivial forms might sometimes offer’. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I map out the concerns which underpin this book, tracing where possible their origins; this involves paying some intellectual dues along the way. I begin by highlighting the ‘cultural value’ debates, which embroil cultural practitioners and social scientists in shared endeavours (Crossick and Kaszynska 2014; Warwick Commission 2015). I arrive at these debates by way of cultural studies, hoping to impart some of cultural studies’ generous and creative spirit into the somewhat instrumental concerns characterising cultural value discussions. From there, I turn to sociology, delineating the emergence of live sociological methods. A queer turn follows, establishing some of the theoretical resources that will be deployed in subsequent chapters and emphasising the importance of reparative and affective modes of engagement for developing live practices of sociology. A section on method/ology sets the reader up for what follows, and finally I provide an overview of the whole book.

Introduction   5

From cultural studies to cultural value My intellectual interest in the cultural, and specifically the inseparability of culture and politics, can be traced back to my inculcation in the anti-­discipline of cultural studies at the Centre for Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University, where I was a postgraduate student in the mid-­1990s. Many of the experiments in research and pedagogy that have become ‘innovative’ and ‘risky’, perhaps even ‘radical’ in the contemporary neoliberal academy, felt routine in cultural studies, for example seminars in nightclubs or public spaces; research co-­produced between teachers and students or academics and community groups; activist interventions as research; and a deployment of diverse media and cultural forms (see Hall and Jefferson 1975/2006; Hall et al. 1978; Gray 2003a). I hope some readers will discern the pulse of cultural studies beating at the heart of this project. In particular, I am grateful to the kind of sociological imagination, research ethic and critical attention to the ordinary complexities of human culture that I learnt from my engagement with scholars from CCCS. This includes an approach to research which foregrounds listening to what people have to say, being open to surprise, and being attentive to the sensory and affective aspects of human experiences (see Willis 1980; Gray 2003b; Back 2007). It draws on an assumption that identity is always in state of process and becoming (Hall 1997: 47); that politics and counter-­politics occur in the micro-­interactions of everyday experiences and encounters (Willis 1977; Williams 1981); that representation does not merely reflect but is constitutive of the world (Hall et al. 2013). Although I didn’t recognise it at the time, I gained an expansive (as well as politicised) concept of pedagogy from cultural studies. The early ‘greats’ of cultural studies – Raymond Williams, Simon Hoggart, Stuart Hall – articulated and realised the significance of public pedagogy, as well as the value of everyday and non-­canonical knowledge. The acknowledgement that cultural forms are themselves pedagogical has influenced my openness to the potential of artistic practice as a site for the generation of alternative know­ ledges. Although this writing predated the ‘affective turn’ (Massumi 2002; Clough and Halley 2007), it espoused an affective sensibility, recognising that for pedagogy and politics to connect with a range of publics involved understanding and enlisting their sensory and emotional engagement. In contemporary policy and academic discourse around the arts, it is more common to hear talk of culture in terms of its ‘value’ to society, a discursive move which separates culture and society and suggests that culture can be measured, assessed and evaluated in terms of the economic and social benefits it might bring. In this way, many of these discussions, delimited as they are by policy-­driven concerns with measurement and particular forms of ‘evidence’, narrow down what is understood by ‘culture’. They also separate culture out as something that can be isolated and relegated, rather than something embedded in, and constitutive of, human life. As Claire Bishop (2012: 13) points out, there are problems when art practices espousing a radical agenda become complicit

6   Introduction

with political and in particular with social policy agendas. As I illustrate in the following chapters, such art can indeed rend holes in the fabric of neoliberal normalcy; however, it can also serve to aid and abet community and cultural exclusion, being used to mask structural inequalities. It has been well documented that urban regeneration is driven by a ‘credo of creativity’ (Peck 2005: 740) or in more recent terms, ‘artwashing’ (Jones 2016), which, rather than providing challenges to or even compensations for the inequalities of neoliberalism, serves the interests of a growing creative elite and assists in the gentrification of city spaces. Bishop (2012: 14) notes that the UK and Northern Europe have experienced a transformation of the 1960s discourse of participation, creativity and community: these terms no longer occupy a subversive, anti-­authoritarian force, but have become a cornerstone of post-­industrial economic policy. Contradictions and complicities abound. Funding for both artists and academics is closely tied into this socio-­political agenda, and my own work has benefitted from, for example, the resurgence of debate about ‘cultural value’ (see Crossick and Kaszynska 2014).2 ‘Creativity’ has been co-­opted in similar ways to service barely disguised economic and social engineering agendas. Bishop (2012: 16) again: Through the discourse of creativity, the elitist activity of art is democratised, although today this leads to business rather than to Beuys.3 The dehierarchizing rhetoric of artists whose projects seek to facilitate creativity ends up sounding identical to government cultural policy geared towards the twin mantras of social inclusion and creative cities. I recognise the pragmatics of the cultural value agenda and also that important work can be, and is being, done under its remit in the circumscribed realities in which we live and work. However, it is also important to remain critical of discourse and practice that collude with neoliberal regimes. Being pragmatic and critical can often feel uncomfortable, but as Hannah Jones (2015: 188) writes of the tensions between social research and policy practice, ‘Perhaps this attention to working within contradiction, of staying uncomfortable, is essential to living according to a sociological imagination, and to practising public sociology.’ I would go so far as to suggest that in our contemporary political moment it is not possible to do publicly engaged sociological work without a degree of discomfort. I turn now to consider the state of the art of sociology and in particular the case for developing a live sociological methodology.

The future of sociology In this early part of the troubled, perplexing and overwrought twenty-­first century, sociology is once again under scrutiny, mostly of the reflexive kind, as sociologists and others debate the extent to which the discipline faces a ‘crisis’

Introduction   7

and what its future holds (Savage and Burrows 2007; Holmwood 2010; Gane and Back 2012). Such a sense of crisis is not new: Alvin Gouldner spoke of the ‘crisis of western sociology’ in 1971. Indeed, Carlos Frade (2016: 863) suggests that ‘so many crises permeate the history of the discipline that one could argue that crisis as a mode of temporal existence constitutes sociology’s very mode of existence’. However the specific context to the renewed sense of concern provides important context for the discussion here. Sociology’s strong-­hold on understanding and representing the social world has been rocked by the control and expertise of governments and private companies over digital (‘big’) data (Frade 2016), whilst postcolonial critiques call for a reconstitution of sociology if it is to engage adequately with contemporary global challenges (Bhambra 2016). The discussion here considers these conditions as prefiguring a (necessary) emergence rather than emergency in sociological theory and method, and as such, the live art of sociology speaks to ongoing critical debates with/in the disciplinary discourses of sociology about its past, present and future. In the same social, political, economic and cultural milieu in which sociology has edged (again) into alleged crisis, there has been a notable growth in the popularity and status of live art. My case for making live art more central to sociological thought and enquiry is made more extensively throughout the following pages; however, I summarise the arguments here. First, I contend that art can provide aesthetic and affective conditions for social and political disruption. It can unsettle and redistribute social, cultural, political and economic power geometries. The power of live art lies not in its representational capacities but in its generative capabilities. Art, of course, is able to re/present ideas, feelings, knowledges and sensations, and such representation is significant to us: ‘we are … representational creatures with representational habits of thought’ (O’Sullivan 2006: 16). However, representation reassures and validates existing knowledge, and whilst that is important work, we also need the resources to question and unsettle our ‘certainties’. Simon O’Sullivan (2006: 1) suggests that whilst representation ‘stymies thought’, With a genuine encounter however the contrary is the case. Our typical ways of being in the world are challenged, our systems of knowledge disrupted. We are forced to thought. The encounter then operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack. However this is not the end of the story, for the rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently. This is the creative moment of the encounter that obliges us to think otherwise. Life, when it truly is lived, is a history of these encounters, which will always necessarily occur beyond representation. The examples from live art and live sociology on which I draw throughout this book provide illustrations of where we are ‘forced to thought’ by such rupturing

8   Introduction

encounters. The fact of their occurring ‘beyond representation’ offers significant challenges to sociological theory and practice. Sociological tools are geared towards accessing, describing and analysing the social world in order to re/ present it. A crisis in representational forms has led to a feeling of impasse, particularly in relation to empirical investigation (Gane 2012); however, Les Back (2007: 165) is upbeat: Reassessing the appropriateness of our tools need not lead to epistemological defeat or a turning away from vital life. Rather, I want to suggest that it might invite an opportunity to bring sociology alive. Here I am using ‘live’ as an adjective to describe a sociology that is imbued with vitality. At the same time as configuring a vital sociology, live sociology is, in Back’s (2007: 165) words, a way of living and something that is practised as a vocation, a way of holding to the world and paying critical attention to it. So, ‘live’ is being used as a sociological verb. This book contributes to the development of live sociology in both these senses. In particular, the discussion seeks to make the case for sociological practice open to researching and communicating social realities that are non- (or barely) representational, and/or require different representational forms in order to understand and intervene in them. A sociology that is generative as well as representational. Like Back’s (2007) delineation of live sociology, this is a hopeful, energetic project, which, by situating vitality at its core, positions the sociologist in the midst of it all, rather than at a (spatial, temporal or intellectual) remove. Epistemological, ethical and methodological issues arise from this (re)positioning, and I attend to these throughout the book. To work with the live, with/in the moment, without trying to critically untangle everything all the time, means accepting uncertainty and contradiction. Queer thinkers often reframe uncertainty and contradiction as necessary and potentially generative, rather than problems to be resolved in favour of clarity and consensus (see Jagose 1997). I proceed in this queer spirit, and as such, I do not seek to move beyond contradiction but to work with it, no matter how uncomfortable that might be. As Sedgwick (1994: 3) puts it, there need to be ‘sites where the meanings [don’t] quite line up tidily with each other’. One image to which I frequently return is Yve Lomax’s (2005) suggestion that we grasp at meaning by ‘letting it slip through our fingers’. Whenever I have that slippery feeling, of catching onto something exciting, sensing its potential, I find myself shaping my hand as if to contain that something for long enough to feel some certainty (how long until certainty?) but my fingers grasp the air: I am left with the trace of an idea, a teasing slick in the palm of my hand. Yasmin Gunaratnam (2013: 18) notes a similar haptic gesture, describing the space of ‘chora’ as hard to pin down – ‘Like the small fish that I played with as a

Introduction   9

child in Sri Lanka, it slips through the analytic fingers.’ Such knowledge, Lomax (2005: 3) notes, is ‘fluid’ and ‘for some this is no way to know’. For my enquiry, like Lomax’s, located in the messiness of the live event with its unpredictable temporality, it may be the only way to know. This acceptance re/positions knowledge and, concomitantly, the researcher’s claims to authority. The researcher is dislocated, and their responsibility shifts from speaking ‘of ’ or ‘at’ something to instead speaking ‘with’ it (Lomax 2005: 7): Listening offers the possibility of propositions coming about which are made with, and so continuously are modified by, that which is sought to be spoken of and considered seriously. (Lomax 2000: xii) Lomax challenges the notion that ideas should always be developed in opposition or critical relation to existing ideas: ‘I speak of running with an idea rather than rushing to conclusions’ (2000: xiii). In this way, she offers a reparative mode of engagement, which resonates, I suggest, with both the development of live sociological methods and a queer feminist politics (Sedgwick 2003). It also speaks to the importance of working sociologically in collaboration with disciplinary others. Whilst interdisciplinarity can be favoured in some higher education contexts, including the allocation of research funding, interdisciplinary collaborations can be difficult in practice, and often claims to interdisciplinarity mask projects in which researchers or teachers from different disciplinary perspectives work alongside each other but do not exchange ideas or knowledges or fundamentally challenge each other’s thinking or methods (see Monk et al. 2017). In their ‘Manifesto for live sociology’, Les Back and Nirmal Puwar (2012: 11) emphasise the importance of creative collaborations: Working with artists, designers, musicians and film-­makers enables new modes of sociology to be developed and performed.… We open ourselves to collaborative relations wherein these specialists do not simply service sociologists. Rather we induce capacities for a respectful exchange, with both partners open to mutation and becoming otherwise. This mode of working with requires the sociologist to relinquish some measure of control and accept a productive degree of uncertainty as to what, if anything, might emerge from ‘mutation and becoming otherwise’. As in Lomax’s (2000, 2005) work, knowledge here is not something to be acquired but is collaborative, relational, becoming: Becoming is not the journey towards a state of being … being isn’t the state that one arrives at after the becoming, rather becoming is the movement of being … it is the movement that comes with time. (Lomax 2005: 7)

10   Introduction

The grasping hand, the way of knowing by letting it slip through your fingers, the slippery fish, the ideas we run with, are haptically apt ways to conceive knowledge as movement, as becoming. Such a conceptualisation involves nurturing methods attentive to movement, fluidity and ambiguity. The anthropologist Tim Ingold (2013: 108) uses the idea of ‘correspondence’ to capture the idea of working with: ‘To correspond with the world … is not to describe it, or to represent it, but to answer to it’. In his book Making he emphasises ways of thinking and knowing through doing, and highlights the importance of writing and researching not in order to represent or describe something but in order to respond to what is going on, and to think with it. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (2004: 454) idea of thinking from the materials, ‘the consciousness or thought of the matter-­flow’, Ingold (2013) experiments pedagogically with making and following the materials and material processes: The way of the craftsman [sic] … is to allow knowledge to grow from the crucible of our practical and observational arrangements with the beings and things around us.… This is to practise what I would like to call an art of inquiry. (Ingold 2013: 6) Such an art of enquiry, of a correspondence with the world, is useful for live sociology, enabling the temporal dimension of becoming and movement in real time, a movement that is sentient and has something to say. In the specific terms of this research, although I do attend ethnographically to its affects, live art is not presented solely as an object of ethnographic analysis: instead I aim for an intellectual and creative engagement, a moving engagement, with the processes and practices of live art. And as Sara Ahmed (2004) points out, to move is a physical and an emotional endeavour.

Queering live sociology This book takes an eclectic, interdisciplinary approach to theory that aligns with Stuart Hall’s (1997: 42) oft-­quoted claim that ‘Theory is always a detour on the way to something more important.’ I value detours, and would suggest that far from denigrating theory (after all, the ‘something more important’ may well be more, different, theory), this claim emphasises the role of theorising as process: it is a key part of what keeps enquiry and, indeed, life on the move. Running throughout the analysis here is a commitment to bringing queer feminist theory and practice to the live sociological project. Queer theory is itself multiple, contested, processual and contradictory. Judith Butler (1993: 228) argues: If the term queer is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflection and futural imaginings, it will have to

Introduction   11

remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes. Queer theory is inherently interdisciplinary, bringing a critical, disruptive perspective to everything it touches, unsettling knowledges that may be seen, from certain disciplinary stances, as certainties. The term ‘queer’ is used as an identity category, an activist politics, a methodology and a theoretical stance (see Giffney 2009). As David L Eng et al. (2005: 1) explain, queer emerged into public consciousness ‘around 1990’: It was a term that challenged the normalizing mechanisms of state power to name its sexual subjects: male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, natural or perverse. Given its commitment to interrogating the social processes that not only produced and recognized but also normalized and sustained identity, the political promise of the term resided specifically in its broad critique of multiple social antagonisms, including race, gender, class, nationality, and religion, in addition to sexuality. Queer theory began, then, with a critical concern to understand and transform sexual identifications and the discursive and material consequences of being labelled according to non-­heterosexual identity categories. Whilst it still retains that function and allegiance, queer has acquired much wider application as a political as well as conceptual force. David Halperin (1997: 62, original emphasis) asserts that ‘Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers.’ This gives queer enormous potential as a conceptual resource, enabling more complex analyses not only of sex/gender identifications, but also of the ways in which multiple forms of social difference assemble in the production of contemporary social subjects. Although it is possible to separate out queer and feminist theory and practice (not all queer work is feminist, and vice versa), in my own praxis they are inseparable. So it is that a queer and poststructuralist-­inflected feminist sensibility underpins every aspect of my research. Queer approaches to knowledge have much in common with calls from within social sciences to develop new methods and methodologies. In John Law’s (2004) book After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, he argues that despite their many strengths, social science methods are ‘blinkered’ by problematic metaphysical assumptions, and he proposes ways of thinking more generously about methods that work in relation to the messiness of life. Speaking on behalf of queer theorists, Heather Love (2016: 345, original emphasis) refers to Law’s (2004) arguments and declares that ‘When it comes to being messy, we are.’ The same applies to feminism. As Wendy Harcourt (in Harcourt et al. 2015: 161) puts it:

12   Introduction

Feminists are at ease with discomfort – it is what most of their work is about, both for them and the subjects they investigate, and the lives they want to enter and change with their research. Working on the borders, across disciplines, feminists are probing the given, the invisible, the pain of violence, the non-­voice, the non-­agency of the subject, oppression, histories no one thought to keep, cultures that build up whole literatures, constitutions that aim to subjugate one gender or deny the existence of others, and are speaking out about bodies that bleed, give birth, are bruised and battered. This is uncomfortable and messy but the only way we are going to get closer to understanding and changing lives and injustices. The ‘mess’ of feminist research has had significant influence on ‘malestream’ social science, not least because it has been written about extensively as methodology, enabling its application to any enquiry receptive to the epistemological arguments (Gray 1997; Letherby 2003; Stanley and Wise 1993). However, the same cannot be said of queer theory, which has been deployed as theory and as activist politics but rarely as methodology. Love (2016: 345) notes how queer theorists have been slow to describe their modes of working as method ‘because the term as it is generally understood is ill suited to address the vagaries of embodied life’. However, change is afoot in both social sciences and queer studies. This shift has been marked by the publication in 2010 of Kath Browne and Catherine J Nash’s edited book Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, and from within queer scholarship, US-­based conferences refocusing queer, black and postcolonial studies through the lens of method (see Brim and Ghaziani 2016) as well as the publication of a special issue on queer method in Women’s Studies Quarterly (2016, 44: 3&4). In conjoining queer approaches and live sociological methods in this book, I hope to bring something to these emerging debates: at the same time, I aim to help normalise the use of feminist queer resources in sociological theory and practice as a generative lens, not only when the focus is sex/gender. A framing in queer theory is also relevant to the partially embedded and often collaborative role that characterises my research engagements. Jack Halberstam (2005: 163) writes about the relationship between queer cultural theorists and subcultural producers and the fact that these identifications and the functions of production and analysis often blur in the context of work on minority subcultures. Although I do not consider myself a cultural producer, I do include examples of my own performance and curatorial-­based practice in the following chapters, and I acknowledge the extent to which my knowledge of, and access to, the practices about which I write depends in large part on my involvement with Fierce, a live art festival based in Birmingham (UK). My entanglements in Fierce’s history, in the form of its archive, and its future, in terms of my role on its board of trustees, locate me partially with/in the cultural world of contemporary live art. I recognise something of myself in Halberstam’s (2005: 163) delineation of a ‘new generation of queer theorists’ who are

Introduction   13

moving on from the split between densely theoretical queer theory in a psychoanalytic mode, on the one hand, and strictly ethnographic queer research, on the other – new queer cultural studies feeds off of and back into subcultural production. The academic might be the archivist, a coarchivist, a full-­ fledged participant in the subcultural scene that the scholar writes about. But only rarely does the queer theorist stand wholly apart from the subculture, examining it with an expert’s gaze. As I go on to argue in later discussion (see particularly Chapter 2), there is a shared and, indeed, embroiled trajectory between queer praxis and live art, extending beyond my autobiographical investments. Many of the salient features of live art giving rise to its political potential spring from the qualities it shares with queer: it is radically indeterminate, anti-­representational, vital, fluid and disruptive, and often revels in generative failure; it celebrates difference, the subaltern, the unspeakable, the damaged; it generates and occupies alternative spaces and times; it bears witness. This book thus enacts a queer (d)alliance with live art, bringing as it does so an appreciation and interrogation of feminist queer theory and method to the development of live sociology.

Towards a reparative sociology Researching with knowledge as indeterminate and processual aligns with what has become known in queer and feminist literature as a ‘reparative’ approach. The so-­called ‘reparative turn’ followed Sedgwick’s (2003) provocative and brilliantly titled article ‘You’re so paranoid, you probably think this chapter is about you’, in which she problematises the ‘suspicious’ reading that dominates critical and deconstructive approaches (to gender and sexuality) in the humanities and social sciences. Sedgwick (2003) explains being driven to grasp the reparative by thinking differently about knowledge. She asks: What does knowledge do – the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects? (Sedgwick 2003: 124, original emphases) She details the ways in which the concept of paranoia has been privileged and she calls for a redress, not to displace suspicious or paranoid research but to allow other positions to be valued. Like live sociology, the ‘reparative turn’ thus emerged out of dissatisfaction with extant methods and regimes of knowledge production. Robyn Wiegman (2014: 7, original emphases) notes that the reparative turn represents a different way of framing knowledge. Reparation is therefore not an alternative to critique but rather,

14   Introduction

a means to compensate for its increasingly damaged authority. For in the political calculus of the present, where faith in the equation between knowledge and political transformation has undergone enormous attrition, many left-­oriented cultural critics, including queer feminist ones, have grown unsure of the self-­authorising thesis that has given political motive to  decades of scholarly work: that knowing is the means for knowing what to do. The kind of reading in which a critic engages not only reveals their impulses towards that object of study, but also denotes the form of authority with which they wish to make claims. Paranoid reading, as Elizabeth Freeman (2010: xiii) puts it, is ‘about having the problem solved ahead of time, about feeling more evolved than one’s context’. This makes explicit the temporal element to dwelling in the moment and attending to what unfolds, instead of rushing ahead to critique. Rather than working on or against the object of study, a reparative position works with. Researching ‘with’ suggests intimacy over critical distance. The focus, resonating with a live sociological project, is on attending, listening and interpreting in medias res. Wiegman (2014: 16) delineates the political work of interpretive practice undertaken by scholars associated with the reparative reading in the queer feminist archive: In emphasising the creative act – novels, films, memoirs – they all put faith in their objects of study as affectively rich environments for cultivating a response to the conditions of the political present, one that simultaneously embraces ambivalence, rejects the demands of progress, and forgoes the dominance of the symptom as the organising agency of criticism. In the process, the political value of interpretative practice quite definitely shifts, as ideological warfare is replaced by the priority of redescription and critique is downgraded to make room, as Sedgwick hoped, for other styles of thought. Sensation, we might say, displaces the authority of suspicion. What might it mean for live sociology to reconfigure research practice as such a creative act, ceding (some) authority to sensation? In reparative theory and practice (see also Love 2007; Freeman 2010), we see a focus on attending and listening to others, and emotions are given analytic purchase. Wiegman (2014: 7) again: symptomatic reading has come under assault by literary critics who express a desire for intimacy with objects of study they neither master nor disdain. In the name of ‘reparative reading’, ‘weak theory’, or compassionate redescription, they seek new environments of sensation for the objects they  study by displacing critical attachments once forged by correction, rejection, and anger with those crafted by affection, gratitude, solidarity and love.

Introduction   15

This broader affective shift is, I suggest, of critical importance to the development of live sociological imagination and methods; however, it is of note that this displacement from a critical to a ‘loving’ attachment has been practised largely within literary criticism, where the objects of compassionate attention are texts, or figures from literary history (e.g. Love 2007; Muñoz 2009; Freeman 2010). What does it mean for the sociologist to bring these critical insights to bear on contemporary social realities? What does it mean to research ethnographically ‘with’, in a reparative mode? Can recasting our role as sociologists in terms of ‘curation’, with its roots in ‘caring’, bring an affective dimension into our research endeavours, at the same time as acknowledging the politics of selection and valuation inherent to curatorial practice? (Puwar and Sharma 2012). The emotional stretch of ‘working with’ is explored in Chapter 5 in relation to embodied spectatorship and the development of an ethical account of how we bear witness to others’ suffering. In anticipation of a concern that deploying such reparative methodologies eschews a critical and analytical perspective, it is important to make clear from the outset that, like Wiegman (2014), I do not propose reparative reading as an alternative to critique. I am keen to hold onto Michel Foucault’s (1988: 155) definition of criticism as a process of showing ‘that things are not as self-­evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-­evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practising criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.’ At the same time, and in a process which is accorded the same value, I want to dwell with the difficult gestures, maybe even those that appear facile but are far from it. Not by way of accepting their ‘self-­evidence’ but rather, as a way to see what they have to say for themselves, before rushing in to ‘expose’ (or impose?) reality in order to bring about social transformation (Foucault 1988). As such, and once more risking discomfort, the research and analysis that this book draws on, proposes and enacts is a mixture of empirical research and critical analysis, and reparative and exploratory methods. A reparative approach to knowledge production and the power relationship assumed between researcher and researched resonates with Rancière’s (1991) call for an assumption of equality at the outset of a relationship – he specifically refers to teacher/student (1991) and artist/spectator (2009) relations. Rancière (2003) is critical of the ‘sociologist king’, working to reveal hidden meanings and rendering audiences and learners as ignorant, in order that knowledge can be unveiled to them by the researcher and critic. Like Freeman (2010), he makes explicit the temporal element of this critical process, beginning with an assumption and assignment of ignorance in order that knowledge can be incrementally revealed/produced, in such a way that the researcher or critic always remains one step ahead. His alternative philosophy begins instead with an assumption of intellectual and creative capacity on the part of students, audiences or participants, enabling a different temporality to unfold (see Lambert 2012). In the following chapters, I discuss what such an assumption might look like in practice and think about how we can deploy it in sociological endeavours.

16   Introduction

Central to this is a positioning of the researcher and their accountability for their actions and productions, whether of words or things: ‘situated knowledges’, in Donna Haraway’s (1991) terms. In her critique of masculinist science and its claims to produce objective knowledge, Haraway (1991: 187, original emphases) called on feminists to ‘insist on a better account of the world’: ‘our’ problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and a no-­nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world. These problems remain pressing. Her argument, alongside Sandra Harding’s (1986) call for a ‘successor science’, is relevant for developing live sociological methods seeking to generate accountable, localised and embodied knowledges, which nonetheless recognise and connect with larger systems and patterns of power and in/equality: Feminists don’t need a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence, a story that loses track of its mediations just where someone might be held responsible for something, and of unlimited instrumental power. We don’t want a theory of innocent powers to represent the world … but we do need an earth-­wide network of connections, including the ability to partially translate knowledge among very different – and power-­differentiated – communities. We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for the future. (Haraway 1991: 187) This aspiration has influenced the research I have undertaken and the theorising that follows. I return to the question of situated knowledges in relation to live sociology in Chapter 3. For now, I offer a brief account of the methodology and methods on which the discussion in this book draws.

Some notes on method/ology The slogans we ought to raise are surely these: ‘Every man his own methodologist! Methodologists! Get to work!’ (Mills 1959: 137) Gender presumptions aside, I am sympathetic to the spirit and message of C Wright Mills’ (1959) sloganeering in The Sociological Imagination. As Nick Gane (2012: 52) highlights, the problems facing sociology that Mills diagnosed in the mid-­twentieth century are still applicable today. Sociology, Mills declared,

Introduction   17

was torn between abstracted empiricism, on the one hand, and a fetishisation of ‘grand’ theory, on the other. Instead, what is called for is a reworking of existing concepts and the development of new theory in the service of particular tasks, and a contingent approach to methods that are developed in response to empirical realities rather than the deployment of ‘off the shelf ’ techniques regardless of their utility. Driven by the desire to construct live sociology through close investigation of – and dwelling and learning with – live encounters, my methods constitute a mixed bag. I would define my overall approach as ethnographic in the ruinous sense (Lather 1997). That is, I am committed to ethnography as an important and generative mode of sociological research but am also mindful of the contested nature of ethnography and its development through critique and renewal as a result of a number of influences, ‘crises’ and ‘turns’, such as the crisis of representation (Clifford and Marcus 1986); the linguistic, interpretive or rhetorical turn, bringing about as it did a crisis in legitimation (Atkinson 1990); and the narrative turn (Denzin 2000). The problematic historical tendency of ethnographic enquiry to stand in for or accurately narrate ‘the truth’ has been taken to task (Lather 1991; Britzman 2000), and there has been increasing suspicion of the authoritative ethnographic text in favour of more open-­ended, ‘messy’ and creative texts demonstrating the partiality and embodied location of the researcher as well as their artful production of the ethnographic story (Atkinson 1990; Richardson 2000). Feminist critique of methods promising objective knowledge has dovetailed with calls for a situated and accountable ‘ethnographic self ’ (Coffey 1999) who is not above or beyond the ethnographic field of social relations. The ruins that remain do not represent a scene of despair, but are hopeful and generative: just as actual ruins provide sites for sensual engagements, the exploration of temporalities and materials through which to explore our relationship with the past (Edensor 2007; DeSilvey and Edensor 2013), metaphorical ruins provide fertile grounds for thinking and building anew (Lather 1997; St Pierre and Pillow 2000). I have come to ethnography via cultural studies and educational research, both fields in which classic, vivid studies testify to the value of ethnography (Hargreaves 1967; Lacey 1970; Willis 1977; Ball 1981; Skeggs 1997). However, many of the features of classic ethnography have needed to be adapted when researching with/in the field of live art. Ethnography provides a means for examining a cultural site, focusing on meanings and knowledges produced by social agents within the context of that particular culture. As such, the ethnographic process traditionally consists of the researcher accessing, and partly constructing, a temporally and spatially bounded ‘field’ where they participate, observe, document and try to make sense of what they see, hear and feel in the process (Burgess 1984). Although there are few formal ethnographic ‘rules’, the duration of the research needs to be long enough for the researcher to gain familiarity and trust so as to get an accurate picture of ‘every-­day’ life within that social space, but not so long that they become ‘over-­familiar’ or behave with ‘over-­rapport’

18   Introduction

and so cannot critically assess what is going on (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995). As Sara Delamont (2002: 122) puts it, ‘Proper field-­work is like a casserole; it should simmer for a long time at a low heat.’ This research has simmered for several years, during which I have worked closely with Fierce live art festival in Birmingham as well as with a number of different artists. My earliest encounters with live and performance art were though Fierce in its earlier incarnation as Queerfest in the late 1990s, when I was a young queer person finding my feet in my new home of Birmingham. I can still recall the frisson of excitement, having glimpsed other possible worlds, when posters featuring the bodies of artists such as Franko B and Ron Athey appeared on billboards across the city. I attend to similar moments of aesthetic disruption and re-­signification more deeply in later chapters. My relationship with Fierce developed into something further than audience awareness when I shared an exhibition space with them at Mead Gallery in Warwick Arts Centre in 2010. I was curating The Idea of a University, a research exhibition based on a year-­long research collaboration with students and staff at Warwick,4 and the then artistic directors of Fierce, Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison, were curating a Fierce event in the same space. Our practice overlapped. I was already interested in the pedagogic value of what could be achieved through art spaces (see Lambert 2009, 2011, 2012), but began to get a feel for the political potential of participatory art. I accepted an invitation to join the board of trustees for Fierce, which opened up a new research arena and access to the ‘backstage’ world of artistic production. In the spring of 2012 I undertook an immersive ethnographic plunge into eleven intensive days of live art programmed for Fierce’s 2012 annual festival in Birmingham. This involved observing and experiencing all the scheduled events, which amounted to over 100 hours of participant observation. During and in between these experiences, I wrote detailed research notes documenting my own responses and also conversations with artists, fellow audience members and volunteers. I conducted (recorded and transcribed) formal interviews with several of the artists, and I also interviewed the Fierce Press Gang, a group of thirteen sixteen- to nineteen-­year-olds tasked with ‘capturing the story’ of Fierce 2012 through interviewing, photography and film. Before, during and after the festival, I made observational and analytical observations based on the extensive reviews, blogs, social media commentary, and video and image sharing which built up around the festival. I took photographs and used the extensive documentation provided by professionals and other audience members who distributed images and recordings via digital networks (see Lambert 2013). I draw on some of these materials in the following chapters. My involvement with Fierce’s live activities alerted me to the existence of their archive. I began some research – still ongoing – that simultaneously involved ordering and cataloguing the archive with the future intention of it becoming a publicly available resource.5 In 2013 this research fed into a public exhibition, What Happens at the Festival Stays at the Festival, at Article Gallery

Introduction   19

in Birmingham as part of Fierce festival 2013. Also in the 2013 festival, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), I worked closely with one artist, Brian Lobel, who was producing Fun with Cancer Patients.6 Spanning several months, Fun with Cancer Patients involved a residential workshop with young people who were undergoing or had recently received treatment for cancer, followed by the creative realisation of a number of their ideas into ‘actions’. These actions were documented and the documentation installed for a four-­week exhibition in a public art gallery (mac Birmingham). I approached Fun with Cancer Patients ethnographically, and for the public exhibition I experimented more explicitly with live sociological methods, designing a Live Art Research Hub into the installation, from where I could immerse myself in the affective space of the artwork. The research hub provides the most systematic attempt I have made to generate and attend to ‘audience’ or visitor responses to experiencing art. I address these methods and some of the research outcomes in greater detail in later chapters (see also Lambert 2016). My collaboration with Fierce also involves presentations at artist-­run events and public discussions with artists: for example, I held an after-­show discussion with artist Chris Goode following the performance of his show Weaklings at Warwick Arts Centre in 2015. Whilst such activities do not constitute methods in a traditional sense, they are part of my research-­informed engagement with live art and artists, and the experiences and conversations they entail inform the ideas and materials on which this book draws. In addition to this work with Fierce, I have also collaborated on distinct projects with other companies such as Vincent Dance Theatre7 (about which more in Chapter 5) and Stan’s Cafe.8 In this way, the cultural ‘site’ of my research is not always clearly delineated: whilst Fierce represents a porously bounded entity of people and activities located in the city of Birmingham, the ludic and fluid nature of festivals means that the events, relationships and meanings slip and stretch far beyond this and have taken me into new and different cultural worlds, for example those of individual artists. One example of this is the artist Cassils, whom I met via their involvement in Fierce festival in 2012 and subsequently studied their other performances (see Lambert 2017). Fierce and the wider landscape of contemporary live art are rendered in more depth and detail in the following chapter. The ethics of researching with live art requires a note, as it is one of the points where ‘disciplinary’ norms and expectations sometimes differ. With a training in traditional social science ethnographies, my usual practice, followed here whenever possible and appropriate, is to do my utmost to ensure the confidentiality and anonymity of participants, ensuring informed consent is obtained. Working within the realms of public art, these important processes can seem both weird and irrelevant, as the whole point about (most) art is to be seen, experienced, recognised. Artists and curators do not seek anonymity but, rather, credit for their work and their thoughts on it, and contemporary live art audiences, participants, artists and curators generally expect art work to be documented

20   Introduction

formally, for example to be filmed or photographed by an official festival photographer, as well as informally by people using mobile phone cameras to record and share their experiences. I have deployed an ethics of anonymity or credit, depending on what the person involved wished for or needed. In the case of children and young people, I have allocated them pseudonyms, and all research with public audience members follows usual social science protocol around anonymity and consent. As formal university ethics becomes increasingly a question of damage limitation, having live and complex ethical questions at the heart of our practice is ever more important. When ethical issues are tricky, there is rarely one right answer (despite the reassuring tick boxes), and situations need to be negotiated, worked though and reflected on continually for us to be as certain as we can be (which sometimes is still uncertain) that we are doing the right thing. Ethical principles developed in feminist methodologies provide the touchstone for my decision-­making (Fonow and Cook 2005). As has been noted, there is a scarcity of existing scholarship in the field of live art, and no work I can identify which takes an ethnographic or sociological approach. Writing from within performance studies, the work of Dominic Johnson (2013, 2015) has been massively helpful in providing a comprehensive and critical stance on live art as a sector, and the lives, philosophies and practices of a number of live artists. Johnson (2013: 6) highlights ‘the methodological problems posed by Live Art’ when trying to provide a historiographical account, largely due to contestations over what defines and constitutes live art practice and a partial documentation of live art practices from the pre-­digital era. There are also challenges to providing expansive and critical reviews of what Bishop (2012: 5) labels as ‘participatory’ art when it is physically impossible to ‘participate’ as a researcher in them all: To grasp participatory art from images alone is almost impossible: … They rarely provide more than fragmentary evidence, and convey nothing of the affective dynamic that propels artists to make these projects and people to participate in them. My project is very different from Johnson’s and Bishop’s in that I am not trying to be comprehensive in my selection of art or, indeed, make cogent claims about live art as a sector or (anti-)genre. Instead, my methodological approach has been to work closely with a small number of artists and events in order to say something about the potential of the ‘live’ in expressing, experiencing, understanding and shaping human complexities. Even so, I have found it important to draw on some artists and practices that I have not been able to encounter at first hand. Whilst Bishop (2012) is right about the near impossibility of documentation such as photographs or film capturing the participatory experience, it is important not to slip into inferring that live participation is ‘real’ set against the ‘representation’ of secondary evidence. I am mindful of Amelia Jones’ (1997)

Introduction   21

argument that different modes of engagement provide different evidence, which is not necessarily better or worse: While the experience of viewing a photograph and reading a text’s clearly different from that of sitting in a small room and watching an artist perform, neither has a privileged relationship to the historical ‘truth’ of the performance. (Jones 1997: 11) Jones (1997) goes on to suggest that live performance can become more meaningfully appraised later, as in the live moment it can be difficult to identify meaning. My own experiences of some performance works certainly attest to this: whilst the ‘affective dynamics’ to which Bishop (2012) refers were powerful in the live encounter, the wider significance of what I had experienced came much later, following my own critical reflection and often discussion with others. The use of audio-­visual documentation is also significant here. Increasingly, as I discuss in Chapter 6, live art is recorded in some way in order to re/ produce and preserve something of the encounter. This enables ‘secondary’ audiences to experience the work, and whilst it is clearly a different encounter engaging different senses – you don’t smell the sweat and the fear, or get so caught up in the ripple of others’ embodied emotions, when watching a film – it is still of course possible to get a good sense of the work and have a genuine affective reaction to it. Indeed, interviewing performance artist Ron Athey, Dominic Johnson (2015) asks him about the ‘mediation of video’ when his live work has been filmed, commenting that ‘showing your work on video seems to brutalise the image, making it more difficult to bear than in live performance. Why is this the case?’ Athey (in Johnson 2015: 211) replies: It’s something to do with the concentrated or forced gaze that video demands. Video drags you right down to the action, and ignores everything else outside the frame. The action becomes more brutal because it’s reduced to sight and sound alone, instead of all the responses an audience member might have to other stimuli, like the feeling of being among other people, or distractions, or the atmosphere in the room. As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 5, I had the opposite experience engaging with the live performance and subsequent film of Cassils’ Inextinguishable Fire (2015). For now, it is sufficient to note that different forms of experiencing art necessarily invoke different affects, and produce and enable different know­ ledges and potentially different subjectivities. Given the practical difficulties of experiencing live art first hand (for example the time and resources required to travel and experience the work), anyone working with live art needs to develop something of a ‘scavenger methodology’ (Halberstam 1998: 13), willing to mix live experience with digital and textual representations.

22   Introduction

Alongside these ethnographic encounters with live art and artists, I have experimented with a very different, though connected, method of enquiry. This approach is more ‘practice based’ (Barrett 2007; Kershaw et al. 2009; White 2014), involving the production of pedagogic space (see Lambert 2011), university and art gallery-­based exhibitions (Sociologists Talking 2008, 2009; The Idea of a University 2010; What Happens at the Festival Stays at the Festival 2013, see Chapter 3), performance in which I was an active collaborator (FAAB 2003–2007, see Chapter 4) and performance poetry (see Chapters 4 and 7). Within certain disciplinary areas, notably performance studies, art and design, and social care, it is common currency to talk about research as ‘practice based’, providing the space to produce and evaluate knowledge through sensory, experiential and affective forms of engagement with the world. Sarah Whatmore (2006: 606–607) talks of an ‘urgent need’ to supplement the familiar repertoire of humanist methods that rely on generating talk and text with experimental practices that amplify other sensory, bodily and affective registers and extend the company and modality of what constitutes a research subject. As more detailed later discussion elucidates, my creative practices do not all fit neatly into methodological categories, functioning as tools of both knowledge production and communication. It is important to note at this point that although arts or practice-­based research is not mainstream or even common sociological practice, I am far from alone in utilising such approaches (an overview of relevant historical and contemporary curatorial sociological activities is provided by Nirmal Puwar and Sanjay Sharma, 2012. See also Byrne et al. 2016; Rogally 2016). However, unless we theorise and package these ‘creative’ events in the usual ways – that is, by writing about them in journal article or book format – they remain marginal to the core business of sociological praxis. I hope by the end of this book to have made a convincing case for more routinely including such creative experiments into our research planning, practice and analysis. At the same time, inclusion and valuation should not equate to a rationalisation of our research processes that leads us back into the (paranoid) territory of authoritative knowledge claims and speaking ‘of ’ and about’ instead of ‘with’. As Trinh T Minh-­Ha (1991: 26) reminds us: a creative event does not grasp, it does not take possession, it is an excursion. More often than not, it requires that one leaves the realms of the known, and takes oneself where one does not expect, is not expected to be.

Beyond narrow and northern epistemologies Disenchantment is that moment of self-­recognition in which you say, ‘what I know is not enough for what I need to do’. We all know how we know what we already know, but we don’t know how to know what we don’t

Introduction   23

know. That is a very fundamental notion of western knowledge. Disenchantment is here understood as very positive term, not a negative one, it is actually the entry point from many interesting projects. (Rogoff in Vives and Pan 2015: np) The recurrent ‘crises’ in sociology identified earlier could be cast as disenchantment in the terms that Irit Rogoff (in Vives and Pan 2015) suggests. Disenchantment in her analysis is accompanied by a kind of exhaustion, which nonetheless is generative in providing a space or state of mind and body where ‘interesting projects’ emerge and take hold. Such disenchantment can be identified in projects that take social sciences to task for their dependence on and reification of knowledges and ways of knowing from the global north, as well as being neglectful in recognising the colonial trajectories of the development of sociology as a discipline (Connell 2007; de Sousa Santos 2016). The empirical focus of this study, as has been demonstrated, is narrowly focused on a localised geography circling around Birmingham (UK). Although I draw on secondary sources as examples, the discussion privileges the live artists with whose work I have been able to have a live encounter, and this has resulted in a canon of mostly white artists from the UK, the US or elsewhere in Europe. Panning out from these artists and their work, the contextual stories likewise privilege a partial perspective drawing on the histories and politics of the global north. There are well-­documented live art scenes in Eastern Asia (see Berghuis 2010) and South Africa (see Pather 2017), and artists from the global south get programmed into UK-­based festivals (and vice versa), but clearly these are a minority of artists, and it is complicated by funding and travel restrictions. Increasingly, critical discussions around live art (which abound in the live art scene) are turning towards global problems and the political role of live art in challenging and changing global inequities.9 For my own work, despite its restricted ethnographic focus, I hope to trouble categories of knowledge and ways of knowing in a manner that is consonant with wider developments to configure a global sociology (Bhambra and de Sousa Santos 2017). My methodological and epistemological approach, outlined above and developed further in the chapters to follow, resonates with calls for epistemologies of the south (de Sousa Santos 2016). My attempts to research ‘with’ concur with Tilley’s (2017: 28) critique of sociology’s ‘extractive tendencies’ whereby knowledge is considered as ‘raw’ until extracted and subjected to a process of ‘academic refinement’. In my use of research methods I pay close attention to the multiple knowledges produced at various stages of the non-­linear research process, and seek to avoid presumptive hierarchies between the sources, scales or stages of knowledge production. Tilley (2017) is also critical of the narratives of linear temporal development that underpin traditional sociological epistemologies, and in my close work with live practices I seek out not only alternative temporalities but also methods that will enable researchers to make more explicit the temporalities with/in which they work – the focus of Chapter 6. In that same

24   Introduction

chapter I also pay attention to the importance of the past in enabling us to live in and understand the present. Whilst my empirical focus is on the absences and erasures in queer histories and the missing or partial documentation of those histories, there are entanglements with the broader project of developing global or southern epistemologies within sociology in recognising that the ways stories have been told so far, and by whom, provide the epistemological and ontological conditions in which we now research. As such, a future orientation towards alternative and ‘alter-­native’ (Bonelli and Mattar 2017) epistemologies and ontologies needs to incorporate a revisiting of the past. For colonial methods, as for heteronormative methods (and, of course, these are overlapping categories), the contexts and sources may not always be the same, but they share difficult affective histories and therefore signal difficult affective methodologies.

Outline of book The rest of the book is organised as follows. The next chapter, Politics and praxis of live art, explores the imbrications of aesthetics and politics. By way of setting the stage for later analyses of live art’s political potential, some definitional discussion grapples with ‘politics’ as an (abstract) term and explores the ways in which many of the artists with whom I have worked explain their practice as political. I provide an introductory overview of the contested term ‘live art’ as it has emerged over several decades to loosely delineate a set of practices and a growing cultural sector. Fierce festival is also given a proper introduction. The chapter interrogates the ways in which the resources of live art might assist the sociological imagination at this time of deep collective despair and capitulation to the demands of neoliberal governmentality. Attention to live practice continues in Chapter 3, Live sociology: generative and uncertain methodologies in action, but with a focus on sociological practices. Existing scholarship in this field is mapped out before turning to some examples from my own practice. In particular, here I present research-­based exhibitions as cases through which to explore the possibilities of a ‘curatorial sociology’. Issues of representation are taken up, drawing on generative moments from my ethnographic research with Brian Lobel’s Fun with Cancer Patients to examine what can happen when representation ‘fails’. Such failures constitute and call forth different ways of knowing and accounting for what we (don’t) know, and what this means for sociological methodologies and methods is further developed though critical consideration of death in live sociology, drawing on interviews conducted as part of Fun with Cancer Patients. The chapter finishes by discussing the Live Art Research Hub, a collaborative experiment in live method, which produced encounters illustrative of live sociology’s generative as well as representational capacities and potential. My own practice also features in Chapter 4, Fierce pedagogies: producing dissensual knowledges and subjects, this time focusing on the production of pedagogic space and performance. The discussion here suggests that live art as

Introduction   25

generative disruption is a form of critical pedagogy, and I argue for a ‘fierce’ pedagogy, which is expansive and political and works though cultural forms, including research engagements. The live encounters I offer here – from the work of pedagogic/social artists as well as my own practice – have the potential to produce alternative knowledges by means of intersubjective engagement. Embodiment is key to this engagement, and in Chapter 5, Bodies and embodied encounters in live practice, bodies are the focus of critical analysis. Theoretical resources from queer feminist scholarship inform the discussion. Attention is paid to the political, activist possibilities of ‘body art’, and in particular, I focus on live body practices in which bodies are subjected to pain and suffering, implicating the spectator/participant as witness. The ethical and political provocations around empathetic witnessing are considered through the live body art of Cassils, Ron Athey and Martin O’Brien. I also attend to the generative role of audience bodies in live encounters using the work of Adrian Howells to think about knowledges and ways of knowing through embodied and intersubjective encounters with others. In Chapter 6, The im/possibilities of time, queer theory is again put to work in troubling and celebrating the temporalities of live practice. The discussion focuses on the ways in which queer work can help us re/think and re/enact the ‘present’ of our research encounters by ‘feeling backwards’ (Love 2007) whilst recognising that we are always moving on from ‘now’ in a state of becoming. The work of artists Graeme Miller, Mette Edvardsen and Monica Ross are examined, and I consider the role of documentation and archival practice in relation to live practice. Chapter 7, Conclusions: towards a hopeful art, draws the preceding discussions, arguments and evidence together in order to call for an art of live sociology open to researching all aspects of the social world, even that which appears barely intelligible or representational, whilst retaining a political commitment to intervening in the interests of social justice.

Notes 1 Live art is notoriously difficult to define, so this brief description is subject to expansion, clarification and contradiction as the book unfolds. 2 I received Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding to work on Brian Lobel’s Fun with Cancer Patients in 2013. 3 Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) was a German artist and university educator associated with Fluxus, performance and installation art. His idea of ‘social sculpture’ provided a role for participatory art in shaping society. 4 For more information see www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/cetl/filmspublications/ ideaofauniversity/. I discuss this and other exhibitions further in Chapter 3. 5 This initial archive research was conducted with funding from the University of Warwick’s Research Development Fund. 6 See www.funwithcancerpatients.com 7 See www.vincentdt.com 8 My collaboration with Stan’s Cafe is ongoing. I have worked as a researcher on a schools-­based project on ‘British Values’ and also on a series of walks around the city

26   Introduction with school children called Trailblazers, funded by Birmingham City Council; see www.stanscafe.co.uk/trailblazers.html. In 2016 we began an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded collaborative PhD project managed between Stan’s Cafe and the Departments of Sociology and Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. 9 For example, Bristol-­based In Between Time’s 2017 Live Art symposium entitled How Can Live Art Unfuck the World? had input from Australia, Estonia, Canada, China, Greece, Hong Kong, Syria, Slovenia, the UK and the US; see www.inbetweentime.co. uk/wp-­content/uploads/2016/10/MC_IBT_ProgNotes_Symposium_070217_v04_Web-­ copy.pdf

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Introduction   29 Jones, H (2015) Negotiating Cohesion, Inequality and Change: Uncomfortable Positions in Local Government, Bristol: Policy. Jones, J (2016) Artwashing: The new watchword for anti-­gentrification protestors, Guardian, Monday 18 July 2016, available at www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ jonathanjonesblog/2016/jul/18/artwashing-­new-watchword-­for-anti-­gentrificationprotesters (accessed May 2017). Jones, A and Heathfield, A (2012) (eds) Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, Bristol: Intellect. Kaszynska, P (2014) Sociology and art – the estranged bedfellows, The Cultural Value Network, available at http://culturalvalueinitiative.org/2014/01/15/sociology-­art-estranged-­ bedfellows-patrycja-­kaszynska/ (accessed May 2017). Kershaw, B, Allegue, L, Jones, S and Picinni, A (2009) (eds) Practice-­as-Research in Performance and Screen, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lacey, C (1970) Hightown Grammar, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lambert, C (2009) Pedagogies of participation in higher education: A case for research-­ based learning, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 17(3): 295–309. Lambert, C (2011) Psycho classrooms: Teaching as a work of art, Social and Cultural Geography, 12(1): 27–46. Lambert, C (2012) Redistributing the sensory: The critical pedagogy of Jacques Rancière, Critical Studies in Education, 53(2): 211–228. Lambert, C (2013) Live art as urban praxis: The political aesthetic of the city, Sociological Research Online, 18(3): 12, available at www.socresonline.org.uk/18/3/12.html Lambert, C (2016) The affective work of art: An ethnographic study of Brian Lobel’s Fun with Cancer Patients, The Sociological Review, 64(4): 929–950. Lambert, C (2017) Queering identity: Being and becoming queer in the art work of Cassils, in N Monk, M Lindgren, S McDonald and S Pasfield-­Neofitou (eds) Reconstructing Identity: A Transdisciplinary Approach, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 131–155. Lash, S and Urry, J (1994) Economies of Signs and Space, London: Sage. Lather, P (1991) Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy with/in the Postmodern, London: Routledge. Lather, P (1997) Drawing the line at angels: Working the ruins of feminist ethnography, Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(3): 285–304. Law, J (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, London: Routledge. Letherby, G (2003) Feminist Research in Theory and Practice, Buckingham: Open University Press. Lomax, Y (2000) Writing the Image: An Adventure with Art and Theory, London: IB Tauris. Lomax, Y (2005) Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time, London: IB Tauris. Love, H (2007) Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, London: Harvard University Press. Love, H (2016) Queer messes, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 44(3/4): 345–349. Massumi, B (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mills, C W (1959) The Sociological Imagination, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Monk, N, Lindgren, M, McDonald, S and Pasfield-­Neofitou, S (2017) (eds) Reconstructing Identity: A Transdisciplinary Approach, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

30   Introduction Muñoz, J E (2009) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, London: New York University Press. O’Sullivan, S (2006) Art Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond Representation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pather, J (2017) Live Art 2017 reflects the crises that are besetting the world, Daily Maverick, South Africa, 16 February 2017, available at www.dailymaverick.co.za/ article/2017-02-16-op-­ed-live-­art-2017-reflects-­the-crises-­that-are-­besetting-the-­world/ (accessed May 2017). Peck, J (2005) Struggling with the creative class, International Journal of Urban and Regional Development, 29(4): 740–770. Puwar, N and Sharma, S (2012) Curating sociology, in L Back and N Puwar (eds) Live Methods, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 40–63. Rancière, J (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rancière, J (2003) The Philosopher and His Poor, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rancière, J (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso. Rancière, J (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum. Richardson, L (2000) Writing. A method of inquiry, in N Denzin and Y Lincoln (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research, London: Sage, pp. 923–948. Rogally, B (2016) ‘Don’t show the play at the football ground, nobody will come’: The micro-­sociality of co-­produced research in an English provincial city, The Sociological Review, 64(4): 657–680. St Pierre, E and Pillow, W S (2000) (eds) Working the Ruins: Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education, New York: Routledge. Savage, M and Burrows, R (2007) The coming crisis of empirical sociology, Sociology, 41(5): 885–899. Sedgwick, E K (1994) Tendencies, London: Routledge. Sedgwick, E K (2003) Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or you’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you, in E K Sedgwick (ed.) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 123–151. Silva, E (2008) Cultural capital and visual art in the contemporary UK, Cultural Trends, 17(4): 267–287. Simmel, G (1968) Sociological Aesthetics, in P K Etzkorn (ed.) The Conflict in Modern Culture and other Essays, New York: Teachers College, pp. 68–80. Skeggs, B (1997) Formations of Class and Gender, London: Sage. Stanley, L and Wise, S (1993) Breaking Out Again, London: Routledge. Tilley, L (2017) Resisting piratic method by doing research otherwise, Sociology, 51(1): 27–42. Trinh, M H (1991) When the Moon Waxes Red: Representing Gender and Cultural Politics, London: Routledge. Vives, M and Pan, S F (2015) A conversation with Irit Rogoff: Where do we sit within all of this? A*Desk of Critical Thinking, 13 December 2015, available at www.a-­desk.org/ highlights/A-­conversation-with-­Irit-Rogoff.html?debut_autora_articles=-1#pagination _autora_articles (accessed May 2017). Warwick Commission (2015) Enriching Britain: Culture, Creativity and Growth, the 2015 Report by the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value, Coventry: University of Warwick, available at www2.warwick.ac.uk/research/warwickcommission/futureculture/finalreport/warwick_commission_final_report.pdf (accessed May 2017).

Introduction   31 Whatmore, S (2006) Materialist returns: Practising cultural geographies in and for a more-­than-human world, Cultural Geographies, 13(4): 600–610. White, C (2014) Practice as research: Knowledge how and knowledge whether, Contemporary Theatre Review, 12(4): 113–120. Wiegman, R (2014) The times we’re in: Queer feminist criticism and the reparative ‘turn’, Feminist Theory, 15(1): 425. Williams, R (1981) The Sociology of Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Willis, P (1977) Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, Farnborough: Saxon House. Willis, P (1980) Notes on method, in S Hall, D Hobson, A Lowe and P Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, London: Routledge, pp. 88–95. Wolff, J (1993) Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Women’s Studies Quarterly (2016) Special Issue on Queer Methods, 44(3&4).

Chapter 2

Politics and praxis of live art

Politics has sort of found me … you follow an aesthetic path and sooner or later you are going to bump into politics pretty hard. (Graeme Miller, artist, interview 2012) Anniversary – an act of memory … was a project that represented everything that Live Art can do and can achieve – the strategies artists can use to effect social, cultural, and political change, to create new relationships between art and activism, and to test the role art can play in the understanding and enactment of human rights. Acts of Memory was not art about politics, but was in itself an act of politics. (Lois Keiden, co-­founder and Director of Live Art Development Agency, 2015: 290–291, original emphases)

Introduction The live art of sociology called for/th in this book is politically and ethically engaged. In particular, it is concerned with attending to knowledges and subjectivities that may resist our usual empirical grasp. Such attentiveness deploys aesthetic and sensory resources and enables generative as well as representational encounters. In this chapter, I turn to the theory and practice of live art, a genre and cultural sector that exemplifies non- or anti-­representational modalities and at its best enacts a radical counter-­hegemonic politics. Live art, Adrian Heathfield (2004: 7) notes, contains a generative force, able ‘to shock, to destroy pretence, to break apart traditions of representation, to foreground the experiential, to open different kinds of engagement with meaning’. It is not difficult to see why such a force is of relevance to live sociology. Live art, I suggest, provides aesthetic resources with which we can build our capacities for resistance, for being and acting in and on the world in complex and contumacious ways. Art, like any aspect of life, operates with/in and against the political, social and economic milieu in which it happens. In this chapter I explore the various imbrications of aesthetics and politics, asking how sociologists might understand and exploit these resources in the current moment.

Politics and praxis of live art   33

The examples of live art with which I work in my research are, in different ways, relentlessly political. Often they are outspoken and unequivocal in their medium and message, expressing a kind of parrhesia, such as Cassils’ burning body in Inextinguishable Fire (2015). Sometimes they provide critical or alternative political interventions, such as Acts of Memory (2012) by Monica Ross, who, following the police shooting of the innocent twenty-­seven-year-­old Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in London, committed to learning the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights by heart and then reciting the Acts in collaboration with local participants in sixty public performances across the UK. Live experiments can create possibilities for personal and collective being in the world that are at odds with the usual ontological possibilities, such as the collective salon space generated by The Haircut Before the Party. As we see in Chapter 5, the personal is political in the embodied enactment of social injustice, suffering and trauma, and resistance. There is also a micro-­politics at work in the everyday and mundane decisions which artists, like researchers, make about their work and ways of working. This ethics of ‘presence’ resonates with the imperatives of live research, to be there, to witness, to account for and be held to account. I begin this chapter by wrestling with the idea of the political – a much-­used phrase – not to delimit its potential but in order to clarify what claims are being made when aesthetic encounters are regarded as having political effects. The discussion draws on insights from Jacques Rancière (2004) and Davide Panagia (2009), who demonstrate the necessity of aesthetic distribution and disruption for politics to occur. This leads to a consideration of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1986) concept of the ‘minor’, formulated in relation to literature but discussed here as a way of thinking about live art and the live art festival. The chapter then turns to address in more detail what live art is and does, mapping its genealogies and contemporary expressions in relation to wider political shifts before interrogating the relationship between contemporary live art practice and the enactment of day-­to-day politics. As the previous chapter established, the discussion in this book draws in part on empirical work carried out over the past decade involving Fierce, based in Birmingham (UK). Fierce has made (and continues to make) a significant contribution to live art through the curation of artists’ work in an international biennial festival. I delineate the festival’s development from 1998 to the present, highlighting the imbrication of Fierce’s artistic practice in the political and cultural fabric of society, in particular of the city of Birmingham. The final section considers the subversive possibilities of festivals, including their intervention in the aesthetic spatio-­temporal organisation of the city. To begin, I examine what politics means in relation to aesthetic practice and enquiry.

34   Politics and praxis of live art

Political aesthetics Mapping the progress of what she calls ‘participatory art’ onto wider socio-­ political developments, Claire Bishop (2012: 3) notes that From a Western European perspective, the social turn in contemporary art can be contextualised by two previous historical moments, both synonymous with political upheaval and movements for social change: the historic avant-­ garde in Europe circa 1917, and the so-­called ‘neo’ avant-­garde leading to 1968. Since the 1990s there has been an exponential resurgence in the development of participatory art practice. Bishop (2012) attributes this re/turn to social and participatory art practice to the fall of communism in 1989 and suggests that Each phase has been accompanied by a utopian rethinking of art’s relationship to the social and of its political potential – manifested in a reconsideration of the ways in which art is produced, consumed and debated. (2012: 3) Bishop’s (2012) book illustrates these three phases extensively with historical and contemporary case studies. My empirical focus is contemporary live practice. However, Bishop’s (2012) argument is important in demonstrating the confluence of social art practice, broadly defined, and periods of political status quo and transformation. Nested within these phases are specific political events around which artistic as well as intellectual energies coalesce: a notable example would be the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center (see Bennett 2012). The limited temporal framing of my contemporary account makes it harder to identify patterns in this way, and can also obfuscate the effect of art. As Bishop (2012) notes, art deemed a ‘failure’ at its time of conception can resonate in new and unintended ways in other times and places. When we undertake live research, we can likewise find ourselves temporally and spatially cloistered. Part of the live sociological imagination then needs to work creatively with temporality in order to incorporate the ‘hauntings’ (Gordon 2008) and future affects of live practice. These possibilities will be examined in more detail in the final chapter. The art of live sociology that this book pursues is enacted, necessarily, from my location in a set of geopolitical coordinates. As I write, the world appears ever more precarious, an ascendency of the political right aided by the entry of right-­wing politicians into mainstream positions in, at least notionally, democratic nations: most notably, of course, Donald Trump gaining the presidency of the United States on a ticket of racism, sexism, US exceptionalism and a promise to see divisive and exclusionary policies enacted in practice. In the UK, the news of Trump’s implausible victory followed in the wake of Brexit, a vote for the

Politics and praxis of live art   35

UK to leave the European Union, which also aligned closely with anti-­ immigrant, protectionist sentiments, with potentially devastating consequences for individuals, families and communities (Demir 2017). I have found in live art nourishment for the (sociological) imagination, and at this political moment such resources feel precarious. Writing in 1995, Donna Haraway (in Harvey and Haraway 1995: 519) talked about being unable to imagine what a world that isn’t capitalist could look like: ‘we are losing social effective imaginaries’, she noted, ‘and it matters in concrete, specific issues’. From a ‘knowledge economy’ perspective, we witness, and must try to explain or contest, the dystopian performances of ‘fake news’ as we revisit questions of truth, validity and reliability in the wake of an emerging digital multimedia acting in the service of what, drawing on Félix Guattari, Anne Sauvagnargues 2011: 173) calls ‘integrated world capitalism’: the latest avatar of globalized post-­industrial capitalism, which decentres the nuclei of power structure productive of goods and services, to move them towards structures that produce signs, the control of information (media, advertising, opinion polls) and subjective codings. The role of aesthetics in relation to these ‘subjective codings’ is central to the arguments made in this book. Whilst there is no doubt that aesthetic practices are often utilised in the service of capitalist and oppressive ideologies and practices, the aesthetic is also central to political resistance and new subjective becomings. Indeed, for French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2004), politics is the moments of aesthetic resistance – a claiming and redistribution of the sensory organisation of society. Moments of politics, so defined, are exceptional, and they are distinguished from what Rancière calls the ‘police’ order, a term he uses to describe the typical exercise of power as it is organised through institutions and processes. The police order distributes and legitimates the roles and subject positions that people occupy. Such an organisation maintains the hierarchical structures of a world in which people are presumed to have different capacities and therefore will occupy and fulfil different (and unequal) positions in the social order. As Oliver Davis (2010: 78–79) explains: What this regulatory framework assumes is that society is a whole of which all the parts are already known – already named and counted – and have merely to be arranged in the most harmonious and productive way. What such an order specifically excludes is the possibility of a dispute over the very naming and counting of the constituent parts … such a dispute, or ‘disagreement’, is for Rancière the very essence of politics. Such a dis- and re-­ordering is aesthetic, enabling political subjects to be seen, heard, recognised and legitimated. Although it is in his most recent work that Rancière has focused explicitly on the politics of art and aesthetics (Rancière

36   Politics and praxis of live art

2004, 2009), his interest in aesthetic experience emerged from his early archival research with the worker-­intellectuals presented in The Nights of Labour (1989). Here he demonstrated that the workers’ enactment of resistance and emancipation did not manifest in taking control of the workplace but in claiming and seizing the right to think, and to occupy the (bourgeois) terrain of aesthetic pleasure. So it is in my work with live artists that the terrain of aesthetic pleasure often serves as a key site for political interventions. Can the resources of live (art) practice assist the sociological imagination at this time of deep collective despair and capitulation to the demands of neoliberal governmentality? Like Rancière, the work of Davide Panagia (2009: 2) considers the ways in which ‘sensation interrupts common sense’: Politics happens when a relation of attachment or detachment is formed between heterological elements: it is part-­taking in the activities of representation that renders perceptible what had previously been insensible. (2009: 3) Live art encounters can constitute such moments of reorganisation, which render things accessible to sense perception and in so doing forge political relations. In fact Panagia’s (2009: 4) description of what happens when we experience a momentary ‘breakdown’ in the certainties that structure our lives could be written to describe the effect of a challenging live art encounter: These moments can be at once tragic or comic, fill us with despair or pleasure, give us insight or distract our trains of thought. Whatever the case may be, they are moments that exceed the limits that structure our daily living, and they interrupt the assurances that guarantee the slumber of subjectivity. They are for these reasons ethical moments, not because they are rule bound or normative, but because they compel us to relinquish our attachment and acknowledge that our subjectivities are inconsistent and open to repetitions of articulation. What Panagia (2009) articulates here is the very localised ways in which subjectivity forms the terrain of political transformation. Panagia’s (2009) argument works alongside contemporary understandings of affect as operating, and doing important political work, at a pre-­discursive level (see Clough and Halley 2007; Massumi 2010). Raymond Williams’ (1977) ‘structures of feeling’ remains a useful conceptual tool for recognising that social and political change does not just occur at the cognitive, public level but also is felt, subjectively and inter-­ subjectively. There is more work to be done on the political work of feelings, an argument to which I return in Chapters 5 and 6. A key feature of this generative and aesthetic definition of politics is that it is constituted by process, vitality and emergence. In the production of subjectivity and knowledge, it does not expose being but rather, enables becoming. Such an

Politics and praxis of live art   37

emphasis recognises the biopolitical tendencies of life as a dynamic force (Foucault 1990; Grosz 2004). It also aligns with queer feminist critiques of essentialist accounts of identity in favour of subjective becomings constituted by repetition, performativity and the continual breaking of habits (Anzaldúa 1987; Butler 1990). I return to the concept of becoming in relation to empirical examples in the following discussion. For now, I want to think about understanding the political work of live art in relation to mainstream practice.

Live art as a minor art One useful way to conceptualise the political work that live art does is by designating it the function of a ‘minor’ art form. Deleuze and Guattari (1986) define the minor in their book on Kafka. If the major articulates the hegemonic and habitual regimes of signification, the minor denotes a break or ‘deterritorialisation’ from and of these regimes. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1986), there are three key functions of a minor literature: it should (a) deterritorialise the major language, (b) be political, as processes of asignification are inherently political by providing a rupture in hegemonic regimes of representation, and (c) be collective. The deterritorialisation of the major language does not occur from outside a major literature but rather, takes the form of ‘stammering or stuttering’ (O’Sullivan 2006: 72) from within, which draws attention to the signification of the major language. Not surprisingly for a Deleuzoguattarian concept, it is the movement of the minor – the sense of becoming minor – that is significant, enabling it to break away from the immobilising power of the major (see also Deleuze 1993). A minor literature is collectively produced and enunciated. Emphasising this third function, Simon O’Sullivan (2006: 71) draws attention to the ways in which contemporary art practices that revolve around participatory, collective activities have an imminent, utopian function associated with the minor. He assigns feminist and postcolonial art practices and histories to a minor register in the sense that they involve speaking from within and against the major traditions of modernism in Western art. The dissident manifestos of Dada, Futurism, the Situationists, operating within but turning against modernism, also fit the definition of a minor. Of course, such a minor note is only ever contingent, and minor practices can become major. In terms of artistic media, if the major language of modern art is painting, other forms such as happenings and performance can have a deterritorialising function. O’Sullivan (2006: 72) declares that The expanded practices of today would be but the latest moment in this genealogy of a minor art positioned explicitly outside the gallery and indeed ‘outside’ typical and traditional definitions of art. Such expanded practices – as we see in the following section – encapsulate live art. Key to the minor/major relationship is the stance that the minor takes in relation to capitalism, and this is a relationship to which I return in thinking about

38   Politics and praxis of live art

the specificity of live art’s political interventions and those of Fierce in particular. If the international art market constitutes one of contemporary art’s major languages, then live art, with its ‘outsider’ status in form and content, occupies a minor key. O’Sullivan (2006: 76) notes: All of this gives the minor an affirmative function. To refuse, or somehow negate the existing language (and thus the existing major forms) is important, but a minor art must do more than this. It must also involve creation. It is also this that gives the stuttering and stammering of a minor practice such an inspirational, we might even say hopeful tenor. A minor art is always involved in the invention and imagining of new subjectivities as well as a turning away from those already in place. I now turn to present the ‘hopeful’ practices that constitute live art in more depth. I give a brief overview of the development of live art as a distinct cultural form before considering some examples of the diverse ways in which politics plays out in the work of selected live artists.

The political work of live art Live Art is now recognised as one of the most vital and instrumental creative spaces in the UK. Live Art is a research engine, driven by artists who are working across forms, contexts and spaces to open up new artistic models, new languages for the representation of ideas and identities, and new strategies for intervening in the public sphere. (Live Art Development Agency)1 Despite having influenced contemporary art practice for at least a century, live art retains an illusive status as a peripheral creative practice (see Kaye 1994; Klein 2012). This marginal status is partly due to the difficulty of capturing its often ephemeral form, resulting in a lack of documentation of live practice, particularly from work produced in the 1960s and 1970s. Its genealogy is bound up in that of performance (see Henri 1974; Goldberg 1988; Roms and Edwards 2012), and its corpus tends to include performance art, site-­specific practices, happenings, and digital and experimental work. The term ‘live art’ began to be used in the 1980s as a way to capture this expansive field. However, live art remains subject to contested definitions and interpretations: a fought-­over concept and set of practices. ‘Writing a history of live art is something of an impossible task’, states Deidre Heddon (2012a: 1) in the opening line in an edited book (Heddon and Klein 2012) that aims to do just that. Heddon (2012a) highlights the messy, non-­linear, unsettled and unsettling qualities of live art, and celebrates them; in my engagements with live art, I do the same.2 As I highlighted in Chapter 1, live art and queer praxis have always been entwined in my own experiences, and so it is no surprise that, like queer theory and practice,

Politics and praxis of live art   39

I regard the slippery, contested and ever-­shifting character of live art to be its key strength. Its fluidity and recalcitrance are what give it political and disruptive purchase, which in turn makes it so interesting and valuable to live sociology. Significant strands of live art’s lineage can be traced to the 1960s (Klein 2012; Roms and Edwards 2012; Saunders 2012), a time of social change and political protest marked by creative, activist and often angry happenings and movements. Experimental work such as Gustav Metzger’s ‘auto-­destructive’ art (see Metzger 1996) demonstrated the potentiality of ‘negative’ practice: In 1961 … Metzger performed one of the most famous acts of auto-­ destructive art when he threw hydrochloric acid at a sheet of nylon on London’s South Bank. ‘The important thing about burning a hole in that sheet,’ he recalls, ‘was that it opened up a new view across the Thames of St Paul’s cathedral’. Auto-­destructive art was never merely destructive. Destroy a canvas and you create shapes. (Jeffries 2012: np) A kind of ‘anti-­art’ emerged out of the avant-­garde movements of Futurism and Dada, of Fluxus and Happenings (Friedman 2012). These international groups and movements worked in different ways to reject dominant ways of organising society, constructing an anti-­war, anti-­bourgeois politics, which also rebelled against traditional forms of art and aesthetics. The art of performance, using the human body as artistic material, gained currency, with high-­profile works such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece in 1964 and a decade later Marina Abramović’s Rhythm O attracting international media attention. The (gendered) body emerged as a site of endurance and resistance, enacting social and political critique, and the encounters that were generated – as exemplified by the two works above – often raised critical questions about the violence, complicity and limits of human relationships (about which more in Chapter 5). Since then, live events and festivals have played, and continue to play, a vital role in establishing the material and cultural space and time in which practitioners and audiences can come together in order to create and experience live work. ‘Performance Platform’ began in 1979 as a one-­day event in the Midlands in England and grew into the National Review of Live Art, an annual festival held over several days across different cities in the UK. From 1986 to 2010 the festival was recorded, and the extensive video archive of the festival is now housed at the University of Bristol.3 There is a growing critical interest, fuelled by the possibilities of digital capture, in live art archives, and the provocations and temporal contradictions of capturing and re/experiencing live events through documentation will be revisited in Chapter 6. This growth in documentation has contributed to an increased awareness of, and access to, live art. In the UK alone, a number of festivals have emerged, including SPILL (London), In Between Time (Bristol), Compass (Leeds and other northern cities), Buzzcut (Glasgow) and of course Fierce (Birmingham). These festivals identify and support

40   Politics and praxis of live art

emerging artists, provide a platform for a diverse range of live work, and bring international and locally produced live art to audiences. Through the artworks themselves, as well as by means of the documentation and media that circulate around them, these festivals also help shape and define the parameters of live art and sustain the value of ‘liveness’ in the cultural repertoires of media and policy­makers. Over time, festivals and artists have been supported by the development of administrative organisations dedicated to live art. In 1979 Judith Knight and Seonaid Stewart founded Artsadmin, which facilitated European tours of performance work and worked to secure funding. Artsadmin now define their remit as follows: As artists continue to question the world, to push boundaries and challenge preconceptions, our role is to help them to do it. Supporting a subversive, agentic role for art is thus embedded in the existence of the organisation. Possibly the most high-­profile association advocating for live art in the UK is the Live Art Development Agency (LADA), founded in 1999 by Catherine Ugwu and Lois Keidan. They explain their current responsibilities: LADA works strategically, in partnership and in consultation with artists and organisations across the cultural sector to develop new artistic frameworks, legitimize unclassifiable artforms, and give agency to underrepresented artists.4 Both these organisations see their role as shaping the discursive and material field of live art. LADA develops new frameworks, legitimises art forms and gives artists agency: powerful interventions which help define and sustain the field, or patch of wild grassland, that is contemporary live art. LADA’s extensive range of projects and residencies, documented online in the form of resources and study-­guides, not only champions but also brings a critical and reflexive approach to live art, staging enquiries into the relationships between live art and race, disability, feminism and privilege.5 By helping artists to access resources and audiences to access artists, Artsadmin and LADA also contribute to bringing live art from the margins into a more mainstream position. However, the most significant development in this regard has been the take-­up of live art in gallery and museum spaces. In contrast to the anarchic, fleeting and precarious times and spaces of festivals and nightclubs, galleries denote endurance, a secure location, and bounded and defined spaces of encounter. Bringing radical live art practice into institutional spaces profoundly influences both the artist and their work as well as having an impact on who gets to see the work and how they experience it. Reflecting on the ways in which the venues for his performance work have shaped what he does, queer body artist Ron Athey explains: 

Politics and praxis of live art   41

I’ve never really resided in the art world, so I’ve been forced to find different spaces for my work – clubs, galleries, alternative venues, festivals – and moving through these contexts and learning how they work tends to change your attitude to making. (Athey in Johnson 2015: 211) Lois Keiden (in Walters 2016) notes the significance of bringing the ‘bleeding’ works of performance artist Franco B (such as I Miss You 2003) from the obscurity of queer spaces and club nights into the Institute for Contemporary Arts and Tate Modern in London. Of course, as I document below in relation to Fierce, festivals have always enjoyed partnerships and collaborations with theatres and cultural centres as part of their programming, but a defining moment in the ‘institutionalisation’ of live art came in 2012 when Tate Modern opened The Tanks, the vaults beneath the gallery that once held oil when the building was a power station. These grey, cavernous, columned spaces were designated as a site for artists whose work ‘ask[s] vital new questions of what it is to be a museum in the twenty-­first century’ (Dercon 2012). The opening programme in The Tanks combined selected historical works with a series of audience events designed to discuss and define the function of live art practice. This growth in live art’s visibility and reach has occurred at the same time as a tightening of financial resources. Since the 2008 financial crash, ‘austerity’ has hit arts and cultural practice hard (Harvey 2016). Radical or counter-­hegemonic art practices, whose work is already positioned as marginal and/or critical of the status quo, are even more vulnerable. Grant Kester (2012: 11) talks of a generation of programmers, curators and gallery directors struggling to come to terms with a shifting landscape in which public art funding is dramatically reduced or eliminated entirely. He goes on to highlight the ways in which the complex shifts in arts patronage and the rationales for arts funding taking place in the UK raise significant ideological as well as practical challenges. They are transforming the relationship between artistic production, governmentality and our understanding of the public. (2012: 12) As I highlighted in the previous chapter, these challenges entail a degree of (uncomfortable) compromise and collusion with neoliberal ideals, values and practices. At a minimum, they require artists and curators to use the discursive formulas of arts policy in order to align their proposed work with funding criteria, even if they are opposed to the political sentiments and implications embedded in such discourse. They also put emphasis on evaluating work against particular criteria that may not represent artists’ and curators’ own sense of the work’s value. For example, the significance and worth of a proposed piece of

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work is routinely measured in terms of the numbers of people who access it, or the artwork’s capacity to increase investment and/or consumption in a particular area. For some artists, it may be the quality of the experiential encounter that matters to them more than the volume of visitors. However, social and participatory art involving meaningful, durational and often personal experiences for audiences can be particularly hard to pitch for in terms of metrics such as audience numbers. In this way, arts organisations representing and supporting artists, and festival curators and artists themselves, walk the line between ‘playing the game’ and enacting a critique of, and challenge to, neoliberal regimes of funding distribution. This compromise is familiar to those trying to do critical work with/ in higher education (Pereira 2016). The stakes are high: the game involves fierce competition leading to an unequal allocation of resources, entrenched inequalities, an erasure of difference, and a promotion of ideologies of individualism and competition. Thus, contemporary live art rests on a cusp between the marginality and precariousness of the past and the potential of enhanced recognition, subject to the vagaries and discriminations that accompany austerity measures. From my ethnographic stance, my sense is that although live art has entered into a space of discourse and distribution that includes mainstream and commercial institutions, it cannot be completely contained and defined, or reduced to simply a commodity. Live art is fluid and quick moving; it occupies multiple registers, and accesses and creates alternative spatio-­temporalities, creating possibilities for simultaneously utilising and subverting the logics of contemporary capitalism. Rather than being an object of study, it is presented as a ‘research engine’, ‘a cultural strategy’, a ‘framing device’6: a generative force, rather than a forceful genre. The artist Joshua Sofaer (2002: np) suggests that at least part of the definition of Live Art has to be its resistance to definition. Maybe it’s called ‘live’ precisely because it hasn’t yet solidified into a category; it is a live process of change and challenge. In a cultural climate of ‘Plain English’ and ‘Transparency’ this slippage, perhaps above all else, makes it a provocative place to be making work at the beginning of the twenty-­first century. It is also a provocative place for the sociological imagination. Much contemporary live art occupies a counter-­hegemonic register in relation to dominant forms of politics, economic and social and personal relations. As I discuss in more depth in the following chapter, radically different forms of knowledge, ways of knowing, and modes of knowledge generation and exchange often characterise live art and demonstrate the potential to engender alternative and oppositional knowledges. The powerful pedagogic and ideological work of art has been well acknowledged, and lively debates still characterise the fields of art theory and practice, specifically around art that is designated as ‘activist’, ‘community’, ‘participatory’ or ‘pedagogic’ (Kester 2004; Bishop 2006a, 2006b). As we have seen from a brief exploration of its lineage, since its inception as a

Politics and praxis of live art   43

discrete form of artistic production, live art has been associated with radical, subversive and transformatory politics. However, Heddon (2012b: 176, original emphasis) observes that There is no shortage … to the claims made for live art’s political potential … but it needs to be underscored as ‘potential’ rather than simply being presumed.… There is nothing essentially political to live art practices, not least because the political does not reside within the art, but rather takes place within a matrix of diverse cultural and historical relations, relations that include the spectator. This research attends to this, working closely with live artists and projects, embedding its enquiry in the immediate relations between art and audiences, and documenting the beginnings of the expansive matrix of relations to which Hedden (2012b) refers. It has also involved paying critical attention to the political as it operates at the micro level, embedded in localised and everyday decision-­making: ‘small p political’, as artist Graeme Miller puts it.

The politics of participation and presence In the discursive currency of live art practice, ‘politics’ is a word that is used frequently and with feeling, often to explain the importance of routine practice. During an interview discussing her piece Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine (2012), in which participants learn literature by heart in order to become a ‘living book’ that audience members can have a one-­to-one ‘reading’ with, Mette Edvardsen told me that all work is political … you cannot not be political: you can be maybe unaware that you are playing a part in politics.… What kind of kinds of beliefs [do you have]? What kind of resistance you can do? … How do you want to set up your work? How do you want to relate to the people you work with? All these little choices by someone who’s on a small scale like me … are also part of that same working of politics. I return to further consideration of Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine in Chapter 6. Graeme Miller also articulated a similar ‘small-­scale’ politics in relation to his own practice, specifically the installation Track. Part of Fierce 2012, Track enabled participants to travel slowly on their backs underneath Birmingham’s ‘Spaghetti Junction’ interchange (see Lambert 2012 and Chapter 6 of this book for more discussion). In an interview, Miller explained: The negotiation is a big part of the process. I sort of do it by default because I haven’t got the money to not drive the van … but as a practice I really like this idea about the broader engagement of making and doing, the people you

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talk to: that’s all part of justifying your bread, and often public subsidy as an artist. You try to give a lot back. The security staff here; I really enjoy engaging with all these people. It’s a real pleasure. The scaffolding gang, the construction people at Spaghetti Junction, and the members of the public. I like being able to sort of not hide. I can stand by my work and face it out physically, really, with the public. And that is political. There is a small p political … celebrating people’s ability to self-­organise … to gather in ways that aren’t necessarily entertainment … to build a sense of grass roots possibility amongst people. At the same time as this ‘small p’ politics, Miller’s work aspires to a larger sense of political impact: For Track … while maintaining absolutely its aesthetic, I’ve got this idea of doing a trans-­border track, that takes you across a canopy of blue sky where you can feel the earth behind your back, but you cannot sense that you have travelled say from the USA to Mexico, or from East to West Cyprus. These ideas take on greater resonance in the light of US President Donald Trump’s pre- and post-­election intentions to build a wall between North America and Mexico (Dowley 2017). There is also a politics of presence demonstrated in Miller’s work. He says of Track, ‘I have never left it on its own. I am always there with it.’ This commitment to ‘being there’ and accounting for the work by standing by it both physically and metaphorically is in stark contrast to the practice of major artists who not only do not stand by their work but sometimes have little to do with creating and installing it, providing merely a conceptual idea, which is realised through others’ labour. Arguably, the grander gestures of larger-­scale works lose something of their political effect if they are ethically compromised at the micro level. A good illustration of this is the ‘human sculptures’ staged by conceptual artist Vanessa Beecroft, described by Nick Johnstone (2005) as ‘beautiful and disturbing tableaux vivants’. Opinion is divided on whether they enact a feminist critique and subversion of the male gaze or an exemplar of unethical participatory practice. For these pieces, between twenty and thirty young women were recruited and paid to be part of the artworks. After having their body hair removed and body make up applied, they were required to appear naked, or dressed in designer underwear and high heels, and stand for several hours at a time as part of an installation that would be staged twice: once for a live public audience and again to be filmed and photographed. The images and recordings were reproduced in limited quantity and sold on the art market at high value. Beecroft, with a personal history of food obsession and body dysmorphia, reports disliking her own image being taken, but sees the ‘girls’ on display as her ‘self-­portraits … diary entries translated to a safely distant, removed canvas of space and anonymous flesh’ (Johnstone 2005: np).

Politics and praxis of live art   45

For the installation of VB467 (titled after Beecroft’s initials and her number of performances to date) staged in The Gagosian gallery in Los Angeles in 2001, the feminist art collective Toxic Titties made a critical intervention. Two members of Toxic Titties, Heather Cassils and Clover Leary, ‘infiltrated’ the work by participating as models, thereby experiencing the work and its political affects at first hand. On the basis of this intervention, they drew attention to the difficult conditions under which the women worked and Beecroft’s methods for maintaining a practical and emotional distance and detachment from the performers and performances (see Steinmetz et al. 2006). The distancing practices in which the artist engaged stand in stark contrast to the careful and caring accountability of Edvardsen and Miller, detailed above. The multiple gazes implicated in Beecroft’s sexualised tableaux also alert us to wider issues around ‘presence’ and what it means to be present in temporal and embodied ways in our roles not only as artist but also as spectator, witness, participant, collaborator and researcher (see Giannachi et al. 2012; Hynes 2016). From my ethnographic immersion in Fierce festival 2012 and discussions I had with individual artists about their work, I gained a clear sense that the political analysis of their work and constructing a narrative about its political value were integral to their artistic identity. I also experienced the ways in which the live art scene facilitated, possibly summoned, the production of a politicised account. The artist Julia Bardsley (in Johnson 2015: 223–224) addresses this, comparing her experiences of working in theatre and live art: the context of live art is incredibly generous.… Suddenly a dialogue about form, ideas, process and serious critical analysis – elements that have always been part of fine art discourse – were here naturally applied to performance. In the theatre it sometimes seemed you were just making shows.… There was no real space or precedent for having dialogues with the audience or other people working in the theatre, no real desire to have conversations about its place in a wider cultural context or the directions it was moving formally.… People within live art seem so alert and curious but also enormously generous with their time and commitment to the work and ideas. Although I cannot make the comparison with theatre, as a researcher I also experience live art in this way, as a space of curiosity and creativity which expands beyond the art works into formal and informal dialogues in the form of workshops and discursive events as well as interactions on social media. This mode of working is writ large in the programming of a festival, when performances and pedagogic interventions intermingle. For Fierce in 2012, the model of artists working in the city of Birmingham for a period of time prior to (and often during) the festival itself contributed to this feeling of a durational development of relationships and ideas. This durational ethics underpins Fierce’s commitment to the people and places of the city, facilitating (international as well as local) artists whose work builds and sustains genuine relationships by creating and

46   Politics and praxis of live art

producing art with local participants. In this way, the work is reflective of the concerns and knowledges of the people and communities of the city. As I discuss in more detail in the following chapter, these politicised approaches relate to what many regard as good ethical practice in social science and feminist research: valuing reciprocal relationships with colleagues and research participants, and accounting for ourselves in relation to the work we undertake and the claims we make. For now, it is time to properly introduce Fierce.

Fierce festival: ‘Live Art: Collision: Hyperlocal: Supernow’ There are showier and more high-­profile festivals, but Fierce understands that it’s not just the party itself that matters, but the traces it leaves behind. Those traces change our relationship with the city, not just for the duration of the festival but for ever. (Lyn Gardner, Art Critic, 2011) In queer clubspeak, [fierce] was the highest compliment anyone could give another. (Fiona Buckland 2002: 37) Fierce is a contemporary live arts festival based in Birmingham, England with a reputation for producing risk-­taking, innovative, challenging art.8 Fierce was founded in 1998 and produced Birmingham’s annual Queerfest, an arts festival which ran alongside Birmingham Pride, generating much-­needed space for the expression of lesbian, gay and queer cultural and political identities through a broad spectrum of artistic and aesthetic practice. Since then, it has produced annual festivals of queer live art, attracting attention for its boundary-­pushing, challenging performances. In recent years, the festival has shifted from an explicit engagement with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) art and politics but sustained a focus on enabling alternative forms of expression. It still espouses what I would identify as a queer politics, both in terms of featuring identifiably queer artists and by enacting an ethics of radical refusal with regard to normative and mainstream values and knowledges, such as those relating to work and economics, forms of community, individual and collective identity, or gender and sexuality. At its best, Fierce art translates this ethics into practice by creating counter-­spaces in which alternatives are thinkable and liveable, if only temporarily. Within its tagline of ‘Live Art: Collision: Hyperlocal: Supernow’, Fierce foregrounds issues around public intervention and involvement, the complex and dynamic relationships between people and knowledges, and the interplay of space and time (see Lambert 2012). Part of my research with Fierce has involved ongoing engagement with the Fierce archive, the form of which has shifted from an unruly collection of assorted and over-­spilling boxes towards a catalogued and publicly available

Politics and praxis of live art   47

resource. This engagement has included a public exhibition of materials from the archive as part of Fierce Festival 2013 (What Happens at the Festival Stays at the Festival 2013). In the archive there is documentation from early Queerfest/ Fierce performances, including funding bids, administrative and financial paperwork, advertising and publicity materials, scripts, audio and video tapes and DVDs, slides and CDs, (mostly) scandalised local media coverage, photographs and artefacts such as a mounted canvas stained with performance artist Franko B’s blood (from his performance of I Miss You 2000). At the time of Queerfest’s emergence in 1998, media reportage of the new festival gives some insight into the (sexual) politics of the era and the potency of aesthetic interventions to disrupt and help shift the socio-­political landscape. Queerfest/Fierce provided (and continues to provide) an alternative set of voices, bodies and subjective possibilities to those on offer from either the cultural mainstream or LGBT (sub) culture. There are, of course, many ironies in the existence and usage of archive materials as a re/source through which to discuss and understand live practice. Live art is fleeting and ephemeral, and although, as we have seen, increasing attention is given to documenting and archiving live work, such documentation necessarily fails to reproduce live experience. The live art archive is thus partial and slippery, giving us glimpses of, and brushes with, performances, audiences, places and times. I pursue the analytic temporalities of the archive and its productive failures of re/presentation in relation to live sociology further in Chapter 6. When the Fierce archive project began in 2013, we recorded a conversation between Harun Morrison and Laura McDermott (then joint artistic directors of Fierce), Lois Kieden (director of LADA), Aaron Wright (then LADA programme manager) and Mark Ball (founder of Queerfest/Fierce). I draw here on some of this discussion in summarising the beginnings and growth of the festival. Mark Ball talked about how Queerfest emerged out of a particular time, a moment in queer culture that felt vibrant and politically assertive. The festival aimed to prioritise work articulating a clear sense of ‘difference’: the intention was not to limit queer to ‘lesbian and gay’ forms, however the media and much of the audience labelled the work as such. After one year of Queerfest, the decision was made to rename the festival as Fierce. This was in part instrumental, as audience interest and participation seemed compromised by both the festival’s explicitly homosexual associations as well as, for gay (friendly) audiences, associations of the word ‘queer’ as an out-­dated or abusive label. The audiences increased ‘tenfold’, as people found the new name easier to associate with. More politically, Ball wished to keep the mobilisation of ‘queer’ fluid and inclusive. From Queerfest to Fierce, the content remained the same, and the media, particularly the local press, continued to decry and denigrate the festival and the artists whose work they produced. They were, said Ball, ‘vicious in opposition to everything we did’, including occasions when Fierce personnel received death threats and warnings of arson attacks on venues. As I have written about elsewhere, Fierce was (and remains) located firmly in Birmingham, and is both shaped by and constitutive of the city of Birmingham

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in terms of place and cultural identity (Lambert 2012). Mark Ball describes Birmingham at that time as a city full of potential: ‘new territory’, a ‘young city’ whose audiences seemed receptive to the work of experimental theatre. However, attracting funding was difficult, reflecting the political and institutional barriers facing both live practice and queer cultural expression in 1990s Britain. Ball went to the Arts Council and was told ‘I don’t think there’s any call for that kind of work in the city.’ Ball recounts that this made him all the more determined, applying three times and finally getting money from the Arts Council (£5,000) and City Council (£800) in order to put on the first festival. From the outset, the festival was marked by close collaborations with existing institutions and nightclubs, often pushing existing arts organisations into new, more ‘risky’ territory. In this way, Fierce arguably provided the opportunity for mainstream and powerful organisations to become a bit more radical, as well as to widen their appeal to a more diverse audience, without taking the responsibilities and risks for this solely on themselves. Lois Keidan asked Mark Ball: ‘Did you have a sense that there was history in the making?’ but, perhaps not surprisingly, the focus was always the ‘precarious’ present, making enough money to fund the next festival. Ball’s approach to the art was ambitious, regarding the ‘city as a canvas’ and staging public pieces in conspicuous spaces, such as the fabulous Great Swallow, aka ‘Bird Man’, who occupied a human ‘nest’ high up in Birmingham’s iconic Rotunda Building in 2005.9 Fierce also attracted pioneering international queer body artists such as Franko B and Ron Athey (whose work I consider in more detail in Chapter 5). At this time, artists such as these were not widely known outside a narrow queer/ club circuit, and their work was often censored (see Johnson 2013a). For Ball, there was an explicit political agenda to staging body-­related practices, positioning bodies as the place ‘where the personal and the political met’. There was also a strong sense of ‘representing’ and ‘giving voice’ to ‘the other’. I engage critically with these ideas of (queer) embodiment and representation in later chapters. Fierce also pioneered work – not so ‘trendy’ then as now – that involved a ‘social encounter’ as artists engaged in shared experience and dialogue with the audience. I provide some examples of this in later chapters, such as the work of The Haircut Before the Party (Chapter 4) and Adrian Howells (Chapter 5). Blogging about the festival expanded with technology into the extensive use of social media to enable more direct communication with the public. Fierce programming celebrates ‘Collision: … of artworks and contexts; of ideas in salons, debates, workshops and talks and of strangers in late night parties’ (Fierce programme 2015). Some of the most interesting and provocative work in Fierce’s recent festivals has involved children and young people. The first festival to actively involve children was in 2007, when Fierce undertook a project with schools supported by Creative Partnerships.10 Such projects helped to catapult Fierce into being more legitimised, and in my recent research with Fierce I identify simultaneous strands of work appealing to different audiences, meaning

Politics and praxis of live art   49

that some see Fierce as a radical queer site of production, providing the opportunity for them to engage with shocking and controversial work, whilst others see it as a source of accessible, public, family-­friendly encounters. For example, in Fierce 2012, Ann Liv Young’s Mermaid Show (see Levine 2012), where she writhes semi-­naked in a bath tub screaming and spitting raw fish at the audience, and Bennett Miller’s Dachshund U.N., a large-­scale replica of the United Nations’ Geneva office in which the world’s political leaders are represented by sausage dogs (see Knowles 2012), were part of the same programme. Both pieces operated in significantly different aesthetic spaces11 and registers, and yet both were making political interventions. The co-­presence of radically diverse works is, of course, made possible by the context of a festival. In the following section, I turn briefly to consider the significance of the festival as a staging for live work.

Festivals In a festival, people gather to instantiate and renew the ties that bind them together in a community. These ties become real through the festival. Art is a power to enact an experience of community. In principle, this community is a universal one that extends to everyone to whom the work of art speaks. (Ken Friedman 2012: 391) Thankyou @fiercefestival for a wonder-­filled weekend. I’m watching the world with slightly altered eyes as we wend our way back.… (Public tweet, 2 April 2012) Whilst the majority of (limited) scholarly literature on the subject of festivals appraises them in terms of their role in urban growth and regeneration and for the economic contribution they make via tourism and consumption, the festival or carnival has also long been credited with revolutionary potential. For example, Situationist International claimed the Paris Commune of 1871 as ‘the biggest festival of the nineteenth century’ (Debord et al. in McDonough 2009: 168). The transgressive potential of festivity is in part based on the political power of aesthetic disruption (see also Bakhtin 1984; Ozouf 1988; Willems-­Braun 1994). Festivals privilege fun and the ludic: as I discuss in relation to FAAB performances in Chapter 4, pleasure and laughter can be subversive and can do political work even (especially?) in the face of deadly serious conditions (such as for the Paris Commune). Fun and play privilege non-­cognitive and affective modes of interaction and knowledge production and exchange, and can create a feeling of affective community and belonging through shared experiences and encounters. In settings where there is an established cultural provision (such as Birmingham), a festival has more reactionary potential by being able to occupy alternative spaces and times to those the existing cultural institutions offer. Fierce festival takes the visitor on an experiential journey, not only in terms of artistic

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encounters but also in relation to the city. Having lived in Birmingham for over twenty years, I had never even imagined, let alone visited, many of the places which the festival opened up to me, such as the cathedral-­like underbelly of the Spaghetti Junction road, rail and canal interchange, already referenced as the site of Graeme Miller’s Track, and post-­industrial ruins such as a former propane gas-­filling station bordering the canal and the location for Eloise Fornielle’s durational performance piece The Message (2012). This once derelict space had been temporarily transformed into an urban garden or ‘pop-­up park’ known as Edible Eastside,12 a social enterprise hosting gardening plots, training and space for artists. A number of live artworks in Birmingham have been presented at A E Harris, a metal works in the Jewellery Quarter district of the city. Here the cold, uneven stone floor, the lingering metallic smell of oil and machinery, the remnants of machines and hand-­made wall markings, all serve as a visceral reminder of the very different labour once carried out in this space, and also of the loss of that work and, increasingly, a whole way of life characterised by Birmingham’s industrial economy. Stan’s Cafe Theatre company permanently occupies some of this space, but other parts of it are still utilised as a factory, bringing the incongruous worlds of engineering and live art together, both arts working to survive in the context of the neoliberal cityscape. Such spaces, typical of so many across Birmingham and other post-­industrial cities in the UK, at once tell a story about the past and the future. They re-­use spaces themselves, and re-­ imagine the wider social and economic contexts, with a focus on growth and creativity. However, they are also contingent, precarious spaces, often speaking more of transition than of renewal. Fierce artworks not only brought audiences into such places, taking them on unusual and sometimes deeply affective journeys as they did so, but also sought to respond to the sites themselves, enabling visitors to articulate stories and ideas. Our modern urban experiences are highly regulated in relation to smell, sound and tactility. Tim Edensor (2007: 226) notes that It is through the haptic senses that the urban ruin is apprehended in most stark contrast to the rest of the city. The spatial recontextualization and condition of objects in ruins draws attention to their material qualities, making evident the matter out of which they are made and foregrounding the sensuous work that was involved in their manufacture and use. The encounter with the materiality of things can provoke a sudden awareness of the material world. The curation of Fierce festival as a whole, and some of the individual works within it, serves to disregulate these senses. The effects of this disregulation are not dissimilar to what queer writers suggest in relation to sites such as nightclubs (Buckland 2002; Halberstam 2005). Historical and contemporary programming for Fierce puts great emphasis on parties and club nights alongside other art forms. In Fierce currency, these are queer events with queer temporalities and

Politics and praxis of live art   51

often feature curated music sets and anarchic multi-­art-form experiences. For example, for Fierce 2012, Harminder Judge curated Holy Mountain Party, a club night featuring live acts inspired by the 1973 cult film Holy Mountain directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Artist Joost Nieuwenburg spectacularly ignited a ring of fire with match heads under his boots, and audience members engaged in ‘bum painting’ in red and green, in homage to a scene in the film. The ludic, daring, heightened sense of excess from the acts was supported by dramatic and often disturbed/disturbing music. Such events operate on ‘club time’ (Buckland 2002): there is no clock, and the passing of time is marked by happenings and sensations, for example the different acts and DJs; the body feeling tired; recreational drug/alcohol highs and lows; the number of dancers on the dance floor. Such time-­less spaces have been (and continue to be) vital for queer politics and for offering queer subjects a place to ‘be’ or ‘become’ away from the surveillance and control of the heteronormative time-­space of everyday life structured to service the (gendered, sexualised, racialised) demands of the capitalist economy (see Freeman 2010). As well as disrupting spatial patterns and structures, the festival breaks up the routine temporality of the everyday. The role of festival curators in shaping and making such encounters possible is critical. Gary Fine (2006), writing about outsider art, points to the significance of curators in generating a theory or a story, and creating inter/connections that go across the material spaces and buildings of the city, between communities, between ideas, between theory and practice, between online and embodied encounters. For artists, the festival enables, in a short expanse of time and space, the kinds of dialogue and exchange that Julia Bardsley commented on above. In my ethnography of Fierce 2012, I saw many of the programmed artists watching or participating in each other’s work, as well as contributing to panels or workshop discussions. In the major, pro-­capital cultural language of the city, the festival takes up a minor key (Deleuze and Guattari 1986). Many of the spaces occupied by Fierce serve a minor function, clearly part of the major geographies and cartographies and yet enacting a deterritorialisation, enabling us to see the main thoroughfares, shopping malls and museums with different eyes. The political status of minor art in which the festival functions is not an achieved, static state, but rather, it is contingent and processual: A minor practice must then be understood as always in process, as always becoming – as generating new forms through a break with, but also a utilisation of, the old. (O’Sullivan 2006: 73) This is true of Fierce festival. It does not (could not?) operate solely on the minor register: in order to attract public funding and work with major partners such as theatres and classical music venues, it needs to be able to be read, to some degree, as part of the major language. And yet, even as it takes that stance,

52   Politics and praxis of live art

it enacts multiple deterritorialising operations, holding the major language to scrutiny and critique, offering alternative affective and political possibilities through the formation of collective subjectivities – usually temporary. Some of Fierce’s public works offer a glimpse of this deterritorialisation in action: the funny, celebratory collective joy of Dachshund U.N., or the perverse, apparently pointless slow walk across an impossibly short stretch of car park, askance from the city and its productivity, of Hamish Fulton’s Slow Walk (see Lambert 2012).

Conclusions This chapter has been concerned with live art practice, defining and delineating what, for the purposes of this book, is meant by live art, and locating my empirical engagements with live artists in their immediate overlapping historical, geographical and political contexts. We have seen that live art, despite its growing popularity, is a fluid and contested term that escapes fixed definitions. This generative slipperiness is in large part due to its ‘liveness’; a temporality that makes it resistant to capture in traditional representational modes. Despite developments in digital technologies, many live art practices still evade anything other than partial documentation. By definition, the live encounter cannot be reproduced, as it so often resists being assigned ‘value’ in relation to the capitalist economy. Such evasions and resistances constitute the political lifeblood of much live art practice, although, as the example of Vanessa Beecroft’s work demonstrated, live art can be complicit with capitalist and oppressive values and practices. The historical circumstances of live art’s development as a distinct, if expansive, art form and cultural sector are relevant to its contemporary iterations, emerging as it has from marginalised, avant-­garde and subversive performance practices. We see this more clearly in relation to empirical discussions in Chapter 5, where live body art is the focus of critical attention. The discussion here has defined ‘political’ in aesthetic terms, drawing on the work of Rancière (2004) and Panagia (2009) to demonstrate that the control and regulation of people and knowledge are maintained through aesthetic and sensory organisation, and as such, any disruption and re-­ordering constitutes a political emergence. Put simply, new voices, bodies, ideas, configurations and subjective possibilities are rendered legible and intelligible by reconfigurations of the aesthetic regime. As I argued in Chapter 1, this is why it is essential for live sociology to have aesthetics at the heart of its practice. I have suggested, following Deleuze and Guattari (1986), that as a ‘minor’ art form, live art can enact a powerful deterritorialisation of ‘major’ forms and their linguistic modes, including mainstream art and the hegemonic repertoires of capitalism. Discussion drawing on empirical examples supports this claim as the book proceeds. As well as defining politics in broad terms, I have highlighted the importance of everyday and small-­scale political acts in the form of the decisions practitioners make, their relations with those with whom they work, and in particular the

Politics and praxis of live art   53

ethical resonances of presence, of being there to account for the work and its generative affects. The politics of presence pervades live encounters, calling not only artists but audiences to account, and the significance of these debates as they arise in relation to artistic practice are taken up in the context of sociological research, where there are epistemological and ethical imperatives to be present and account for that presence. This chapter has presented Fierce live art festival, providing an introduction which contextualises my own empirical engagements with Fierce as an organisation as well as demonstrating the political work of this and other live art festivals. Fierce’s specific interventions in queer politics, which are demonstrable both historically and in the festival’s contemporary articulations, have been highlighted. Following on from the discussion in Chapter 1, I argue that Fierce espouses a queer approach in the expansive sense of queer, not only pertaining to sexual politics but taking a playful, disruptive and trouble-­making approach to normativity in all its guises. I have highlighted in particular the ways in which Fierce queers time and space, both as a festival as well as in the work of some of its artists. This will be attended to in more detail in the chapters to follow. Although not all the live art practice discussed throughout this book is part of Fierce, a significant amount is, and my collaborative engagement with Fierce over a number of years informs my access to and relationship with art and cultural practice in a broader sense. Another way of putting it is that my perspective on live art is achieved from being situated within Fierce festival in Birmingham. The temporal, spatial and political implications of this infuse the stories I hear, see, feel and tell. In the next chapter, I turn my attention to sociological practice and interrogate the idea of live in relation to social theory and method. As with live art, one of the premises of live sociology is its political and ethical commitment to enhance our capacities for living together, for understanding and, where possible, standing up to social injustices and preventable suffering. The special qualities of liveness are further interrogated and put to work in the interests of developing these capacities.

Notes   1 Available at www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about/what-­is-live-­art/   2 I am also mindful of Johnson’s (2013b: 16) observation that a ‘well meaning refusal to define Live Art remains a hindrance to artists working in the sector’. Whilst I don’t feel in a position to ‘define’ it, my critical attention to live art practices contributes to the ongoing construction of it as an intellectual field and cultural sector.   3 See www.bristol.ac.uk/theatre-­collection/explore/live-­art/national-­review-of-­live-art-­ archive/   4 See www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about   5 See www.thisisliveart.co.uk/projects/restock-­rethink-reflect   6 See www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about/what-­is-live-­art/   7 Details and an image of this performance are available at www.gagosian.com/­ exhibitions/vanessa-­beecroft--march-­17-2001

54   Politics and praxis of live art   8 For visual samples of Fierce’s work, see the photofilm of Fierce 2011 by Briony Campbell, https://vimeo.com/26089510; a film providing an overview of work between 2011–2014, https://vimeo.com/100824229; and Kate Rowles’ film of 2012, https://vimeo.com/75094325   9 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl4-H02Hqmw 10 Creative Partnerships was a UK Government-­funded scheme initiated by New Labour in 2002 to facilitate children’s engagement with artists’ creative practice in schools. The funding was cut by the Coalition Government in 2011. 11 Mermaid Show was staged in Birmingham’s cavernously beautiful but dilapidated old Methodist Hall, used now as an alternative club/rave space. Dachshund U.N. was staged in one of Birmingham’s public (but privately owned) squares outside the Ikon modern art gallery and surrounded by upmarket restaurants. 12 See http://edibleeastside.net/

References Anzaldúa, G (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestizo, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Bakhtin, M (1984) Rabelais and his World, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Bennett, J (2012) Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11, London: IB Tauris. Bishop, C (2006a) (ed.) Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art, London: MIT Press. Bishop, C (2006b) The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents, Artforum, February 2006. Available at: www.artforum.com/html/issues/200602/new (accessed April 2017). Bishop, C (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London: Verso. Buckland, F (2002) Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-­Making, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Butler, J (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. Clough, P and Halley, J (2007) (eds) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davis, O (2010) Jacques Rancière, Cambridge: Polity. Deleuze, G (1993) Language: Major and minor, in C  V Boundas (ed.) The Deleuze Reader, New York: University of Columbia Press. Deleuze, G and Guattari, F (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Demir, I (2017) Brexit as a backlash against ‘loss of privilege’ and multiculturalism, Discover Society, 41, available at http://discoversociety.org/2017/02/01/brexit-­as-a-­ backlash-against-­loss-of-­privilege-and-­multiculturalism/ (accessed March 2017). Dercon, C (2012) An open manifesto: 15 weeks of art in action, in The Tanks at Tate Modern, Programme Notes, London: Tate, pp. 2–3. Dowley, L (2017) On the other side of the wall: How Donald Trump has divided Mexico, The New Statesman, 12 March 2017, available at www.newstatesman.com/ culture/2017/03/other-­side-wall-­how-donald-­trump-has-­divided-mexico (accessed May 2017).

Politics and praxis of live art   55 Edensor, T (2007) Sensing the ruin, Senses and Society, 2(2): 217–232. Fine, G A (2006) Everyday Genius: Self Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M (1990) The History of Sexuality, Volume One, New York: Vintage. Freeman, E (2010) Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Durham NC: Duke University Press. Friedman, K (2012) Freedom? Nothingness? Time? Fluxus and the laboratory of ideas, Theory, Culture and Society, 29(7/8): 372–398. Gardner, L (2011) Birmingham’s Fierce Festival is a gem of local legacy building, Guardian, available at www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/mar/24/birmingham-­fiercefestival-­legacy (accessed May 2017). Giannachi, G, Kaye, N and Shanks, M (2012) (eds) Archaeologies of Presence: Art, Performance and the Persistence of Being, London: Routledge. Goldberg, R (1988) Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, London: Thames and Hudson. Gordon, A (2008) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grosz, E (2004) The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, London: New York University Press. Harvey, A (2016) Funding Arts and Culture in a Time of Austerity, New Local Government Network and Arts Council England, 13 April 2016, available at www.artscouncil. org.uk/publication/funding-­arts-and-­culture-time-­austerity (accessed April 2017). Harvey, D and Haraway, D (1995) Nature, politics and possibilities: A debate and discussion with D Harvey and D Haraway, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13: 507–527. Heathfield, A (2004) (ed.) Live: Art and Performance, London: Tate. Heddon, D (2012a) Introduction: Writing histories and practices of live art, in D Heddon and J Klein (eds) Histories and Practices of Live Art, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–11. Heddon, D (2012b) The politics of live art, in D Heddon and J Klein (eds) Histories and Practices of Live Art, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 175–205. Heddon, D and Klein, J (2012) (eds) Histories and Practices of Live Art, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Henri, A (1974) Environments and Happenings, London: Thames and Hudson. Hynes, M (2016) Public sociology for an emergent people: The affective gift in Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present, The Sociological Review, 64: 805–820. Jeffries, S (2012) Gustav Metzger: ‘Destroy, and you create’, Guardian, 26 November 2012, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/nov/26/gustav-­metzger-null-­object-robot (accessed May 2017). Johnson, D (2013a) Does a bloody towel represent the ideals of the American people?: Ron Athey and the Culture Wars, in D Johnson (ed.) Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey, London: Live Art Development Agency/Intellect, pp. 64–93. Johnson, D (2013b) Introduction: Live art in the UK, in D Johnson (ed.) Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 5–12.

56   Politics and praxis of live art Johnson, D (2015) The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art, London: Palgrave. Johnstone, N (2005) Dare to bare, Guardian, 13 March 2005, available at www.the guardian.com/artanddesign/2005/mar/13/art (accessed May 2017). Kaye, N (1994) Introduction – live art: definition and documentation, Contemporary Theatre Review, 22(1): 1–7. Keiden, L (2015) Backpages, Contemporary Theatre Review, 25(2): 273–291. Kester, G (2004) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, California: University of California Press. Kester, G (2012) Introduction: The game is up: Programmers, patronage and the neo-­ liberal state, in M Steedman (ed.) Gallery as Community: Art, Education, Politics, London: Whitechapel Gallery, pp. 10–17. Klein, J (2012) Developing live art, in D Heddon and J Klein (eds) Histories and Practices of Live Art, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 12–36. Knowles, B (2012) Dachshund U.N. review, This Is Tomorrow, available at http://this istomorrow.info/articles/fierce-­festival-bennett-­miller-dachshund-­u.n (accessed May 2017). Lambert, C (2012) Redistributing the sensory: The critical pedagogy of Jacques Rancière, Critical Studies in Education, 53(2): 211–228. Levine, C (2012) Mermaid show review, This Is Tomorrow, available at http://thisis tomorrow.info/articles/fierce-­festival-ann-­liv-young-­mermaid-show (accessed May 2017). McDonough, T (2009) (ed.) The Situationists and the City, London: Verso. Massumi, B (2010) The future birth of the affective affect: The political ontology of threat, in M Gregg and G J Seigworth (eds) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 52–70. Metzger, G (1996) Damaged Nature, Auto-­Destructive Art, London: Coracle. O’Sullivan, S (2006) Art Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond Representation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ozouf, M (1988) Festival and the French Revolution, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Panagia, D (2009) The Political Life of Sensation, London: Duke University Press. Pereira, M (2016) Struggling within and beyond the performative university: Articulating activism and work in an ‘academia without walls’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 54: 100–110. Rancière, J (1989) The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-­Century France, London: Temple University Press. Rancière, J (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum. Rancière, J (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso. Roms, H and Edwards, R (2012) Towards a prehistory of live art in the UK, Contemporary Theatre Review, 22(1): 17–31. Saunders, G (2012) The freaks’ roll call: Live art and the Arts Council, 1968–73, Contemporary Theatre Review, 22(1): 32–45. Sauvagnargues, A (2011) A schizoanalytic knight on the chessboard of politics, in E Alliez and A Goffey (eds) The Guattari Effect, London: Continuum, pp. 172–185. Sofaer, J (2002) What is live art? Joseph Sofaer website, available at www.joshuasofaer. com/2011/06/what-­is-live-­art/ (accessed May 2017) Steinmetz, J, Cassils, H and Leary, C (2006) Behind enemy lines: Toxic Titties infiltrate Vanessa Beecroft, Signs, 31(3): 753–783.

Politics and praxis of live art   57 Walters, N (2016) Because of Love, documentary about the life and work of Franko B, London: LADA Live Online. Willems-­Braun, B (1994) Situating cultural politics: Fringe festivals and the production of spaces of intersubjectivity, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 12(1): 75–104. Williams, R (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 3

Live sociology Generative and uncertain methodologies in action

Based in the arts, touched by critical theory, live methods offer oppositional levers that valuably, in the confused mess of private troubles, provide aids to identify the ‘sensitive nerve-­centres’ of contemporary capitalism. (Les Back and Nirmal Puwar 2012: 8)

Introduction: a shift to the live In the previous two chapters I have referred to the ‘shift to the live’ that has occurred in art. In part this denotes, as Adrian Heathfield (2004: 7) explains, a focus on immediacy in a technologically mediated social world: In the hi-­tech, spectacle-­rich environment of the West, cultural production is now obsessed with liveness … art’s shift towards immediacy and interactivity offers a reflexive space through which to interrogate these cultural dynamics, to stage an acute enquiry into what we think of as near, dear and happening now. Sociologists, too, have drawn attention to changing realities, in particular the increasing complexity of how contemporary social relations are formed and enacted in time and space (see Urry 2003; Adkins and Lury 2009). Just as art has shifted ‘towards immediacy and interactivity’, so has (a certain strand of ) sociology, also keen to ‘stage an acute enquiry’ into what is happening now. Such an enquiry, unsurprisingly, shares similar epistemological and practical concerns to those of art, and as such, arts and social sciences are coming to take more interest in each other’s perspectives and resources. Much of this shift to the live, as Heathfield (2004) suggests, is driven and facilitated by digital culture. Just as life is so often rendered immediate by technological devices, so too the methodological tools of live sociology look to use digital resources of investigation, capture and communication alongside traditional methods. In this chapter, I shift this concern with the live from the terrain of artistic practice into that of social science. I examine the potential of ‘live sociology’, considering its delineation and usage so far in the work of Les Back (2007, 2012) and others (Gunaratnam

Live sociology   59

2012, 2013; Michael 2012). The chapter hopes to set in motion a flight path for the live sociological imagination, to be deployed in relation to empirical engagement with artistic, social and pedagogic practices here and in the following chapters. I suggest that the shared investment in liveness between art and sociology generates an intersecting creative domain in which both fields can engage in productive mingling, exchange and critique. The discussion here is both constitutive of and located within this domain. One of the key arguments made in this chapter is that both live sociology and artistic practice – and the boundaries between these can be sometimes blurred – must hold tightly onto two commitments that are both central to articulating and intervening in liveness. The first of these is a determination to engage with that which is barely able to be represented: the fleeting, partial whispering of social, affective, embodied life that slips out of our representational grasp and yet signals to us that it exists and needs our attention. The second is a political and ethical imperative to intervene in the world in order to help shape and bring about social change. These commitments sit in productive tension with each other, and one of the challenges to which this chapter rises is to explore methodologies and methods that fulfil these commitments. These explorations are informed by the definitions of politics established in the previous chapter. In particular, I revisit Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1986) concept of the major and minor, which I used to denote, respectively, the hegemonic operations of mainstream art theory and practice and the disruptive properties of counter-­ hegemonic art forms such as live art. This chapter presents examples of live sociological methods that, working within the overarching context of predominantly representational systems of signification, privilege generative rather than representational epistemologies. In so doing, these methods do not stand outside of mainstream or traditional forms of sociology, but instead enact from within what Deleuze and Guattari (1986) call a deterritorialisation of its language. Drawing on the reparative and queer politics established in previous chapters, the examples provided here propose and demonstrate a specific approach to knowledge production and analysis. That is to say, they generate modes of engagement and discovery based on a rejection of explicatory or didactic approaches in favour of the generation of affective and sensory space/times in which knowledge emerges through discovery, participation and collaboration. Such a politics is also key to emphasising the generative alongside the representational capacities and potentialities of live sociological methods. The chapter proceeds as follows. After introducing live sociology, I address some of the spatial and temporal provocations and possibilities of thinking with both art and sociology. This discussion lays down groundwork for more detailed investigation in Chapter 6. A section on curating sociological knowledge draws on examples of my own research experiments utilising exhibitions for the presentation of findings and as a method for generating research material. Such methods and the kinds of data they produce raise issues around the represent­ ability of certain experiences and events: I consider two examples from my

60   Live sociology

ethnographic research with Brian Lobel’s Fun with Cancer Patients (2012) project, where representation could be said to have failed, although in fact there were good political reasons for refusing a representational format. The generative as well as representational capabilities of art and live sociology are reviewed. This discussion leads into contentions of ‘unknowability’ within sociological research, and I revisit this concern before making a case for death, which defies being either ‘known’ or ‘represented’, being an integral part of live sociology. The chapter finishes by presenting the Live Art Research Hub, an experiment in live sociological method that, embedded within an art exhibition, produced encounters that I frame as ‘generative moments’. These include a research encounter with a visitor to the gallery who stopped to talk, and a poem produced by another visitor whose words provide a critical and provocative intervention in the enactment of both the artwork and the research.

Live sociological methods: space, time, scale Sociology is a way of living and something that is practised as a vocation, a way of holding to the world and paying critical attention to it. So, ‘live’ is being used here as a sociological verb. The price of insight may well be discomfort, be it in the puncturing of soothing illusions or the questioning of our most basic assumptions about progress or hope. (Les Back 2007: 165) Playing as it does with multiple takes on ‘live’ (to live/alive/now), live sociology marks a profoundly critical yet hopeful moment in the discipline, drawing attention to the alleged crisis in empirical sociology, the failures of ‘dead’ sociology, and the urgency of paying sociological attention to the world at the current moment (Savage and Burrows 2007; Adkins and Lury 2009; Clough 2009; McKie and Ryan 2015). It presents a way of doing sociology that is not afraid of, dismissive of, or in competition with other forms of knowledge production (for example digital or artistic); rather, Back (2012) presents a compelling case for re/newed sociological value, able to utilise and draw on a wider range of methodologies whilst retaining sociological commitments to thick and rich description of the social world and attending sociologically to the world through research. But what does it really mean to pay sociological attention? Etymologically, the roots of attention encourage us to wait for, or expect (French attendre) as well as to give heed to, or literally ‘stretch towards’ (Latin attendare). To attend can be to be present (at an event) as well as to care for (a person or matter). In all these senses, to pay attention involves a particular stance and movement, with a concomitant ethics and politics. In their Introduction to a special issue of The Sociological Review on the theme of Live Methods, subsequently published as a monograph, Les Back and Nirmal Puwar (2012) draw up a ‘manifesto’ for live sociology, consisting of eleven aspirations. These are to:

Live sociology   61

  1 Develop new tools for ‘real-­time’ and ‘live’ investigation   2 Avoid the ‘trap of the now’ and be attentive to the larger scale and longer historical time frame   3 Develop capacities to see the whole, without a totalising perspective   4 Make sociological craft more artful and crafty   5 Develop empirical devices and probes that produce affects and reactions that re-­invent relations to the social and environmental   6 Curate sociology within new public platforms   7 Utilise our senses equally in attending to the social world   8 Foster the liveliness of words   9 Recover sociology’s history of inventive craft 10 Take time, think carefully and slowly 11 Engage political and ethical issues without arrogance or the drum roll of political piety. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges offered by Back and Puwar’s (2012) manifesto is their third goal, calling for the development of capacities to see the whole, without a totalising perspective. As a feminist committed to the production of partial perspectives and the accountability of a place from which to stand and speak, I am wary of the ‘god-­trick’ of seeing everything from nowhere (Haraway 1991). Celia Lury’s (2012) contribution to the construction of live sociology suggests the development of ‘amphibious sociology’, able to dwell in the middle of things and see from a ‘frog’s eye’ view how things move and relate. An amphibious sociology insists that live methods must reflect life lived in multiple media rather than a single unified medium. Like amphibious creatures living on ‘both sides’ (i.e. on land and in water) of life, amphibious sociologists are able to dwell in the immediacy of the live event as well as the analytical processing of it, participating (in parts) rather than representing (in wholes). Lury (2012: 191) writes: the methods of liveness cannot work from or find a centre since there is no single whole in relation to which a centre might be found. Instead, live methods must be satisfied with an engagement with relations and with parts, with differentiation, and be involved in making middles, in dividing without end(s), in mingling, bundling and coming together. The objects of such methods – being live – are without unity, un-­whole-some; put another way, they are partial un-­divisible, distributed and distributing. Lury (2012: 190) defines the middle of a space of liveness against the median or mean of representative dimensions: ‘In contrast to such centralizing measures, in an amphibious sociology, with a frog’s eye view, there can be no single centre but only a middle, or rather many middles to be worked in, worked up and worked out.’ Perhaps through live art practice we can configure a way to frame our engagement with ‘relations and with parts’, recognising the contingent and

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kaleidoscopic nature of such a frame. An artist whose work I find endlessly provocative, Graeme Miller, has a piece that offers some insight into what such a framing might look like. It is called Beheld, and in an interview in 2012 Miller described it to me as follows: Beheld is a long investigation into the sites where people have fallen from aircraft: stowaways, basically, around airports, who’d stowed away in the undercarriage of jet liners and died from lack of oxygen. Their bodies are kind of tossed to the ground around places like Richmond. It’s a secret geography … I went to these sites, and then lay on my back for a long time with a microphone, and there’s a real shift happens … you feel completely detached from the world – very, very, isolated. And also, which way is up becomes very ambivalent … gravity seems to lose its effect on you when you’ve been doing it for a while. It’s quite a vertiginous view. And that reversal of up and down felt like a way of meeting the gaze, even though there was no gaze, but the sort of imagined gaze, of these often-­anonymous … migrants who’d fallen to these spots. So I built that idea into this piece and went to ten sites around the world to lie on my back and take photographs with a fish-­eye lens … in all these gardens near Paris, and Lisbon and New York, around wealthy airports.… Those images, those circles of sky, then got projected into glass bowls that you looked down into but you had to lift these glass bowls to activate the sound in them. So the sky became a transmitter of place and of meaning, which in this case was someone’s life, an anonymous person’s life.1 Although Miller makes no grand claims for what we might come to know through this piece, I was struck by how the work springs from the micro-­political experience of one ‘anonymous’ body. From that location where a person’s body fell, he provides a mechanism – the glass bowls with the images that activate the sound – to ‘take’ the audience to that place, enabling them to see that same patch of sky and hear the noise of being there: to imagine the unimaginable of falling from the undercarriage of a plane and landing on that patch of car park or garden. Simultaneously, the piece maps, by inference, a global picture of inequality and the violent disregard for some people’s bodies and lives, giving us some insight into what it might mean to develop such capacities to see and feel, in medias res, an ‘un-­whole-some’ (Lury 2012: 190) and un-­totalising whole. If questions of space and scale need to be attended to, so too do the temporalities of our live practices. Speaking in relation to live art, Beth Hoffman (2012: 37, original emphasis) notes that ‘live’ traditionally indexes a particular set of ontological parameters – happening in the here and now, presentness – and ‘time’ functions as a fundamental dimension of this ontology. To be live is to always be live in time. Time is

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the locus of the ‘nowness’ of live art’s now; time’s movement effects the disappearance of live art in its ephemerality; it constitutes an indispensable dimension of the condition of being alive. The teasing temporalities of live practices disrupt linear, progressive notions of time within which traditional modes of knowledge production operate. In particular, live art often takes an explicitly critical, often playful and troublesome, approach to the normative temporalities of life – clock time, capitalist work time, or the time/space flows of urban living. These form part of the counter-­ hegemonic value of artistic interventions that, I suggest, offer political resources. Time and space are both vital features of live practice but cannot be completely segregated. My understanding of the spatial has been influenced by Doreen Massey’s (1992) endeavours to configure it in dynamic and politically progressive ways. Massey (1992) argues for the inseparability of the social and the spatial and the spatial and temporal (what she calls space-­time). She draws attention to the ‘power-­geometry’ of space (see Massey 1993), formed as it is out of (unequal) social relations. As I explore in more depth and detail in Chapter 6, there is scope for the development and deployment of sociological methods that similarly put alternative temporalities to work in exposing and possibly disrupting the powerful organisational and constraining mechanisms of (hetero) normative time. One of the ways in which we can re/deploy time/space in the micro-­politics of our research endeavours is by utilising what, in their manifesto, Back and Puwar (2012) refer to as creative, ‘crafty’, sensory-­based ways of engaging (in) the world. Using selected examples from my own practice, I sketch out possibilities for re/thinking the role of the sociologist as curator.

Curating sociological knowledge As academics we became apprentices in the craft of curatorship through practice. In this respect, curating sociology is an intervening methodology that reflexively works with practitioners to produce cultural co-­productions engaged in the transformation of research problems. Explicit research questions can be critically transformed into aesthetic practices intervening in the public arena. (Nirmal Puwar and Sanjay Sharma 2012: 58) Puwar and Sharma’s (2012) delineation of the role of the sociologist as curator of live public encounters is based on their production of Noise of the Past, which involved the creation of a film and a music performance, launched at Coventry Cathedral and then circulated internationally. Noise of the Past interrogated postcolonial narratives of war and memory by way of intervening in public debates and imaginings around nation and belonging (see Puwar 2011). I use Puwar and Sharma’s (2012) notion of ‘curating sociology’ to present and explore some

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examples of my own curatorial practice. These examples, whilst different in content from Noise of the Past, share a concern with presenting ideas and materials in affective and sensory ways. Together with students, academic colleagues and artists, I have created research exhibitions with the aim of ‘intervening in the public arena’ and engaging audiences on multiple sensory levels. A key feature of their design has been a live and interactive component. The first of these research exhibitions, carried out in 2008, was Sociologists Talking.2 For this project, Elisabeth Simbuerger and I worked with interview data from semi-­structured interviews that Elisabeth had conducted with twenty-­ five sociologists in one university in the UK. The respondents were invited to speak about their relationship to sociology, aspects of their teaching, including what they consider to be the most important thing they teach to students, and the teacher–student relationship in the changing context of contemporary universities. Elisabeth and I listened to the completed interviews, transcribed and coded the data. Wondering how best to analyse and convey the thoughtful, provocative responses, and the entanglements between the sociologists’ ideas on pedagogy and sociological theory, we decided to experiment with the form the output would take. We conceptualised a multimedia and site-­specific exhibition in which the responses could be listened to rather than read on a page. We selected a particular space for the first iteration of Sociologists Talking – a hi-­tech open space classroom at the University of Warwick called the Teaching Grid.3 With curatorial and practical advice and support from Lisa Metherell, an artist and researcher, we organised the space to incorporate Sociologists Talking, a documentary film we had produced with sociology undergraduates called Students at Work: Learning to Labour in Higher Education,4 and documentation around Reinvention: a Journal for Undergraduate Research,5 an international, open access journal offering students opportunities for peer-­reviewed publication. These three projects all deployed the theoretical tools of critical pedagogy in order to make interventions in contemporary higher education. Themed extracts from the sociologists’ interviews were made into audio files and downloaded onto mp3 players. Attached to headphones, these hung from the ceiling with labels denoting their themes. Mindful of preserving the anonymity of the sociologists’ identities, the interview transcripts had been re-­recorded using actors’ voices. Further fragments of the interviews and the theoretical resources framing the analysis, which included Back’s (2007) The Art of Listening, were put on the glass surfaces in vinyl lettering or projected onto the screens, walls and white curtains that act as room partitions. Different voices, interpretations and experiences jostled and intersected, and no two visitors had the same experience, as the space/time of the interactive installation foreclosed any linear or singular reading. Back (2008) used the exhibition as a prompt for thinking about regimes of value and measurement in the university context, and the changing shape of sociology within these regimes (see also Back 2016: 47–52). The following year, we curated Sociologists Talking (2009) as a stand-­ alone piece, this time using the aesthetics of a regular university classroom as

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the exhibition space (see Figure 3.1). Questions of pedagogic and sociological authority came to the fore in this very different space, with the rows of desks oriented to the front of the class and the fixed, concrete walls and white boards providing more certain surfaces than the glass and curtains of the Teaching Grid with their reflective and billowing materials. Sociologists Talking provides one example of taking a live sociological approach to the communication of data and analysis. Presenting our data in this way enabled us to work towards Back and Puwar’s (2012) manifesto aspirations that as sociologists we ‘utilise our senses equally in attending to the social world’ and ‘foster the liveliness of words’. Since this time, I have worked more closely with a variety of artists, and this has widened my understanding of the repertoire of materials with and through which the social world can be encountered, experienced and understood. For The Idea of a University in 2010,6 I was fortunate to be able to use the Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre to exhibit research from a year-­long collaborative staff–student project mapping the spatial, historical and political generation and regeneration of the University of Warwick from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present day. For this research project, a  team of academics and undergraduate and postgraduate students from the disciplines of sociology and history co-­produced research, sharing all aspects of the process, including data gathering, analysis and giving conference papers.

Figure 3.1  Sociologists Talking, University of Warwick (2009).

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Although the student participants were moving on to new ventures by the time the project came to its end and the exhibition planning began, a different collaboration emerged, as I shared the exhibition space with the artistic directors of Fierce.7 We curated distinct exhibitions in the gallery but worked together to make the experience feel connected for audiences, and I benefitted from their curatorial expertise and imagination in designing and setting up The Idea of a University. The Idea of a University was a mixed-­media installation, produced from original archival and interview data, comprising photographic images interweaved with interview and documentary texts, documentary films, audio recordings of extracts from interviews, a social reading space for visitors to engage in the wider theoretical and archival resources relating to the project, and a programme of scheduled discussions and events. In this way, the exhibition not only communicated findings from the project but also provided a space/time in which new data was generated, as visitors, their memories often prompted by the visual and audio archival resources, told their own stories. These accounts came from members of the university as well as local residents. The siting of the exhibition in a public gallery, accessible to the community as well as university staff and students, made this possible. As such, it provided a forum for the enactment of public sociology (Burawoy 2005; Back 2007; Puwar and Sharma 2012; Hynes 2016). Looking back over my curatorial sociological practice, I see a shift from the experimental format of Sociologists Talking, in which the exhibition was primarily used to communicate findings at the end of a traditional qualitative research process, to The Idea of a University, which both presented research data and analysis and generated new material through public engagement with the exhibition. In 2013, my design and occupation of the Live Art Research Hub as an integral part of Brian Lobel’s Fun with Cancer Patients exhibition marked my first attempts to utilise curatorial methods as part of the research process itself, generating data in the midst of an exhibition by attending to people’s intellectual and affective responses to the materials and themes of the artwork (see Lambert 2016). I return to discuss the Live Art Research Hub later in this chapter. What all these diverse projects have in common is a commitment to resisting didactic modes of sharing or communicating ideas in favour of generating affective and sensory space/times in which materials, provocations, theory, stories – data in all its messiness – can be engaged with by visitors on their own terms. Such an approach recognises participants’ own capacities for making sense of materials with minimal explication as well as enabling knowledge production to occur in collaborative and multi-­sensory ways. As such, there are multiple risks implicated in such method/ologies. There is a risk of ‘aesthetic’ failure in terms of producing something that looks and feels ‘good’. It is also necessary to cede (some) authorial control and epistemic authority, enabling participants to take or make the meanings they want from the research. To some extent, this is true of any form of research output: despite our best didactic efforts, readers and

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spectators actively make their own sense of what we have to say and ‘translate it on the basis of their own intellectual adventure’ (Rancière 2009: 21). However, the kinds of participatory and fluid engagement with knowledges offered by exhibitions such as those described above facilitate multiple, contesting, partial, surprising interpretations, some of which may run counter to the researcher-­ curator’s intentions or desires.

Re/presenting live practice Whether in art, sociology or life, to be ‘live’ is to be in the moment, and what happens in that ‘moment’ eludes re/presentation (Phelan 1993). This poses significant challenges for sociologists wishing not just to dwell in live encounters but also to attend critically, documenting and re/presenting the experience and its meanings. In Chapter 1, I offered a methodological critique of research that attempts to package and represent the social world, supplanting and superseding it with singular authoritative elucidation. Such an approach has been characterised as (amongst other things) explicatory (Rancière 1991), paranoid (Sedgwick 2003), and colonial and piratic (Tilley 2017). This should not lead to a refusal to investigate, describe, analyse or re/present the empirical world, but it does entail utilising methods able to extend aesthetic enquiry and dwell in the space/time of productive contradiction and uncertainty. This may mean interrogating our usual methods of representation and experimenting with less usual ones, as in the examples above. It certainly means being more critical about what representation does. How are our knowledge regimes bound up with particular modes of representation, and to what extent can live sociological practice disrupt these? ‘Representation’, says Craig Owens (1992: 91), ‘is not – nor can it be – neutral; it is … the founding act of power in our culture.’ This strong statement makes us pause for a moment to think more critically about a word and act central to the practices of both art and sociology. Crucially, we need to interrogate the assumed relationship between meaning and representation. The imbrication of representation and power circumscribes what can be known or made culturally legible (Butler 1993: 238). The ‘representational world’ in which we live forces us to think (and unthink, but rarely think out outside of ) binaries. Simon O’Sullivan (2006: 16) makes the link between the representational function (of art) and subjectivity: We are … representational creatures with representational habits of thoughts. We inhabit an internal and an external world. We separate ourselves as subjects from the object world.… Art … is complicit in this dynamic. Art mirrors back an apparently reassuring image of our own subjectivity.… As such, a transformation in how we think about art will necessarily alter the topology of how we think about ourselves and vice versa. It is in this sense that the crisis of representation is also a crisis in typical subjectivity.

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Sociology, too, plays a role in re/producing the world in this way, parsing subjects from the object world and our selves from others. But sometimes this representation is unreliable and fails. Yasmin Gunaratnam (2013: 18), researching the lives of migrants who are dying, explores the methods necessary to attend to what might be ‘withdrawn from sensibility and superficial appearances’. One of the roles of live art explored here is to offer lines of flight out of representational ways of being and into – what? What lies beyond, what possibilities open up, if we are to move away from representational ontologies and epistemologies? In the previous chapter I introduced the concept of minor art, taken from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) idea of a ‘minor literature’. Major art forms are representative. One of the potentialities of minor art is to deterritorialise the major through stuttering and stammering its language; through emphasising art’s affective capacities over what it signifies; through humour and incongruity, such that new collective assemblages emerge. O’Sullivan (2006: 73) suggests that A minor art pushes up against the edges of representation; it bends it, forces it to the limits and often to a certain absurdity … affective ruptures – which themselves utilise existing materials – are the fertile ground for new forms of representation, new signifying regimes. Live art already occupies, I have argued, this minor function. The Live Art Development Agency notes that For many artists, Live Art is a generative force: to destroy pretence, to create sensory immersion, to shock, to break apart traditions of representation, to open different kinds of engagement with meaning.8 One of the ways in which it does this is by displacing the centrality of visual signification for experiences that are felt in the body. Ethnography has had its own ‘crisis of representation’, recognising the instability of knowledge claims, the failure of research tools and language itself to capture and reflect back ‘reality’ (Denzin 1997). Influenced by poststructuralism, there has been a notable shift in the criteria for representativeness, accounting for the specificity and constructedness of knowledge claims and the potential multiplicity of narratives which emerge from one event (Lather 1997). However, other than the self-­avowedly ‘tentative’, ‘tortuous’ and ‘portentous’ (Thrift 2008) attempts to construct a non-­representational theory within geography, representation tends to be skirted around with a nod to its limitations accompanying a determination to do it anyway. Part of the challenge for live sociology is to do it differently, and to think and to experiment, with and alongside the resources of live artistic practice, in order to enable possible new regimes of signification. To think a bit more about what failures in representation might mean for sociological research and the kinds of knowledge to which we can lay claim, I turn to consider two examples from my ethnographic work

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with artist Brian Lobel on his project Fun with Cancer Patients (2013). These examples recount the limitations, productive failures and im/possibilities of documenting the live. They also point towards the ways in which (sometimes) letting go of a representational imperative can enable new or different narratives and experiences to unfold. They make a case for generative rather than (or alongside) representational encounters.

Representational failure in Fun with Cancer Patients Fun with Cancer Patients was carried out as part of Fierce festival in 2013, and I worked closely with the artist as a social researcher throughout its duration. For the first few months of Fun with Cancer Patients, the ‘artwork’ took the form of a residential workshop with teenagers who were undergoing or had recently undergone treatment for cancer, during which the young people, in response to the question ‘What would be useful for you?’, came up with ideas for ‘actions’, artistic interventions of some kind that would communicate their experiences of cancer and cancer treatment to the public.9 Six of these ‘actions’ were then realised and documented in different ways. The documentation was exhibited in a free gallery space at mac Birmingham, a public arts centre. I describe two of the actions here: Cancer Friends and Tell the Kitchen, which demonstrate the im/ possibilities of documenting and representing live practice. The Cancer Friends action came out of the young people’s desire to ‘celebrate our cancer friends’. In a film introducing Fun with Cancer Patients, Brian Lobel explains the notion of cancer friends: I had never really heard of the term ‘cancer friends’, being like the person that you meet during cancer, and the friend who becomes your friend after others might … become uncomfortable talking about cancer.… We created this cancer friends day, where I gave people one hundred pounds, and a disposable camera, if they spend the day thinking about what a cancer friend means.10 The participants signed a ‘contract’11 to agree to the terms of the exchange. These were that they would trade their mobile phone for £100, which they would spend on or with their cancer friend, who would be the sole focus of their attention. At the end of the day, they would get their phone back and, in return, would give their disposable cameras, full of the pictures they had taken, to the artist and would share their reflections on what it meant to be or have a cancer friend. In this way, the action met the young people’s need and desire to spend time with their friends and have these special friendships recognised, as well as providing some insight into the concept of cancer friends as it is enacted and described by the young people. From the outset, it was only possible to achieve fleeting and partial documentation of the day’s activities. The young participants and their elected cancer

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friends all met, with the artist, photographer and me as researcher, in a large shopping centre. The photographer tried to take pictures of this initial meeting, at which instructions for the day were given out and contracts signed; however, security staff came over and prevented photographs being taken. Once the participants had exchanged the use of their mobile phones for the money, they went off in pairs and groups, and we barely saw them for the rest of the day. We stayed in the same meeting spot, and some of them ‘checked in’ when they were passing, but the experiences they had were theirs alone. They documented these using the disposable cameras, and at the end of the day the artist collected their reflections on their day with their friends and their thoughts on what a cancer friend was. To do this, we sat outside the shopping centre in a noisy circle, eating doughnuts and chatting. The artist audio-­recorded the conversation and I made handwritten notes. For the public exhibition, printed versions of all their photographs were displayed, together with some of the things they had said about cancer friends, alongside an account from a medical professional about the significance of friendships to young cancer patients. The documentation, when exhibited, captured very little about the day in all its social, experiential complexity. From the perspective of traditional social science research, the day felt like a fascinating failure. What were the young people up to? Where did they go, and why, and how did they feel? How was this art, and of what significance might it be to a wider public in helping them understand the importance of cancer friends? How might I be able to pursue these questions after the event? However, I learnt something important from the artist, who was sanguine about the unrepresentability of the day’s action: the kids’ experience was their experience, and there was a politics to them being enabled to go and have fun, do ‘normal’ things, without being objectified as a cancer patient or victim or survivor. The removal of their own ‘representational devices’ in the form of their phones was also significant, forcing these technology-­ dependent young adults to be ‘in the moment’, focusing their attentions on their experiences and relationship with their friends. The camera, or the researchers’ gaze, was not on them, and they were authoring their own day through their analogue photographs and collective discussion at the end. For Brian Lobel, the aim of Fun with Cancer Patients is precisely to overturn dominant views of what cancer means and to disrupt prevailing medical, charity and media discourses, which offer limited and limiting subject positions for cancer patients. The exhibition materials failed to represent the day, but they did something else. They created a space in the public art gallery in which visitors were often challenged in relation to their views about young people with cancer, and were prompted to reflect on the idea of cancer friends and friendships, often in relation to their own experiences. After engaging with the Cancer Friends materials, many visitors told complex and occasionally harrowing stories about the impact of cancer on their own friendships. Tell the Kitchen was even more ‘unrepresentable’. This action emerged from the participants’ discussions about diet, food and taste in relation to cancer

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treatment and hospitalisation.12 As the young people’s own reflections, and the accounts of medical professionals, testified, having cancer and cancer treatment can have a profound effect on a patient’s appetite, desire for particular foods, body and weight, and relationship with food and eating. For those post-­treatment, their memories of food in hospital can be profoundly sensory and often very emotional. What the young people wanted to see happen was that young cancer patients would get to eat whatever they wanted. In order to make this happen, two gourmet/artist chefs called Blanch and Shock13 spent a day in the Young People’s Unit (YPU) at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth (QE) hospital, where many of the city’s young cancer patients receive their treatment. I spent the day with them. In the morning, they visited each patient resident on the ward with the dietician and asked the patient what they were hungry for at that moment. They prepared that precise meal for the patient for their tea. Like the activity for Cancer Friends, this action was framed in response to what cancer patients find useful, and its politics lay in providing an encounter and experience which was completely normalising – being able to eat what you feel like – but the antithesis of cancer patients’ usual experience. Normally, patients choose from a set menu of pre-­prepared meals designed to be of high nutritional value, but widely regarded as lacking in taste or aesthetics. In the research diary I made during the day, I noted the explanation given by the YPU dietician: All food is cooked externally, brought here and reheated. It’s nutritionally good but people don’t like it. It’s very traditional food – most patients at the QE are over the age of fifty-­five. This is an adult hospital so teenaged patients miss out. Instead, this intervention offered a highly personalised, indulgent experience that privileged the desires of the participants over any concerns with the art or research. No cameras filmed or photographed the sick patients; the only documentation produced and exhibited was menu-­style descriptions of the meal each patient ordered, a single picture of each completed dish, and reflections from medical professionals on the significance of food to cancer patients. Again, Brian Lobel was passionate about the politics of (non)representation. My research notes read: The aim is to take Instagram style pictures of food to exhibit with the recipe. Brian says there won’t be any pictures ‘of happy children eating food’ … ‘I can’t in good conscience put it on display’ he says, ‘the goal is to be really small: a small introduction to a space that is about themselves. The audience don’t get to feel it, don’t get to cry about it, just see it. Very cold’. When I looked at the final documentation presented in the Fun with Cancer Patients exhibition, I felt a chasm between the intense, emotional, powerful and eccentric day in which this action had been carried out, and the impersonal,

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sterile, almost clinical representation of it for the public. However, this cannot be considered a ‘failure’ of representation, in that it was clearly part of the artist’s intention that visitors to the exhibition would be denied access to that emotion. In turn, as with the resources from the cancer friends day, the ‘cold’ materials were utilised in the public exhibition to create a new affective space, which, in failing to capture the young people’s experiences, generates possibilities for visitors to the exhibition to have an emotional experience of their own (see Lambert 2016). It is also important to note that being beyond (artistic) representation does not equate to the art not having a ‘real-­life’ impact. In an interview, Sarah, a support worker who helped facilitate Tell the Kitchen, noted that we had one girl – who hadn’t eaten properly since she’s been in [hospital]. Been in for ages. I don’t think she’s eaten properly since. She came up [for tea], and was very kind of nonchalant about it, ‘That was alright. And then she said to me the next day, ‘that was the best meal I’ve had in ages.’ In both these examples, we can see the artist’s strategic and political refusals to represent the emotion and intensity of the live action sitting alongside the impossibility of ‘capturing’ and representing experiences that are complex and fast-­ moving and operate on multiple registers. The wider implications around (lack of ) documentation are revisited in Chapter 6: for now, I want to attend sociologically to the question of knowledges that resist being known.

Un/knowability I have become tired of reading elegant pronouncements on the unknowability of culture and social life; there is no compensation in these bold statements of defeat for me any more. The task, it seems to me, is to pay truth the courtesy of serious effort without reducing the enigmatic and shifting nature of social existence to caricature and stereotype. (Back 2007: 153) One of the significant (and I think valid) critiques of the so-­called ‘turn to affect’ (see for example Clough and Halley 2007; Gregg and Seigworth 2010) has been its failure to account empirically for live experiences and feelings. As I have written about elsewhere (see Lambert 2016), there has been a strong presumption within affect theory that affect is not susceptible to empirical observation and analysis, as it is understood as an (unrealised) capacity to act, manifesting in automatic, pre-­reflexive bodily sensations and responses. As such, it eludes the usual methodological approaches (Massumi 2010; Hynes 2013). Productive critiques and reworkings of affect theory from feminist scholars have suggested ways for conceptualising the relations and movements between bodily, pre-­ cognitive and discursive affective responses (see Ahmed 2004; Hemmings 2011; Wetherell 2012; Sointu 2015). Sara Ahmed’s (2004) concept of ‘affective

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economies’ and Margaret Wetherell’s (2012) delineation of ‘affective practices’ both provide useful frameworks for live sociology to work with and between the ‘knowledge that slips’ (Lomax 2005) and that which makes itself amenable to our research endeavours. Live sociology, if it is to be useful here, needs to escape concerns that to move beyond representation is to become ‘unknowable’ in such a way as to be empirically unreachable. It is important not to reify the unintelligible, but rather, to keep working at our research endeavours, which take us to places, events, experiences and encounters that do not immediately, or in any coherent way, yield to our pre-­existing systems of understanding. Yasmin Gunaratnam (2012: 120) argues that Thinking about the status of what is inaccessible, mysterious or unlocatable is to think about differential histories and scales of existence and how these histories and scales are rendered and approached – and always in media res – from different, and sometimes antagonistic, disciplinary perspectives. Gunaratnam’s (2013) empirical focus on the experiences of migrants who are dying foregrounds a political and ethical imperative, requiring the development of methods driven by a desire (and, for some, a responsibility) to oppose unnecessary suffering.… The unintelligible in this regard is not so much a bounded territory or domain, an empirical no-­go zone. Rather, it signifies and problematizes the underlying drive of the attentiveness of live sociology as an imperative to uncover and to do something about unnecessary suffering. (Gunaratnam 2012: 120) What can be known is not prescribed or certain, but neither can it be automatically rendered unintelligible. Gunaratnam’s (2012: 120) delineation of live sociology’s generative capacity is key here: I am suggesting that the unintelligible in the practice of live sociology involves something more than being the opposite or absence of intelligibility. Carrying the capacity to put into motion, touch, interrupt and halt is the very condition of future ‘live’ empirical activity; a site of problem-­making and accounting for that is simultaneously an opening to the generation of different methodological practices, knowledge, and a way of thinking about the usefulness of what we do. She highlights two methodological points of importance: the first is being attentive to a ‘range of different materials out of which attempts at intersubjective bridging and communication can be produced, and which exceed the social, the material and the temporally linear’ and the second is ‘the cultivating of an

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empirical sensibility that is hospitable to the inaccessible and the non-­relational’ (Gunaratnam 2012: 120). I suggest that live art utilises such materials. Specifically, queer and feminist art practices working with the body and with affect offer possibilities for enacting the kinds of methodological adventures to which Gunaratnam (2012) refers. I attend in more detail to some examples of such practices in Chapter 5. Possibly the ultimate ‘unknowable’, also carefully and creatively addressed in Gunaratnam’s (2013) work, is death. We need to ensure a place for death in the future of live sociology.

A live sociology of death Everyone talks around death. They never talk about in it. (Zoe, support worker, interview 2013) Zygmunt Bauman (1992: 2, original emphases) states that ‘Death is the absolute other of being, an unimaginable other, hovering beyond the reaches of communication’, illustrating both the dualistic and oppositional framing of life and death as well as death’s banishment to a state beyond even our imaginations, let alone our capacities to relate (to) it in anything other than metaphor. However, the inevitability of death, and the extent to which it is integral, in varying degrees, to people’s affective and political experiences of living and becoming, makes it important to sociological attentiveness to lived experiences. Since I became interested in the development of live sociology, death has troubled me in enmeshed intellectual and affective ways. Death is one of the few life experiences we are all certain to encounter; yet it remains beyond our experiential and empathetic knowledge. Dying and death are profoundly sense-­based knowledges, both for the person dying and for people who witness their experiences, and yet there is often a non-­sense about death: an unspeakability. Death, for many, is barely culturally intelligible, or our utterances and stories are communicated in such limited discursive frames that what words we have feel hopelessly inadequate. Further, in many cultural contexts, we see embedded in social and cultural norms what Chris Searle (1998: 1) calls a ‘turning away’ from the inevitability of death. This turning can involve both a denial of embodiment (in which the inevitability is contained) and the enactment of practices focusing on optimism and the transformation of death into hope and life (Searle 1998: 3). For the development of live methods, there is much at stake here. First, there is an imperative for live sociology to make death an important focus of research. Gunaratnam (2012) provides some insight into utilising live methods in order to be with, and talk about, death and dying. For Gunaratnam (2012: 108), ‘ “live sociology” takes its vital inspiration from death’: There is an existential and carnal destiny to this world of life at its limits that makes tangible a central sociological problematic – that of intersub­ jective communication and understanding.

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In addition, regardless of the subject of research, if we are to develop a methodology attentive to vitality then we also, I suggest, need to insist on that vitality incorporating, rather than denying, death and dying. That is to say, optimism and a focus on the continuation of life need to mingle with a range of ‘negative’ affects – such as fear, anxiety, grief, confusion – which are also necessarily part of embodied life. Whether or not we are engaging explicitly with dying, death should be present in our live methods as it is in our embodied lives. Issues around the representation of death came to the fore in my research with Brian Lobel’s Fun with Cancer Patients (2013). They did so in multiple and complex ways, and here I consider how the art worked to open up or shift the optimistic re/framings and ‘turn towards’ the presence of death. The analysis draws on a joint interview with two non-­medical support workers (Sarah and Zoe), who accompanied the young people during the project, and one of the oncologists (Dave) allied to the project, who treated some of the participants as patients and attended part of the residential workshop. The image of the grim reaper in Figure 3.2 was annotated by one of the teenaged participants in the initial residential workshop, where the artist worked closely with the young people to share experiences and decide on future ‘actions’. The participants were tasked with working in groups to create a visual montage of their thoughts and feelings about cancer using a selection of provided images. Although the young people were not afraid to use the images signifying death in their constructions, including the grim reaper, ‘he got left in the corner’, as Sarah put it: ‘it was almost like, “okay, so that’s me dealing with death” … and it gets a closed lid on it’. The aim of the final exhibition was to incorporate documentation of the young people’s actions. However, the artist, Brian Lobel, decided to include a final exhibition piece around death using the image in Figure 3.2, on which one of the young people had written ‘I never had a relationship with Death until cancer.’ Rescued from ‘the corner’ and mounted alone in a display box as part of the public exhibition, the annotated image signified in very different ways than it had in the workshop setting. It was alone, rather than located in the context of other images. The black cloth on which it was mounted and the coffin-­like shape of the display cabinet denoted a finality about death which was perhaps not intended by the participants’ deployment of the grim reaper as a future threat, a live ‘relationship with’ death, rather than becoming death itself. Divya Tolia-­ Kelly (2016: 903, original emphases) identifies the ‘cabinet’ as a site of display and knowledge production (her focus is on museums). The display cabinet ‘isolates’, she writes: ‘Artefacts are thus “severed” from their original situatedness in a display that privileges the sight of them.’ It is no coincidence that death here was segregated, severed and contained. No touching, no feeling allowed. For Lobel, the decision to include death in the exhibition in this way was fraught. He raised it with the young people when the exhibition was in situ and they were all gathering at the arts centre to see it for the first time. I noted in my research diary how he acknowledged that he had not

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Figure 3.2  Artwork produced by participants in Fun with Cancer Patients (2013). Source: photograph by Christa Holka. Courtesy of Brian Lobel.

consulted them and joked with them that ‘it’s difficult to do – just send a facebook message, “hi, how do you feel about death?” ’. Talking about death is not (just) about our own fears, taboos or awkwardness; it is also about protecting others. The grim reaper picture in the exhibition was accompanied, on the wall alongside it, by commentary from Dave the oncologist. It reads:

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I have always been fascinated by the ‘protective mechanisms’ that kick in when patients become palliative. On reflection, I very rarely use the words death or dying. I am more likely to use phrases such as ‘I am no longer able to make you better’ or ‘I am not able to do anything now to make your cancer go away’. If I speak with parents alone first, I always make it clear that if the young person asks me a question, I will always give an honest answer or response. I think the parents find this more worrying than the young people. I will always ask young people if ‘there is anything they would wish to say to me or ask me’ during consultations and I can perhaps only think of one occasion when I have been asked outright, by a young person ‘Am I dying?’. I am always convinced that the young people understand what is being said but never raise it in order to protect both themselves and their parents. On occasions I feel we do not address the ‘elephant in the room’ but most of the time, that is appropriate for that young person and their family. When I interviewed Dave following the exhibition, he elaborated on his experiences of dealing with young people whom ‘we know we can’t cure’ in terms of the dynamic between them and their parents or other close family, who often try to close down the conversation to prevent an honest answer to the question ‘Am I dying?’ However this ‘protective mechanism’ works both ways, as young people, faced with cancer and death, are often also concerned about their parents. Dave said, ‘I’m half convinced that it protects the parents more. They don’t want to make parents upset, and therefore, they don’t ask. This ‘relational’ responsibility around death featured in the workshop itself as well as in the wider networks in which a patient is embedded. In the interview extract below, Zoe, one of the support workers, talked about the ways in which the young people had navigated their use of the ‘death’ images at the workshop: [Death] is something that is there. And [she is speaking as a young person might] ‘I want to deal with it, but I don’t have the skill, strength, capacity to actually take it forward. Here are the things [images] that I know I’m comfortable with’ … perhaps that they know we [the staff] are comfortable with, perhaps they know other people are comfortable with. Here, Zoe highlights how ‘comfort’ is not just an individual concern and how the potential impact of bringing death into the affective and discursive space of the workshop needs to be navigated in terms of its possible effects on others. Zoe continued: [I]f one of them stood up and said ‘let’s do a big thing on death’, I don’t know.… But it was interesting that when they did their pictures, and they chose their pictures and made them into their own collages and stuff, quite a few of them did pick the grim reaper, the gravestone, those images that you don’t see in cancer publicity do you?

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In this explanation Zoe reveals the difficulties of ‘dealing with’ death for the young person, not just as an individual but as a patient with a relational sense of responsibility to others. Doing ‘a big thing on death’, that is, selecting it as a topic for an ‘action’, was not really an option; however, the opportunity to incorporate death into their montages via the unusual images was taken up by the participants. The collective nature of the artistic process is clearly central here. These young people were not able to simply pursue what they wanted to as an individual concern; they were working alongside other cancer patients and professionals, and were mindful that, in this setting especially, everyone’s relationship with life is precarious. However, the fact that the death iconography was available legitimised its use as part of the creative process. The Death exhibit also featured a statement from Sarah. In it, echoing the optimistic futurism identified by Searle (2008), Sarah refers to the Treat treat treat mentality of these units. There’s always a plan, there is always a what next? and once a patient can no longer be treated, there is no what next. She points to a lack of other ways for young people who can no longer be treated to engage with death, such as creating memory boxes or planning their funeral. Instead, fear of others’ reactions closes down such an alternative plan. A lot of young people think about legacy and what they are leaving behind. We talk about grief and loss a lot but we don’t talk about death. We talk about ‘I’m never going to be able to do this, or that’ and this is probably them coming to terms with their dying, without ever verbalising it. In their daily working practices, the professionals supporting young people with cancer also struggle to discuss death with them. In Zoe’s and Sarah’s interviews, they used ‘road’ metaphors to describe how conversations with young people around life and death are framed, and how the contradictory experiences, which cancer patients simultaneously negotiate, are managed: Zoe: 

it’s that language of [you’ve] ‘come to the end of the road’, you know, ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, never cold hard facts. Sarah:  it’s always a bit of a dual carriageway for the young people as well, because they’re mentioning future and plans, and then, on the other hand, ‘when this happens, I want to leave behind … I want to achieve this’, these kind of wish-­lists. So they’re planning for the future alongside … probably more realistic short-­term goals. Zoe:  we can feel it’s a bit contradictory and, as staff, you don’t recognise that’s what they’re doing … ‘yesterday you were saying to me in three years’ time you want to go to Uni, but don’t you know you’re dying? Today you’re saying, “How do I manage?” ’ … it’s a way of coping isn’t it? You can’t live in one lane all the time.

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As we saw from Dave, the medical team also deal in phrases (‘I am no longer able to treat you’) that may be obfuscating and certainly do not enable a young person to be ‘in death’, as Zoe put it, in any constructive way. This art project, the different perspectives it offered, and the responses to it generated through my engagements as a researcher demonstrated an unsurprising gap in our collective capacity to deal with, to discuss, and concomitantly to understand, death. Sarah’s reflections raise critical, sociological questions, about what death is (if not just grief and loss) and how, if (young) people do not (or cannot) verbalise it, we can begin to understand their and our relationship with death. A live sociology of death needs the methodological tools to, as Zoe put it, be ‘in death’: ‘everyone talks around death. They never talk about in it’ (her emphasis). Her observation resonates with my earlier reflections on the temporality of live research and the ethical and epistemological imperative to dwell in, to attend (to) death, to take the ‘frog’s eye view’ (Lury 2012). Running with Zoe and Sarah’s road metaphor, we can perhaps articulate a cartographic responsibility for live sociological practice. If the medical and support network provides ‘one road’, treat, treat treat, and it will be fine or it’s not fine and there the road ends, and the young people themselves maintain their ‘dual carriageway’, holding in tension a realistic appraisal of their lives ending and a narrative of future plans, then live methods can increase the routes on offer. What would a less linear series of tracks look and feel like in terms of creative research practice? How might our methods and our theorising expand the possibilities for co-­constructing bearable narratives about our own and others’ mortality (Aaron 2013)? Sarah and Zoe raised a similar sentiment in relation to cancer itself: Sarah:  [we

do a lot of] moving on … a lot of ‘what’s next’? ‘What’s next’? And that’s why Zoe and I were thinking this [Fun with Cancer Patients] is quite different. Because we’re actually in the here and now. Or maybe a little bit in the past. And actually, really digging, kind of picking the scabs off things for some people, but gently. You know, it wasn’t awful. And it wasn’t traumatic. It was just – it was what it was … because they were really in the moment. And I think a lot of what we do as professionals is … encouraging socialisation. Encouraging normality … Zoe:  Getting on with life. Sarah:  Yeah, so actually to be in it, there’s a slightly different angle. Zoe:  Yeah. To be in the cancer, going in and really focusing on that. Their reiteration of being ‘in’ it, articulated in relation to both death and cancer, highlights the temporal achievements of the live art project. Rather than the rush to the future via ‘socialisation’, ‘normality’, anything to avoid the difficult place of the present, the art workshops and actions enabled the young people to ‘be in  the here and now’. Sarah’s idiomatic ‘it was what it was’ to describe what was actually in that moment indicates the complex, immutable nature of what it

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possibly meant for the young people themselves to think more deeply about, or with more acceptance of, (their) cancer. We don’t know ‘what it was’ for them, except in our inferences from their subsequent discussions, action and outputs (such as the annotated grim reaper), but what we can see is a very different subjective space/time being made available for the participants than the usual modes of support on offer. In this next and final section I stay with the Fun with Cancer Patients project but return to my curatorial and practice-­based work utilising live methods. The project culminated with a public exhibition documenting, as I have discussed, the ‘actions’ initiated by the young people’s participation. I designed and developed what I called the Live Art Research Hub, embedded within the exhibition, as a base for exploring and generating visitors’ responses to the exhibition materials.

The Live Art Research Hub Fun with Cancer Patients Live Art Research Hub: A space for the sharing and exchange of thoughts, ideas, reactions, questions, feelings and observations in response to the exhibition. (Statement on wall of research hub) This exhibition challenged me very profoundly, in very unexpected ways, and gave me a deep emotional connection to my own existing experience. (Jane, visitor to exhibition, interview) In my research notes from the Cancer Friends and Tell the Kitchen days of ‘action’, I observed that the ‘audience’ for the project – an imaginary audience at that point in the project – do not get to see what went on. It was important for the artist, Brian Lobel, that in this piece of work, spectators do not witness suffering; they are not invited to feel sorry for the participants. The final audience – visitors to the public exhibition – only get to see the ‘end product’ in the form of documentation on the actions. Having followed the project through from the beginning and shared some of the intense, affective, funny and complicated experiences along the way, I was intrigued to see how this would play out in terms of the public exhibition. Would it capture or do justice in any way to the young people’s experiences? When so many media interventions around cancer and young people aim precisely to invoke emotional and sympathetic responses, what did it mean to create an art exhibition seeking to actively deny them? In fact, the exhibition was very open to emotional responses, but it was clear that these would be based on visitors’ experiences, not those of the participants. In the opening text to the exhibition, Lobel writes: Fun with Cancer Patients was created to give a space for honest reflection, first for patients, then for medical staff, about the effects and realities of this

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illness. This project is an attempt to open that reflection up to the public, all of whom come with their own cancer story. As with any piece of art, a viewer’s interpretation is deeply affected by their own experience, especially true when the work is about cancer. We hope viewers will embrace their histories and contribute their own cancer stories as they really wish to tell them, not just how they think we want them to be heard. The exhibition, then, is less about the participants and their experiences and more about the visitors, the ‘public’. The materials on display do, of course, provide powerful emotional context and provoke or enable others’ affective responses; however, the nature of those responses depends on the people themselves. The project also embeds a ‘research’ dimension from the outset, inviting visitors to ‘embrace’ their histories and, if they wish, ‘contribute their own cancer stories’. The Live Art Research Hub became integral to this aspect of the exhibition. It occupied a corner at the top end of the gallery, marking a ‘half-­ way’ point in the flow of the exhibition, and although the statement on the wall clearly marked it out as a space of research, the ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of it made it integral to the exhibition. There was a blurring, an entanglement of art and sociology that found material form in the physical space of the hub. From within the hub, two research assistants14 and I worked on a rota for every day of the four-­ week duration of the exhibition; we observed, wrote notes, talked with people, listened to people, witnessed their responses and their dedications, conducted interviews, took photographs and facilitated people’s sharing of stories in all kinds of different formats, including written, spoken, drawn and gestural (see Lambert 2016). A good deal of anxiety went into getting the hub ‘right’ in practical, aesthetic, research and ethical ways. In my research notes from just before the exhibition opened, I wrote: Suddenly I feel proud of the hub. It is where art ethnographies should be, in the heart/part of it. Brian [Lobel] has pasted one of his graphics [see Figure 3.3] of a stern looking female doctor with a clipboard just into ‘our bit’ of the space, and it feels like a funny and generous offering: ‘these people are part of what I’m doing’, it says … I am moved by the gesture which signifies trust and acceptance. Our shared space(s). Although the original iconography depicts a medical rather than an academic doctor, there was a humorous nod to the science of research with the clipboard, and it helped me simultaneously reflect on how we stand within yet apart from the art/work as well as in relation to traditional social science methods (could we be further from clipboard sociology?). The co-­sharing of space marked an important statement in terms of a disciplinary mingling of knowledges, and also became the locus for points of tension when norms of (for example) ethical practice in art and social science proposed conflicting responses (see Chapter 1). These disciplinary tensions cannot be wished away from collaborations such as

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Figure 3.3  Live Art Research Hub in Fun with Cancer Patients exhibition (2013).

these and deserve more critical attention in thinking through the potentialities of curating sociology (Puwar and Sharma 2012). In fact, the hub became integral to realising one of the project’s aims. The artist’s statement declares: ‘Instead of asking for your sympathy, or pity, Fun with Cancer Patients asks for your intellectual and critical engagement around cancer.’ Of course, people can engage intellectually and critically without sociologists on board, but as the project developed, it became clear that live sociology had much to offer as a way of promoting, generating and documenting people’s intellectual and critical and, I would add, affective engagement (see Lambert 2016). In this way, as Puwar and Sharma (2012: 46) put it: Curating sociology is entangled with re-­purposing methods from a cross-­ disciplinary standpoint. However, it is not a one-­way exchange, as there may be much that is also shared and redistributed from within sociology. I have written elsewhere about some of the audience’s engagement as generated within the hub (see Lambert 2016). I want to finish this section by looking at selective responses that demonstrate the ways in which the partial documentation of the young people’s experiences opened new affective spaces for some visitors. The first example involved a difficult and complicated encounter with a

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woman who walked around the exhibition on her own and then came into the hub area and began to talk. Her style was monologic. Occasionally, she stopped to ask: ‘is it OK for me to talk like this?’ and after receiving reassurances, she would continue. When she had gone I wrote up several pages of notes on the encounter. In these, I document how her outpouring of her story fixed me stock still, listening intently, with the feeling that if I were to move my body she would stop talking. She also stood very still: it felt as if a switch had been flicked, compelling her to talk. She talked about her son, who had had cancer several years ago as a child but was now recovered. He was also adopted, with a difficult early history, and the dual factors of his childhood trauma and subsequent illness with cancer combined to provide an impossible situation for her as his adoptive mother, leaving her without adequate support from friends or family. She talked in incredible detail, and with current anger, about the failure of individuals to support her and her family in ways they needed, and she expressed rage and resentment that others did receive the support she craved. Her language was visceral and uncompromising. There were some touching stories embedded in her outpouring, resonating with the Cancer Friends material. She smiled once, and it was when She recollected a time when she watched her son in hospital with two other boys, all of them attached to drips … the boys were talking about the best way to get anaesthetics, ‘like three old men’ and she was struck by how he could only have that kind of in-­depth, intense conversation with fellow cancer patients. At the end of her story – she talked for about twenty minutes with minimal intervention – she said ‘thank you’ and noted that this was ‘an important piece of work to have shown in this space’, congratulating the arts centre for ‘taking it on’. Feeling shell-­shocked, I did a lot of thinking about our role in ‘being there’ to catch whatever the fall-­out might be from the exhibition’s emotional provocations. We had listened with care and attention. Our opinions or advice had not been solicited, and much of what the woman talked about was in the past, not a current problem needing solutions. The exhibition had provided a space/time in which her story made sense and in which it was legitimate to tell it. Jill Bennett (2002: 346) provides two useful concepts through which we can understand emotional encounters such as this, which are provoked by artwork, but are not directly connected to it. Bennett (2002: 340) talks about ‘sense memory’, an embodied, felt memory: ‘to be in the grip of sense memory is, by definition, to remain haunted by memory that resists cognitive processing’. Although in many ways the woman above was able to tell parts of her story as if it were contained in ‘ordinary’ or cognitive memory, the ways in which her monologue shifted back and forth without narrative or linear structure between different aspects of her trauma (her son’s cancer treatment, his early neglect and extreme behavioural problems, the failures of friendship) indicated that these were not memories

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that had been subject to reflection and narrative organisation or rehearsal over the course of time. She also did not narrate different emotional events along ‘usual’ scalar orders, in that what appeared to be trivial examples of unintentional thoughtlessness from a friend were expressed with the same ferocity of emotion as examples of intense suffering. We saw other examples of sense memory in action in people’s engagements with the materials, such as a man who came to us and showed us a wristband for a cancer charity, which he worked round and round his wrist with evident pain. Bennett (2002: 346) also talks about ‘secondary witnesses’ who do not see or feel the ‘original’ trauma but ‘live out the reality of loss in a context where pain is not contained in the single moment but is present in everyday life in all interactions’. This woman, as with other visitors to the exhibition, did not (could not) feel the trauma and sadness of the young people’s difficult encounters with cancer, but through the contagious affect of the intersubjective time/space of the exhibition itself and her sense and ordinary memory of her own losses and griefs, she nonetheless felt and experienced sorrow. Her narrative can also be understood through Gunaratnam’s (2012) concept of ‘total pain’. Recognising that ‘pain and suffering can be produced and experienced across a plurality of social and bodily sites’ (Gunaratnam 2013: 137), ‘total pain’ is a term from palliative care that ‘interpolates, and at time creolizes, physical, social, psychological and spiritual pain. It also gives recognition to pain that is accrued over a lifetime.’ Such a concept provides a framework for recognising that this woman’s painful experiences of her son’s cancer and cancer treatment are overlaid and interwoven with earlier physical and psychic traumas. Acknowledging the layers of pain does not make it easier to respond to them, let alone resolve them. Gunaratnam (2012: 115) notes that in a palliative care setting, beyond administering pain-­relieving tranquillising medication, the role of the care practitioner is passive, attentive, accepting of the limited ways in which it is possible to understand or relieve the plurality of pain. There are resonances between this therapeutic and ethical role for the medical/care practitioner and the live sociologist. Sociology is ‘the art of listening’ (Back 2007). Only sometimes, listening is all that is possible and required. I finish with a poem that was written by another visitor to the exhibition, Jess. Jess became actively involved in a day of creative research activities within the exhibition: these involved people writing their responses to the exhibition materials at the ‘beginning’, ‘middle’ and ‘end’ of it (although, of course, in reality people did not necessarily observe the spatial flow of the gallery space) and in different formats, including as hand-­written messages or drawings stuffed into syringes or written on paper leaves to be hung on a tree branch (see Figure 3.4). Jess then collated the responses that visitors had generated and wove them together to write the following poem. The poem, which is reproduced with her permission, demonstrates the generative possibilities of these kinds of methodological interventions. It serves as an indicator of her own and others’ engagement with the exhibition and its provocations, as well as providing analytical and methodological reflections.

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Fun with Cancer Patients wordweave By Jess 2013 Imagine how it felt when we saw ‘cancer’ written on a wall next to ‘fun’ In big bold black letters in a public place associated with leisure and pleasure and creative endeavours. As a general rule we get talked about in medical environments We were glad of the chance to hear people talking about how they live with us How the mention of us in a happy environment made them feel It was an enlightening experience People don’t talk to us that much Conversation with an enemy leads to reconciliation It takes the fire out of the fight It made a refreshing change We were eager to hear about what you would say, what it would make you feel to see these two words together We all came along, carried in your bodies to watch and to wait in our usual style, Multiple Myeloma, with her grand title, chatted with Breast Cancer in her glamorous pink Bowel Cancer and Testicular Cancer sat together pretending they weren’t there. We spoke about our different jobs, the problems associated with our work It’s nice to stick together when you are rejected by society and shunned with contempt. ‘How does the title “Fun with Cancer Patients” make you feel?’ they asked They really wanted to KNOW, ‘how do we really know?’ We sat and watched, people wrote, drew and coloured, Spoke with their bodies, their movements, approaches and avoidances People chatted at length, burst into tears, ran away in disgust, sighed with satisfaction, cheered with relief You showed us more than you told us Speech failed you when your actions didn’t Your tears reached us when your words only showed the limitations of vocabulary We wished we could be different How does this make you feel? ‘Thoughtful’ said one Brain Tumour nodded sagely

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‘Interested’, ‘inquisitive’, ‘intrigued’, ‘reflective’, ‘surprised at my ignorance’ said others Happy words with sad words made people think ‘Shocked’, ‘nervous’, ‘frightened’, ‘apprehensive’, ‘very stirred up’, ‘dread’, And sad, very sad, a bit sad … every variety of sad, One person even wrote that they felt the exhibition was trying to make them feel a different feeling and then they felt sad that they felt sad. Either way, they felt sad ‘Yada yada yada, bla, bla, bla’ said a particularly virulent Oesophagus Cancer who was fasting that day and in a bad mood ‘no shit Sherlock!’ We were beginning to feel despondent, apart from those who were gloating, when we found a drip stand be-­decked with paper doilies ‘Looking forward to being inspired’ wrote one optimistic soul ‘Happy’, ‘amazing’, ‘fabulous’, ‘HAPPY’ (underlined), wrote someone who seemed to be trying too hard. ‘Interested and very happy’, There were smiley faces drawn in ink, and sparkling coloured-­in hearts, Scrunched up private notes on coloured paper pushed into syringe drivers The children behaved very differently from the adults, grabbing the packets of unused medical syringes with abandon and no hint of fear The adults apologised for not being good with needles Perhaps the children don’t know us yet We went into ‘denial’, that well worn phrase ‘They haven’t met with us yet’ we said But we knew that they probably had We noticed that most of the written comments were nameless, unsigned Those written in a child’s hand had their names inscribed in bold letters like a declaration MUSTAFA (he was happy), so was LAYAN, HANNAH felt inspired to help the people who host us Rihanna simply signed her name, like a witness There were those for whom the question didn’t make sense, There were Chinese characters which only some understood, and random numbers whose sequences we couldn’t decipher, whose meanings have yet to reveal themselves Red Herrings? False leads? Or keys to unopened locks? They tried to make room for a journey, to find a beginning middle and an end But people only took different routes, Wrote down the beginning, but not the end The journeys were different too

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Like our progress as diseases, our journeys as growths and systemic failures People were touched and moved, inspired and hopeful, they hoped for cures, ranted at governments for lack of funding They wanted us eradicated Some thought it excellent, and helpful, illuminating, brave, they were pleased that young cancer sufferers had an opportunity to confront their feelings There were those who said it was energising, happy and engaging We felt better for this But yet others simply felt guilty for feeling sad, and felt bad for reacting with sadness We struggled to understand, but in a peculiarly human way, admitting their sadness seemed to help them People expressed their feelings with affecting statements of belief ‘They should be feeling immortal’ ‘they are confronting life’ One woman was particularly distressed and apologetic because it made her cry ‘I’m sorry, you said cancer, I’m sorry, I have someone in my family with cancer, and you asked how I feel’ Many more spoke of their loved ones and of their suffering at our hands. And this is perhaps why some of you thought it belonged elsewhere, in a hospital perhaps It was ‘too sad to see’, ‘inappropriate’, ‘shocking’, not ‘art’ We watched bewildered by your variety and thought of our own diversity, and of our own helplessness to prevent what we do to human life Still others thought the opposite, wanted more We became increasingly confused ‘the topic needed to be more in the public sphere’ they said And then a startling cry of truth, from someone who had to be coaxed to speak, who felt it wasn’t right to say out loud what she really thought A woman who saw the title every single day at work A woman who could not write down what she really felt or speak the truth of it, feeling it was somehow wrong to do so ‘It just makes you think’ she said ‘And I don’t particularly want to think about that every day It exists I don’t want it in my face at work and at home It makes me think of my family again I think it’s worded wrongly What’s fun about it? It’s not fun at all.’ We turned to leave We are not welcome here.

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Figure 3.4 Visitor responses to the creative methods that formed the basis of Jess’s poem, Fun with Cancer Patients (2013).

By personifying cancers as they inhabit our cells, Jess’s poem makes visible cancers in their multiple and diverse forms. The undetected ways in which cancer can occupy people’s bodies chimes with one of the key affective responses identified by the research: a fear of what if? This was described in an interview by another visitor to the exhibition, Ruby, as follows: As soon as you start talking about cancer … you’re talking about life and death … you’re already starting to think what if, what if, what if, what if. Cancer here serves as what Brian Massumi (2010: 64) calls a ‘sign event’ that gives us the affective sensation of something happening even though it may not have yet occurred. The poem generates the same affect in the reader when it refers to the children, about whom the cancer cells declare: ‘ “They haven’t met with us yet” … / But we knew they probably had.’ Such an affective state of possible future threat infused people’s reactions and underpinned the range of responses that the poem identifies. In the third stanza Jess captures some of these, and she highlights the methodological implications of ‘the limitations of vocabulary’ and the necessity of understanding what might be being communicated when people ‘spoke with their bodies, their movements’. Even the written

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responses were contradictory, often performative, ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations. The ethical imperatives of this exhibition and my research involvement are brought poignantly to the fore at the end of the poem, in the form of the woman who ‘had to be coaxed to / speak, who felt it wasn’t right to say out loud what she thought’. This woman was an employee at the arts centre, who ‘saw the title every single day at work’, and for her the exhibition with its juxtaposition of ‘fun’ and ‘cancer’ provided unwelcome and misjudged impingement on her life. Her angry and emotional response is an important reminder for artists, sociologists and any of us whose work intervenes in critical ways in the business of life-­as-usual that our methods must disavow any sense of epistemological entitlement and incorporate people’s refusal to participate as a legitimate and meaningful form of engagement. As a whole, the poem itself reflects the critically humorous register of the exhibition’s title by giving the different cancers voices and personalities as well as their own agentic and emotional capacities. It made me think more about ways in which the materiality, agency and affect of non-­ human forms might be rendered aesthetically legible and intelligible in relation to the space/time of the knowledge encounter. As Jane Bennett (2010) argues: What is needed is a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces operating outside and inside the human body … a countercultural kind of perceiving. (Bennett 2010: xiv)

Conclusions This chapter has highlighted some of the key features of live sociological methods and explored some of the ways in which these can be deployed and developed in theory and practice. Drawing on the useful framework of a ‘manifesto’ for live methods as proposed by Back and Puwar (2012), I have considered some of the provocations they raise. Back and Puwar (2012) call their manifesto points ‘aspirations’, and as I have indicated, some are challenging but achievable through our ongoing practices, whilst others need all the resources of the sociological imagination: an imagination that is not confined to disciplinary methodological or theoretical repertoires but is prepared to collaborate and take risks. In particular, the spatio/temporal politics of live sociology are full of both promise and pitfalls. The focus on attending to what is happening now puts particular emphasis on the time of the present but must not, as Back and Puwar (2012: 2) state, become a ‘trap’. The time of the present is impossible time, in that it carries the past and the future within it and slips away from us as soon as we try to pin it down. The live event that seems small and ordinary nonetheless holds within it genealogical and geopolitical struggles as well as the immanence of becoming. Imaginative sociological resources connecting times and places thus need to be deployed and repurposed or re-­energised in the service of live methods.

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The sixth of Back and Puwar’s (2012: 10) aspirations calls for ‘Curating sociology in new public platforms’. I have used examples of my own experimental development of research exhibitions as a way of communicating research findings in a form that enabled visitors to make their own path through the findings and hear/encounter multiple voices and opinions in a non-­linear, unpredictable format (Sociologists Talking 2008, 2009). For The Idea of a University (2010), occupying a public and officially ‘arty’ space, the exhibition both shared findings and generated new material through the curation of spaces and activities with/in the exhibition. My final example of the Live Art Research Hub, devised as an integral part of the artist Brian Lobel’s Fun with Cancer Patients public exhibition, was more explicitly a method of data generation, providing a space from within the installation to work closely with visitors as they encountered the materials and expressed their opinions, feelings and understandings of (amongst other things) cancer, illness, treatment, the use of humour, art and death. Using selected examples of data generated in the hub (see also Lambert 2016), I demonstrated how the artwork did not so much represent the young people’s experiences as create an affective space/time in which visitors were able, if they wished, to tell their own stories. In this way, the modalities of the art, and the research hub, were generative rather than representational. Using examples from the Fun with Cancer Patients project, I have suggested alternative ways for thinking about the ‘problems’ of representation accompanying live practice. A similar openness and willingness to attend to the sensory, poetic, complicated and contradictory nature of our subjective and affective experiences provides a guard against the dead end of ‘unknowability’. Instead, live methods can articulate and enact a desire and political commitment to generate and renew ways of thinking and researching that are able to tolerate – if not embrace – uncertainty and discomfort whilst dwelling with and attending to empirical realities. One of the most unrepresentable and unknowable issues demanding our attention is death. Using interview data from cancer professionals working closely with the young patients who participated in this project, and drawing on the work of Gunaratnam (2013), I have suggested the importance of live sociology incorporating death into its ambit. The discussion here has opened up and only briefly touched upon questions of embodiment and temporality, which are explored, respectively, in Chapters 5 and 6. After the focus on curatorial practices in the discussion here, the next chapter illustrates different ways of knowing through ‘artful and crafty’ (Back 2012) modes of discovery in the form of pedagogy, performance and poetry.

Notes   1 See film documentation of Beheld at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drwh9Ub18XI   2 To listen to audio recordings of the interviews as well as access information about the  exhibition, see www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/cetl/filmspublications/ sociologiststalking/   3 See www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/using/libspaces/teaching-­grid

Live sociology   91   4 Further information and film available to view at www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ iatl/cetl/filmspublications/studentsatwork/   5 Access the journal at ick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/reinvention   6 See www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/cetl/filmspublications/ideaofauniversity/   7 As detailed in Chapter 2, Fierce is a live art festival based in Birmingham, England, with which I work closely as a researcher.   8 See www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about/what-­is-live-­art/   9 See www.funwithcancerpatients.com for further information, including a film made by the artist explaining the project. 10 See film at www.funwithcancerpatients.com 11 Documentation on the cancer friends action, including the contract, is available at www.funwithcancerpatients.com/works/take-­a-well-­deserved-break/ 12 See www.funwithcancerpatients.com/works/tell-­the-kitchen/ 13 Blanch and Shock’s account of their day is available at www.blanchandshock.com/ fun-­with-cancer-­patients 14 The research assistants were Keir Williams and Anna Douglas.

References Aaron, M (2013) (ed.) Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying, Newcastle-­uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars. Adkins, L and Lury, C (2009) Introduction: What is the empirical? European Journal of Social Theory, 12(1): 5–20. Ahmed, S (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Back, L (2007) The Art of Listening, Oxford: Berg. Back, L (2008) Sociologists talking, Sociological Research Online 13(6)3, available at: www.socresonline.org.uk/13/6/3.html Back, L (2012) Live sociology: Social research and its futures, in L Back and N Puwar (eds) Live Methods, Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, pp. 18–39. Back, L (2016) Academic diary: Or why higher education still matters, London: Goldsmiths. Back, L and Puwar, N (2012) A manifesto for live methods: Provocations and capacities, in L Back and N Puwar (eds) Live Methods, Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, pp. 6–17. Bauman, Z (1992) Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies, Cambridge: Polity. Bennett, J (2002) Art, affect, and the ‘bad death’: Strategies for communicating the sense memory of loss, Signs, 28(1): 333–351. Bennett, J (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Burawoy, M (2005) For public sociology, American Sociological Review, 70(1): 4–28. Butler, J (1993) Critically queer, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1(1): 17–32. Clough, P (2009) The new empiricism: Affect and sociological method, European Journal of Social Theory, 12(1): 43–61. Clough, P and Halley, J (2007) (eds) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham NC: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G and Guattari, F (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

92   Live sociology Denzin, N K (1997) Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gregg, M and Seigworth, G J (2010) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gunaratnam, Y (2012) Learning to be affected: Social suffering and total pain at life’s borders, The Sociological Review, 60(SI): 108–123. Gunaratnam, Y (2013) Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care, London: Bloomsbury. Haraway, D (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books. Heathfield, A (2004) (ed.) Live: Art and Performance, London: Tate. Hemmings, C (2011) Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hoffman, B (2012) The time of live art, in D Heddon and J Klein (eds) Histories and Practices of Live Art, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 37–64. Hynes, M (2013) Reconceptualising resistance: Sociology and the affective dimension of resistance, The British Journal of Sociology, 64(4): 559–577. Hynes, M (2016) Public sociology for an emergent people: The affective gift in Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present, The Sociological Review, 64: 805–820. Lambert, C (2016) The affective work of art: An ethnographic study of Brian Lobel’s Fun with Cancer Patients, The Sociological Review, 64: 929–950. Lather, P (1997) Drawing the line at angels: Working the ruins of feminist ethnography, Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(3): 285–304. Lomax, Y (2005) Sounding the event: Escapades in dialogue and matters of art, nature and time, London: IB Tauris. Lury, C (2012) Going live: Towards an amphibious sociology, in L Back and N Puwar  (eds) Live Methods, Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell/The Sociological Review, pp. 184–197. McKie, L and Ryan, L (2015) (eds) An End to the Crisis of Empirical Sociology?: Trends and Challenges in Social Research, London: Routledge. Massey, D (1992) Politics and space/time, New Left Review, I/196: 1–14. Massey, D (1993) Power-­geometry and a progressive sense of place, in J Bird, T Putnam, G Robertson and L Tickner (eds) Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, London: Routledge, pp. 60–70. Massumi, B. (2010) The future birth of the affective affect: The political ontology of threat, in M Gregg and G J Seigworth (eds) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 52–70. Michael, M (2012) De-­signing the object of sociology: Toward an ‘idiotic’ methodology, in L Back and N Puwar (eds) Live Methods, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 166–183. O’Sullivan, S (2006) Art Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond Representation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Owens, C (1992) Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, London: University of California Press. Phelan, P (1993) Unmarked: Politics of Performance, London: Routledge. Puwar, N (2011) Noise of the past: Spatial interruptions of war, nation and memory, Senses and Society, 6(3): 325–345. Puwar, N and Sharma, S (2012) Curating sociology, in L Back and N Puwar (eds) Live Methods, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 40–63.

Live sociology   93 Rancière, J (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rancière, J (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso. Savage, M and Burrows, R (2007) The coming crisis of empirical sociology, Sociology, 41(5): 885–899. Searle, C (1998) Constructing death: The sociology of death and bereavement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sedgwick, E K (2003) Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or you’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you, in E K Sedgwick (ed.) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 123–151. Sointu, E (2015) Discourse, affect and affliction, The Sociological Review, 64(2): 312–328. Thrift, N (2008) Non-­Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, London: Routledge. Tilley, L (2017) Resisting piratic method by doing research otherwise, Sociology, 51(1): 27–42. Tolia-­Kelly, D P (2016) Feeling and being at the (postcolonial) museum: Presencing the affective politics of ‘race’ and culture, Sociology, 50(5): 896–912. Urry, J (2003) Global Complexity, Cambridge: Polity. Wetherell, M (2012) Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding, London: Sage.

Chapter 4

Fierce pedagogies Producing dissensual knowledges and subjects

but we the inclusive we cannot be wished away wished out of pedagogic spaces corridors texts spaces must be made we cry we insist for every landscape shifts in play we resist there are new geographies (Extract from ‘Moving On’, Cath Lambert 2005)

Introduction The previous chapter paid methodological attention to engaging with and enacting live encounters in sociological research, delineating criteria and ambitions for the development of live methods, and thinking through some of the issues around non/representation in relation to knowledge production. This chapter focuses on the ways in which aesthetics and knowledge, or the production of a knowing subject, intersect. The discussion asks what we can learn from live art and research practice about this work of production. Can live practice deploy its aesthetic resources in order to emancipate learners, activate spectators and democratise knowledge production? And, specifically, what is the role of aesthetics, across and beyond artistic and academic endeavours, in the re/production of dissensual knowledges and subjects? I address these questions by delineating what I call a fierce pedagogy, which pays explicit attention to aesthetics, is queer, dialogic, dissensual and collaborative, manifests as struggle and contributes to new subjective becomings. Critical, radical and feminist pedagogies have already received extensive and sometimes combative theoretical attention. I do not rehearse classic debates in critical pedagogy, although the analysis here is indebted to them, and, I hope,

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contributes to them (for good accounts see Cowden and Singh 2013; Darder et al. 2017). Instead, I look to the moments when aesthetics and pedagogy collide in ways consonant with the project of live sociology. As we see from the empirical examples to follow, these collisions can unsettle and redistribute social, political, cultural and economic geometries as well as offering the possibility of new political subjectivities. The approaches they deploy provide useful resources for live sociology, enabling us to think about the aesthetic materiality in which live encounters happen or are brought about and the potential for social researchers to recognise and make explicit the aesthetic environment or, where methodologically appropriate, design and facilitate an aesthetic intervention. In bringing pedagogy into the project of live sociology, I am drawing on and emphasising the imbrications of pedagogy and research in academic knowledge production as well as providing another means for live methods to enact public sociology (Burawoy 2005; Baviskar 2008; Hanemaayer and Schneider 2014; Hynes 2016). For the purposes of structuring the chapter, I have identified three approaches that utilise pedagogic resources in different ways. The first involves live activities promoting dialogue/dissensus and exchange: here I use the work of The Haircut Before the Party collective and the Art and Engagement workshops run by Vincent Dance Theatre, drawing on my direct involvement with the art and artists. Second, I focus on the production of material spaces and places of knowledge production, using my concept of ‘psycho classrooms’ to describe spaces that generate dissensus (see Lambert 2011) and drawing examples from my own research/pedagogic practice in such a space. Third, I consider pedagogic interventions in the form of live performances. Here, I present the case of FAAB, a feminist performance collective of which I was a member. To begin, I define fierce pedagogies.

Fierce pedagogies Discussion in previous chapters has established the key role of aesthetic experience in shifting sense perception and thereby enabling new or different ways for people to engage with, and be in, the world. Whilst the moment of sensory shock or rupture occurs at a pre-­cognitive, affective level, an epistemological disruption follows. As Tyson Lewis (2012: 4) puts it, The first lessons of education are always on the level of the senses themselves. Before cognition, there is already an aesthetic partitioning of the sensible. Conventional ideas, perceptions and knowledges may be challenged or displaced, making possible alternative and possibly oppositional knowledges. As I acknowledged in Chapter 1, I gained my own sense of pedagogy as both an expansive and a politicised practice from my lessons in cultural studies. In particular, the recognition that cultural forms are themselves pedagogical has influenced my openness to the potential of artistic practice as a site for the generation

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of alternative knowledges. Henry Giroux (2000) builds on the work of Stuart Hall to argue that As a performative practice, pedagogy inhabits all of those public spaces where culture works to secure identities, does the bridging work for negotiating the relationship between knowledge, pleasure and values, and renders authority both crucial and problematic in legitimising particular social practices, communities and forms of power. (Giroux 2000: 354) Critical pedagogy, as a theoretical and practice-­based approach, offers vital resources to any project of social and political change and emancipation. In turn, I suggest that the work of pedagogically engaged artists has a good deal to offer to critical pedagogy at a time when formal education, including higher education, becomes more – or more transparently – wedded to dominant forms of economic re/production than ever (Canaan and Shumar 2011). The ‘founding texts’ of critical pedagogy remain useful, despite – or perhaps because of – their geographical and historical specificity, for the critical tools they offer for thinking about power and knowledge. Paulo Freire’s work in 1960s Brazil is a case in point. Freire (1970), working with illiterate labourers in the context of an oppressive regime, developed both a critique of educational authority as a form of ‘banking’ as well as a framework for enacting popular education based on dialogue and exchange. Such a framework calls into question the relationship between teacher and student: educators must be ‘imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power’ (Freire 1970: 56). Such a politics is relevant to the development of live methods, as is the recognition that social and political transformations are processual and take time: ‘The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity’ (Freire 1970: 65). His critique of oppressive methods and model of humanising methods are routinely and explicitly deployed within contemporary UK-­based museum education (see Steedman 2012), where his assertion that people’s involvement in the dialogic production of knowledge should be ‘not pseudo-­participation, but committed involvement’ (Freire 1970: 51) is an important corrective to the easy attribution of liberatory potential to anything participatory (see Lambert 2009; Bishop 2012). Tyson Lewis (2012: 66) theorises Freire’s account in aesthetic terms, drawing on Rancièreian terminology: ‘Education becomes an aesthetic event at the precise moment it becomes political, i.e. at the moment when banking is ruptured through a repartitioning of the sensible.’ Rancière’s (2004) politics of aesthetics displaces the ideological critique of traditional critical pedagogy and emphasises instead the aesthetic dislocation of roles and subjectivities. Elsewhere (see Lambert 2012), I have made a case for paying greater attention to the critical pedagogy of Jacques Rancière within educational research and practice. This attention involves, as discussed in Chapter 2, recognising the fundamental

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role of aesthetics in de/limiting and re/distributing the sensory organisation of society along un/equal lines. It also involves attending to the aesthetic dimensions of a pedagogy that presumes intellectual and creative equality of all students and explores what (if anything) can be achieved under that supposition. This presumption of equality is outlined in Rancière’s (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster1 and, in ways consonant with Rancière’s project, is also central to live sociological practice. Put simply, a presumption of everyone’s equal capacities (of intelligence, creativity and so on) should define our pedagogic, research and creative relationships, disrupting and reconfiguring the dualistic and power-­ infused relations of teacher/student, researcher/researched and artist/audience. A presumption of equality also has temporal implications. When enacted, it eradicates the delay between the assertion of ‘ignorance’ and the conferring of knowledge or ‘explication’: what Rancière (1991: 117) calls the pedagogical fiction of progress. This temporality has significant ramifications beyond the micro-­politics of pedagogic relations between a teacher and a student: Rancière (1991: 117) argues that ‘Explication is not only the stultifying weapon of pedagogies but the very bond of the social order’, leading to a pedagogisation of humanity (Rancière 1991: 120). In The Emancipated Spectator (2009), Rancière takes the arguments made in The Ignorant Schoolmaster as a starting point and applies them to the field of contemporary art, and here we see that for Rancière, explicitly pedagogic art shares the same problems as explicatory teaching, seeking to instruct and emancipate by creating a distance or delay, which the teacher/artist then closes. He redefines spectatorship as follows: Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting; when we understand that the self-­evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection … viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms this distribution of positions. The spectator also acts, like the pupil or scholar. She observes, selects, compares, interprets. (Rancière 2009: 13) The examples on which I draw in this chapter illustrate this redefined pedagogic relationship, mindful of the wider implications for live research practice. They also attend to the potential of such redistribution for generating new subjectivities. For Rancière, subjectivity occurs when a person refuses their ‘proper’ or assigned place in the given aesthetic order. That refusal is the moment of politics, and as such: politics is always irreducibly aesthetic; it creates something that did not exist before. A collective subject is produced from the material of a hierarchical social order – one that, like other artistic productions, creates new ways of seeing and being seen. (May 2009: 115)

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The suggestion that such political interventions generate new ways of becoming a subject certainly feels true, and similar claims are often made in the context of critical pedagogy. Dennis Atkinson’s (2011) ‘pedagogy against the state’ is one such example. He defines it as ‘a pedagogy that maintains a constant surveillance of the markers that define learning in order to pass beyond them into an expanded conception and affect of learning’ (Atkinson 2011: xii, my emphasis). Atkinson (2011) is interested in the ways in which we can be affected by the representational accounts of accepted knowledges, which ‘refer to specific normalized subjectivities that are produced through these knowledges and practices’, as well as being moved in a different way by what he calls ‘an event of learning, a learning encounter or real learning’. Such an event or encounter punctures accepted knowledges and the ‘normalised’ subjectivities affiliated to them and moves ‘beyond assimilated knowledge and practice in order to open up new pedagogies and new learning communities’: By implication pedagogy against the state suggests that pedagogy itself must pass. It suggests an anti-­pedagogy. In a sense representation controls thought and practice whereas events or encounters have the potential to open up new ways of conceiving and acting and in doing so lead to new, perhaps more emancipated subjectivities and learning communities. (Atkinson 2011: 15) This account resonates with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1986) concept of becoming minor (see Chapter 2). We are required again to think about a movement beyond representation. However, it is difficult to get an empirical grip on this desire, not least if we are working with an understanding of subjectivity as processual and emergent. Throughout my research activities, whether working with art and artists or experimenting with my own practice-­based modes of knowledge production, I have been attentive to ways of recognising, holding onto and engaging with those moments when something seems to shift in people’s way of being in the world. Sometimes this requires reading with and from the affective, sensory and embodied ways in which we respond to aesthetic events; at other times it relies on a more reflexive, discursive explanation, or a combination of the affective and discursive (see Wetherell 2012; Lambert 2016). As I have argued in previous chapters, queer theory brings vital resources to the development and enactment of live methodologies. Similarly, a key component of fierce pedagogy is its queerness. This distinguishes it from traditional critical pedagogies of the left that, rooted in Marxism, often express certainty as to their own ‘rightness’ and can be didactic in their attempts to transform others’ thinking. As I mapped out in Chapter 1, queer theory and practices contest and disrupt the certainties of hegemonic knowledge regimes. Queer brings much-­ needed antagonism, complexity, excess, ambiguity and irreverence to processes of knowledge production and exchange. Queer ways of knowing are like Yve Lomax’s (2005) ‘knowledge that slips’, processual, uncertain, exploratory:

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as Irit Rogoff (2006: 14) puts it, ‘a pedagogy at peace with its partiality, a pedagogy not preoccupied with succeeding but with trying’. Like Rancière’s (2004) definition of politics, as introduced in Chapter 2, queer interruptions inflict sudden and often momentary damage on the certainties of secure knowledge by shifting the coordinates of time and space, enabling different voices to be heard, different bodies to be seen, different perspectives to be shared. I illustrate these claims with discussion of the performative interventions made by the FAAB feminist collective in the final section of this chapter. For now, I turn to the first of my three methods for the deployment of fierce pedagogies, focusing on social activities and encounters designed to provoke dialogue/dissensus and knowledge exchange.

Pedagogic art: the epistemologies of social practice While it is common for a work of art to provoke dialogue amongst viewers, this typically occurs in response to a finished object. In these projects, on the other hand, conversation becomes an integral part of the work itself. It is reframed as an active, generative process that can help us speak and imagine beyond the limits of fixed identities, official discourse, and the perceived inevitability of partisan political conflict. (Grant Kester 2004: 8) In his book Conversation Pieces, Kester (2004) focuses on art whose materials are socio-­political relationships, and to which dialogue is not just an outcome but integral to the creation of the work. His concern is to develop an analytical framework for dialogic art, seeking to understand the aesthetic significance of collaborative and conversational processes that can change participants’ perceptions. I am less concerned with whether or how such practices are understood as ‘art’, but the questions Kester (2004: 89) asks along the way – ‘Is it indeed possible to conceive of an emancipatory model of dialogic interaction? And is there a way to understand this dialogue as a form of aesthetic experience?’ – are pertinent to the development of aesthetically informed social encounters that contain pedagogical force. Commenting on art where the viewers’ active participation is called for, Kester (2004: 54) writes: This catalyzation of the viewer, the movement toward direct interaction, decisively shifts the locus of aesthetic meaning from the moment of creative plenitude in the solitary act of making … to a social and discursive realm of shared experience, dialogue, and physical movement. In the following section I explore this ‘catalyzation’ in the dialogic and durational aesthetic space of a very special haircut.

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The Haircut Before the Party My research notes from 31 March 2012 read as follows: The Hair Cut Before The Party are two young, earnest, engaging artists who cut hair, for free. They have a ‘pop-­up’ salon … which they take to festivals, street corners, wherever they want to set up a hair-­cutting encounter. For Fierce festival, they are installed in the festival hub in Digbeth, Birmingham. There are two chairs. No mirrors. A shelf with books on. There is no music but the room is full of the sounds of multiple conversations, as a lot of people are sitting around watching, reading, talking. I book myself and Tobias [my young son] in for haircuts. We wait and browse the materials on the table: there is a ‘catalogue of readings’ on the theme of revolutionary subjectivities, with sections entitled ‘modernist artefacts’, ‘postmodern’, ‘contemporary movements’. There are also colouring sheets and crayons. With no financial transaction taking place between the person cutting hair and the person whose hair is being cut, the exchange takes other forms, most notably dialogue and trading of ideas and opinions. While my hair is being cut, we talk about student protests, Agamben, Rancière, Paul Mason, Fierce. My little one talks about Star Wars. It takes a long time, and is a serene, humanising experience at the end of which I feel like I have been given a gift. The Haircut Before the Party (THCBTP) are Lewis Bassett and Richard Honguez, a ‘radical collective hairdresser of friends’ who emerged from a community of squatters in London in 2010. In the squat, getting your mate to cut your hair was a matter of necessity and also trust and friendship. Noticing that in the squat a distinct communal physical and discursive space was generated by the act of haircutting, the artists wondered what would happen if they were to create such a space in the public realm. This experiment led to THCBTP, setting up temporary salons in different kinds of public spaces where anyone can get a haircut for free. ‘Friendship’ is significant to THCBTP: their tagline reads ‘the friendship before the vanguard’, and the salon not only welcomes people getting a haircut, but others come to watch, read and discuss. The haircut provides a way in, a practical ‘need’ to be met, which in turn facilitates a space of dialogue. It is significant that this space operates outside the governance of commerce and financial exchange. By refusing payment from the individual, THCBTP refuse not only the relational codes that shape the liaison between ‘service provider’ and ‘customer’, but also the concomitant behavioural and power norms that suffuse commercial public space. Maggie Gray (2011: np) writes: As an experimental space in the heart of a city in economic strife, it quietly challenges our relationship to the capital; to the formal and informal networks that structure society; and to each other.

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The social space of the salon stands as the reverse of what Marc Auge (1995: 90) calls ‘non-­places’, the plethora of transport stations, hotel chains, shopping malls, which do not relate or integrate with other spaces or with history: ‘The non-­place is the opposite of Utopia: it exists, and it does not contain any organic society.’ What can happen in the temporary salon space is not prescribed, although it is steered. THCBTP espouse a radical left politics and shape their salons according to specific political causes and questions: in 2011 they established salons at schools and university picket lines in solidarity with strike action being taken against pension cuts. Each person whose hair was cut was asked what collective action against austerity might look like. For Artsadmin’s TwoDegrees Festival in London, climate change and the crisis in economic and political systems shaped the conversations. A programme of ‘popular education’ events was tied into the salon. The following year they took a self-­declared ‘line of flight’ across Europe, ‘through the political and economic crisis of 2012, to discover the meaning of revolution and collectivism today’.2 The ‘Catalogue of Readings’ into which I dipped at Fierce festival reads like an anarchist intellectual’s bookshelf. This is an overtly political and pedagogical project. However, how the space that they open up is filled is up for grabs. I am, of course, free to disagree with the politics on offer, and the conversation I have is very much that – there is no hectoring or teaching, but interested questions, careful listening, lively dissensus and good humour. Here, the personal is political. Having your haircut is an affective and intimate encounter. Talking about hair, whether you want to have it trimmed above or below your ears, whether or not you will keep the fringe; all these banal and personal interactions are normally far removed from either the intellectual abstractions of social and political theory, or the performative thrust of political activism. Such interactions are a reminder that haircutting is both ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild 1983) and ‘body work’, defined by Carol Wolkowitz (2006: 8) as (paid) work that ‘takes the body as its immediate site of labour, involving intimate, messy contact with the … body, its orifices or products through touch or close proximity’. In a traditional hairdressing salon, this intimacy is managed through the relational framework of provider/client and the aesthetics of the space characterised by bright lights, mirrors, smells of products. Referring to the  management of embodied labour in service environments along the line of the Fordist assembly line, Wolkowitz (2006: 75) notes the mass-­production techniques of hairdressing that ‘govern the arrangement of the bodies of both workers and customers and the relationship between them’ (she illustrates the point with a photograph of twelve women in a row with their heads in a hair drying machine). In most salon settings, this has now given way to a more individualised and informal spatial arrangement; however, the relationship is still ‘stage-­managed’, making (gendered) demands on the worker. This staging relates to not only the spatial organisation of the interaction but the time made available. As Wolkowitz (2006: 78) writes:

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Much clearly depends on the constraints under which interactions with customers take place, since the productivity goals set by management often conflict with customer demands. This can be frustrating for workers if the pace of work prevents them from helping customers as they would like. In my own reflections of my THCBTP haircut, I noted the time it took. Removed from the relations of financial exchange, the intimacy of the haircut as an act of care, of tending to another’s body, is heightened. I return to the significance of touch as a means of knowing in the following chapter, and to the political significance of delayed temporalities in Chapter 6. For now, I turn my attention to a different kind of aesthetic space created explicitly in order to generate dialogue, exchange and learning.

Archive and engagement with Vincent Dance Theatre I try to make work with enough space in it that you can project your own stories onto it. (Charlotte Vincent, director, Vincent Dance Theatre, in Vincent and Lambert 2015) I experienced a very different kind of knowledge production and exchange in action during a series of workshops run by Vincent Dance Theatre (VDT) during 2015. Marking twenty-­one years of ‘moving people and making them think’, VDT presented a tour of twenty-­one works from the company’s collection, accompanied by the curation of live and online events, which aimed to involve the public in dialogue and debate. Key to these events was the creation of an Archive and Engagement space. One such space was established at Warwick Arts Centre for four days in March 2015 to accompany a performance of VDT’s one-­woman show Look at Me Now Mummy. During this time, a number of school and college students came for organised workshop activities, facilitated by VDT personnel, and members of the public also dropped in to participate. I worked closely for the duration with the practitioners in the space, joining in with and observing the activities and outputs. In the following discussion I draw on ethnographic data from the workshops.3 The Archive and Engagement space consisted of a long table on which twenty-­one place markers had been laid out (see Figure 4.1). Each of those places contained a sheet of A4 paper with a task for participants to complete. In  the workshops I observed, people moved freely around the table and undertook the tasks in no particular order, depending on what caught their interest. Some tasks were to be completed alone; others were collaborative. Some could be completed quite quickly, whilst others took a long time. As well as the ‘placemat’ instructions, the table was loaded with documents and artefacts from VDT’s archive. There were props from past shows, notebooks full of

Figure 4.1 Table at Vincent Dance Theatre Art and Engagement workshop, Warwick Arts Centre (2015).

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Charlotte Vincent’s ideas, plans, and personal and professional reflections, and resources with which to undertake the tasks. In all the tasks, there was a request to post whatever had been produced (image, film, text) to an online forum so that documentation from the activities was archived.4 In this way, the workshops operated simultaneously as pedagogical, creative and research spaces. The workshops enabled close insight into the (usually hidden) ‘workings of production’ of VDT. The predominantly young participants thus became producers in the sense that Walter Benjamin’s ‘Author as Producer’ (1934/2005) invokes: visitors who are enabled to participate and themselves create outputs whilst being given access to the means of production and real insight into the creative, technical and emotional labour of such production. Many of the tasks demanded that the participants engage in ‘play’, a mode of production that many of us find difficult in traditional knowledge settings such as schools and universities. In my research diary I noted the impact of this method on many of the participants: I watch a young woman making something out of a balloon and fake blood; ‘I feel like a child again’, she says. Jo is a dance student, and describes her balloon creation as being ‘about fertility, a womb … I miss being about four … I’m going to create my next piece about this [bloody balloon]. I never think to create pieces out of play.’ Jo was responding to the ‘fertility task’. This task drew on VDT’s production of Motherland, a performance in which blood was used to symbolise fertility, miscarriage and motherhood. The task instructed participants to ‘Think about your own body’s relationship with fertility and, using anything on the table, create a response to that.’ The resources available included red balloons, fake blood, cotton wool, paper cones, nails, a baby doll. Many of the young women were drawn to this task and spent much more than the recommended ten minutes on it. I observed how much they enjoyed the play, the mess, the opportunity to experiment and to explore ‘risky’ themes. I noted that Some of the stuff they have created is quite excessive and silly and exploratory – it feels like they are trying out half knowledges (about birth, reproduction) through the sensory materials. Watching the sensory exploration and the production of completed pieces, it was clear that what I called at the time ‘half knowledges’ and uncertain opinions were being tentatively expressed: One girl is making an art thing on the floor. She is from Portugal. She has the ‘blood bowl’ and lots of cotton wool, which she has soaked in the blood. Her hands are stained red and she is squishing it into shape. I ask her what she is making but she appears reticent to talk about it. I say, ‘that’s OK’.

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She then, almost immediately, says, ‘It’s a baby, growing’. When she came to this country she realised she had conflicts with many other students who are pro-­choice. She says she feels ‘ambivalent’. She says ‘if a girl just has sex by choice and gets pregnant then having an abortion is not right.’ She has put her hand prints on it, which represent, she explains, ‘the baby expressing itself ’.… She is finding the course and being in a new country a bit difficult, but hoping next year will get easier. The participant above did want to talk, though she was unsure and perhaps afraid of judgement for the political perspective her artwork was expressing. Her ambivalence was focused on the specific issues of abortion but also spoke to a wider feeling of being out of place in an unfamiliar country. She worked alone, but many of the girls got involved in each other’s creations: One woman is putting blood inside a balloon. There is lots of input from the others. It’s messy. She says it symbolises how ‘everything, periods, fertility, pregnancy’, are all ‘on the inside and from the outside you can’t tell what’s going on’. She notes that, ‘you can’t talk about it’. This theme of a lack of language, as well as a silencing of discussion, around sex, periods, pregnancy, childbirth and abortion emerged strongly. The art materials and the structure of the task provided the participants with a powerful medium of expression and communication, a new language of fabrication (Ingold 2013). The activity of making and the growing display of completed works created an affective space: As we discuss the failures of language, another young woman makes a sculpture out of bloody nails, symbolising the pain of periods. One nail has fallen down, trailing blood, and she leaves it. The women discuss the euphemisms they use for periods. There is a momentary feeling of shared empathy: I sense that we can all feel the ‘pain’ of the bloody nails. There is also anger and resentment, clearly finding expression in the bloody sculptures but also in the dialogue around them. As work was completed, it formed a macabre gallery of artwork, which was added to by each new set of workshop participants. Conflicting opinions and emotions mingled in the display, allowing contradictions to sit together. Representations of an ‘unwanted’ foetus lay next to a basket of fluffy but slightly bloody eggs conveying hope for fertility (see Figures 4.2–4.4). Expressions of period pain and feminist pride were imbricated in the sculptures in ways that the discussions could not quite articulate. The pieces often ‘bled’ into each other, and as more were added the significations often blurred, some acquiring new connotations in the light of the shifting context.

Figure 4.2 ‘Fertility works’, Vincent Dance Theatre Art and Engagement, Warwick Arts Centre (2015).

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Figure 4.3 ‘Fertility works’, Vincent Dance Theatre Art and Engagement, Warwick Arts Centre (2015).

VDT’s archive and engagement workshops fulfilled all the criteria for what I have described as ‘psycho classrooms’ (see Lambert 2011). I came up with the term in response to an exhibition at London’s Haywood Gallery in 2008, Psycho Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture (see Rugoff 2008). I defined psycho classrooms as follows:

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Figure 4.4 ‘Fertility works’, Vincent Dance Theatre Art and Engagement, Warwick Arts Centre (2015).

sites of dissonance and critique in and through which the potential of space to influence pedagogy can be realised. [They] aim to disrupt the habitual impulses and relations of teaching and learning and invite adventurous participation. Such an invitation presumes an equality of the intellectual capacities of those working within the space, accompanied by a willingness to allow uncertain outcomes. The aesthetic and material design and usage of such spaces works to disrupt and redistribute what forms of knowledge might be sayable, audible, visible and do-­able: for example, psycho classrooms should enable the generation and deployment of embodied and emotional knowledges. (Lambert 2011: 28)

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The production and exchange of knowledge through play in the archive and engagement space was ludic and embodied. Dialogue and dissent characterised the interactions in the space: after the initial introduction to the space and the tasks, facilitation was minimal and non-­interventionist. Multiple, fragmentary knowledges overlapped, and there was an equality of production and exchange between ‘expert’ knowledges and the everyday sharing of opinions and experiences which the tasks prompted. I noted that When they leave the room there is ‘blood’ on their hands, chalk on their clothes; they are marked by the experience. Whilst there was no follow-­up research to tell us about any lasting impact from the young people’s participation, their responses to and reflections on the tasks pointed to shifts in enhanced political awareness, new possibilities for their own creative and academic practice, and an awakening in terms of affective entitlement, having been able to express their feelings and have them legitimated. Staying with the theme of psycho classrooms, I turn to another haircutting encounter that featured as part of a pedagogic event entitled Queer Salon.

Queer Salon: re-­i nventing pedagogies of gender and sexuality Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005), like Freire, locates pedagogy as an experience in the making, and calls for the development of new critical languages through which to understand and acknowledge this process, which precedes or exceeds our regular analytic tools. Such tools involve foregrounding embodied sensation as well as language, subjective experience, affect, play and pleasure (see Ellsworth 2005: 2). Ellsworth (2005) looks specifically to unusual places of learning that present such pedagogic possibilities, and her discussion recognises the pedagogic intent often embedded in the work of artists, architects and designers who understand the non-­cognitive ways in which we inhabit and make meaning in space: they … emphasise noncognitive, nonrepresentational processes and events such as movement, sensation, intensity, rhythm, passage and self-­ augmenting change. They seem to aim their designs at involving their users in ways that exceed physical mechanisms such as memory, recognition or cognition.… Such places of learning implicate bodies in pedagogy in ways the field of education has seldom explored. (Ellsworth 2005: 6) The concept of psycho classrooms was a tool for exploring critically the design and construction of explicitly pedagogic spaces, which from the outset had the criteria above in mind. I used the idea to describe and analyse the creation of one

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such space, a teaching room at the University of Warwick called the Reinvention Centre.5 I do not rehearse that discussion here (see Lambert 2011), but instead I discuss an event – Queer Salon (2013) – which I curated in the Reinvention Centre as part of a project called Gendered Knowledges.6 Queer Salon utilised a queer aesthetic to create a space that aimed to be welcoming and inclusive but also disorienting, subverting the dominant spatial organisation of university classrooms or conference-­based events and disrupting ‘normal’ knowledge and power relations. The furniture and arrangement of materials aimed to produce queer encounters between people and objects (Ahmed 2006). Inspired by my experience with The Haircut Before the Party (see above), I invited the queer and trans friendly Open Barbers7 (Greygory Vass and Felix Lane) to be part of the pedagogical event. Like THCBTP, Open Barbers recognise and play with the politics of the haircut. There are similar anti-­capitalist impulses in their ‘pay what you can afford’ policy. They also began life as a ‘pop-­up’ salon, attending LGBT festivals and conferences, collaborating with artists and academics. Open Barbers’ original motivation was the exclusionary and discriminatory practices of hetero/normative hairdressing. They found that women who wanted a short ‘butch’ cut, or people identifying as trans or non-­gender-binaried, often experienced the sexual politics of traditional barbers/hairdressers as oppressive. In part, this is about the powerful norms dictating the boundaries of acceptability when it comes to the aesthetics of hair styling; it is also about the emotional and social exchanges that circulate in and around the act of the haircut, already discussed in relation to THCBTP. Greygory began Open Barbers as ‘Queer Cuts Exchange’: I would offer alternative haircuts and others offered something back. Hair cutting is something I really enjoy, and it was important for me that people reciprocate with something that they enjoy too. The exchange happened not based on skill level or some notion of equivalent value, but on the basis of people’s enjoyment. (Greygory in Zoya 2011: np) For our Queer Salon, we paid Open Barbers an artists’ fee so they could offer haircuts for free throughout the day. We set up the haircutting part of the Reinvention Centre room using traditional and functional hair salon equipment, such as chairs for the visitors, a table for the barbers’ equipment, and mirrors; however, we selected and arranged the objects queerly. Rather than the straight lines of regular mirrors, which return a ‘faithful’ image, we arranged a series of distorting surveillance mirrors, which created multiple and fractured reflections across the space (Figure 4.5).8 Quotes pertaining to queer representation or identity adorned the walls, and at the other side of the room we created a reading salon, complete with a ‘closet’ in which instead of clothes, visitors could browse and select queer readings from the hangers. On the opposite wall, we showed films throughout the day. Rather than re/presenting pre-­existing materials, the curation of the space enabled

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Figure 4.5 Open Barbers cutting hair, as seen through the mirrors in Queer Salon, Reinvention Centre, University of Warwick (2013).

bodies, texts, materials and activities to overlap and ‘speak to’ each other. Moveable furniture (blocks, benches and beanbags) facilitated self-­organisation, and refreshments encouraged movement and conviviality. The temporality of the day was a flow rather than a structured schedule, punctuated by the rhythm of the haircuts as people waited their turn. All the Gendered Knowledges events, including Queer Salon, were designed with the intention of experimenting with pedagogy and knowledge production as the groundwork for a new interdisciplinary course in gender/sexuality. The course has now been formally approved by the University of Warwick and will be taught as an interdisciplinary postgraduate module.9 The three examples I have discussed so far illustrate, in different ways, the pedagogic possibilities of spaces that are designed to be dialogic, provocative and sensory. In the case of VDT’s Archive and Engagement workshops and Queer Salon, the design and curation of objects in space shapes the movement of bodies and ideas, facilitating haptic and affective experiences and encounters. All are live spaces, generating knowledge through social activities and encounters. I now turn to consider, again drawing on my own practice, a different form of pedagogic encounter: live performance.

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Faabulous knowledge production: live art interventions with/in the academy Yes, it’s fucking political/Yes, it’s fucking satirical. (Skunk Anansie, Lyrics from Stoosh) Humour has the power to reveal social ambiguities and cultural contradictions, conditions and contexts … humour has subversive potential in that it can weaken the dominant ideology by meticulously representing its absurdities and, in so doing, exposing them to ridicule. (Pamela Downe 1999: 68) FAAB10 were a feminist educational collective who between 2003 and 2007 devised and performed sketches, poetry, satire, scholarship and song at mainstream academic conferences.11 I was a founding member of FAAB, along with Louise Archer, Jacky Brine, Valerie Hey, Carole Leathwood and Diane Reay, all academics working in education/sociology/gender studies in UK universities. We defined FAAB as offering ‘a collective performance for individualistic and performative times; a critical commentary on performativity in higher education, and new and old orthodoxies in contemporary educational research’. The interventions offered not just a critique of, but also enacted an alternative to, neoliberal working regimes: mired, of course, as all such alternatives are, in contradictions. We also drew attention to the importance of fun and humour as key resources through which to propose and enact a politics of hope and encouragement by creatively presenting alternative ways of thinking about, and engaging with, educational policy, politics and praxis. FAAB was born out of our outrage about the devastating effects of global and national neoliberal education policies on (amongst other things) academic institutions, academics, students, educational research and gender equity (Leathwood and Archer 2004; Reay et al. 2005; Leathwood and Read 2009). As feminist academics, we found ourselves located as simultaneously inside/outside contemporary neoliberal academic practice, and this location was further complicated by our inclusion and exclusion from the language of neoliberal and managerial discourse in higher education (Archer 2008; Hey and Morley 2011). In addition, some of the policy enactments in contemporary educational policy and practice, normally pursued under the auspices of ‘modernisation’ and ‘audit’, were (are) so ridiculous that parody seemed the most appropriate response. FAAB performances responded to this by subverting discourse through satire, whilst also, necessarily, subjecting ourselves to parody, as we questioned the implications of our contradictory investments in both resisting and enjoying the hegemonic language of academic practice. The performances sought to ‘fight back’ against the ways in which we are both positioned by, and participate in, the managerial and often masculinist repertoires of organisational restructuring, prescriptive pedagogy and audit that characterise

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compulsory and post-­compulsory education across national arenas (Blackmore 2000; Davies 2003; Morley 2003). In early deliberations when FAAB was taking shape, we discussed the ways in which mainstream academic conferences often imbue and reproduce such repertoires, not least in the spatio-­temporal organisation of papers, panels, bodies and knowledges. The aesthetics of FAAB’s performances aimed to temporarily disrupt, displace and hold to account these modes of organisation from within: to  ‘perforate’ the institution, as avant-­garde artist Ulay (in Johnson 2015: 28) puts it. So it was that full of productive rage, the six of us agreed how to communicate our own and others’ critical work around these pressing concerns and how to most effectively make some intervention in the business-­as-usual of knowledge production in the academy. Skunk Anansie’s angry ‘Yes, it’s fucking political/Yes, it’s fucking satirical’ became the opening music for our first performance. We started singing ourselves. Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep, Mountain High’, Gloria Gaynor’s ‘We Will Survive’, Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’ and many classics from the British music hall tradition – an early showcase for women’s subversive, political performances – were given new lyrics and thus transformed into feminist critiques of educational policy and practice (Figure 4.6).

Figure 4.6 FAAB perform My Old VC, Gender and Education Association conference, Cardiff (2005).

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We collectively wrote, rehearsed and performed several scripts full of songs, satirical sketches and poetry, utilising symposia slots within the main conference programmes or scheduled as evening ‘entertainment’. The non-­linear, multi-­ vocal and mixed-­genre format we adopted posed a challenge to conventional methods of doing, writing, analysing and presenting (educational) research. It refused to conform to modes of academic delivery that often privilege the authority of one voice or way of speaking, and can constrain and regulate our critical and emotional responses (Denzin 2000). The songs in particular disturbed the serious, regulated order of the institutionalised space of academic knowledge production and introduced disquiet, laughter and an embodied expression of collective emotion, not just from the performers but from audiences too. Commenting on FAAB’s performance at the British Education Research Association (BERA) (2003), Sue Clegg (2005: 126) wrote: What followed was funny, engaging, moving; involving pastiche and parody, rewrites of classic comedy sketches and favourite musical anthems … and also quiet statements in lyrical language of the pain that working in higher education can cause. As a bitterly funny commentary on the elitism of higher education, and the collusive ways in which we as academics are complicit in the competitive practices of research selectivity and as a defiant enactment of the politics of refusal – it was simply glorious! As individuals these are women academics who have made major contributions to the theoretical literature dealing with post-­compulsory education; but in breaking out of its theoretical conventions they used (and parodied) theory in ways that gave hope, certainly to me, and judging by the riotous applause, to most of the audience. This was certainly not the usual reaction of a group of academics at a … symposium. Why it was so important, I would argue, is that it connected theory and practice, and showed that we can act, and can defy the seemingly endless ways in which the practices of higher education seek to compartmentalise us and our students. FAAB offered a different way of producing and circulating knowledge in the academy. Its politics worked through a circulation of affects (Ahmed 2004). Some of these affects were ‘negative’ (anger, frustration, despair), but there was also joy, which Clegg (2005) refers to in the quote above – ‘it was simply glorious!’ Isabelle Stengers (2008: np) writes of an event that provokes a circulation of joy as something that puts categorizations and distances into becoming without erasing them in a grand movement in which everyone becomes homogenous … that rejigs distances, so that something else moves across.… Joy can conjoin transitivity, contagion, and lucidity.… When new possibilities of thinking and acting appear, it is an ontological, or cosmological, event that we must learn to celebrate, even if it’s precarious, or precisely because it’s precarious. Joy is immanent to a situation, and guarantees nothing.

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Here, Stengers (2008) helps us to think through the role of affect in enabling the aesthetic shifts that make different knowledges, ‘new possibilities of thinking and acting’, possible. One of the most popular sketches, which we incorporated into every performance, was The Class Sketch. Taking our inspiration from the 1960s satirical comedy series ‘The Frost Report’,12 featuring John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett, which highlights the elitism of the British class system, our adaptation focused on some of the structural inequalities in the organisation and resourcing of UK universities, ranked according to their degrees of research ‘excellence’ (Figure 4.7). The ranking criteria we used were taken from the UK’s 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE),13 which generated the following ‘quality profiles’ for the research activity of universities: 4* Quality that is world-­leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour 3* Quality that is internationally excellent in terms of originality, significance and rigour but which nonetheless falls short of the highest standards of excellence 2* Quality that is recognised internationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour 1* Quality that is recognised nationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour Unclassified Quality that falls below the standard of nationally recognised work. Or work which does not meet the published definition of research for the purposes of this assessment.14 In our version, our ‘top professor’, played by Valerie Hey, to the top left in Figure 4.7, tells the audience, I look down on them because I am a 4* professor of academic distinction. I have European funding, a large ESRC15 grant, three research assistants, an administrator and an unlimited conference allowance. I am the editor of a number of high impact journals. I am the world-­leading George Orwell Chair of Educational Dystopias (GOD-­ED). The others, representing ‘3*’, ‘2*’ and ‘unclassified’ institutions, respond, looking up and down as they reflect on their ‘place’ within the hierarchy. The final words go to the staff at the ‘unclassified’ institution. Our male ‘unclassified’ academic, played by Carole Leathwood, says: I’m from a new university. We’re unclassified and I know my place. I look up to them both.… But while my university is poor, we are honest, hard-­ working and committed to widening participation and social justice. I could look down on them, but I don’t. On the other hand, I look down on her [his female colleague]. No, I don’t! I mean I wouldn’t, of course I don’t! We have an equal opportunities policy! And anyway, we’re both in the shit.

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Figure 4.7 FAAB perform The Class Sketch, American Educational Research Association conference, San Francisco (2006).

His female colleague, played by Diane Reay, bleakly responds: I know my place and it’s a hard place to be. I seem to look up to all of them – when I have the time. I have a full teaching load, I’m programme director for the teacher-­training course and I have a PhD from 1990 that I’m still trying to publish from. I collaborate with him. We are both in the shit but I’m the one that cleans it up. Despite its added complexity, our sketch lacked the additional and interconnected layers of in/equality accounting for race, age, disability and sexuality, which would more accurately represent the stratified nature of the UK’s higher education landscape. The Class Sketch received laughs of appreciation and recognition every time it was performed; however, the most intense laughter and gasps of disbelief were always reserved for the bit where, by way of explaining the UK context to an international audience, we simply described the RAE and presented the rankings as listed above. These criteria for assessment, which many of us are obliged to take so seriously in our daily working lives and which in turn shape our individual and institutional research trajectories, were suddenly exposed as ludicrous (for critical discussion of RAE/ REF see Back 2008; Sayer 2015). For

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us, the potency of The Class Sketch lay in the effects of enacting resistance within the very discursive set of practices in which we were (and still are) ourselves deeply invested and implicated. The alternative subjectivities, which, I would suggest, were temporarily generated at the moment of this aesthetic disruption, were conflicted subjectivities, enacting our simultaneous compliance and resistance. Many of the sketches, like The Class Sketch, spoke to wider educational and political issues but were deeply rooted in our own localised experiences of working and studying in UK universities during this time. New Labour’s policy-­ making thus provided rich material for much of our work, such as a series of interviews between media interviewer ‘Jeremy Laxman’ (performed by Carole Leathwood) and politician ‘Tony Flair’ (performed by Louise Archer) (replacing Laxman with ‘Barry King’ when we performed in the US).16 These exchanges provided a critique of the marketisation of education, highlighting the deployment of certain discourses and values and the interplay of global and local politics, economics and educational policy-­making. Here is an extract from the performance at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Conference in San Francisco (FAAB 2006): Barry (King):  We’re back with our guest the President of the United Kingdom. Tony (Flair):  Oh well, I wish! but not quite.… Barry:  I’m sorry, we’re back with Prime Minister Flair. Mr Flair, in a recent

interview, President George W Bush said ‘we live in a competitive world and we better make sure the future of this country has the capacity to compete in that world’. Would you go along with that? Tony:  Yes, absolutely! What we are trying to create is a world-­class education system that will really enable us to compete in the global education market. And we feel confident that our policies constitute real value for money and will deliver. Barry:  OK, but if we’re the winners in this competition, what about the other guys? Who’s going to lose? Someone has to lose, right? Tony:  Well, that’s the beauty of it: ultimately we’re all winners. This is a win-­ win situation. Free trade and GATS will allow us to share our excellence with other countries – so people in the developing world, for example, will benefit by being able to buy our expertise. Barry:  So these countries don’t have their own education systems? I mean, you’re not just going to blaze in there like John Wayne and take out the local sheriff, so to speak? What will happen to their own education systems? Tony:  Well, Barry, I obviously don’t liken myself to John Wayne. In fact, it’s more like Saving Private Ryan, if anything – we’re going in there to help. I mean the problem is, too many people seem to want to just stand in the way of progress. We’re trying to think outside the box here – we’re equalising through globalising. Barry:  And this global education business must certainly make a dollar or two!

118   Fierce pedagogies Tony:  Barry:

Well, it makes sound economic sense, if that’s what you mean. So tell us about your vision for world education. You’ve got a plan to make it better, right? Tony:  You’re darn right! My vision is one of excellence – I’m committed to excellence, totally committed to excellence. After all, today’s young people are tomorrow’s future. We have a strategic portfolio to operationalise – we’re world-­streaming our educational vision. We’re totally committed to driving up standards, not only in our own back yard, but in everyone else’s back yards too. Boundaries are just fences you haven’t yet stepped over – and we’re trampling down the global neighbourhood’s herbaceous borders! Barry:  Well, that sure is a vision! Against the pressure to seek out authoritative and fundamentalist solutions to the complex contradictions with/in which we live and work, FAAB’s performances suggested and enacted a set of localised and contingent responses. In this way, we aimed to create spaces of possibility for re/imagining alternatives, engaging in critical and supportive dialogue, and expressing individual and collective feelings of despair as well as, of course, hope. We adapted old sketches and produced new ones, utilising the format of the old English music hall as a structuring and aesthetic device for some shows. Most performances opened with the rage of Skunk Anansie’s ‘Yes it’s fucking political’ and closed with Adrienne Rich’s (1986: 209) questions: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when? If not with others, how? As well as emphasising the political and ethical necessities of collective thinking and responsibility as an antidote to neoliberal individualism, our performances marked an affective line of flight through rage, humour, dissensus and love. Despite the risks that it might fuel the denigrating discourse of women as ‘frivolous’, emotional and not to be taken seriously as academics (McWilliam 2000), we were determined to explore the radical possibilities of fun, and the potential, as well as the costs, of attempting to reclaim laughter as a serious resource. As Judith Butler (1990: x) notes, ‘laughter in the face of serious categories is indispensable for feminism … without a doubt, feminism continues to require its own forms of serious play’. We located our work within a genealogy of others who, in different contexts, utilise the subversive potential of dialogue and humour as powerful strategies for expressing serious and urgent political and intellectual concerns (Bakhtin 1981; Downe 1999; McWilliam 2000; Guerrilla Girls 2012; Watson 2015). Performance artist Anne Bean notes that laughter from an audience brings audience and performers together in a shared temporality:

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Being ‘in the present’ was simply unavoidable, because laughter is a very ‘present’ and shared action.… There’s a terrible closeness between hysteria, anguish, terror, the feeling of mourning, and the ridiculousness of it all. (In Johnson 2015: 52) Our intention was to create not only a politics, but also a poetics of education, which would be transgressive in form as well as in content (see Reay 2014). All our performances featured a poem, ‘Moving On’, which I wrote in order to capture the affective implications of trying to enact a pedagogy of social justice in the contexts of audit and managerialism, and explain the motivations and hopes for the performative experiment which was FAAB. I return to this poem in the final chapter. FAAB’s interventions offer an example of an aesthetic and pedagogic event producing possibilities for a dissensual, feminist, activist, academic subjectivity. The performances and people’s responses to them revealed and challenged some of the interconnected cultural, discursive, policy and economic mechanisms through which our universities and our selves are transformed to serve the interests of capitalist accumulation and reproduction, whilst offering an immanence that cannot be defined but can be understood as an example of Atkinson’s (2011) ‘pedagogy against the state’. Thinking with both Stengers (2008) and Atkinson (2011), the problem of ‘distance’ can be scrutinised here. The concerns of critical pedagogy, whether relating to art or education, are necessarily embroiled with questions of complicity and dis/stance. Where does the critical artist or pedagogue stand in relation to dominant and mainstream practices against which they work? Is it better to work with/in, as FAAB did, using the ‘master’s tools’ (Lourde 1984), or to attempt to be an ‘outsider’ and develop new tools of critique and transformation? In public art debates, these positions are often polarised, using Chantal Mouffe’s ‘engagement-­with’ as a model for working with institutions and existing frameworks, or a Marxist idea of ‘exodus’. Emma Mahony (2014) takes the political resistance theory of ‘interstitial distance’ from the work of Simon Critchley (see Critchley 2007) and applies it to the field of art. She uses the examples of Liberate Tate and The Freee Art Collective, two different groups with different tactics who oppose Tate’s sponsorship by British Petroleum (BP) (in the case of Liberate Tate) and oppose all corporate and state-­ funded cultural production (in the case of Freee Art Collective). Both, as Mahony (2014: 14) highlights, ‘use public institutions as strategic platforms to perform their political grievances’; they also use the language of their target (Tate, the art world) in order to challenge it. FAAB operates, I would suggest, at such an interstitial distance, opening a political space within the ‘target’s’ territory. We were able to intervene in powerful ways precisely because of our knowledge of cultural and intellectual production in higher education.

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Conclusions This chapter has argued for the deployment of a fierce pedagogy that explicitly deploys aesthetic means for political outcomes. Here, politics denotes a shift in the sensory ordering of the social, such that counter-­normative possibilities for knowing and/or being can be glimpsed or grasped. Such pedagogy is not prescriptive and can take many different forms. Drawing on some of the tools of critical pedagogy, I have explored the potential of different kinds of ‘knowledge spaces’ that facilitate live encounters. First, I examined the epistemological work of pedagogic art that consists of social spaces where the audience/visitors and their intersubjective exchange – whether dialogic or dissensual – provide the substance of the practice. Grant Kester (2004) calls such work ‘conversation pieces’. My examples of The Haircut Before the Party and Vincent Dance Theatre’s Art and Engagement workshops demonstrate the social, pedagogical and political possibilities generated by the aesthetic and affective environment. In both of these cases, it was not just the space that was important but the activities facilitated by the artists and the opportunities these created for sensory and emotional engagement with others. Following on from that, I focused on psycho classrooms, or pedagogic spaces where the environment itself is conceptualised with the aims of enabling sensory and embodied learning (Ellsworth 2005). I presented the orchestration of a classroom-­based pedagogic event, Queer Salon (2013), which used queer and feminist approaches to knowledge production and exchange. Finally, I attended to performative pedagogic/research methods using the example of the FAAB educational feminist collective. FAAB’s performances and the responses to them demonstrate the importance of rage, humour and joy as serious political resources and raised the difficulties, inherent in all critical practice, of working with/in or outwith formal systems and institutions of power and knowledge. Overall, this chapter has suggested a key place in the practice of live sociology for pedagogy. I have drawn on and worked with an expansive definition of pedagogy, which is not limited to the politics of the classroom, though that remains an important sphere, but attends to the wider cultural terrain on which identities and desires are constituted and mobilised through processes of learning and the generation and exchange of knowledges (Williams 1966; Grossberg 1994; Giroux 2004). As we have seen in the examples explored here, such pedagogies implicate bodies. They deploy sensory resources for enabling bodies to produce and encounter ways of being in and understanding aspects of the world through shared activities, conversation and affective experiences. The potentialities of embodied knowledges as they emerge from live encounters are subject to more critical attention in the following chapter.

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Notes   1 The Ignorant Schoolmaster tells the story of Joseph Jacotot, who in 1818 had an ‘intellectual adventure’. Jacotot was a lecturer in French literature, forced into exile in Belgium, where his students spoke no French, and he spoke no Flemish. Using a bilingual story as a ‘thing in common’, he asked them to learn the French text with the help of the translation. Rancière tells us Jacotot had very low expectations of the students. However, they learnt well, demonstrating that to learn well they did not need a teacher to explain but just to verify their intelligence.   2 See http://cargocollective.com/SamTrotman/filter/cargocollective.com_THBTP/The-­ Haircut-Before-­The-Party-­Line-of-­Flight   3 I also participated in two public events with Charlotte Vincent: a pre-­show conversation between us called Short Changed, which addressed the role of live arts in enacting social and political change, and a discussion on Embodied Methodologies with a mixed audience of academics and creative practitioners called for a more symbiotic relationship between social sciences and the arts. Both talks were recorded. Full recordings are available at www.vincentdt.com/dialogue-­debate/   4 See www.vincentdt.com/project/archive-­engagement-space/   5 The Reinvention Centre teaching room was one material output from a five-­year collaboration between the Universities of Warwick and Oxford Brookes funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning strategy (www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/cetl/about/).   6 Gendered Knowledges (GK) ran from February to July 2013, and explored radical interdisciplinary pedagogies in relation to gender/sexuality. It was funded by the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL) at the University of Warwick. All GK events, including the Queer Salon, are presented here: www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/ cross_fac/iatl/funding/fundedprojects/strategic/genderedknowledges/   7 Since 2016, Open Barbers have operated as a social enterprise from a dedicated London-­based salon: http://openbarbers.co.uk   8 I am indebted to Lisa Metherell for the concept and the loan of materials. See www. lisametherell.co.uk   9 Ways of Knowing: Gender, Bodies, Power. See www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ iatl/activities/modules/pgmodules/waysofknowing/ 10 The acronym came from an impassioned and out/rageous call, made by Jacky Brine at an after-­dinner speech at Gender and Education Conference, in which she declared: ‘we need Feminists Against Academic Bollocks’. As the collective who took up this call, the moniker FAAB stuck, but as a flexible referent; so, for example, we would often feature as Feminists Against Academic Bureaucracy. 11 Including British Educational Research Association (2003), Discourse, Power, Resistance (2004), Gender and Education Association (2005 and 2007), American Educational Research Association (2006) and the Society for Research into Higher Education (2007). 12 See www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hhrwl 13 See www.rae.ac.uk/ 14 Available at www.rae.ac.uk/aboutus/quality.asp. RAE has since been replaced by the Research Excellence Framework: see www.ref.ac.uk/ 15 Economic and Social Research Council, one of the major social science research funding bodies in the UK. 16 Jeremy Paxman is an English broadcaster well known for interrogating politicians for the BBC. Tony Blair was prime minister of the UK, 1997–2007. Larry King is a popular American television and radio host.

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References Ahmed, S (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ahmed, S (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, London: Duke University Press. Archer, L (2008) The new neoliberal subjects? Young/er academics’ constructions of professional identity, Journal of Education Policy, 3(23): 265–285. Atkinson, D (2011) Art, Equality and Learning: Pedagogy against the State, Rotterdam: Sense. Auge, M (1995) Non-­Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, London: Verso. Back, L (2008) Sociologists talking, Sociological Research Online 13(6)3, available at: www.socresonline.org.uk/13/6/3.html Bakhtin, M (1981) Epic and novel: Towards a methodology for the study of the novel, in M Holquist (ed.) The Dialogic Imagination, Texas: University of Texas Press. Baviskar, A (2008) Pedagogy, public sociology and politics, Current Sociology, 56(3): 425–423. Benjamin, W (1934/2005) Author as producer, in Walter Benjamin: 1931–1934, Selected Writing, Harvard: Harvard University Press. Bishop, C (2012) Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, London: Verso. Blackmore, J (2000) Warning signals or dangerous opportunities? Globalisation, gender, and educational policy shifts, Educational Theory, 50(4): 467–486. Burawoy, M (2005) For public sociology, American Sociological Review, 70(1): 4–28. Butler, J (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. Canaan, J and Shumar, W (2011) Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University, London: Routledge. Clegg, S (2005) Critique and practice: closing the pedagogic gap, in J Satterthwaite and E Atkinson (eds) Discourses of Education in the Age of New Imperialism, Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, pp. 113–130. Cowden, S and Singh, G (2013) Acts of Knowing: Critical Pedagogy in, against and beyond the University, London: Bloomsbury. Critchley, S (2007) Infinitely Demanding. Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, London: Verso. Darder, A, Baltodano, M and Torres, A (eds) The Critical Pedagogy Reader, London: Routledge. Davies, B (2003) Death to critique and dissent? The politics and practices of new managerialism and of ‘evidence-­based practice’, Gender and Education, 15(1): 91–103. Deleuze, G and Guattari, F (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Denzin, N K (2000) The practices and politics of interpretation, in N K Denzin and Y S Lincoln (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research, California: Sage, pp. 897–922. Downe, P (1999) Laughing when it hurts: Humour and violence in the lives of Costa Rican prostitutes, Women’s Study International Forum, 22(1): 63–78. Ellsworth, E (2005) Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy, Abingdon: Routledge. Freire, P (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Penguin.

Fierce pedagogies   123 Giroux, H (2000) Public pedagogy as cultural politics: Stuart Hall and the ‘crisis’ of culture, in P Gilroy, L Grossberg and A McRobbie (eds) Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, London: Verso, pp. 139–147. Giroux, H (2004) Cultural studies and the politics of public pedagogy: Making the political more pedagogical, Parallax, 10(2): 73–89. Gray, M (2011) Two Degrees Festival: The Haircut Before The Party, This Is Tomorrow, 29 June 2011, available at http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/two-­degrees-festival-­thehaircut-­before-the-­party#.T5_i9Xvmtj8.tumblr (accessed November 2015). Grossberg, L (1994) Introduction: Bringin’ it all back home—pedagogy and cultural studies, in H A Giroux and P McLaren (eds) Border Crossings: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–25. Guerrilla Girls (2012) The Guerrilla Girls Art Museum Activity Book, New York: Printed Matter Inc. Hanemaayer, A and Schneider, C (2014) (eds) The Public Sociology Debate: Ethics and Engagement, Vancouver: UBC Press. Hey, V and Morley, L (2011) Imagining the university of the future: Eyes wide open? Expanding the imaginary through critical and feminist ruminations in and on the university, Contemporary Social Science, 6(2): 165–174. Hochschild, A (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hynes, M (2016) Public sociology for an emergent people: The affective gift in Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present, Sociological Review, 64(4): 805–820. Ingold, T (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, London: Routledge. Johnson, D (2015) The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art, London: Palgrave. Kester, G (2004) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, California: University of California Press. Lambert, C (2005) ‘Moving On’: A FAAB poem, in J Satterwaite and E Atkinson (eds) Discourses of Education in the Age of New Imperialism, Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, pp. 183–188. Lambert, C (2009) Pedagogies of participation in higher education: A case for research-­ based learning, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 17(3): 295–309. Lambert, C (2011) Psycho classrooms: Teaching as a work of art, Social and Cultural Geography, 12(1): 27–46. Lambert, C (2012) Redistributing the sensory: The critical pedagogy of Jacques Rancière, Critical Studies in Education, 53(2): 211–228. Lambert, C (2016) The affective work of art: An ethnographic study of Brian Lobel’s Fun with Cancer Patients, The Sociological Review, 64: 929–950. Leathwood, C and Archer, L (2004) Social class and educational inequalities: The local and the global, in Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 12(1): 5–13. Leathwood, C and Read, B (2009) Gender and the Changing Face of Higher Education: A Feminised Future? Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Lewis, T E (2012) The Aesthetics of Education: Theatre, Curiosity and Politics in the work of Jacques Rancière and Paulo Freire, London: Bloomsbury. Lomax, Y (2005) Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time, London: IB Tauris.

124   Fierce pedagogies Lourde, A (1984) The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, in A Lourde (ed.) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Berkeley, CA: Crossing, pp. 110–114. McWilliam, E (2000) Laughing within reason: On pleasure, women and academic performance, in E St Pierre and W Pillow (eds) Working the Ruins: Feminist Poststructuralist Theory and Methods in Education, New York: Routledge, pp. 164–178. Mahony, E (2014) Locating Simon Critchley’s ‘interstitial distance’ in the practices of the Freee Art Collective and Liberate Tate, Art and the Public Sphere, 3(1): 9–30. May, T (2009) Rancière in South Carolina, in G Rockhill and P Watts (eds) Rancière: History, Politics: Aesthetics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 105–119. Morley, L (2003) Quality and Power in Higher Education, Buckingham: Open University Press. Rancière, J (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rancière, J (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum. Rancière, J (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso. Reay, D (2014) From academic freedom to academic capitalism, Discover Society, 5: 15 February, available at http://discoversociety.org/2014/02/15/on-­the-frontline-­fromacademic-­freedom-to-­academic-capitalism/ (accessed May 2017). Reay, D, David, M and Ball, S (2005) Degrees of Choice: Social Class, Race and Gender in Higher Education, Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. Rich, A (1986) Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985, London: Virago. Rogoff, I (2006) Academy as Potentiality, A.C.A.D.E.M.Y, Frankfurt: Revolver, pp. 14–15. Rugoff, R (2008) Psycho Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture, London: Haywood. Sayer, D (2015) Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF, London: Sage. Steedman, M (2012) (ed.) Gallery as Community: Art, Education, Politics, London: Whitechapel Gallery, pp. 10–17. Stengers, I (2008) History through the middle: Between macro and mesopolitics, interview with Isabelle Stengers by Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, Inflexions, available at www.inflexions.org/n3_History-­t hrough-the-­M iddle-Between-­M acro-and-­ Mesopolitics-1.pdf (accessed May 2017). Vincent, C and Lambert, C (2015) Short Changed: The Role of Live Arts in Enacting Social and Political Change, Warwick Arts Centre, 11 March 2015. Audio recording available at www.vincentdt.com/dialogue-­debate/ (accessed May 2017). Watson, C (2015) Comedy and Social Science: Towards a Methodology of Funny, London: Routledge. Wetherell, M (2012) Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding, London: Sage. Williams, R (1966) Communications, London: Chatto and Windus. Wolkowitz, C (2006) Bodies at Work, London: Sage. Zoya (2011) Open Barbers is styling genderqueer London – interview with Open Barbers, 13 September 2011, Dapper Q, available at www.dapsperq.com/2011/09/open-­barbersis-­styling-genderqueer-­london/ (accessed May 2017).

Chapter 5

Bodies and embodied encounters in live practice

[A]rt is not frivolous, an indulgence or luxury, an embellishment of what is most central: it is the most vital and direct form of impact on and through the body, the generation of vibratory waves, rhythms, that traverse the body and make of the body a link with forces it cannot otherwise perceive and act upon … it is culture’s most direct mode of enhancement or intensification of bodies, culture’s mode for the elaboration of sensations, and thus culture’s most intense debt to the chaotic forces it characterises as nature. (Elisabeth Grosz 2008: 23)

Introduction Live sociology implicates bodies, senses and feelings, the articulations between them, and their role in producing, mediating and conveying subjectivities and social relations. Its investigations push up against the spatial, temporal and material conditions of embodied emergence and existence. In this chapter I propose that this involves utilising embodied methods, which includes an explicit acknowledgement of our embodied dis/investments in our (live) research practices. In the preceding discussion I have drawn on some of my own research that has experimented with practice-­based methods. A focus on practice, on doing and producing, necessarily involves haptic and sensory modes of engagement. Here, I pay closer attention to the politics of embodiment in live practice. Of course, ‘the body’ has long occupied a central position in sociological research, particularly in feminist work, although this has tended to be research about bodies rather than using bodies. The phrase ‘the body’, denoting a singular, universal or normalised conception of embodiment, has been taken to task in anthropology (see Mascia-­Lees 2011). My emphasis here is very much on the particularity of bodies and embodied experiences. To be ‘live’ calls forth our experience of life as fleshy, fragile, emotionally charged bodies. Although bodies do not get much of a mention in Les Back and Nirmal Puwar’s (2012) manifesto, in empirical work utilising live sociology, the bodies of those being researched are treated with care and attention (Back 2007; Gunaratnam 2012). In The Art of Listening, Les Back (2007: 70) highlights the ways in which ‘memory

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and structures of feeling are inscribed on the human frame’ in the form of tattoos and piercings, thereby communicating complex emotions such as love and loss as well as recording relationships, places, allegiances. Back (2007: 73) notes that in the act of tattooing, ‘boundaries are breached, involving hurt and healing. It is a profoundly corporeal experience’, and one which in breaching boundaries also problematises the relationships ‘between agency and control, permanence and ephemerality, trauma and healing’. This ‘political technology’ of the body, using Foucault’s (1977) terminology, is put to performative use in live art practice, where ‘private’ and individualised acts such as tattooing, piercing, surgery and other forms of body modification are often enacted for an audience, creating an intersubjective and affective space of suffering, loss, endurance and resistance. As we have already seen, many live artists routinely use bodies – their own and the bodies of the audience – as materials to probe, re/present, challenge and change social realities, and as such, ‘body art’ raises and stages important questions about sensory and embodied ways of feeling and knowing. Some body art experiments occupy an ‘extreme’ register, at the limits of what might be considered humanly possible or bearable. I pay such art particular attention, following a strong hunch that these liminal practices provide conditions for what Elisabeth Grosz (2008) refers to as ‘elaborate sensations’, linking bodies with forces they otherwise could not perceive. Such practices also raise critical questions around intersubjectivity, in particular challenging our capacities to witness and feel empathy. I begin the discussion in the abstract, mapping out briefly the theoretical terrain that helps to make sense of what follows. Of course, the abstraction is artificial: we think with our bodies, know through touch, remember and relate through music and smell; our understanding is affective. But ‘the body’ is contested matter, and matters in different ways through different conceptual lenses. Having surveyed and assessed the contestations, the chapter goes on to look at the political work of live body art, beginning with feminist practice from the 1960s, before ‘body art’ was really considered ‘a thing’, and then moves on to consider in depth the performances of selected queer artists. Following existing scholarship in performance studies, I propose that the affective and embodied encounter brought about by work such as this provides possibilities for ethical spectatorship. In the final section of the chapter, I attend to work in which participant and audience bodies constitute the live practice. Key to understanding these encounters are issues around touch and affect. I begin by acknowledging my debt to feminist and queer poststructuralism.

Embodied theory The framing of this chapter draws on a queer feminist approach to embodiment as a key locus of power and resistance and as a site of becoming. Feminist poststructural theory has put embodiment firmly on the analytical map by emphasising the ways in which ‘the body’ of social theory is implicitly ‘male’, ‘white’ and ‘able’,

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and bodies are embedded in the dualistic construction of the Western world, which codes bodies as female, minds as male, with corresponding binaries of emotion and rationality, nature and culture, and so on (Butler 1993; Grosz 1994; Young 2005). Such theory works to expose and deconstruct these binaries, and feminist methodologies emphasise bodies as central to epistemological processes of knowledge production. In Chapter 3, I drew attention to Donna Haraway’s (1991: 189) damning critique of the ‘god-­trick’ of disembodied vision, which claims the power to see and know objectively whilst remaining invisible and thus unaccountable – ‘seeing everything from nowhere’. She argues: We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate colour and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name … objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment … only partial perspective promises objective vision. (Haraway 1991: 190) Such methodological arguments have had a profound impact on ethnographic modes of knowledge production. However, the concept of ‘situated knowledges’ has sometimes become shorthand for autobiographical exposure (particularly from early-­career, often female researchers – see Troyna 1994; Paechter 1996). The concept can also be used to erroneously fix bodies in time and place (Harvey and Haraway 1995: 508). People themselves, their situations, their knowledges and, of course, their bodies are contingent, relational and in flux. I want to retain Haraway’s commitment to situated knowledge and partial perspective whilst queering the subject such that bodies and subjectivities can be conceptualised as work in progress. Queer theory, as discussed in Chapter 1, has forced and forged new ways of thinking about bodies, separating bodily signification from identity and emphasising the inherent performativity in becoming a subject (Butler 1990, 1993). Recent articulations of queer offer an expansive understanding of its scope to trouble all forms of stability and normativity (see Halperin 1997; Eng et al. 2005; Giffney 2009). As I have discussed in relation to Fierce festival, what began as a queer project primarily revolving around sexual politics has changed over time into a forum for the curation of a range of dissident and destabilising live encounters. Some of the most interesting queer art I have experienced has been marked by a deliberate turn away from the representational possibilities of queer bodies and instead engendered a queer encounter with/in space and time (Doyle and Getsy 2013; Metherell 2014). I deal more explicitly with the spatio-­ temporal in the following chapter; however, it is important to note here that engaging directly with live bodies also means attending to movement in space/ time, absences and objects. It means attending to decay, disease and death. It means attending to the excesses of living and the traces a body leaves behind.

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Embodied activism and body art: bodies as canvas I had decided to write the words ‘Votes for Women’ on my body, scratching it in my skin with a needle, beginning over the heart and ending on the face … I succeeded in producing a very fine V just over my heart. This was the work of fully twenty minutes, and in my zeal I made a deeper impression than I had intended. (Constance Lytton, Suffragette, in Lytton and Wharton 1914: np) Whilst imprisoned in Holloway in 1909, Lytton attempted to inscribe her political message onto her body. She had few resources at her disposal; incarcerated, lacking access to wider media, Lytton had her own body and – as her account cited above details – she found a hairpin with which she could make incisions. Her act draws attention to struggles over the ownership of one’s own flesh and blood, and the merging of the personal and political through an embodied act of pain. It is just one of many possible examples illustrating that the use of the body as ‘canvas’ for political expression predates any articulation of aestheticised ‘body art’. During the 1960s, as more artists incorporated their bodies into their art, we encounter a blurring between activism and art that continues to animate contemporary practice. As Sophie Anne Oliver (2010: 120) notes: Since the early ‘Happenings’ and feminist body-­art of the 1960s and 1970s, performance art has achieved historical status as negotiator of a new relationship between art and politics … its repeated engagement with the body as a mode of experience as well as a means of expression has forced audiences both within and outside of the art world to pay attention to embodiment as a cultural and political force. Not only did body art forge new relationships between art and politics, but feminist experiments with the body challenged hegemonic knowledge repertoires. Amelia Jones (1998) argues that the shift made by women artists from using traditional materials such as paint into working with the medium of the body constituted a critique and rejection of modernism. North American artist Carole Schneemann (2013: 1) reflects on how her discipline as a landscape painter developed through the physicality of painting into her performance piece Eye Body, first performed in 1963: I envisioned a sequence of actions where I would spontaneously collage my body so that it became part of my painting constructions … This work also proposed the questions: Could I be both image and image-­maker? Could these visual actions destabilize the pervasive traditions of male artists’ configurations of the female body?

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At a time when women were rarely considered in the role of ‘image-­makers’ and their bodies widely represented as passive, these questions struck at the heart of the masculine (art) establishment. Jones (1998: 3) notes the impact of Schneemann’s work at this time in relation to power and knowledge structures: Schneemann … activates a mode of artistic production and reception that is dramatically inter-­subjective and opens up the masculinist and racist ideology of individualism shoring up modernist formalism. The reigning model of artist analysis … protected the authority of the (usually male, almost always white) critic or historian by veiling his interests, proposing a Kantian mode of ‘disinterested’ analysis whereby the interpreter presumably determined the inherent meaning and value of the work through objective criteria. There are clear parallels here with feminist and social science critiques such as Haraway’s (1991, see above) of scientific claims to objectivity. The specificities of different bodies – exposed and enacted through live performance – threatened to undo the formalism that characterised prevailing regimes of knowledge production and analysis. Women artists used their bodies to reposition themselves as subjects as well as objects and to challenge and permeate the boundaries (nature/culture; reality/performance; art/life; desire/disgust and so on) on which a good deal of cultural and social theory depended. Jones (1998: 11, original emphases) explains that While body art is surely not the only type of cultural production to instantiate the dispersal of the modernist subject … it is one of the most dramatic and thorough to do so if it is engaged with on the deepest levels of its production, precisely because of its entailment of the subject as embodied in all of its particularities. In the same way, I suggest that contemporary live art practice deploying bodies (the artist’s and/or audience’s) serves to dramatise social and political concerns and modes of political resistance, particularly in relation to transformative subjectivities. In aestheticising bodily practices, the intersubjectivity of meaning and value come to the fore. Clearly, as Jones (1998) also recognises, the potential of feminist body art was not entirely realised, in that modernist and masculinist structures and regimes of power and knowledge were, alas, not overthrown. However, myriad examples of censorship, virulent dismissal and marginalisation of such work – whether artistic or academic – stand as clear indicators of such potential (see Doyle 2013: 9–12). And of course, if we evaluate feminist body art in as much as it contributes to an overall feminist project, then there were clear gains achieved in terms of both activism, including an increased visibility and recognition of oppression and discrimination, and theoretical developments in the form of critiques of positivist, orientalist and essentialist perspectives (Wark 2006). Provocations such as Schneemann’s prefigured the emergence of body artists taking on the political issues of the global north in the 1970s and 1980s: gender

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and sexual oppressions and identities; HIV/AIDS; racism; disability; military, state and intimate violence. As the definition of performance art expanded and accommodated new forms of practice, so work that had hitherto not been considered under the rubric of ‘art’ became available to a wider and different audience. Notable here is the queer/post-­punk scene out of which performers such as Ron Athey emerged (see Henkes 2013), introducing what Peggy Phelan (1993) calls ‘hardship or endurance’ art in which the artist uses the space/time of performance to enact self-­inflicted pain (or pain inflicted by others at their behest) in the form of piercing, tattooing, wounding, cutting or other bodily harms. Dominic Johnson (2012: 121), referring in particular to the work of Ron Athey and Franko B, argues that the body is put at risk in situations that stage singularly difficult experiences of intimacy … by urging their own bodies into crisis, [they] pose subjectivity as radically compromised by its encounters with the bodies of others. These encounters call audiences to account: this invitation to address one’s own responsibility for pain endured by another in performance art may inform our awareness of larger political problems, such as individual, negligent culpability in a time of war. (Johnson 2012: 123) The responsibility of audiences was dramatically enacted in high-­profile pieces that gave visitors power over the artist’s body. For example, Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (first performed in 1964 at Yamaichi Concert Hall, Kyoto, Japan, and then subsequently in New York and London) invited visitors to cut away her clothes. In Marina Abramović’s Rhythm O, first performed in Naples in 1974, over the duration of six hours, the artist invited the audience to do what they wanted with her, using any of the seventy-­two objects available in the room; some responded aggressively, including holding a loaded gun to her head. Such acts posed critical questions about intersubjective responsibility and accountability as well as the specificity of live art as a space/time of encounter that calls forth particular ethical codes of spectatorship and consent. In the following discussion I look more closely at the work of three queer live body artists whose work stages some of these problematics and whose practice has touched mine. The work of Cassils, Ron Athey and Martin O’Brien has been (and continues to be) instrumental for me in thinking through and trying to understand the lure and repulsion of ‘extreme’ live body art, and to extract from it relevance for my own and others’ sociological imaginings and investigations. In particular, I am interested in the politics of witness demanded by the extreme affective and embodied encounter. Such art takes me (as it would many people) way out of my comfort zone. I have struggled with the enactment of what, on the face of it, feels like ‘unnecessary’ suffering, being forced to re-­evaluate what

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‘necessary’ means in this context. The discomfort and dissonance of this engagement is provocative, and, drawing insights from the scholarship of performance art, I explore this site of provocation as itself a source of ethical witness with political effect. I begin by sketching out this argument before exemplifying it through my own experience as a researcher/audience member at the live performance of Cassils’ Inextinguishable Fire.

The politics of ethical spectatorship Previous chapters have noted the ‘shift to the live’ in sociology, art and life. In part, this shift has been brought about by the imperatives of technology and the intensification of digital media, which communicates what is happening now, no matter that we might be physically far removed from the action. The many of us who are digitally connected in our personal and/or professional lives do not have to seek out aestheticised representations of trauma and suffering: they circulate through media platforms and our social media networks, positioning us as frequent spectators to others’ pain. Debates within the closely related fields of trauma studies and memory studies highlight the incommunicability of pain and the impossibilities of unproblematic witness, as the spectator is at risk of becoming complicit with atrocity by objectifying the suffering subject, reiterating original violences (see Scarry 1985; Caruth 1995; Sontag 2003; Jacobs 2008). It can also be problematic to refuse to witness, and not looking constitutes its own mode of participation (Taylor 1997). Here, I draw on the work of performance and film theorists who, whilst accepting the necessary problems of spectatorship, seek to define ethical witnessing in the context of extreme body art (Bennett 2005; Cartwright 2008; Jones 2009; Stoddard 2009; Oliver 2010). Many of these authors utilise the French sociologist Luc Boltanski’s (1999) delineation of three ways in which spectators respond to others’ suffering. Boltanski (1999) suggests we react to representations of suffering either with anger, which leads us to denounce the perceived cause or perpetrator; with emotion or ‘tender-­ heartedness’, which leads us to be sentimental; or with an aesthetic response. Neither anger nor sentiment leads to empathy, as in displacing the responsibility for the suffering away from themselves, these emotions do not oblige the spectator to mitigate the others’ pain. However, an aesthetic response simultaneously positions the viewer as a self-­conscious viewer of suffering: making the object enter the subject’s interiority in order, by coming out from within, to reveal its unpresentable aspect.… Once the fictional characters of the persecutor and the benefactor have been dispensed with along with their illusionary reflections … suffering is looked at in the fact and confronted in its truth, that is to say as pure evil. But it is by watching himself [sic] seeing evil that the spectator can unmask the truth of evil within himself and thus accomplish the fundamental aesthetic process. (Boltanski 1999: 119)

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This is a theory of spectatorship that implicates the viewer in the suffering, thereby making an empathetic response possible. As spectator, I cannot feel the pain of the other as they do, but by attending to my own emotional, embodied, situated response, I can feel my own pain, which recognizes, and thus renders intelligible, the other’s pain. In an attempt to tease out these complex ideas in relation to embodied suffering as witnessed in the context of live body art, I turn to consider my experiences of Cassils’ live performance and film, Inextinguish­ able Fire (2015).

Cassils: Inextinguishable Fire Cassils is a trans/genderqueer Canadian performance artist and personal trainer, based in Los Angeles, whose work is shown internationally. I first experienced their1 work at Fierce festival in Birmingham in 2013, where they performed Becoming an Image and we both presented at Live Art UK’s conference exploring the future of live art (for discussion of Becoming an Image and some of Cassils’ earlier work, see Lambert 2017). Cassils’ Inextinguishable Fire takes its inspiration and name from an agitprop documentary by Harun Faroki (1969), in which Faroki examines the unimaginable horror of the effects of napalm on the human body in the Vietnam War, highlighting collusions between technology, politics and film media. Whilst holding manufacturers of chemical weapons to account, he also draws attention to the spectator and the impossibilities of a film communicating, and the viewer comprehending, the suffering incurred by napalm burn. His gesture of extinguishing a cigarette onto his arm, whilst the narrator tells us, ‘A cigarette burns at 400 degrees. Napalm burns at 3,000 degrees’, demonstrates the limitations this poses for empathetic identification: we can possibly ‘feel the pain’ of the cigarette burn, but can we scale this up and still identify with the suffering? Cassils takes up these themes: Inextinguishable Fire (2015) comprised a one-­off live performance and film. The performance involved a high-­risk stunt in which Cassils is dressed in fireproof clothing and is set alight for fourteen seconds, the longest time possible for a full body burn before the fire breaks through the fireproof clothing. The fourteen seconds of burning were previously filmed in a studio, but extended in the film to fourteen minutes of slow motion frame.2 I was in the audience for the stage performance at the National Theatre in London and the public film showing immediately afterwards.3 Here are my research notes, written at the time of the performance: I enter the auditorium and I see Cassils standing alone, spot lit, naked except for a pair of black pants. They are looking intently at the audience as we take our seats. I sit on the second row, close to the stage. I feel uncomfortable. Cassils’ stance invites us to stare, but it feels voyeuristic. The house lights are up: we look at each other … Cassils stands so still. Breathing very deeply and slowly. So still. The light catches their muscles, making their

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body a kind of bright white against the black of the stage … there is a low hum, building. Three men in boiler suits come onto the stage. One crouches at the back, preparing the clothing Cassils will put on. The others collect the items one by one and help Cassils to dress in a careful, caring and stylised way. The clothes (three pairs of trousers, three tops, three pairs of socks, three pairs of gloves, a hood) are all dripping with freezing gel. Every few seconds Cassils seems seized by a violent shiver; their body needs to be induced into a hyperthermic state so that when they are on fire, their sweat will not boil on their skin. It is difficult to watch. We catch snippets of speech: ‘first glove going on’, and the occasional ‘OK?’ to Cassils, who gives a brief nod. When it comes to covering their face in freezing gel they seem to be in trouble breathing. This is distressing to watch. The men paint inflammatory material up Cassils’ legs and back. The horror of what is  going to happen increases. The sound of fire burning intensifies and the  auditorium lights dim as they get ready to set Cassils alight. I feel frightened. My palms are sticky and my heart is racing. I keep thinking ‘don’t do it! You don’t have to do it!’ I feel like shouting it out, but of  course I don’t. Then one man with a burning stick lights Cassils and shouts ‘You’re on fire!’ They need to hold their breath for the duration of the burn (‘breathe and your oesophagus will burn’). After fourteen seconds a man shouts, ‘to the ground!’ and Cassils falls onto the stage floor. The men move in with extinguishers to put the fire out. I exhale, realising I too have been holding my breath for the duration of the burning. They push the mask off Cassils; I see them gasp and I feel tearful with relief that they are OK. Cassils is quickly helped off the stage. No bows or claps. There is silence. Then people begin to clap. The lights go up and there are, ‘oh my god’ type murmurs and beginnings of low conversations. The woman in front of me is frantically scratching the back of her neck and I realise I am doing the same. If I attend here to my own embodied and affective responses, it is clear that I felt ‘uncomfortable’ from the outset in my role as spectator, conscious of my own gaze on Cassils’ body. I was especially mindful of not only ‘staring’ but also visibly making notes. This discomfort gives way to more intense emotions as Cassils’ distress becomes apparent: ‘It is difficult to watch’ and a few seconds later, ‘This is distressing to watch’, but I continue to not only watch but be acutely aware of myself watching. I could turn away, or close my eyes, or let my mind wander (see Doyle 2013: 74) – I have certainly used those strategies in other situations – but I don’t. Instead, ‘I feel frightened’, and my own body responds as if I were the one in danger. I am sweating – ‘my palms are sticky’ and ‘my heart is racing’. Without knowing I am doing it, I hold my own breath for the duration of the burn. When it is over I am ‘tearful with relief ’. Amelia Jones (2009) refers to Henri Bergson’s philosophical deployment of neuroscientific research to explain how a spectator’s affective experience is ‘given meaning

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through memory: sensory input sparks paths of neurons that fire according to previous experiences’ (Jones 2009: 54). In other words, my emotional and sensory response is not just about what Cassils is going through at that moment, but about my own sense memory, which surfaces during the encounter, causing me to suffer. My desire to stop the action, I later learn, is a common audience response to extreme performance. Jennifer Doyle (2013: 75) says of watching Franko B’s I Miss You!,4 ‘The experience of witnessing this performance was riddled with the questions you might expect: Should we be doing this? Is he okay?’ and Sophie Anne Oliver (2010: 126) discusses performances by Marina Abramović when audience members have intervened to stop her cutting herself. I interpret my own failure to intervene in Cassils’ burn (‘don’t do it! … I feel like shouting it out, but don’t of course’) as a rational awareness of audience etiquette overriding my instinctive affective reactions. How might my embodied and affective response to the performance of Cassils being set on fire help elucidate the theory of ethical witness outlined above? To be clear, this is not an argument for the spectator (me, in this example) being a more or less ethical human being. I did not orchestrate my response to Cassils’ performance, and I have had very different emotional responses to other live performances and traumatic events. It is also likely that other members of the audience at Inextinguishable Fire were unmoved, or angry or bewildered with Cassils. As Amelia Jones (2009: 56) notes: The difference between performative woundings that become simply spectacular and those that retain the sharp edge of political agency is never inherent. It lies in their capacity to provoke empathetic identification in specific viewers. And indeed, at the end of the performance, it is my own experience I am left with, not Cassils’. Drawing on her own experiences as a spectator at Ron Athey’s shows, in which he subjects his body to wounding, piercing and penetration, Jennifer Doyle (2013: 82) similarly observes: within the space of the art, it is hard to imagine how one might get closer to another’s pain, and yet that proximity yields surprisingly little information about the other’s experience. At such performances, I am very conscious of my own skittishness and unease, my own projection – but, above all, I feel acutely aware of the fact that there is a difference, a distance between not only myself and the artist but between myself and other spectators. Empathy, thus, does not reside in knowing how others feel; it is not a unity with others, but rather, an awareness of distance and difference. As the analysis of one visitor’s reactions to Fun with Cancer Patients (2013) at the end of Chapter 3 illustrated, I do not, cannot feel what another feels, but my feelings are instead based on my own hurts and experiences, and I recognise that capacity to feel in

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others. Each person’s feelings of empathy and identification are therefore distinct, filtered as they are through their own memories and experiences. Such an account points to the complexity of our affective sense-­making, not just in relation to performance art or obviously representational expressions of suffering, but in wider experiences of trauma. When I attend a funeral, or sit with a dying friend, I grieve not only for or with that person, but also for other losses. To return to Boltanski’s (1999) formula, what is also vital here is my acknowledgement, my allowing my feelings to surface, however unpleasant, uncomfortable, ambivalent, they may be. For Jones (2009: 52), this is also where the political possibilities of the act of witnessing lie. In order to provoke a political response, the affect must be accepted rather than disavowed or repressed: if the act [of wounding] is marginalised or erased from public consciousness it can fail to provoke affect, or this affect can be repressed, and so the work can fail to have political effects. (Jones 2009: 52) My acknowledgement of the emotional and embodied impact that Cassils’ burning had on me – my empathetic response – recognises Cassils’ body as a ‘grievable’ body, and the act of their burning as culturally intelligible as an act of pain and suffering. Were I to disallow my feelings and refuse, or be unable, to empathise, then I would silence and render invisible Cassils’ pain by failing to acknowledge it. What does this mean for social research, a practice also fraught with the ethics of beholding and accounting for what we have seen? For a sociologist to bear witness to the weight and wonder of the world, we must remember, and allow ourselves to experience, our own weights and wonders, and be able to recognise the ways in which these experiences and our capacities to remember and be affected by them will impact on our empathic identification and, concomitantly, our responses to others’ experiences. Importantly, and to remember Haraway’s (1991) situated knowledges, this does not mean having to recount our own experiences as part of our sociological stories, though we may wish to (see Back 2007: 155–160). It means attending to our own experiences and recognising their bodily and affective impact as integral to our ability to witness – to be with and to understand – the pain of others. After my emotional experience of watching Cassils’ live performance, I walked alongside the Thames, thankful for a cool breeze, to Southbank Centre, where the film – a slowed-­down recording of the fourteen-­second live burn – was shown on the outside wall to a large audience of people who had, like me, just seen the live act, as well as members of the public who happened to be passing. My affective experiences of the film were quite different. My research notes contain no references to emotions, and instead I focused on the aesthetic details, techniques and effects of the film: the sense of distance created by the

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camera panning out, the mediating effects of a backdrop of red cloth. I noted down how the film made me think about other burning bodies: holocaust victims; the New Cross Fire; Israfil Shiri; protesters in Tibet; my friend Chris; Mohammed Bouazizi.5 In the live performance, although the affective knowledge of these real-­world horrors may well have been integral to my sensory response, I did not consciously think of them. Watching the film, I had time and critical distance with which to think. I wondered about the three men who helped Cassils to dress, set them alight and extinguished the flame. I didn’t consider them at all during the live event, but in my notes written during the film I ask, ‘I wonder what this is like for them, and for people who in “real life” deal with burning bodies. What would they make of this as “art”?’ The slowing down of the burn forces the audience to spend time with it, rather than the usually fleeting encounters we get via news headlines or Twitter feeds. Instead of the intense proximity of the live action, during which I felt as if there was little distance between me and the heat and smell of the burning, the body in the film felt far away. Whilst the fire in the live performance was, of course, extinguishable, in the film it burns on and on, in a loop, signifying the endless burning of the fires of global violence and protest. Whilst the live act remains only as an imperfect memory in the bodies and minds of those who witnessed it, the film serves as a critique and reminder of the daily horrors of violence and resistance and our spectatorial involvement in the suffering of others. The dual media format of Cassils’ Inextinguishable Fire draws attention to  the different aesthetic and political work of ‘live’ and ‘representational’ modalities. Live performance is also representational – ‘representation without reproduction’, as Peggy Phelan (1993: 3) puts it. Amelia Jones (2009: 45, original emphasis) asks: can a representational wound be as ‘painful’, elicit the same degree of empathetic response, and thus be as meaningful, as one carved into a body in real time before our ‘present’; and watching eyes? She argues that it can; that we do not have to experience suffering in the live act in order for it to have a political affect. Pain clearly signifies through representations: we are daily moved by stories, photographs and films of others’ trauma. In fact, ‘the imaging of pain is the primary mode through which its political effects take place’ (Jones 2009: 47). Acts of suffering are only made widely known through cultural representations, as few people get to witness live acts, whether occurring as they unfold on the street or in the act of performance. However, not all cultural representations of suffering have political effect. For them to do so requires a ‘bodily’ response: Whilst the experience of wounding first hand is ontologically distinct from experiencing it through a picture, film or video … a ‘live’ wound is not necessarily more affective (or for that matter politically effective) than a

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representational one … the wound affects us if and only if we interpret and experience it as ‘real’, that is, on some level as a violation of bodily coherence that we feel could happen to us. (Jones 2009: 50, original emphasis) Representation of pain enables it to be identified as pain, which is not just personal but has social meaning and thus becomes knowable to others.

Beyond the queer body? These representational concerns have a particular resonance in relation to Cassils’ work. I have argued elsewhere (Lambert 2017) that Cassils’ work operates in both representational and non-­representational modes; in the development of their work to date, there has been a shift from seeking to provide positive representations of a genderqueer body as radical political intervention into spheres of cultural normativity, to using their queer body in order to enact an indeterminate process of ‘becoming’. Cassils has worked on their own body as a project of ongoing gender transformation – ‘I use my physical body as sculptural mass to rupture societal norms’ (Cassils in Frank 2014: np) – and using photography and film has reproduced and circulated images of their body to assist with that project of rupture. There is a rich tradition in feminist and queer art of producing positive representations of women’s and queer bodies in order to counter the barrage of either negative or lack of representation in, for example, mainstream art or media. The photographic work of Del LaGrace Volcano (Volcano and Halberstam 1999) and Catherine Opie (see Halberstam 1998) are good examples. These and other ‘representational’ artists do important political work. At the same time, as previous chapters have addressed, there are problems with limiting our knowledges to representational regimes, and much has been written about the dangers of so-­called ‘identity politics’ and the concomitant production of essentialised categories (see Alcoff 1995; Spivak 1998; Lambert 2017). Cassils’ move towards what they call ‘anti-­representational tactics’ is a response to the danger that queer representations have, often unintended, complicities with neoliberal politics (Clifford 2000; Halberstam 2005; Eng 2010). Acknowledging the dangers of their own body becoming a commodity, a fetishised market product, Cassils says that it is necessary to keep moving, to stay in a state of ‘continual transformation’: As trans politics become more mainstream we run the risk of becoming a target market subject to the same slotting and governing as the dominant culture. I’m invested in transness as a political position that offers the possibility of resistance. I want to play with formal possibilities which embrace the obtuse and the unrecognizable. I am curious as to what ideas and questions can come from continual transformation. (Cassils in Grey 2015: np)

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In Inextinguishable Fire, Cassils seeks to move beyond their body as the focus of attention, but nonetheless uses their body to create a queer and unsettling experience for the audience. In Cassils’ own words: I now trust that the trans content is inherently ‘in’ the work … ‘Inextinguishable Fire’ speaks to the unrepresentability of trauma and asks what that means for not just my body but many bodies. In this way I aim to make a humanist work that does not only exist within the confines of the identity politics specific to my own subjectivity. (Cassils in Grey 2015) The body on stage at the beginning of the live performance was a queer, white, able body. By dressing in the multiple layers of protective clothing and freezing gel, Cassils’ body becomes a more indeterminate body, moving beyond the representation of any particular identity in order to become any/body who could burn. We are reminded of Halperin’s (1997: 62, original emphasis) assertion that ‘There is nothing in particular to which [queer] necessarily refers.’ Such expansive definitions of queer provide political traction in dealing with the complexities and contradictions of contemporary forms of identity. I would suggest that it is not that Cassils is no longer ‘queer’, but that the queer subject here is not the conforming ‘good gay’ (Casey 2007) of queer liberalism but the abject, marginalised, unintelligible body, in a state of confusion and becoming: a queer ‘assemblage’ (Puar 2005). What I am arguing for here is a way of working with (our own and others’) bodies that is able to realise the affective and political dimensions of our intersubjective encounters in both representational and non-­representational modes. Notwithstanding the legitimate critiques made of identity politics, identity remains important (Love 2007) and, relatedly, the specificity of bodies must not be ignored. Not all bodies are equally subjected to the threat of violence. As painfully illustrated by the devastating fire in Grenfell Tower, a twenty-­fourstorey block of public housing flats in West London, not all bodies are exposed to the same lack of care or subject to the same risk.6 Our analyses need to account for the particular injustices enacted on black and brown, queer, disabled and otherwise marginalised bodies, whilst recognising the capacities of bodies to critique, resist and transform social realities. I turn to the work of two artists whose work exemplifies these possibilities.

Fighting pain with pain, sickness with sickness: Ron Athey and Martin O’Brien To watch Athey perform is to witness him turn his body inside out in performance, up to the brink of disaster … Athey has consistently explored the politics of modern subjectivity, and the profoundly disorienting effects of aestheticising death and destruction, subjection and survival. (Johnson 2013a: 10)

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I am my body but my body is against me. I’m drowning. Breathe for me; will some body breathe for me? (Martin O’Brien, Breathe for Me 2016) Both Ron Athey and Martin O’Brian are artists who produce work using their own bodies, which can be difficult, perhaps unbearable, to watch and experience. Their performances raise many of the issues around spectatorship and empathy already addressed in relation to Cassils. My specific attention to them here, and my purpose in bringing their distinct performances together in my analysis, is that they deploy the ‘sick’ and ‘queer’ body in live practice that is infused with the inevitability of death, illustrating the capacities of live body experimentation to produce alternative knowledges and subjectivities. Ron Athey is a North American artist who is now well known in the US, European and UK live art scenes. His work emerged in the 1980 and 1990s and references his early life experiences. These experiences include his mother’s mental illness, an extreme and abusive fundamentalist Pentecostal upbringing, years of drug addiction, and living – whilst many around him did not – with a diagnosis of HIV. The aesthetics of his performances draw on, and draw together, excesses of schizophrenia, evangelism, sexuality and emotion. Despite being seeped in his autobiographical experiences, his performances can also be seen as a ‘staging of crisis, sexuality and the death drive, in the “plague years” and in the “post-­AIDS” era’ (Johnson 2015: 196). In this way, the work moves beyond the personal to provoke ‘broader aesthetic and political frameworks through which to encounter his visual palette of body modification, bloodletting, ritual actions, fetish glamour and operatic excess’ (Johnson 2015: 196). The film-­maker Catherine (Saalfield) Gund (2013: 54) talks about Athey challenging ‘pain with pain’: Athey’s performative strategy in the face of illness, destruction and death is to embody and amplify the pain. He describes his different enactment of dying as ways of ‘learning to love the monster’: AIDS destroyed my world, so, how to go forward? … From the living corpse of the Incorruptible Flesh manifestations to wrestling death in the Self-­Obliterations – for me, whether or not these images are front- or back-­ loaded with the spectre of AIDS, it’s still relevant, and representative of life: of learning to love the monster, pseudo-­health aesthetics, and the giver of death, anal sex. (Athey in Johnson 2015: 200, original emphasis) In so doing, Athey presents a radical politics of resistance. As Gund (2013: 54) puts it, he ‘survives – that is to say, he lives – by cultivating extreme responses to the situations he finds himself in’. Athey’s work has courted controversy, particularly in the US, where his work was denounced by the US Senate in 1994 in the context of the 1990s ‘culture wars’. At the centre of the demonisation and panic around Athey’s practice was his use of blood in performances and his

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HIV-­positive status, at a time when the conservative Right’s homophobia and panic around AIDS were at a combined height. During a performance of extracts from Four Scenes in a Harsh Life (1994), Athey cuts deep lines into the back of Darry Carlton (a.k.a. Divinity Fudge). Impressions of the wounds were made on sheets of paper, which were then strung out over the audience. A writer who was not at the performance wrongly claimed the audience had been exposed to infected blood, and together with inflated claims about public arts funding for the performance, the controversy exploded, still influencing discussions and interpretations of Athey’s work over a decade later (see Johnson 2013b for full discussion). Doyle (2013: xiv) highlights the ways in which the controversy serves to simplify the work, reducing its political charge and steering discussion and (scholarly as well as media) attention away from a consideration of its difficulty and the radical possibilities it presents. Martin O’Brien is a UK-­based artist who, like Athey, regards and enacts his own corporeality in the context of life lived as a long death sentence. O’Brien has cystic fibrosis,7 and his artwork aestheticises the pain and tedium of (his) illness and medical treatment. He explains that working with a chronic illness means that endurance and hardship ‘hold within them a different set of possibilities’: Endurance can work to reveal illness through the way the body reacts to hardship, and the presentation of this opens a dialogue between concepts of ‘the body’ within a medical discipline and wider forms of cultural body politics. (O’Brien 2012: 146) As with Athey, deeply personal and embodied issues, the staging of intimate crises, drive and to some extent define O’Brien’s work, and yet the performances of both artists open dialogue – as O’Brien suggests above, with powerful knowledge regimes and logics. In 2016 I helped to organise a showing of Martin O’Brien’s durational performance of Breathe for Me at Warwick Arts Centre in Coventry, with the intention of providing audiences with practice that fused different disciplinary knowledges and ways of knowing in a visceral and provocative way.8 Breathe for Me (2016) lasts for three hours, during which time audiences can come and go or endure the whole performance, whilst O’Brien subjects his body to a repertoire of brutal and repetitive medicalised acts, being beaten, penetrated, suffocated, and subjecting himself to examination and treatment. In Breathe for Me, as in other examples of O’Brien’s work, endurance both reveals the illness and can be regarded as a form of treatment. This line of analysis follows Petra Kuppers’ (2007) argument that artists re-­embody knowledge derived from medical understandings of illness, and in so doing produce new forms of knowledge through this body-­based interaction. Although through a radically different aesthetic, O’Brien’s work, like Brian Lobel’s Fun with Cancer Patients, asserts

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an alternative way of knowing about and responding to illness that defies constructions of sick subjectivities as either heroic or abject. O’Brien does not refuse medical knowledge: his work incorporates and to some extent amplifies medical procedures. However, in his performances he asserts an agency over these processes and relocates the body of expertise as his own body. A mantra in some of his work – that he is ‘fighting sickness with sickness’ – is taken from the performance artist Bob Flanagan, who also had cystic fibrosis, from which he died in 1996. In some of his pieces, O’Brien collaborates with Flanagan’s partner and collaborator Sheree Rose, drawing on the sadomasochistic (s/m) rituals which framed their relationship and work, and bringing s/m understandings of power, pain, consent and endurance to bear on the medicalised body (see Juno and Vale 2000).9 O’Brien plays with the temporalities of endurance and with a condition which is chronic (from the Greek khronos meaning ‘time’). In pieces during which the audience watch harrowing and repetitive action, time matters: it is felt in the body. It recalls the duality of dying through illness, an experience in which the  desire to end suffering and to live struggle and co-­exist.10 O’Brien (2012) notes that his work involves observation, the body being watched, tested, treated: the audience are thus positioned in relation to a ‘medical gaze’, but without the medicalising ‘distancing’ techniques. A medical practitioner has a context for their observations and a set of rituals and frameworks in which to contain the harrowing and often disgusting bodily interventions. The audience, lacking these structures, need to make sense of what they observe through their own frameworks. A medical practitioner can also do something to help, to alleviate the suffering a little, whilst an audience watches, helpless. In film extracts of O’Brien’s work, it is possible to see audiences flinch and recoil, turning their heads away. A member of the audience at Last(ing) (2013) says: It was one of the most intense things I think I’ve ever seen. Just seeing it, the smell; I thought I was going to faint.11 Although I was not in this audience, I recognise in others’ embodied actions what Jill Bennett (2005: 43) calls ‘the squirm’, an empathetic strategy for maintaining engagement as a spectator of unbearable material. By squirming or moving their body in such a way as to shift the sense of emotional and sensory discomfort, a spectator enacts what Bennett (2005: 43) calls ‘seeing feeling, the point at which one both feels and knows feeling to be the property of another’. Since reading Bennett’s analysis, I have been conscious of myself squirming in many contexts where I feel compelled to witness but need to retain a sense of self, to remind myself that the trauma and suffering are not mine. The gesture of scratching the back of my neck, which I also noticed another audience member doing at the end of Cassils’ burn, could be read in this way. O’Brien’s work, like Athey’s, performs and explores the relationship between queerness and sickness. Whilst their respective enactments of pain embody

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distinct aesthetics, both refuse the heroism of suffering, both take pleasure in bodily abjection and excess, and both enact penetration and adornment of the rectum ‘as a site of jouissance, where pain and pleasure meet’ (O’Brien 2012: 149). They both deploy the queer strategy of what Athey calls ‘dissociative sparkle’. In Mucus Factory (2011–2014), O’Brien beats his chest raw to bring the mucus up from his lungs and spits it out, lining up small jars of mucus like a production line. He attempts to use the sticky mucus in playful ways, coating his buttocks with glitter. Glitter speaks to a queer aesthetic (Metherell 2014). In Athey’s Deliverance (1997), an enema is administered and the liquid expelled into glitter-­filled cylinders. Glitter functions in both performances as a queer ‘tactic’ of survival, serving immediate aesthetic and wider political purposes. Athey uses the term ‘dissociative sparkle’12 to refer to the moments of glitter, disco or sequins that sparkle within the darker horror of his work. He explains: You have to interrupt the morbidity to shape the rhythm of the piece, and to make the imagery and the atmosphere bearable. (Athey in Johnson 2015: 213) However, this tactic is not just a way of managing the spectacle for the audience, because the sparkle symbolises a queer survival strategy: Our communities are special, because we find surprising responses to deep oppression. A speck of glitter emerges. It’s very different to being happy and glittering. The sparkle works differently when you have to pay for it in a certain way. (Athey in Johnson 2015: 213) Athey articulates the complexity of queer desire. The dissociative sparkle is an aesthetic rendering of the tropes of loss, mourning and the death drive, which inhabit queer cultural forms (Edelman 2004; Love 2007; Muñoz 2009). I address these concerns in more detail in the following chapter. For now, I turn to the audience who seek out the emotional highs and lows of extreme art and whose bodies become art.

Extreme audiences I have a passion for collecting extreme experiences. (Laura McDermott, joint director of Fierce Festival 2009–2016, Fierce brochure) I really like it when I am seriously and devastatingly moved, break down uncontrollably in tears, or experience a moment of acute rage or anger, or inconsolable sadness or melancholy. It can feel like being transported for the moment to a different ‘realm’ of emotional or sensorial experience that

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is other than the everyday … and yet is simultaneously connected to and rooted in it. But touch is also an extremely powerful facilitator of deep connection with the self and with another. (Adrian Howells in Johnson 2015: 269) It is not just artists who seek out extreme experiences. Whilst it is not possible to generalise about audience motivations for engaging with challenging live art, audiences rarely stumble into such encounters by accident. Around Fierce festival, an excitement is tangible from prospective audiences, circulating on social media in the lead-­up to events. Often the terms of the anticipation are expressed in sensory language, as these comments on Twitter in the build-­up to Fierce 2012 demonstrate: Excitement at Secret Show now morphed to trepidation, intrigue, anticipation, collywobbles and curiously, mild indigestion. (Public tweet, 5 April 2012) I’m at fever pitch. Can’t wait to finally FEEL an Ann Liv Young Show. (Public tweet, 5 April 2012) The addictive ‘high’ of an extreme encounter is a factor for some people. Following Fierce’s festival in 2012, I interviewed a young audience member who talked about her experiences of Ann Liv Young’s performance of Mermaid (2012) (to which the second Twitter comment above refers), during which, from her front row seat, she became part of the drama when the mermaid flopped up to her in a flurry of water and spat out raw fish. Hana explained why this became her ‘favourite’ show: I’ve never seen an artist just scatter an audience like that before, because everyone was just absolutely terrified of her. And the fact that she spat raw fish in my face, it was, a new experience for me and I was really terrified … I’m never usually terrified. And it was like woo, I’m really scared, wow, the adrenaline was just there, and at the time I hated it and then afterwards then you get the high. It’s like going on a fair ground ride. You hate it at the time and then afterwards you think, that was brilliant! I want to do it again! Hana clearly articulates the extremes of sensation she experienced as a member of the audience. I was also in the audience for this performance and can attest to the general feelings of panic, as some of the audience did attempt to ‘scatter’ away from Ann Liv Young’s frenzied mermaid attack. I also hated it at the time, but unlike Hana, would not want to repeat the experience (although I found it intellectually interesting). Hana could be talking here about any activity that provides an intense adrenaline hit, such as extreme sports. As research in these areas articulates, the socio-sensual states generated by extreme experiences operate in

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the realm of feeling and sense perception rather than language (Lyng 2005; Laviolette 2009). For Tim Edensor (2007: 221) the popularity of such experiences can be seen as a reaction to the regulated order of everyday life: The habitual concern with epistemological and sensory security is simultaneously accompanied by a desire for its transcendence, a shaking up of the experiential order that can be partly satisfied by the sensual experience. Although each audience member has their own response to the experience, in the case of the live body practice examined so far, the proximity of other audience members is also central to the flow of affect in the performative space. Doyle (2013: 76) points out that intense feelings often do not come from the artist, who might give little away. She uses Franko B’s I Miss You! as an example of an event which is ‘supercharged with emotion’, with feelings circulating around the room and the bodies. From a research perspective, getting to grips with the embodied interactions in a context such as this is complex. It calls for accounts of affect that recognise the ways in which feelings are not the property of individuals but circulate in a social field, attaching to bodies and objects (Ahmed 2004; Wetherell 2012; Sointu 2015) and are not just in the present but draw on and anticipate past and future events (see Lambert 2016). A different, but no less challenging, spectatorship is called for in more intimate performances that are less spectacular and in which audiences’ bodies are integral to the action.

Audience bodies: touching encounters [B]odies are fashioned through immediate contact with those around us, those with whom we are in touch – literally and metaphorically … It is through the visual, tactile, and aural contact between flesh-­and-blood bodies that we both perceive and are perceived by others. (Margaret Shildrick and Janet Price 2005: para 9) If we take Shildrick and Price’s (2005) phenomenological account of embodiment seriously, it follows that social research needs to both incorporate as well as account for bodily touch. They draw on Ros Diprose’s (2002) account of intercorporeal generosity to explain social existence and meaning in terms of our giving and receiving of our bodies to others. Importantly, aligning with the account of empathy already outlined, such a generosity does not depend on assumptions of sameness or unity with others but rather, ‘maintains alterity and ambiguity in the possibilities it opens’ (Diprose 2002: 90). Successful artistic or academic practice touches us. It does not have to make contact, the physical touch of another’s body, to touch us emotionally. However, physical touch involves a different kind of knowing. We only need to think about how we may use touch in our daily encounters: a hug, a handshake, a barely perceptible stroke of another’s arm to attract their attention. Touch, it is believed, releases

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oxytocin, a ‘neuroprotective chemical’ (Hughes and Baylin 2012: 53), which helps us feel loved and loving, enhancing our capacity to care for others. The late performance artist Adrian Howells produced pieces, often one-­to-one encounters, involving touch. His performances raise issues around risk and intimacy, but in a different register than the extreme body art discussed above. Deirdre Heddon (Heddon and Howells 2011: 1) explains that In this form of performance practice – intimate, personal, and interactive – the boundary between performer and spectator dissolves in the process of exchange, an exchange that asks for a committed and at times vulnerable sort of spectatorship. At Fierce festival in 2007, Howells staged a performance entitled Held, in which an audience of one person would spend time in an apartment with Howells, using three different rooms as distinct sites of physical intimacy, beginning with holding hands, and talking about the experience, across a table in the kitchen, before sitting together on a sofa talking about music and memories, and finally spooning together in a bed for half an hour. Howells was interested in the confessional exchange often brought about by physical touch: he discusses the case of a woman who told him she had never been properly held or touched before, and recounts the stages of her ‘confession’ from oral to somatic: In the final stage of Held, ‘spooning’ her on a bed in silence, I felt every sinew and muscle of her body relax and let go over the course of that half hour. In the context of what had taken place in the previous two stages this felt very much like a bodily confession and, for me, a different way of listening. (Heddon and Howells 2011: 5) Reminded of Les Back’s (2007: 163) observation that (as sociologists) ‘We speak a lot about society but all too often listen to the world within limited frequencies’, I am interested here in the possibilities Howells raises of listening with our bodies. Howells’ work is research-­led: he sought to explore conceptual questions around the possibilities of ‘body language’, asking what it means to listen to the body of another. His 2008 performance Foot Washing for the Sole examined this. In this one-­to-one encounter, Howells would kneel at the feet of an audience member and wash, dry, anoint, massage and kiss their feet. He describes his performative research method as follows: During the foot washing and drying I would facilitate a minimal, spoken exchange; during the massage … there would be an opportunity for silence and a bodily ‘conversation’ between my hands and their feet. The silent time was also intended to provide an opportunity for internal contemplation and self-­reflection … I asked seven questions during the foot washing stage that

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ensured the focus remained on the participant and would simultaneously allow for a body-­memory connection and either a verbalised or an internalised confession. (Heddon and Howells 2011: 7) Held (2007), Foot Washing for the Sole (2008) and, the following year, a research project called The Garden of Adrian (2009) attempted to create a space and structure within which bodies could produce and exchange knowledge. After the incitements to talk and ‘confess’ in the two earlier works, in The Garden of Adrian Howells put greater emphasis on silence, attending to his bodily role as ‘a catalyst for the participant’s silent journey’ (Heddon and Howells 2011: 10). In the context of our mass-­mediated culture, when there is so much talk and, as Back (2007) alerts us, limited frequencies for listening, Howells’ work suggests that ‘an alternative performance strategy might be to carve out other spaces, other modes of connection than the spoken exchange, other forms of the dialogic’ (Heddon and Howells 2011: 12).

Conclusion: knowing bodies [E]xperiments with the live body over the past century have radically interrogated modes of containment that continue to dominate the most basic understanding of how humans live and create in the world. (Amelia Jones 2012: 22) This chapter has sought to illustrate the centrality of bodies to live practice. Mapping the development of ‘body art’ as a political intervention, and drawing on diverse examples of ‘experiments with the live body’, I have interrogated the political possibilities of embodied encounters, paying attention to the ways in which live body art generates alternative ways of being and knowing (in) the world. Live sociology needs live bodies at the forefront of its analyses, and all bodies, including that of the researcher, are integral to generating and making sense of social realities. Embodied research makes particular demands in terms of live methods. This means, to return to C Wright Mills’ (1959) concern with abstract empiricism, echoed in contemporary accounts of sociology (see Gane 2009), that standardised methods cannot be selected and deployed regardless of empirical context. The wondrous specificity and complexity of people’s diverse and multiple embodiments calls for the development of new or renewed embodied live methods. Body encounters and experiences are intersubjective and highlight the im/possibilities of ethical and empathetic relations with others. I have paid particular consideration to the role of the spectator as witness, a relation of power that is enacted daily in the context of our mediatised lives, and is staged, often dramatically, in live performances using the body. We are not just ‘onlookers’, ‘spectators’; we bear witness with/in our bodies, using our sense memory to feel and account for the intersubjective experience: ‘to witness an

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event is to be present at it in some fundamentally ethical way, to feel the weight of things and one’s own place in them’ (Etchells 1999: 17). Throughout the chapter, I have attended to the role of the body in facilitating possibilities for the generation of knowledges, challenging hegemonic ways of knowing, and enacting alternatives. The different examples discussed have drawn attention to the many dialects of the language of bodies. Indeed, Athey (2014: 164) identifies bloodletting as well as other aspects of live art as ‘an expression beyond language’, and, of course, these forms of expression are not fixed: what is communicated by blood, as Athey’s practice so vividly demonstrates, meant different things in the homophobic and frightened atmosphere of the 1980s than it does in the post-­AIDS US/UK culture of the twenty-­first century. As social researchers, this means taking the aesthetic language of (for example) blood and mucus seriously, not just as objects, but as substances conveying meanings. These works challenge not only our dependence on words but also our tendencies to privilege the visual in making claims to knowledge. Jasbir Puar (2005: 134) notes that ‘Tactile economies reassert ontological rather than epistemological knowing and highlight touch, texture, sensation, smell, feeling and affect over what is assumed to be legible through the visible.’ In Chapter 2, I discussed Track (2012) by Graeme Miller, a participatory piece in which the visitor lies on their back and travels, very slowly, along a track running underneath Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction road interchange. Miller said of the way Track works: It’s not visual, it’s not visual at all … you’re sort of photographing it with your stomach and your spatial, animal self, and that’s kind of wonderful. (Graeme Miller, interview 2012) Miller’s assertion foregrounds the capacities of bodies for experiencing and making sense of the world, highlighting that our bodies are a key research instrument for sociologists as well as artists. His claim that ‘it’s not visual’ is intri­ guing, as in some ways the underbelly of the Spaghetti Junction is an incredible visual feast, ‘cathedral like’, as Miller himself says, and full of the spectacular beauty generated by buildings (or in this case roads) set against the sky. However, his comments that follow perhaps explain the claim: it is more than visual. Whilst our eyes might take in the view, the impact of it is felt in the stomach, as you lie face up, exposed and moving, with the sensation of the tracking shaping what and how you see and feel. A recognition of the whole bodily role in experiencing and documenting (the metaphorical ‘photographing’ in Miller’s terms) serves as a critique of dominant forms of visuality, which prioritise and privilege the (merely) visual (see Mirzoeff 2002). Queer and feminist engagements with bodies (whether of people or knowledge) have informed this chapter. As we have seen in relation to the work of the artists considered here, queerness is celebrated and utilised through non-­ normative embodiments that refuse bodily ideals of health, integrity and

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self-­sufficiency. Instead, we are presented with bodies that leak and bleed, are wounded and wound, blurring corporeal and emotional boundaries between bodies of artists and audiences, between life and death. These enactments provide counter-­hegemonic representations of gendered embodiments as well as enacting radical gender indeterminacy by performing an endless becoming, as in the work of Cassils. The conceptual strengths of queer feminism are developed in further detail in the next chapter, where I consider the temporalities of live practice.

Notes   1 Cassils uses the non-­binary pronouns they/them/their.   2 For information and trailer of Inextinguishable Fire, see http://heathercassils.com/ portfolio/inextinguishablefire/   3 The performance and film showing were part of SPILL festival 2015: https://spillfestival.com   4 In I Miss You (1999–2005), Franko B, naked and painted white, walks slowly up and down a white ‘catwalk’, dripping blood from veins in his arms: www.franko-­b.com/I_ Miss_You.html   5 Fourteen young Black people died in the New Cross Fire in 1981, preceding the Brixton riots; Israfil Shiri was a refugee who fled Iran after being persecuted for his sexuality; after learning he would not receive asylum in Britain, he set fire to himself in Manchester’s Refugee Action Centre and later died. Mohamed Bouaziza was a Tunisian market trader; he set himself alight in despair at his own desperate circumstances and catalysed the Arab Spring protests of 2010.   6 Fire broke out at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017. At the time of writing, the death count was seventy-one, but many more people are missing and may never be identified. The fire is subject to criminal investigation and an independent judicial public inquiry. For discussion of the social inequities exposed by the tragedy, see de Noronha (2017).   7 Cystic fibrosis is a genetic and life-­limiting condition in which a build-­up of mucus in the lungs and other organs reduces lung function and causes digestive problems. See www.cysticfibrosis.org.uk   8 The performance was intended as part of the curriculum of the MA interdisciplinary module Ways of Knowing (see Chapter 2). In the end, practical complications conspired to postpone the delivery of the module and prevent me from seeing the live performance.   9 See an extract of O’Brien and Rose performing Sanctuary Ring (2016) at SPILL Festival: https://vimeo.com/194115310 10 Expressed with poignancy in Deborah Steinberg’s blog https://darkcloudblog.wordpress.com 11 Clips from the performance together with audience reactions are available at https:// spillfestival.com/show/lasting/ 12 Incorruptible Flesh (Dissociative Sparkle) was a solo piece performed in 2006: it is part two of a series. The first, Incorruptible Flesh (1997), was a collaboration with Lawrence Steger, who died the following year; Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound) was a collaboration with Dominic Johnson, performed at Fierce festival in 2007. Incorruptible Flesh (Messianic Remains) was performed at SPILL festival in 2014.

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References Ahmed, S (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Alcoff, L (1995) Cultural feminism versus post-­structuralism: The identity crisis in feminist theory, in N Tuana and R Tong (eds) Feminism and Philosophy: Essential Readings in Theory, Reinterpretation and Application, Boulder: San Francisco, pp. 434–457. Athey, R (2014) In conversation with Martin O’Brien [extract], in A Jones (ed.) Sexuality: Documents of Contemporary Art, London: MIT Press, pp. 164–167. Back, L (2007) The Art of Listening, Oxford: Berg. Back, L and Puwar, N (2012) A manifesto for live methods: Provocations and capacities, in L Back and N Puwar (eds) Live Methods, Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, pp. 6–17. Bennett, J (2005) Empathetic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art, London: IB Tauris. Boltanski, L (1999) Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, J (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. Butler, J (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, London: Routledge. Cartwright, L (2008) Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Caruth, C (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Casey, M (2007) Spatial (in)visibilities and the good gay/ bad gay binary, in K Brown, J Kim and G Brown (eds) Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practice and Politics, London: Ashgate, pp. 125–126. Clifford, J (2000) Taking identity politics seriously: ‘The contradictory, stony ground’, in S Hall, P Gillroy, L Grossberg and A McRobbie (eds) Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, New York: Verso. De Noronha, N (2017) The right to adequate housing? Reflections on an avoidable tragedy, Discover Society (46), available at http://discoversociety.org/2017/07/05/the-­ right-to-­adequate-housing-­reflections-on-­an-avoidable-­tragedy/ (accessed July 2017). Diprose, R (2002) Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-­Ponty and Levinas, New York: SUNY Press. Doyle, J (2013) Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, London: Duke University Press. Doyle, J and Getsy, D (2013) Queer formalisms: Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy in conversation, Art Journal, 74(4): 58–71. Edelman, L (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, London: Duke University Press. Edensor, T (2007) Sensing the ruin, The Senses and Society, 2(2): 217–232. Eng, D L (2010) The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy, London: Duke University Press. Eng, D L with Halberstam, J and Muñoz, J E (2005) Introduction: What’s queer about queer studies now? Social Text, 84–85, 23 (3–4): 1–17. Etchells, T (1999) Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, London: Routledge. Foucault, M (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Allen Lane.

150   Bodies and embodied encounters Frank, P (2014) 10 Transgender Artists Who Are Changing the Landscape of Contemporary Art, Huffington Post, 26 September 2014, available at www.huffingtonpost. com/2014/03/26/trans-­artists_n_5023294.html (accessed May 2017). Gane, N (2009) Concepts and the ‘new’ empiricism, European Journal of Social Theory, 12(1): 83–97. Giffney, N (2009) Introduction: The ‘q’ word, in N Giffney and M O’Rourke (eds) The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–13. Grey, K (2015) Fire in the Belly: Trans Artist Cassils Immolates for Art, interview with Cassils, Huffington Post, June 2015, available at www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/04/ cassils-­inextinguishable-fire_n_7505500.html (accessed May 2017). Grosz, E (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grosz, E (2008) Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, New York: Columbia University Press. Gunaratnam, Y (2012) Learning to be affected: Social suffering and total pain at life’s borders, The Sociological Review, 60(SI): 108–123. Gund, C (S) (2013) There are many ways to say hallelujah! in D Johnson (ed.) Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey, London: Live Art Development Agency/Intellect, pp. 226–233. Halberstam, J (1998) Female Masculinity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, London: New York University Press. Halperin, D. (1997) Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haraway, D (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books. Harvey, D and Haraway, D (1995) Nature, politics and possibilities: A debate and discussion with D Harvey and D Haraway, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13: 507–527. Heddon, D and Howells, A (2011) From talking to silence: A confessional journey, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 33(1): 1012. Henkes, A (2013) A party for the “freaks”: Performance, deviance and communitas at Club Fuck! 1989–1993, The Journal of American Culture, 36(4): 284–295. Hughes, D and Baylin, J (2012) Brain-­Based Parenting: The Neuroscience of Caregiving for Healthy Attachment, London: WW Norton. Jacobs, J (2008) Gender and collective memory: Women and representation at Auschwitz, Memory Studies, 1(2): 211–225. Johnson, D (2012) Intimacy and risk in live art, in D Heddon and J Klein (2012) (eds) Histories and Practices of Live Art, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 121–147. Johnson, D (2013a) Introduction: Towards a moral and just psychopathy, in D Johnson (ed.) Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey, London: Live Art Development Agency/Intellect, pp. 10–40. Johnson, D (2013b) Does a bloody towel represent the ideals of the American people?: Ron Athey and the Culture Wars, in D Johnson (ed.) Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey, London: Live Art Development Agency/Intellect, pp. 64–93. Johnson, D (2015) The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art, London: Palgrave.

Bodies and embodied encounters   151 Jones, A (1998) Body Art: Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jones, A (2009) Reforming the wounded body: Pain, affect and the radical relationality of meaning, Parallax, 15(4): 45–67. Jones, A (2012) The now and the has been: Paradoxes of live art in history, in A Jones and A Heathfield (2012) (eds) Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, Bristol: Intellect, pp. 9–26. Juno, A and Vale, V (2000) (eds) Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist, New York: Juno. Kuppers, P (2007) The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lambert, C (2016) The affective work of art: An ethnographic study of Brian Lobel’s Fun with Cancer Patients, The Sociological Review, 64: 929–950. Lambert, C (2017) Queering identity: Being and becoming queer in the art work of Cassils, in N Monk, M Lindgren, S McDonald and S Pasfield-­Neofitou (eds) Reconstructing Identity: A Transdisciplinary Approach, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 131–155. Laviolette, P (2009) Fearless trembling: A leap of faith into the devil’s frying pan, The Senses and Society, 4(3): 303–322. Love, H (2007) Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, London: Harvard University Press. Lyng, S (2005) Edgework: The Sociology of Risk Taking, London: Routledge. Lytton, C and Wharton, J (1914) Prisons and Prisoners, Some Personal Experiences, London: William Heinemann, available at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/ lytton/prisons/prisons.html (accessed March 2017). Mascia-­Lees, F E (2011) Introduction, in F E Mascia-­Lees (ed.) A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, Chichester: Wiley-­Blackwell. Metherell, L (2014) Glittering Orientations: Towards a Non-­Figurative Queer Art Practice, unpublished PhD, Birmingham City University. Mills, C W (1959) The Sociological Imagination, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mirzoeff, N (2003) (ed.) The Visual Culture Reader, London: Routledge. Muñoz, J E (2009) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, London: New York University Press. O’Brien, M (2012) Treating the body, Contemporary Theatre Review, 22(1): 146–151. Oliver, S-­A (2010) Trauma, bodies, and performance art: Towards an embodied ethics of seeing, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 24(1): 119–129. Paechter, C (1996) Power, knowledge and the confessional in qualitative research, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 17(1): 75–84. Phelan, P (1993) Unmarked: Politics of Performance, London: Routledge. Puar, J K (2005) Queer times, queer assemblages, Social Text, 84–85, 23(3/4): 121–139. Scarry, E (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York: Oxford University Press. Schneemann, C (2013) Foreword: Live art performance body art, in D Johnson (ed.) Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK, Abingdon: Routledge. Shildrick, M and Price, J (2005) Deleuzian connections and queer corporealities: Shrinking global disability, Rhizomes, issues 11/12, www.rhizomes.net/issue11/shildrick price/ (accessed May 2017). Sointu, E (2015) Discourse, affect and affliction, The Sociological Review, 64(2): 312–328.

152   Bodies and embodied encounters Sontag, S (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Hamish Hamilton. Spivak, G (1998) Subaltern studies: Deconstructing historiography, in G Spivak In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, London: Routledge. Stoddard, C (2009) Towards a phenomenology of the witness to pain, dis/identification and the Orlanian other, Performance Paradigm: A Journal of Performance and Contemporary Culture, 5.1, available at www.performanceparadigm.net/index.php/journal/ article/view/65 (accessed March 2017). Taylor, D (1997) Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Troyna, B (1994) Blind faith? Empowerment and educational research, International Studies in Sociology of Education, 4: 3–24. Volcano, D and Halberstam, J (1999) The Drag King Book, London: Serpent’s Tale. Wark, J (2006) Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America, Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press. Wetherell, M (2012) Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding, London: Sage. Young, I M (2005) On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing like a Girl’ and Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 6

The im/possibilities of live time

The construction of radically different alternative futures is hardly possible without recognition of alternative histories, alternative timelines and alternative approaches to time itself. (Ivana Milojević 2008: 338) There is no way that the world is totally colonized by a single system of spatiotemporalities. Everybody lives in more than one world all the time, and learns how to do so, even inside oneself as well as in any social collectivity.… Agency is … the practice of actualizing the consequences of multiple lived worlds. (Donna Haraway in Harvey and Haraway 1995: 515)

Introduction: the temporalities of live practice If the social is always past, in the sense that it is always formed, we have indeed to find other terms for the undeniable experience of the present: not only the temporal present, the realization of this and this instant; but the specificity of present being, the unalienably physical. (Raymond Williams 1977: 128) Since it is not possible to talk of live practice without invoking temporality, time has pervaded the discussion in previous chapters. The time of live is the present, but before we have located, let alone unpacked, our analytical tool bags, it seems as though that present is in the past. The present is impossible time. And yet, as we have seen, it is an instance of possibility and urgency: a dizzy, uncertain time when for a twinkling, multiple worlds are up for grabs. The present is imbued with potentiality, and in that sense it is a promise of what might become, oriented towards the future. This chapter dwells in and wrestles with these temporal im/possibilities in relation to live sociological practice. For the sociologist, the time of live is never just the present: it is the lived moment as it embedded in a wider nesting of temporalities. As Les Back and Nirmal Puwar (2012a: 8) put it in the second aspiration in their manifesto for live methods: ‘Avoid the “trap of the now” and be attentive to the larger scale

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and longer historical time frame.’ This embeddedness is what distinguishes the live art of sociology this book advocates from the kind of real-­time live data produced by digital methods, such as time-­stamped information generated by Twitter or Google. Emma Uprichard (2012: 135–136) evaluates the trend towards digital methods within sociology and asks: is focusing on the ‘now’ the way to go? Is that really what we want to do? The answer to those questions … is a definite ‘no’, for fear of increasing the likelihood that we will become (more) stuck in a series of perpetual presents without any recourse to either understand our pasts or affect our future. In this vein, I wish to map out a different temporality for live research, which exploits and works with/in the resources of the present but does not reify it or become stuck. Uprichard (2012: 136) ends her article by calling for a ‘radical epistemological and methodological reconceptualization of time “in” method’. My analysis here hopes to contribute towards this ambitious task. This temporal methodological ambition correlates to a spatial one, reminding us that space/time needs to be thought together (Massey 1992) as we interrogate normative ideas of scale (e.g. local/global, micro/macro), containment and practices of place-­making. I have already alluded to some of these methodological challenges in relation to live method, retaining a ‘frog’s eye’ (Lury 2012) perspective on what is happening now whilst recognising structuring patterns of history, wider political contexts and future imaginings in our enquiries and analyses. In Chapter 3, I drew attention to the artist Graeme Miller’s piece Beheld, in which audiences lifting a glass bowl in a gallery are propelled by sound to the circle of sky from which a person fell from an aeroplane to their death. Beheld becomes not only ‘a transmitter of place’, as Miller described it, but also of time, enfolding personal and historical stories into the present of the bowl as it is lifted and experienced anew. Invoking again the significance of situated knowledges (Haraway 1991), our methods need to address the time with/in, from and to which we speak. Drawing analogies between spatial and temporal epistemologies, Michael Serres (in Serres and Latour 1995: 48) warns – deploying a good dose of cynicism – that attending to the live does not mean ‘living in the present moment’: Just as in space we situate ourselves at the centre, at the navel of things in the universe, so for time, through progress, we never cease to be at the summit, on the cutting edge, at the state-­of-the-­art development. It follows that we are always right, for the simple, banal and naive reason that we are living in the present moment. The curve traced by the idea of progress thus seems to me to sketch or project into time the vanity and fatuousness expressed spatially by the central position. In a similar vein, Giorgio Agamben (2009: 39) writes of the untimeliness of the contemporary:

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Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands … because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time. The ambition for the live sociologist, then, is to be untimely and askance: to avoid the bright lights and certainties of the centre position and the present moment and instead to remain anachronistic and askew. What methods might be apposite for this challenge? Donna Haraway’s (in Harvey and Haraway 1995) comments at the beginning of this chapter alert us to the multiple temporalities people occupy in their everyday lives, reminding us to train our senses to the small-­scale, individualised, molecular rhythms of time as they are lived. Yasmin Gunaratnam’s (2013: 16) ethnographic study of migrants at the end of their lives provides an exemplary study of this. As briefly touched on in Chapter 3, her concept of ‘total pain’, taken from philosophies of palliative care, recognises pain as being ‘physical, psychological, social and spiritual’; it ‘gives recognition to pain that is accrued over a lifetime’ but understands that experiences of pain refuse a linear temporality (Gunaratnam 2012: 137). Perhaps the most important aspect of ‘total pain’ is that it does not render different experiences of pain equivalent or equally accessible but is able to allow for, even if it cannot empirically explain, pain and suffering that is ‘ontologically and temporally insecure and/or withdrawn’ (2012: 109). The role of memory, in embodied as well as cognitive forms, is critical, as present pain and suffering recalls previous experiences of pain and suffering, assembling different temporalities of trauma that may result from social or physical causes. As the previous chapter has established, any reconceptualisation of time in method needs to account for bodies. This is what Raymond Williams (1977: 128) alludes to in his call for a way of accounting for the ‘specificity of present being, the unalienably physical’. With embodiment at the forefront of our attention, it is difficult to forget or write out wider temporalities, as they are written onto bodies themselves. Genetic patterns we inherit and reproduce (or don’t; see Shakespeare 2003), lines and bodily contours of aging, scars of injury and adventure, piercing, tattoos and adornments – all tell or hint at multitudinous stories whilst the live body enacts its endless becoming. In the previous chapter, Martin O’Brien’s work amplified the politics of duration by enabling audiences to experience time as duration through witnessing his body’s endurance of routine, repetitious and difficult medical interventions over a prolonged period of performance (three hours in the case of Breathe for Me 2016). Unlike the temporality of an ‘event’ characteristic of most performance work, durational work ‘lacks the distinction that separates the event from the mundane, the everyday: the bracketing off and casting out of experience into the domain of the “uneventful” ’ (Heathfield 2009: 22). Methodologically, a durational encounter enables us to experience time in a phenomenological way rather than to consider it as an

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abstract form. Anything that is subject to duration, whether it be bodies, intersubjective encounters or material objects, ‘stick[s]’ to us, ‘conditioning a tactile attentiveness’ (Heathfield 2009: 22). Regardless of the ‘length’ of the duration in capitalist ‘clock time’, other features of temporality mark a durational encounter. These features or phenomena deserve our critical attention. I attempt to make them explicit in attending to live practice in this chapter. I argue that the project of re/conceptualising the time of live method benefits from queer theory and its capacities to open up and re/distribute time and space in aesthetic and political ways (Halberstam 2005; Ahmed 2006). I take inspiration from theorists such as Heather Love (2007), José Esteban Muñoz (2009) and Elizabeth Freeman (2010), whose approaches to the subject of time are not only queer but also reparative: researching, dwelling, thinking with and in the times of which they write (Sedgwick 2003). Many of the artists whose work I attend to in this chapter do not necessarily define as ‘queer artists’, but I would argue that their work has queer affects and so is amenable to the kind of theorising enacted by these thinkers. The artists whose work I consider here certainly deploy queer time in Halberstam’s (2005) expansive sense of temporalities that capture the eccentricities of lives lived and living in ‘alternative’ ways. The chapter is structured as follows. I begin the discussion with the future, partly in order to disrupt the easy and problematic linearity of deferring the future to the end, and partly because the radical potential of the present lies in, as O’Sullivan (2006) puts it, ‘new modes of becoming and new worlds for a people yet to come’. Drawing on a performance poem I wrote for a conference on the future, I map out queer approaches to temporality as a way of establishing the theoretical landscape most conducive to developing live sociological methods. I then briefly argue for the importance of both theories and practices that challenge and offer alternatives to ‘capitalist time’, before exploring some examples of live art practice utilising temporality in specific ways. Live art, as defined in Chapter 2, does not just exploit the possibilities of the present but intervenes critically in these debates and concerns. I attend to some examples of live practice that engage thoughtfully with time and enable audiences to do the same, revisiting Graeme Miller’s Track (2012) for the ways in which it ‘frames’ the present and ‘what is’ within that present rather than adding complexity and criticality. I speculate that this method enacts a practice-­based equivalent of the reparative reading (Sedgwick 2003). I then consider the role of memory in Mette Edvardsen’s Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine (2012) and Monica Ross’s Acts of Memory (2012). My interest in these selected works lies primarily in what they offer in terms of the stated ambition to reconceptualise temporal methodologies and even offer practical methods for live enquiry. In the final section of the chapter, I turn to the tantalisingly contradictory role of documentation and the archive in the context of live practice.

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Queer temporalities I begin this section on queer time with a poem that I wrote to perform at the Live Art UK conference, held in Birmingham in 2013, with the theme of Live Art in 2113. The poem imagines a queer future a century on. I use the poem as a springboard for presenting both the difficulties and the potentialities of queer temporality as a resource for thinking about and intervening in social and political change.1 Queer Future (2113) twenty one thirteen strange numbers

awkward on the tongue a place far off

now

gone wrong

i indulge in imagining a queer time and place

2

with no she/he agenda no distinguishing sex from gender and enforcing difference in order to render heterosexuality hegemonic no moronic norming girls do this boys do that no performative naming genetic blaming queer shaming no longer the lingering chronic failure of owning ambiguous genitalia no need to measure pathologise medicalise arbitrate XY XX no need to define sex masculinity in crisis and divisive partitioning of goods power wealth deep and depressing inequalities in health repressing and expressing emotion liberated from the gender script3 all these concerns dated the kids don’t get why society waited until twenty one thirteen before the effects of inclusive curricula kicked in abusive vernacular kicked out

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the symbolic violence of gendered consumerism pink for me blue for you rendered black and white as a racist fist fight none of the policing of that vast space out there that should be to share but is gendered male encoded boy girls welcome if they’re well behaved if their skin is the right shade and they’re not too fat too loud too queer or otherwise depraved in my imagined queer time and place gay or straight are fossil phrases that blank gazes from the gender free youth so runs my dream so runs my dream so runs my dream but queer dreams do not run smooth do not glide into imagined futures because to be queer is to live without a future backwards4

feeling

we fuck the future with the nihilistic now5 and the ghosts of homies and palones6 homies and palones still shamed tortured incarcerated killed in many parts of our shared world feeling backwards through abjection and the ghosts of homies and palones homies and palones undoing futurity with viral fluids undoing futurity fucking for fun queers disrupt the logic of heteronormative reproduction and so on and so on so no neat linear progress myths can take root here it is clear that (this) utopia cannot be queer7 i imagine a queer time and place with utopia in ruins and my dream runs why why why why why

an architecture of endless questioning8 a failure to conclude

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ever failed no matter try again fail better9 failure rescued from the archive of negative affect10 along with discomfort risk process gossip excess and rendered generative a queer game in which we reframe ignorance as a point of arrival11 an educational ambition12 we undo our theory and our theory undoes us13 undoes us undoes us for what does it mean to be human to be in human is to be in flux a hectic restless haptic existence power is biopolitical and so is resistance14 but bodies are leaky unruly and freaky15 they revel and unravel across the shifting intersections of our differences the glittering joy of our differences whilst consensus renders us still mute spent i am therefore i think i think therefore i dissent through everyday words gestures senses we invent and reinvent a beautiful praxis what’s left when the dream is faded is that to be human is to struggle twenty one thirteen i see fierce struggle and it makes my heart beat The poem articulates queer from the space/time of my own situated present, doing queer politics in the UK: a time and place when it is not too far-­fetched, if we maintain a forward-­looking, blinkered vision, to imagine the gender-­free ‘utopia’ the poem lays out at the beginning. Such a vision is given momentum by social, political and legal developments ushering in a ‘queer liberalism’ (see Puar 2005; Eng 2010), which attempts to reconcile queer theory’s radical political aspirations with the emergence of liberal demands for legal and domestic

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rights and state-­sanctioned privileges. Whilst in some national contexts there is evidence of broad cultural shifts in attitudes to gender and sexuality, these gains are geopolitically uneven.16 In a more conceptual vein, accounts of queer temporality often eschew linear or even optimistic perspectives, and range, as the poem articulates, from the extreme negativity of Lee Edelman’s (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, in which the symbolic figure of the Child represents a futurity that queers should resist rather than be subsumed by, to more hopeful readings of queer’s potential to oppose heteronormativity whilst creating more liveable alternatives (Muñoz 2009; Halberstam 2011). Jack Halberstam (2005: 152) asserts that queer temporality disrupts the normative narratives of time that form the base of nearly every definition of the human in almost all of our modes of understanding, from the professions of psychoanalysis and medicine, to socioeconomic and demographic studies on which every sort of state policy is based, to our understandings of the affective and the aesthetic. Halberstam (2005) sees the defining features of queer time springing from two sources: queer time developed in opposition to heteronormative time (the institutional logics of heterosexuality, family and reproduction), and queer time developed in a more expansive mode to capture the eccentricities of lives lived in alternative ways. A key factor in the emergence of queer time is recognition of the ‘constantly diminishing future’ (Halberstam 2005: 2) brought about by AIDS. The suffering, deaths and stigma of the AIDS epidemic had material and symbolic effects, leading both to the loss of many lives and communities, and to a melding of queer temporality and mourning. Like other communal and subjective ontologies with histories of collective suffering (see for example Brown 1995; Cheng 2002) queer modalities are forever haunted by loss. However as Halberstam (2005: 2) asserts: The constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now, and while the threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud, the urgency of being also squeezes new possibilities out of the time at hand. In the previous chapter, we saw a manifestation of that urgency in the live art practice of Ron Athey and Martin O’Brien, both producing work full of vitality by embodying dying itself in its dramatic and banal manifestations. Echoing the strategies utilised by Athey and O’Brien of fighting pain with pain, and sickness with sickness, ‘negative’ emotions such as stigma and shame, inherited from the queer past, are not denied but deployed by queer theorists, and thus negative affect is put to work for potentially transformatory political purposes. This dis/stance on history and the future means that ‘Contemporary queers  find themselves in the odd situation of “looking forward” while we are “feeling backward” ’ (Love 2007: 27). Love (2007: 146–147) is not nihilistic in

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Edelman’s (2007) vein, but her analysis resists what she calls ‘the criterion of utility as a standard of judgement for the feelings and experiences that I describe’, accusing some within queer studies of trying to ‘ignore what they could not transform’. Drawing on a reparative reading of literary texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which are ‘visibly marked by queer suffering’, she argues that the past is living, ‘dissonant, beyond our control, and capable of touching us in the present’ (Love 2007: 10). She locates her method in a terrain of enquiry which in recent years has ‘shifted the focus away from epistemological questions in the approach to the queer past’, focusing instead on desire and affect across time: Exploring the vagaries of cross-­historical desire and the queer impulse to forge communities between the living and the dead, this work has made explicit the affective stakes of debates on method and knowledge. (Love 2007: 31) Central to Love’s (2007) argument is that although it can be tempting to ignore the ‘bad old days’ of queer history and instead focus on recent political and social gains in some parts of the world that signal a happier future for queer subjects, to do so entails significant losses. Not least of these are the missed opportunities to make a wider range of feelings, rather than the usual narrow canon, the basis for political action. A politics based on gay pride does not go nearly far enough in accessing, understanding and transforming the many whose lives are compromised or destroyed through the material and cultural effects of – at a minimum – disability, illness, poverty and racism, or those whose lives are still shaped by ‘the closet’ of sexual shame, a discourse still alive and kicking in contemporary cultural and media circulations.17 However, in the face of these realities, to ‘feel backwards’ is to risk a loss of agency. Thus, to engage with negative histories and affects, it is also necessary to problematise conceptualisations of political agency. Such an agency invokes Walter Benjamin’s (1999) angel, resisting the storm of progress into which it is pulled by keeping its gaze fixed on the destruction and ruins of the past. Love (2007: 148) writes: Benjamin’s sacrificial witness functions as something like an ethical ideal for the historian and the critic. Yet the figure poses difficulties for anyone thinking about how to effect political change. What are we to do with this tattered, passive figure, so clearly unfit for the rigours of the protest march.… The question is how to imagine this melancholic figure as the agent of any recognizable form of activism. This question of melancholic attachment haunts accounts of the left, trying to articulate structures of feeling (Williams 1977) that are ‘authentic’ in naming real losses without becoming mired in the stasis of nostalgia. Such an articulation requires an engagement with the affective structures of time:

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The aim is to turn grief into grievance – to address the larger social structures, the regimes of dominations that are at the root of such pain. But real engagement with these issues means coming to terms with the temporality, the specific structure of grief, and allowing these elements of negative affect to transform our understanding of politics. We need to develop a vision of political agency that incorporates the damage we hope to repair. (Love 2007: 151) In my attention to live art practices, I have tried to sustain openness to what this vision might look and feel like. Given that it will necessarily be multiple, fluid, probably uncomfortable if not painful, possibly fleeting, awkward, queer, perhaps ‘vision’ itself is the wrong ambition. Kathleen Stewart (2007: 86) challenges the linear temporality of agency as a projection towards the future, articulating it instead as ‘strange, twisted, caught up in things, passive, or exhausted. Not the way we like to think about it … all agency is frustrated and unstable and attracted to the potential in things’. One articulation of such agency emerges, as we saw in the previous chapter, in the work of queer live body artists whose practice performs damage and refuses to disregard forms of suffering because they are not transformative. Film-­maker Catherine (Saalfield) Gund (2013: 54) writes of the impact Ron Athey has on her at a time of personal and collective desperation brought about by AIDS: I have to give in. But I don’t want to give up.… And Ron [Athey] is always crossing the line … his ability to make the present riper than the future, more important than the absoluteness of the end, the promise of no tomorrows.… He demands my focus and honesty. I do not have time to feel hopeless. It is like he is always shaking me. To be always shaken. To be kept in the present so immediately and physically. This is one of the temporal gifts of live art such as Athey’s. As Gund’s (2013) confessional account makes clear, this attention to the live is born out of a fear of death. It is not a hopeless or passive response, nor is it a ‘distraction’; rather, the materials of the horror – the fear, grief, blood, pathos, penetration, wounding, tending, dying – are appropriated and repurposed. Embedded in these histories of trauma and loss, the range of affects to which queer theorists open their arms is expansive and eclectic. If live methods are to take seriously (as they must) the political work of affect, a similar openness should be cultivated. Alongside and embroiled in the usual affective repertoires, this also entails paying attention to banal, annoying, embarrassing and ambivalent affects that don’t have obvious utility, such as envy, anxiety, irritation (see Ngai 2007; Berlant 2011; Halberstam 2011). Analysing the relationship between Jacques Rancière and queer theory, Oliver Davis (2009) identifies in early writing by Rancière and his colleagues for the Révoltes Logiques collective an attention to skin, whereby attachments and political memories (in their case

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around the political events of 1968) play out as irritabilities on the skin’s surface. This ‘irritable attachment’, as Davis (2009: np) identifies it, may offer epistemological possibilities: Superficiality is salvaged from ordinary language and tentatively advanced as a methodological principle; irritability or touchiness is reclaimed from the conventional archive of negative affect as the basis of a new epistemology, an emotional disposition capable of bearing historical and political meaning. Irritability enables queer subjects and theorists to remain affected by heteronormativity whilst avoiding the excesses and paralysing impact of victimhood or paranoid fear of the future. Irritability, like other prosaic and apparently minor affects, operates on the ‘surface’ rather than the deep, complex feelings of classical passions. Such affects are therefore more amenable to a reparative mode of engagement. Stewart’s (2007) extraordinary writing on ordinary affects works the surface in the same generative way, keeping Stewart (2007: 129) ‘in the middle of things’, a methodological stance outlined in Chapter 3 to which I have aspired in many of the practices presented throughout this book. Whilst attending to these affects appears to be more of a spatial task (the skin/the surface), it is by identifying such emotions and their ambiguous political impacts in the past – whether that be in the queer accounts to which Love (2007) and Muñoz (2009) attend, or in our own and others’ memories – that we can mobilise as wide a range of affects as possible. Affect is, as both Love and Muñoz demonstrate, a transitive method: we ‘feel backwards’ or, as Muñoz (2009: 1) puts it, ‘feel beyond’: The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educating mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalising rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Also appreciative of the quotidian, Muñoz (2009) draws on the resources of hope and astonishment, attending to their affective contours. These theoretical framings resonate with sociological analyses of the everyday, linking ordinary affects and experiences and enabling critical attention to be paid to methodological temporalities (Goffman 1959; de Certeau 1984; Maffesoli 1996; Stewart 2007; Pink 2012; Back 2015). Elizabeth Freeman is another queer theorist whose work offers provocations and resources for methodological temporal interventions as well as a politicisation of temporal mechanisms and their material outcomes. In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Freeman (2010: xii) offers a resounding and vital (if avowedly paranoid) critique of the ways in which our time is circumscribed by capitalist logics:

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corporations and nation-­states seek to adjust the pace of living in the places and people they take on: to quicken up and/or synchronize some elements of everyday existence, while offering up other spaces and activities as leisurely, slow, sacred, cyclical, and so on and thereby repressing or effacing alternative strategies of organizing time. Thus being normatively ‘modern’ is a matter not only of occupying an imagined place at the new end of a sequence but also of living a coordinated, carefully syncopated tempo between a quick time that seems to be enforced and a slow time that seems to be a matter of free choice. Chrononormativity is the process by which such forms of temporal existence and their biopolitical manifestations in bodies (working; having and raising children) take form. Such forms privilege some bodies and lives, rendering them culturally intelligible, whilst others are made invisible and unrecognisable. Freeman (2010: 19) denotes such lives as ‘denizens of times out of joint’, whether their asynchronous failures are as a result of class-­based, cultural, sexual or other embodiments. It is imperative that the methods of live sociology do not themselves work with/in or reproduce chrononormative modes if we wish to account for bodies, lives, stories, political possibilities lived outwith this ‘state sponsored time-­line’ (Freeman 2010: 4). Live art offers some vital resources for generating, occupying and deploying asynchronicity. One of the prominent features of live practice is a playful and disruptive approach to normative and capitalist modes of keeping time and timing life. Such artworks take pleasure in confronting the regulatory mechanisms of clock time: ‘Frequently deploying a contemplative and “wasteful” expenditure of time, performance continues its long wrangle with the forces of capital’ (Heathfield 2004: 10). It is significant that time-­based live art does not just use time as content but enacts an intellectual exposure of time’s constructedness and the attendant possibilities of doing time differently. Durational practices also offer the potential for a subversion of capitalist temporalities. Heathfield (2009: 23) argues that In their attention to and playful subversion of the orders of time, durational aesthetics give access to other temporalities: to times that will not submit to Western culture’s linear, progressive meta-­narratives, its orders of commodification; to the times of excluded or marginalized identities and lives; to times as they are felt in diverse bodies. My contention here is that methods seeking to attend to the experiences of these excluded and differently felt times must make a range of temporal aesthetics key to their endeavours. Whatever shape live practice takes, we must not simply formulate our methods for researching the live in relation to existing spatio-­ temporal political discourses, but instead allow our methods to, where and when appropriate, trouble those very discursive frames. Such critiques take on a

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particular resonance in the contemporary context of late/post-­neoliberalism, where time is a valued capital and speed a virtue, and resonate just as keenly in the academic context when even the researcher writing about time does so in the grip of chrononormativity’s clutches. In turning to consider examples of live art’s explorations of different temporalities, I am mindful of how they might function or be repurposed as method. I revisit Track (2012) with this in mind.

Track: framing the present At various points throughout this book I have referred to the provocative work of Graeme Miller, whose spatio-­temporal public interventions offer a great deal to the live art of sociology. Here, I pay some close attention to Track as installed for Fierce festival 2012. I draw on my experiences of Track and an interview conducted with Miller during the festival. I have discussed this piece elsewhere (see Lambert 2013) in relation to the political interventions the piece makes in urban aesthetics. Here, I am more interested in thinking further about the methodological possibilities of practice that ‘frames the present’. I suggest that this approach enacts a practice-­based equivalent of reparative reading (Sedgwick 2003; see discussion in Chapter 1). Track consisted of 100 m of parallel tracks installed underneath Birmingham’s infamous ‘Spaghetti Junction’, a knotty interchange of rail, road and canal networks. Built in 1970, the roads link the city to the M6 motorway and are raised up on over 500 concrete columns. With its particular brutalist concrete structures and grey and gritty urban aesthetic, the Spaghetti Junction is symbolic of Birmingham for many visitors who must pass over or through it on their travels. Apart from occasional people on canal boats, dog walkers and graffiti artists, few routinely venture beneath the interchange. For visitors coming to experience it, Track opened up a surprising part of, and perspective on, the city. The journey to get to the location, through tunnels and along canal paths, was disorienting, requiring the navigation of unfamiliar sounds, sights, smells and material obstacles. To experience Track, each visitor in turn climbed a few steps to the raised track, lying on their back on a platform, and then was pushed very slowly so that they had the experience of moving underneath the roads and rail, seeing and feeling a very different aspect of the city’s landscape (Figures 6.1–6.3). I loved my own experience of the slow ‘ride’, which Graeme Miller jokingly referred to as ‘zen funfair’. The first time I did it, I noted in my research diary that ‘I am lost in the present … I feel as though I have no thoughts in my head … I have experienced a kind of timelessness.’ With nothing to look at beyond the underbelly of the roads and the patches of sky between them, I sensed an ‘emptying out’ of all the busy-­ness and complexity of the city. I interviewed Graeme Miller during the festival and after I had encountered Track, and I asked him about his motivations for making this kind of work, his experiences of the process, and how Track fitted in to his wider body of work. Track forms  part of Miller’s attempts as an artist to respond to the acceleration of

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Figure 6.1  Graeme Miller’s Track, Fierce festival, Birmingham (2012).

contemporary urban life and the negative effects this can have on our concentration and ability to be in the present. He talked about the difficulties he has – and has identified in others – in focusing on artwork in a gallery that presents us with new ideas and information, when everyday life itself is so difficult to get a conceptual grasp on. Alongside other public art pieces such as Beheld, to which I referred earlier and in Chapter 3, Track contributes to a body of practice that Miller calls his ‘civic works’, which are to do with ‘being a useful member of the village in some way’. They involve the design and construction of mechanisms or instruments that have a utility: better to be a blacksmith, but there is a role for being an imagineer … a belief that with clever design you can make things that are useful.… The imagination’s not used for fantasy or escape. You need every drop of imagination to look at what is, and to look at reality, especially anything complex, the complex lives of other people … the motion of the planet … what things are made of, all those things are kind of wondrous … once you start clarifying that frame and emptying it out, it suddenly gets bewildering. Here, Miller is using people’s experience of Track as a method to frame ‘reality’: ‘a little device for showing that things are; that the minute you start staring at

Figure 6.2  Graeme Miller’s Track, Fierce festival, Birmingham (2012).

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Figure 6.3 View from Graeme Miller’s Track, Fierce festival, Birmingham (2012).

them, they become bewilderingly complex, quite mercurial’. When I returned to Track on a different day, I had a different experience, probably because I knew what to expect and had questions and ideas. I noticed detail that had passed me by before: the features of the engineering on the columns and underside of the roads; strange and quirky hand-­drawn symbols left by those whose hard labour has built, repaired and maintained this road interchange over the decades. I thought more about how incongruously beautiful it was, especially when the grey columns tracked past blue sky, and how this aesthetic contrasts with the grim perspective generally encountered from above. Writing about how the ordinary happens before the mind can attend to it, Stewart (2007) notes that ‘Sometimes you have to pause and catch up with where you are.’ What are the methodological implications of such pausing? What methods can allow us to pause? Miller’s Track illustrates, I suggest, a way of forcing us to pause, and framing the ordinary. Such a frame enables us to listen and feel, slowly and with patience. Jean-­François Lyotard (cited in O’Sullivan 2006: 49) notes that attention to ‘It happens that’ rather than ‘What happens’ requires a high degree of refinement in the perception of small differences … you have to impoverish your mind, clean it out as much as possible, so that you

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make it incapable of anticipating the meaning.… The secret of such ascesis lies in the power to be able to endure occurrences as ‘directly’ as possible without the mediation of a ‘pre-­text’. The process of experiencing something in time without rushing to explain what it means requires effort and discipline. I am reminded of Stuart Hall’s (1989: 131) invocation of Gramsci in his instruction to ‘Turn your face violently towards things as they exist now’. Not as you’d like them to be, not as you think they were ten years ago, not as they’re written about in the sacred texts, but as they really are: the contradictory, stony ground of the present conjuncture. Such a stance and action is far from easy or apolitical, and, mirroring the relationship between reparative and paranoid reading, sits alongside rather than overwriting ‘critical’ or reflexive accounts (see Sedgwick 2003; Rogoff 2003; Wiegman 2014). Like reparative approaches, it calls for close attention and deep description. Although the length of time a participant experienced Track was brief (in ‘clock time’), it deployed a durational aesthetic. My initial research notes indicate this: time slowed, and all the usual markers of temporality were suspended in correspondence with the spatial suspension of my supine body. Instead of passing in seconds and minutes, the temporality I experienced was marked by the swooshing of cars racing above, the columns as they passed in and out of my frame of vision, the barely perceptible sensation of my body moving. Whilst for the duration of Track I was held in the present, by the time I reluctantly got off the platform and regained an upright position, all I have of the experience is a memory. Miller’s work also attends to this ‘fleeting’ quality of our perception, demonstrating that ‘what’s there’ is not only unique to each person but an ever-­ changing phenomenon. For one of Miller’s film-­based pieces entitled Bassline (2009)18 shown at the Barbican in London, participants walked the city with a camera attached to their bodies and then recounted their memories of the walk. Miller explained that Bassline is really about the fact that the minute you perceive something it’s already a memory … when it turns from a sensation into a perception, it’s already happened.… Memories that happened a micro-­second ago, they’re as much memories, they’re as much neural pathways, flashes of connection, as things that happened ten years ago … Bassline is a mechanism for laying that bare, that kind of strange, spooky complexity, of a city that’s changing every second in a million different minds. These methods and the insights they generated resonate with an emergent body of work on ‘walking methods’ within sociology (see Moles 2008; Bates and

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Rhys-­Taylor 2017), although, with some exceptions (such as Holgersson’s 2017 work in Gothenburg, Sweden), these studies tend to foreground space, and time only gets a passing mention. In the following section, I turn to consider the role of memory in greater depth through the work of Mette Edvardsen and Monica Ross.

Mette Edvardsen: Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine In his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury portrays a dystopian time and place in which books are banned and burned in order to prevent people accessing them. The novel’s protagonist, Montag, is a fireman tasked with burning literature. He tries to resist orders but falls foul of the laws that punish dissidents. He ends up in the hands of an underground movement of people who have learnt texts by heart, becoming ‘living books’ in order to preserve the knowledge. Granger, one of the living books, asks: ‘would you like, some day, Montag, to read Plato’s Republic?’ ‘Of course!’ ‘I am Plato’s Republic. Like to read Marcus Aurelius? Mr Simmons is Marcus.’ ‘How do you do?’ said Mr Simmons. ‘Hello,’ said Montag. ‘I want you to meet Jonathon Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver’s Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucious and Thomas Love Peacock and Matthew Jefferson and Mr Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.’ Everyone laughed quietly. ‘It can’t be,’ said Montag. ‘It is,’ replied Granger, smiling. ‘We’re book-­burners, too. We read the books and burnt them, afraid they’d be found. Micro-­filming didn’t pay off; we were always travelling, we didn’t want to bury the film and come back later. Always the chance of discovery. Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it.’ (Bradbury 1953: 194–195, original emphases) In the ruinous remains at the end of the novel, the only redemption – both politically and socially – lies in memory. In the enclaves of Birmingham’s central public library in March 2012, I met and read my own living books. I met (Un)arranged Marriage by Buli Rai, several of Aesop’s Fables, Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and outside, on a

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sunny bench overlooking the inner ring road, Crash by J G Ballard. These living books were on offer to visitors to the library as part of Norwegian artist Mette Edvardsen’s Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine (2012), in which local volunteers joined Edvardsen in learning by heart literature of their choice, which they would then recite in one-­to-one encounters with visitors who chose their story. Although the live readings took place within the limited time frame of the festival, the living books began their memorising long before, including a period of practising in the library itself. This location was important. Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine has been presented in many different cities (and languages) and usually within a library. For the 2012 Birmingham project, the location was poignant, as the library was due to be demolished amidst widespread and often heartfelt concern that part of the city’s history would be lost.19 I carried my own attachments to the location: aside from a partiality to its brutalist architecture, I spent many hours in there as an undergraduate, researching and writing essays. That time – the early 1990s – was before I gained digital access to knowledge or made systematic use of a computer for storing data or writing. Books were therefore a major part of my knowledge world, and without instant access to the internet and digital storage, (my own) memory was more critical to my scholarly practice than it is now. Being back amongst the corridors of books and journals, back at the public desks bearing markings of others’ time and efforts in the layered graffiti, I could identify personally with Edvardsen’s (2017: 52) claims that ‘memory is radical in our time’: Forgetting has become a virtue and a quality; memory has become superfluous and unusable. In step with the acceleration of our time, it is more important to be able to navigate and move on, and technology does not simply make information available; it shapes the way we relate to it and what information is. But learning by heart is not about acquiring knowledge.… In a world that is defined by the new at all times, memory may be seen as resistance to forgetting, and learning by heart as a gesture against efficiency and utility. Here, Edvardsen (2017) articulates the political role of memory as a resistance to neoliberal managerial approaches to progress, which often feature an abandonment of the past and investment in the new: in political rhetoric, this manifests as a dismissal of ‘old-­fashioned’ or ‘backwards’ sentiments in favour of what Love (2007: 150) might call the ‘chin-­up neoliberal polemics’ of ‘going forward’. There are, of course, specific political dis/investments in remembering in relation to particular periods, people or events, as we saw in relation to queer memory. There is also, in our outcome-­obsessed and time-­poor cultures, something subversive about time spent learning something by heart.20 It is hard work, and the stuttering of memory, its slippages and ‘failures’, are part of the process. In my readings of the living books there were such moments: a stalling, stammering or repetition, a screwed-­up face or head in hand as the living book ‘lost

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their place’ and tried hard to find the story line again. In the intimacy of the one-­ to-one encounter, such stutterings were an important reminder of the imperfections of memory. In an interview with Mette Edvardsen towards the end of the Birmingham project for Fierce festival, she noted that Memory is also deceptive. Memory is also something that changes over time.… Even once you have ‘swallowed’ [the story] … you have to keep doing it. The practice (and practise) of remembering, in this artwork as in life, is vital if the memory is to be retained. When we tell and retell stories from memory, they change over time, often imperceptibly. Since 2014, Edvardsen has been carrying out a new project that picks up from the ending of Fahrenheit 451 by imagining a post-­war future in which books become legalised, the characters above will tell the stories to future generations and the stories will be ‘rewritten’. What will be changed, lost, forgotten, re-­imagined, in this retelling? To explore this question, some of the living books from Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine have begun (re)writing themselves as books for print (see Edvardsen 2017). As Edvardsen’s new project intimates, there is nothing ‘bad’ about the slippages of memory; new creativities emerge. We need to forget as well as remember. Indeed, Marc Auge (1995: 24) suggests that part of the problem (for some) of ‘supermodernity’ is an excess of events to think about and to remember. Ignorance is as heterogeneous as knowledge and has a value in the necessarily shifting processes of memory. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007: 69) puts it as follows: learning certain forms of knowledge may involve forgetting others and, in the last instance, becoming ignorant of them … in the ecology of knowledges, ignorance is not necessarily the original state or starting point. It may be the point of arrival.

Monica Ross: Acts of Memory Programmed alongside Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine at Fierce 2012 was another performance embodying the act of memory and demonstrating the political affects of performing such embodiments. Monica Ross’s Acts of Memory (2012) was sited just around the corner from the library, in St Phillip’s public square. As with the living books, Acts of Memory involved local volunteers joining the artist in a process of memorising and performing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Ross’s impetus for this was the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in London in 2005.21 In response to this devastating human wrong, Ross committed to learning all the Acts by heart and performing at least sixty events, involving local people wherever she went, who could learn and recite the Acts in any language they chose. All the performances were filmed

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and photographed, edited in consultation with the reciters and made available as an open archive.22 In the Birmingham performance, booklets containing transcripts of Acts were handed out to passers-­by and listeners during the recital. The uncertain and stumbling renditions mirrored the broader disjunctures, failures and re-­interpretations of the Acts in the social and political enactment of human rights. A group of teenagers hovered on the outskirts of the performance, and when Article 26, ‘education shall be free’, was pronounced, an interjection of ‘no it won’t!’ came from the crowd.23 At the end of the performance, a teenager approached Monica Ross and spoke with her: she gave him the microphone and from the booklet he re-­read Article 26 to cheers from his mates. There are a number of political interventions made by this piece, which depend on its temporal structures ‘unfolding in time and place, across different context and communities’ (Kokoli 2016: 28). Yve Lomax (2016: 37) writes of the Acts of Memory: Through the sixty acts of repetition, forgetting, stumbling, and making common, the Declaration of Human Rights becomes open to use, to new uses, and with that has drops of transformation and potentiality introduced into it … [challenging] any hardened idea that declares that this Declaration has definite objects (subjects) with fixed and immutable meanings. In keeping with an art practice that refuses ‘monumentality’ (see Ross 2016: 20), the claims for its political impact are humble: ‘drops of transformation and potentiality’. In the performance I saw, the young man’s impromptu intervention seemed to illustrate this potential. I felt a repartitioning of the sensible, in Rancière’s (2004) terminology: a shifting of aesthetic coordinates such that a different and surprising articulation of politics could occur, enabling a different voice to speak and be heard. It was momentary, a ‘drop of transformation’, and although I only experienced one performance, the live and public nature of the recitations opened the performances to interruption, unpredictability, intervention, and a plurality of resonances and interpretations at every iteration. Track, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine and Acts of Memory were all programmed together in Fierce’s festival of 2012. There were other events and performances in the same programme that dealt explicitly with time (for example Hamish Fulton’s Slow Walk; see Lambert 2013). Although, of course, some visitors engaged with one performance only – such as passers-­by caught up in Monica Ross’s recital, or the earnest young enthusiast of road interchanges and his mum who were in front of me in the queue for Track – many people experienced multiple events, and thus it was not just the temporalities of each individual encounter but that of the festival as a whole, with its subversive spatio-­temporal rhythms and dis/locations, that helped to temporarily dislodge the flows of urban chrononormativity. As Graeme Miller’s reflections on Bassline above demonstrate, memory is  not just a resource for recalling and recounting the past; our experiential

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engagement with and documentation of live encounters also implicates memory and the inevitable stuttering and stammering which are the imperfections of memory. There is also an ethical imperative to remember. Susan Sontag (2003: 115, original emphasis) says: ‘Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.’ There is a role for sociologists, as for artists, to re-­articulate and perform the past in order to maintain that relation. This discussion is taken up in the final section, where I consider the temporalities engaged in the act of documenting live practice and the generation and use of archives.

Archive and documentation Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility – in a maniacally charged present – and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control. (Peggy Phelan 1993: 148) Documentation is powerful. It provides evidence that something happened, and what that something was. Documentation is increasingly how, as academic or artistic practitioners, we demonstrate the value of our work. It is necessary to gain funding or jobs. The imperative to document can be linked to an increase in the use of technologies, particularly digital technologies. Value is added to a talk or performance that can be digitally recorded and live-­streamed to a wider audience, and/or made available after the live event has finished. Lacking documentation of some kind, our claims are rendered merely ‘subjective’ and subject to the vagaries of memory. The archive conveys a similarly powerful knowledge source (see Spivak 1999). The word itself derives from the Greek arkhē, referring to first or fundamental ordering principles, and later used to denote ‘government’. This etymology hints at the authority imbued in the concept of archive, providing foundational, official and, by implication, ‘trusted’ accounts, from which histories are subsequently re/told and re/written. Foucault (1989) draws an analogy between the archive and archaeology, both providing governing structures capable of shaping values and knowledges in a given society. It will come as no surprise to learn that some of the most urgent and disruptive challenges to the authority of the archive emanate from the spheres of artistic and cultural production (Merewether 2006; The Atlas Group 2006) and notably from live art. There is a contradiction at the heart of processes of documenting and archiving live practice. Some live work simply resists, escapes or fails to secure documentation. Phelan (1993) is well known for her claim that the very existence of live performance depends on its immateriality and non-­ representability. She has declared that to attempt to reproduce live practice ‘betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology’ (1993: 146). This betrayal is bound up in the political work that live performance does by evading capitalist reproduction and representation. It is in its ephemerality, and the failure of

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capital to inhabit and assign value to the ephemeral, that live art refuses easy commodification. Live artists often avoid documentation for other reasons. As noted in Chapter 2, live practice prior to the 1960s remains largely undocumented, leading to lacunae in contemporary knowledge and understandings of earlier performance art. The lack of documentation springs from the limited availability of technologies of capture, but also from the culture of live art at that time, which privileged work produced in and for the moment. The performance artist Anne Bean, whose work has been shown internationally since the 1970s, told Dominic Johnson: If I look back to an early performance, I sometimes think I’d love to see the work again, and I’m pleased when somebody brings me a photograph from those years. That seems contradictory, because, at the time, documenting my performances just wasn’t relevant to the development of what I was doing. In fact, I felt the documentation was a distraction, and a suppressant and inhibitor of being, of core responses, as it pushed one’s awareness into collusion with a potential gaze from the future, away from now. (Anne Bean in Johnson 2015: 50) Bean’s pleasure in being able to ‘see the work again’ is understandable. Few of us do not derive an emotional response from photographs or other visual reminders of past events (Harper 2012). However, her pleasure is at odds with the ‘irrelevance’ of documentation at the time the performances occurred, and her claim that documenting the live events would have had negative effects is interesting in these documentary-­obsessed times, when it seems as though many of the most intimate and quotidian aspects of life are subject to digital capture. What Bean articulates is a political stance that to document a live encounter reduces its integrity to the ‘being’ of the present, distracting and inhibiting its value by taking attention from the live moment, ‘away from now’. Her observation is pertinent to the development of live methods. As contemporary researchers and practitioners, we work mainly on the assumption that documentation is an important and positive thing, and our practices of documentation actively seek ‘collusion with a potential gaze from the future’. Yet, what if we are to acknowledge that such a collusion takes something away from the ‘the now’, somehow diminishes the time of live? As an ethnographer, I have often felt that the intensity of what I am experiencing in a live encounter will be lost the moment I produce a notebook or replace my own vision with the camera’s gaze. Of course, the accessibility and ubiquity of digital, small-­scale and everyday technologies (such as smartphones) have enhanced the practical possibilities for less obtrusive live capture, but however subtle the act of recording is, Bean’s point that the focus or energy is somehow dispersed remains valid. In Chapter 3, I discussed some of the ‘actions’ involving the young people in Brian Lobel’s Fun  with Cancer Patients (2013). The Cancer Friends and Tell the Kitchen actions happened almost entirely away from the camera’s lens: the only visual

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documentation to emerge from Cancer Friends was photographs taken on disposable cameras by the young people themselves as part of their day of friendship activities, and for Tell the Kitchen a single shot of each meal produced for the patients at Birmingham Queen Elizabeth’s Young People’s Unit. The artists’ insistence that these activities were to remain as live events was part of the specific politics of representation around cancer, and the desire that the documentation finally on show would not reproduce the kinds of limiting constructions of cancer patients routinely deployed in policy, charity and medical discourses. ‘This is the best kind of art’, said Brian of the intense, complex, emotional day on the Young People’s Unit, ‘art that nobody gets to see’ (research notes, July 2013). In identifying some of the ways in which live art messes about with time, Heathfield (2004: 8) notes the ‘creation of works whose time is autonomous and exceeds spectators’ ability to witness it’. These aspects of Fun with Cancer Patients (2013) operated in this way. Drawing critical attention to the normative valuing of longevity over live impact, Ron Athey (in Johnson 2008: 509) asks: Why … is ‘timeless’ art considered more valid than the ephemeral? I care more if it has at least cut to the quick at some point, as opposed to it being a piece of smartypants art in a vitrine for semi-­eternity. Where does all this leave live method in sociology? Despite compelling arguments for the ‘purity’ of the undocumented live performance, I am not seeking to reify an undocumented experiential encounter. Drawing as they do on documentation and re/presenting live encounters in multiple ways, my own writing and analyses, including those contained in this book, enact a ‘betrayal’ of performance’s ontology, in Phelan’s (1993) terms. As I discussed in Chapter 5, there is nothing inherently more political or more ‘real’ in the live encounter than in representations of it (Jones 1998; Sofaer 2002). And whilst I am sympathetic to the desire to generate and venerate the ephemeral, and I recognise its playful and political powers of equivocation, I am wary of the idea that even undocumented live practice stands outside of capitalism, though it may trouble it from within (see also Auslander 2008). There are, as has been indicated, good reasons to document and archive. Most fundamentally, performance itself is not antithetical to memory or the archive unless we make certain presumptions about different modes of knowledge production, such as valorising textual over somatic epistemologies (Schneider 2001). Whilst the vast majority of us do valorise the textual over the somatic, making room in archives for different kinds of knowledges needs to be part of the temporal project of live sociological method. There are also political reasons for ensuring that archives do not just re/present hegemonic accounts of history. Queer, feminist, postcolonial and critical race scholars have illustrated that marginalised subjects and communities can be obscured from history when their stories go undocumented, or only certain stories and accounts are told and represented (see for example Bayly 1993;

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Chatterjee 1997; Burnard and Lean 2002; Ghosh 2004; Broeck and Junker 2014). José Esteban Muñoz (1996) has drawn attention to what he calls the ephemerality of queerness, particularly relating to queers of colour. Such ephemerality can be a matter of political necessity: Queerness is often transmitted covertly. This has everything to do with the fact that leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack. Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere – while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility. (Muñoz 1996: 6) Such a history means the queer archive is fragmented and partial, existing in the form of not only ‘innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments’ but also coded stories and performances, in queer languages – literally, in the case of Polari and other queer cants and cultural codes. Gavin Butt (2005) endorses the epistemological value of gossip as ‘whispering in the archive’, filling in with performative and intersubjective authority for the cracks and absences in documentary evidence. Muñoz (1996) points to the fact that dependence on a fragmented and ambiguous archive can undermine the authority of scholarship in that area, reproducing the marginalisation of minority subjects in both senses of the word. In this context, Jack Halberstam (2005, 2011) has been instrumental in reframing the queer archive as an active, collaborative and process-­based resource: The archive is not simply a repository; it is also a theory of cultural relevance, a construction of collective memory, and a complex record of queer activity. (Halberstam 2005: 169–170) Archive here is something to think with as well as to use, interpret and create from (see also Ahmed 2010, 2012). Issuing a challenge to the hegemony of certain bodies of knowledge and their claims to authority, Halberstam’s work creates and celebrates alternative archives: of trauma and emotion (such as the archive of materials around the life and death of transgender teenager Brandon Teena); of silliness and stupidity (such as animated and popular films); and of failure (Halberstam 2011). There are also alternative readings to be had by attending to archival content queerly. In an essay offering a queer reading of the French-­Hungarian photographer Brassaï’s famous pictures of 1930s Parisian nightlife at Le Monocle bar, Halberstam (2004) notes how Brassaï talked about taking photos as a kind of ‘theft’ as he tricked and persuaded his way into gay bars, clubs and brothels. In Le Monocle he deployed an ‘exoticising gaze’ on what he perceived, and wished to portray, as a sad ‘underworld’ of women

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wanting to be men and dressing and behaving as men whilst mourning the fact that they could not achieve ideal masculinity. Halberstam (2004) talks us through the multiple ‘glances’ at the photographs and how each glance reveals a different reading or interpretation. At first glance, we are likely to see, as Brassaï did, ‘men’ – a normative, stable image of men drinking in a bar. On our second glance, we may realise that there is something else going on, and our gendered reading is disrupted. Halberstam (2004) discusses the different ways in which this disruption is experienced: we may see, as Brassaï did, a ‘young female invert’ (his caption for one of the pictures), a woman performing masculinity, and feel shock or disgust, or we may feel ‘desire, belonging, identification, fascination’ (2004: 79). We can read the wearing of tuxedo as a sign of mourning (as Brassaï did) or as a sign of ‘pleasure, power, confidence and strength’. What Halberstam (2004) calls the ‘transgender look’, ‘the second or third glance, restores to the subculture what the original captions took away from it’ (2004: 79). In the same essay, Halberstam (2004) considers the revisiting of Brassaï’s photographs by queer photographer Del LaGrace Volcano. In Ode to Brassaï (1995), contemporary butch or transgender subjects pose for the camera, and a mirror at the back of the bar also catches Volcano taking the photograph. Rather than the ‘theft’ of the image enacted by the absent Brassaï, Volcano puts hermself24 in the frame of reciprocal gazes. These two examples, of queerly reading the original images and performing and replenishing the archive, point to the mutability of archival materials and their authority. Halberstam (2005) draws on Ann Cvetkovich’s (2003) concept of an ‘archive of feelings’ to emphasise the work of affect in constructing and making sense of the past. The archive of feelings, says Cvetkovich (in Carland and Cvetkovich 2013: 73), ‘gives us permission to turn down the volume on the voice of critique and pay attention to the strong feelings that get attached to things’. Again, we see a queer impulse to deploy reparative modes of engagement. Cvetkovich (Carland and Cvetkovich 2013: 76) draws attention to ‘the absent archive’ and the role of art in attempting to capture those losses and make them matter. She references Zoe Leonard’s Analogue, which includes a series of photographs of storefronts in New York City, documenting disappearing neighbourhoods that have been important for queer art and artists. Such photographs ‘speak to the problem of absent archives, by cultivating a capacity to see things that don’t seem to be there. The photographs enable us to glimpse ghostly presences’ (Carland and Cvetkovich 2013: 76). The idea of documenting absences calls to mind the British artist Rachel Whiteread’s ‘ghost’ buildings and objects: concrete sculptures of ‘negative space’ inside or between the material form of domestic furniture, rooms and houses. For example, in 1993 she installed House,25 a full-­scale replica of the interior of a condemned terraced house, in the East End of London. It was demolished a few months later. By materialising what’s not there, the inside-­out sculptures draw our attention to absences and the reasons why such absences might exist. Similar work is performed by Doris Salcedo’s abstracted assemblages, which operate as ‘melancholic archives’ (Lauzon

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2014). Since the 1980s, Salcedo has produced installation and sculptural pieces that ‘have sought to transform testimonies of political violence in Columbia into abstracted sculptural assemblages that bear witness to suffering and loss’ (Lauzon 2014: 198). Her work, like Whiteread’s, utilises domestic materials, often empty chairs that appear to stand in for humans or emphasise their absence. Salcedo’s work does not make a spectacle of suffering; it offers no victims to feel sorry for, no consolations for the viewer. The work of queer theorists and artists working to compensate for absences or erasures expands ideas of archive beyond that of a repository contained in a building under ‘house arrest’, as Derrida and Prenowitz (1995: 10) put it, and instead provides us with archive as a fluid, generative concept working between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, a ‘fabulation’, speaking with authority at the same time as questioning it; an archive intolerant of inherited hierarchies of authority, able to include and work with and between visual materials, objects, texts, bodies, affects, ephemera. Such archives might assemble around themes or dispositions, like Halberstam’s (2005, 2011) or like Sara Ahmed’s (2010) ‘unhappy archives’ or ‘willfulness archive’ (2012). Ahmed (2012: np) warns us that ‘It is important we do not assume we find wilfulness in the places it has been deposited. We are following a depositing rather than finding what is deposited.’ The relationship between the researcher and their archives is, thus, troubled. Rebecca Schneider (2001) asks that we approach documentation of live art not as a transparent or even accurate reproduction or presentation of the live, but as itself a performative act. In Cassils’ Becoming an Image (2013), the documentation is not only part of the live event but makes the event visually possible for the audience. In this piece, Cassils punches, kicks and wrestles with a tonne of clay in a pitch-­black space until the artist is exhausted and the clay transformed from a solid block to a sculpture.26 A photographer works alongside Cassils in the performance, documenting the performance and in the process providing the audience with visual glimpses of the action as the camera’s flash briefly lights the room. Even the ‘live’ image the audience sees is ‘suspect’, as the flash burns the image onto their retina, providing an ‘after-­image’ that moves and fades. The photography here does not just serve a documentary purpose but is integral to the live experience (for further discussion of this piece, see Lambert 2017). I have grown accustomed as an ethnographer at live art events to seeing an embedded cameraperson filming or taking pictures. When my research project was officially designed ‘into’ the Fun with Cancer Patients (2013) exhibition at mac Birmingham, with a research hub that formed an integral part of the flow and aesthetic of the installation (see discussion in Chapter 3), social research activity became performative in a more visually obvious sense than is usual in ethnography. The research activities – interviews, drawing on a chalk wall, participating in creative activities – were part of the audience’s experiences of the exhibition, and their outputs contributed to the overall look and feel of it. The fact that many people’s thoughts and responses generated by the research were then read and often responded to by other visitors meant that the knowledge

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generated by the research became part of the discursive as well as affective space of the exhibition (see Lambert 2016). The few live art archives that exist are produced at the uncomfortable intersection between the ‘documentary drive’ (Heathfield 2009: 13) and a desire to resist documentation. One such archive is that of Fierce, dating from the beginning of the festival as Queerfest in 1998 (see Chapter 2). I participated in the initial sorting and cataloguing of materials when we moved all the boxes of documents, VHS tapes, audio tapes, DVDs, slides, photographs, posters and flyers, scripts, administrative paperwork and objects into a studio space where we could go through each box and catalogue its contents, transferring them to appropriate storage boxes and folders. In the middle of this process we produced a public exhibition, What Happens at the Festival Stays at the Festival, for Fierce 2013. This was curated by Fierce together with Birmingham artist Sarah Farmer, and I wrote the introductory material. The exhibition was held at ARTicle Gallery in Birmingham City University’s School of Art. The exhibition occupied a space between representing the past of Fierce’s activities through visual materials, primarily film footage of previous festivals and publicity materials, and producing the past through the necessarily constructed ways in which memories and different accounts jostle together in the materials and in the endless new memories and stories prompted by the visual mnemonics. The curation took account of the partial ‘truths’ offered by the materials, locating tantalising glimpses of spot-­lit images or texts inside the archive boxes, into which visitors could peep through the boxes’ holes (Figure 6.4), playfully evocative of ‘glory holes’ (Humphreys 1970: 65). As audience members bent and crouched, trying to see and make sense of the fragments, the archive seemed agentic: sharing but also withholding its stories, not only inviting but compelling an imaginative engagement. Work on Fierce’s archive, a collaboration between cultural practitioners (curators and artists) and academics, is ongoing and operates from an assumption that knowledges are multiple, fluid and subject to revisions. We know that many of the accounts of live art produced by Fierce are in people’s memories and recollections, and so the archive aims to be a living resource, generating materials not only from new artistic practice but from oral history accounts and new performances based on the archive itself. Driven by a strong sense of the value of this history as artistic practice, there is also an ethical imperative to make visible to a wider public and future audiences live work, predominantly queer work, that was marginalised and rendered inaccessible to a large number of people at its time of performance. As Chapter 2 demonstrated, Fierce itself and many of the artists associated with Fierce were subject to negative press, censorship and in some cases threats of violence in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I share with Fierce colleagues a sense of political responsibility to the performers in the archive (a sort of personal ‘feeling backwards?’) and to contemporary and future artists and audiences for whom this queer material should be available as the stuff of live: not hidden, repressed, lurking in a dusty, damp corner of an artist’s studio.

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Figure 6.4 Peeping into archive boxes at What Happens at the Festival Stays at the Festival, Fierce festival, Article Gallery, Birmingham (2013).

In all these ways, the archive offers the live sociologist an opportunity to make visible and utilise time as a resource, interrogating questions of authority and power, the different temporalities of diverse media, the materiality of a range of affects, the imbrications of memories and identities. As such, the archive is a gift.

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Conclusions: undone by theory? The other night my cat brought in a tiny mouse, hanging unharmed from either side of its mouth together with a clump of grass caught up in the success of the hunt. My well-­intentioned attempts to rescue the mouse and return it to the ‘wild’ of the garden descended into farce. The mouse just didn’t get that I was trying to help it. It was lightning-­fast and shape-­shifting. Each time I felt the brush of fur on my skin it was gone again, leaving me on my knees, hands cupped and empty. This sensation of not quite getting there in time, feeling something, feeling close to success, yet doomed to be left foolishly grasping, has re-­occurred in the writing of this chapter. It is the sensation that accompanies Irit Rogoff ’s (2003) declaration that a theorist is one ‘who has been undone by theory’. This chapter constitutes such an undoing, in that having taken the live and present as the focus of enquiry thus far, it seems that there can be no live and present. The more we attempt to theorise it, the more it dissembles and escapes our grasp. Talking about the present has slip-­slided into talking about the past and the future and any number of strategies to ‘get at’ the impossible present by side-­stepping, looking away or askance. Queer theory, the conceptual framing through which this chapter has grappled with the time of live, has provide a powerful set of tools for undoing, turning normative spatio-­temporalities inside out from the outset and offering multiple possibilities for alternative modes of engagement with time. To declare live time impossible is not to dismiss it: in fact, the present is rich with interwoven temporalities, remnants and potentialities. The ending of my performance poem Queer Future is hopeful in its vision of ‘fierce struggle’, and such a struggle applies to grappling with the im/possibilities of live time. What is required is  that we attend to the live, and the time of live, in all its complexity and contradiction. Bringing queer theorists and sociologists together in an appreciation of the quotidian, this chapter has attended to the political work of minor and ordinary affects. Following a ‘turn to affect’ more broadly, there is growing recognition within sociology of the political work of affect (for some examples see Faircloth 2011; Gunaratnam 2013; Loveday 2015; Sointu 2015; Lambert 2016; Tolia-­ Kelly 2016). I do not rehearse those debates here, but instead, call for live sociology to attend to banal affects, the political work of which is unclear, marginal and possibly haphazard, through a temporal lens. The political work of some time-­based live art practice is clear, and the discussion has highlighted the potential for alternative or tampered temporalities to run counter to the chrononormative (Freeman 2010) imperatives of contemporary (particularly urban) life. Such potential is relevant for live sociological theory and practice, where opportunities arise for not only recognising but enacting subversive temporal interventions. This not only applies to empirical research but also to writing. In their manifesto for live methods (see Chapter 3), Back and Puwar’s (2012a: 13) tenth aspiration is to ‘Take time, think carefully

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and slowly’, declaring the need to ‘rethink the relationship between time and scholarship’. I revisit the politics of writing in the next chapter. As with previous chapters, the discussion here has attended to selected live art works that demonstrate and provoke along the lines of my own enquiry. Here, I have re/visited Graeme Miller’s Track, Mette Edvardsen’s Time Has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine and Monica Ross’s Acts of Memory. I encountered all these artworks within days of each other at Fierce festival 2012, and I interviewed Miller and Edvardsen during the same period. Track has particularly interested me for the way in which it offers itself as a ‘device’ for looking at the present, at ‘what is’. Together with the discussion on ordinary affects, it is a reminder that there is much to be gained by being with the complexity and enormity of what’s there, in a reparative mode. Graeme Miller’s rather elaborate mechanism for enabling this shows that such a method is not as easy as it seems. The role of memory came to the fore in the latter two pieces, demonstrating the ways in which memory is embodied and performed as it imperfectly impinges on and constructs the present. Finally, I delved into the issue of documentation, close to the heart of sociology. A brief encounter with some of the creative ways in which archival knowledges can be both deployed and troubled has demonstrated some of the possibilities of documentation and archival practice for live method. Such possibilities can, however, only be realised if we begin by acknowledging the privilege and authority of some forms of documentation, from which we can uncover and expose the representational work of documents and (imperfect) reproductions of live practice. We also need to acknowledge the different temporalities and different qualities of ‘live’ that are denoted by the live encounter that escapes or refuses documentation, and by that which incorporates the forward glance of its representational capture by securing itself a place in history via the archive. This is tricky, as it involves attending to what is ‘not there’ and by implication ‘not known’; however, the discussion has demonstrated that things can be known in other ways, including body memories, and in traces and ‘hauntings’ (Gordon 2008). Although it seems an unlikely objective to celebrate being undone by theory, I present it here as an achievement. In the opening chapter, I located my approach to theory alongside Stuart Hall’s (1997: 42) as always being a ‘detour on the way to something more important’. The word ‘detour’ derives from the French détourner, to turn away. Remembering the ambition stated in the introduction to this chapter for the live sociologist to be untimely and askance in their methodological approach, a detour is an apt metaphor for the role of theory in such a project. And if the detour is to be a genuine losing of one’s way, affecting and possibly changing the direction of travel, some undoing will occur. Previous discussion (see particularly Chapter 1) has suggested the need to find different ways of doing sociology (Law 2004; Savage and Burrows 2007; Holmwood 2010; Savage 2010; Back and Puwar 2012b; Gane and Back 2012). Doing differently requires undoing, enacted as an un/timely, messy and generative ad/venture.

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Notes   1 Although the academic references were absent from the live performance, I made them available in printed versions. They are an important part of the poem, which I see as performing a research function: a sort of poetic paper. In order to maintain the flow of the poem, I have listed the references as endnotes and included them in the bibliography in the usual way.   2 Halberstam (2005).   3 Connell (2005).   4 Love (2007).   5 Edelman (2004).   6 Polari for men and women. Polari is a British form of cant slang often associated with gay subculture; see Baker (2002).   7 Muñoz (2009).   8 Kraftl (2007).   9 Beckett (1983). 10 Halberstam (2011). 11 de Sousa Santos (2007). 12 Rancière (1991). 13 Rogoff (2003). 14 Foucault (1998). 15 Grosz (1994). 16 In April 2017, international media reported on allegations of detention, torture and death threats against homosexuals in Chechnya, supported by Russia (see Knight 2017). Kyle Knight is researcher for LGBT rights at Human Rights Watch: see his website for publications relating to a global picture of LGBT violence and discrimination, www.hrw.org/about/people/kyle-­knight 17 For up-­to-date research into LGBT experiences of discrimination across a number of areas, including crime, immigration, health and education, see www.stonewall.org.uk/ our-­work/stonewall-­research 18 See video documentation on Bassline (2009) at www.youtube.com/watch?v=48-5n TF7Lvk 19 The ‘old’ Birmingham central library was designed by the architect John Madin and built in 1974. It closed in 2013, and the building was demolished in 2016, having been replaced by a new iconic building on a different site. 20 Ironically, given that not so long ago rote learning was the pedagogical norm in compulsory education in the UK, and in many contexts this remains the case. I am  certainly not arguing that rote learning is inherently subversive, but it can become  so in particular time/spaces infused with a sense of digital immediacy and urgency. 21 De Menezes was a twenty-­seven-year-­old Brazilian man living in the UK, who was   shot dead by police officers as he boarded a London Tube train. The shooting occurred two weeks after the 7 July 2005 terrorist attacks in the city in which fifty-­two people died, and there had been a further failed attempt the previous day. De  Menezes was wrongly identified as a suspect. Following the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to prosecute police officers for the shooting, De Menezes’ family took the legal case to the European Court of Human Rights. They lost their case. 22 See www.actsofmemory.net. A video recording of the Birmingham performance is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQj8a0cTAyc 23 In spite of protests and appeals, university tuition fees for England and Wales were raised to £9,000 per year in September 2012 (see Clery 2015).

The im/possibilities of live time   185 24 Volcano uses the pronoun ‘herm’ in keeping with herm self-­definition as an hermaphrodyke. 25 See www.artangel.org.uk/project/house/ 26 More on Becoming an Image at http://cassils.net/portfolio/becoming-­an-image-­2/

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188   The im/possibilities of live time Love, H (2007) Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, London: Harvard University Press. Loveday, V (2015) Embodying deficiency through ‘affective practice’: Shame, relationality, and the lived experience of social class and gender in higher education, Sociology, 50(6): 1140–1155. Lury, C (2012) Going live: Towards an amphibious sociology, in L Back and N Puwar (eds) Live Methods, Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, pp. 184–197. Maffesoli, M (1996) Ordinary Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity. Massey, D (1992) Politics and space/time, New Left Review, I/196: 1–14. Merewether, C (2006) Introduction: Art and the archive, in C Mereweather (ed.) The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, London: the MIT Press, pp. 10–17. Milojević, I (2007) Timing feminism, feminising time, Futures, 40: 329–345. Moles, K (2008) A walk in thirdspace: Place, methods and walking, Sociological Research Online, 13(4): 2, available at www.socresonline.org.uk/13/4/2.html Muñoz, J E (1996) Ephemera as evidence: Introductory notes to queer acts, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 8(2): 5–16. Muñoz, J E (2009) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, London: New York University Press. Ngai, S (2007) Ugly Feelings, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. O’Sullivan, S (2006) Art Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond Representation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: Politics of Performance, London: Routledge. Pink, S (2012) Situating Everyday Life: Practices and Places, London: Sage. Puar, J K (2005) Queer times, queer assemblages, Social Text, 84–85, 23(3/4): 121–139. Rancière, J (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rancière, J (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum. Rogoff, I (2003) From criticism to critique to criticality, European Institute for Pro­ gressive Cultural Politics, available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0806/rogoff1/en (accessed May 2017). Ross, M (2016) Time and again, in S Treister and S Hiller (eds) Monica Ross: Ethical Actions: A Critical Fine Art Practice, Berlin: Sternberg, p. 20. Savage, M (2010) Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Savage, M and Burrows, R (2007) The coming crisis of empirical sociology, Sociology, 41(5): 885–899. Schneider, R (2001) Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Re-­ Enactment, Abingdon: Routledge. Sedgwick, E K (2003) Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or you’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you, in E K Sedgwick (ed.) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 123–151. Serres, M and Latour, B (1995) Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Shakespeare, T (2003) Rights, risks and responsibilities: New genetics and disabled people, in S J Williams, L Birke and G A Bendelow (eds) Debating Biology: Sociological Reflections on Health, Medicine and Society, London: Routledge. Sofaer, J (2002) What is live art? Joseph Sofaer website, available at www.joshuasofaer. com/2011/06/what-­is-live-­art/ (accessed May 2017)

The im/possibilities of live time   189 Sointu, E (2015) Discourse, affect and affliction, The Sociological Review, 64(2): 312–328. Sontag, S (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Hamish Hamilton. Spivak, G (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History for the Vanishing Present, Harvard: Harvard University Press. Stewart, K (2007) Ordinary Affects, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. The Atlas Group (2006) The Secrets File/ The Operator ≠17 File/ Let’s Be Honest, the Rain Helped, in C Mereweather (ed.) The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, London: the MIT Press, pp. 177–180. Tolia-­Kelly, D P (2016) Feeling and being at the (postcolonial) museum: Presencing the affective politics of ‘race’ and culture, Sociology, 50(5): 896–912. Uprichard, E (2012) Being stuck in (live) time: The sticky sociological imagination, in L Back and N Puwar (eds) Live Methods, Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, pp. 124–138. Wiegman, R (2014) The times we’re in: Queer feminist criticism and the reparative ‘turn’, Feminist Theory, 15(1): 425. Williams, R (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 7

Conclusions Towards a hopeful art

Queer research [is] to practise invention to the brink of intelligibility. (William Haver 1997: 277)

Researching to the brink The world is not – has never been, nor ever will be – certain and knowable. ‘The world’ here stands in for global assemblages of power, politics and people; for imbrications of the human and non-­human, the macro, meso, micro and molecular; for everyday practices and affects as they play out on the terrains of inter/subjectivity. The work of knowing, understanding, explaining and changing the world as we live in it is an important part of being and becoming human (Freire 1970) and of special concern to the discipline of sociology. It is therefore not surprising that sociology finds itself almost perpetually in states of reflection and concomitant ‘crisis’ in relation to the specific epistemological challenges in which it is embedded whilst seeking to intervene (Savage and Burrows 2007; Gane and Back 2012; Frade 2016). These crises are primarily methodological in that they represent challenges to ways of knowing, to theories of knowledge production, and to the tools of knowledge generation and exchange. One response to the methodological challenges of contemporary social realities has been the emergence of a set of ideas and practices that have become known as live sociology (Back 2007, 2012; Back and Puwar 2012; Gunaratnam 2013). Live sociology seizes upon the opportunities of mediatised and digital culture and re/configures a role for social researchers as enacting as well as reflecting social realities. This role re/locates the researcher in time/space: the idea that we can stand outside, above or beyond the places, people or issues about which we write needs to be (once again?) disavowed, not just in words but through the enactment of conceptual, methodological and empirical formulations re/locating sociologists in medias res. As I have argued and illustrated throughout the preceding chapters, these ideas are not ‘new’; they have been the mainstay of queer, feminist and postcolonial work for a long time (Sedgwick 1990; Haraway 1991; Tilley 2017), as well as being articulated within social science

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(Law 2004); however, such work remains marginalised in relation to sociological self-­reflexivity as it is enacted at the ‘heart’ of the discipline. This book revises and renews the aspirations of live sociological method (see Back and Puwar 2012) as well as offering new articulations of live sociology, drawing on exemplary practices from within live art as well as from my own practice-­based research. Taken together, these diverse and often experimental illustrations demonstrate the generative capacities of liveness as providing a way of thinking differently about the limitations of representation. Whilst recognising the importance and unavoidability of representational knowledge and ways of knowing, I argue for live sociology to attend to ‘knowledge that slips’ (Lomax 2005). Experiential and sensory knowledges that are barely intelligible should not (must not) be off-­limits for empirical investigation and analysis. Instead, different modes of enquiry and communication need to be deployed alongside our traditional and well-­honed methodological tools and approaches. With this in mind, I have brought the resources of queer feminist theory and praxis to the project of developing live research methods. As William Haver’s (1997) quote at the beginning of the chapter suggests, the central problematic of queer research and writing can be defined in terms of its capacity to pursue, generate and analyse knowledge in partial, complicated, contradictory and often messy ways. Haver (1997) also alerts us to the disruptive, relentless energy that queer resources offer, as queer research ‘practise[s] invention’, always troubling, twisting, turning, re/fusing and exceeding what is on offer (Butler 1993). However, what I particularly want to draw attention to in Haver’s (1997) definition of queer research is the brink. The kinds of knowledge and political processes I call for and exemplify in The Live Art of Sociology seek to enquire, understand, explain and intervene, and to do so in the context of the world’s infinite complexity. Such processes are not interested in rendering the social world ‘unknowable’ or empirically ‘unreachable’. Accordingly, they do not take us to a wall, or a void; they take us to a brink. I want to propose the brink of intelligibility as the aspirational time/space of live sociology. Brinks can be both exciting and uncomfortable. They are places of endless becoming rather than arrival, and it calls on our powers of (sociological) imagination and our political wills to keep moving towards the brink rather than retreating to the clearer ground of (alleged) empirical assurance. However, it is this imbrication of imagination and political will that makes live sociology, as I articulate it here, vital to wider human projects of being in and understanding the world. Such a live sociology involves a) attending to and engaging with social realities that are often barely intelligible and lie beyond usual mechanisms of representation and b) doing so with a politicised and ethical commitment to challenge inequalities and suffering. These two distinct but connected components do not always sit easily together, and maintaining both in our theory and practice sometimes calls for different conceptualisations of the political as well as re/inventions of research methods. There are no definitive ‘right’ or even ‘best’

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theories or methods here: as I noted in Chapter 1, C Wright Mills (1959) called for a rejection of abstract theory and method in favour of contingent approaches developed through and with the specificities of the empirical context(s). Nick Gane and Les Back (2012: 409) elaborate: On this latter point, Mills is decisive: theory or method should never simply be ready-­made, and nor should they ‘determine the problems’ (Mills, 1959: 67). The task instead is to let empirical problems determine the theoretical and methodological means through which they can be addressed. It is at this point that, for Mills, the promise of sociology (its underlying ambition) coincides with what he calls its craft, which refers not simply to methodology but also the literary and stylistic practices through which such a sociology is to be inscribed. It is in this spirit that this book draws together conceptualisations of politics that foreground aesthetic, affective and sensory re/distribution of bodies and ideas in space/time. Some theoretical paths have been muddied in combining (at a minimum) queer, feminist, art-­based and sociological theories in order that new ‘bootleg trails’ or theoretical ‘desire paths’ can be cleared for the empirical challenges of live research.

The political ambitions of live sociology: becoming aesthetic and becoming minor The ‘shift to the live’ (Heathfield 2004) of recent decades increasingly frames many of our day-­to-day activities, adjusting the spatio-­temporal rhythms of our social encounters. Developments in contemporary art and sociology take place in this immediate and mediatised context and both reflect and shape the social world. There is, thus, urgent need for critical and politically engaged responses to this shift and its consequences. Live art and live sociology, in different and overlapping ways, are stepping up to this need. Aesthetics must be at the heart of both projects, as I argued in Chapter 1. The basis for this argument, which was developed further in Chapter 2, is that politics is aesthetic and any real transformation, whether at the level of the social order or of inter/subjectivities, involves a disruption and reconfiguration of what and how we see, feel, hear, smell and sense (Rancière 2004; Panagia 2009). Live methods are political. They are attuned to social injustice and suffering and seek to contribute to social change. One of the things about live art practices that have attracted my sociological attention is the relentless and creative ways in which they seek to disrupt normalcy and generate alternative ways of being in and knowing the world (Heddon 2012). These deterritorialising ambitions of live practices (whether in art or sociology) can be articulated using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1986) concept of becoming minor. In the context of their work on Kafka (1986: 16), Deleuze and Guattari define a ‘minor

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literature’ as one which ‘doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language’. A key feature of any minor language is its breaking away from dominant discourse, as it stutters and stammers the words and meanings of the major language, reinventing, refusing and subverting hegemonic forms through the creation of new language and meanings. The political work of the minor can be seen in action in relation to the work of Fierce live art festival, which I presented in some detail in Chapter 2. Not only has Fierce provided the source of many of the empirical examples used throughout the book, but its own history and politics as a queer and generative cultural resource encapsulate and enact some of the provocations of live practice. This concept of the minor has also proved useful in thinking about  the deterritorialising work of live sociology. Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 27) ask: How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, an official language.… Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-­minor. This is an aspiration I endorse for live sociology, positioned within and against major institutions of power and signification: to always assume deterritorialising, political and collective functions, and to stutter and stammer new ways of being in, and understanding, the world. Such a stuttering and stammering implies an awkward and difficult role. It does not sit comfortably with neoliberal performance indicators that call forth competitive and self-­assured subjectivities, let alone with academic pretensions to be authoritative, original and ‘world-­leading’ in our knowledge claims. However, it articulates the creative and agentic formulation of new and renewed forms of live sociological praxis.

Pedagogies of live sociology Pedagogic considerations need to be integral to live sociological practice. Issues of teaching and learning are implicit in existing work on live methods. They feature in relation to shared concerns between live sociology and public sociology, where students are considered ‘the first public’ for research (Burawoy 2005; Back 2016); however, this formula prohibits students/the public being recognised and valued as co/producers of knowledge (see Hynes 2016). Discussion in Chapter 4 has elaborated theories and practices of critical pedagogy in relation to live art and live sociology, calling for an expansive and politicised conceptualisation of pedagogy that I have termed ‘fierce’. Fierce pedagogies pay explicit attention to aesthetics; they are queer, dialogic, dissensual, collaborative; they manifest as struggle and contribute to new subjective becomings. Elaborating on how we might ‘practise invention to the brink of intelligibility’, Haver (1997: 285) calls upon queer pedagogy and argues that

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The question of the pedagogical must undoubtedly be allowed to resonate in several registers simultaneously: in the formal and informal disciplinary and epistemological structures of our learning, certainly; in institutional classrooms, of course, not excepting the university classroom and the seminar; but also, and perhaps most importantly, in our microscopic learnings, unlearnings and relearnings, the infinitesimal negotiations by which we learn and unlearn the world. Three empirical examples of fierce pedagogies were highlighted in Chapter 4. The first was an exploration of live art practices where the art consists of dialogue or dissensus and exchange of ideas and knowledges: the kind of work that Grant Kester (2004) calls ‘conversation pieces’. My ethnographic and experiential encounters with The Haircut Before the Party and Vincent Dance Theatre’s Art and Engagement workshops demonstrated, in different ways, the epistemological and political possibilities of social practice when that practice attends to the aesthetic and affective conditions it generates. The second example of fierce pedagogies was the design and use of ‘psycho classrooms’ (see Lambert 2011), pedagogic encounters prefigured by paying critical attention to the design of space and the material arrangement of bodies and objects in that space. Queer Salon in the Reinvention Centre at the University of Warwick illustrated alternative ways of engaging with curricular knowledge around gender and sexuality. The third example of fierce pedagogy in action was through the medium of performance; I recounted a different kind of academic knowledge production and exchange enacted by the FAAB feminist collective and their interventions at mainstream academic conferences. Such conferences embody academia’s dominant modes of (disciplinary) knowledge valuation and reproduction (Henderson 2015). FAAB’s singing, dancing, satire and poetry enact a Deleuzoguattarian stuttering, stammering and caterwauling of the major language of higher education. At the same time, affects – particularly rage and joy/humour – are put to work in exposing and reconfiguring the sensory and aesthetic organisation of bodies (of knowledge and people) in space/time. Fierce pedagogies recall and re-­instate the pedagogisation of culture as articulated in the work of cultural studies (see Giroux 2000). They also recognise the ‘pedagogisation of society’ as well as of the individual, as delineated by Jacques Rancière (1991) to denote the problematic temporality of a mode of knowledge production that depends on a distance or delay between those who know and those who do not. This ‘gap’ can be a feature of teacher/student or researcher/ researched or artist/spectator relations, as well as signifying unequal relations between nations and geopolitical regions, such as the global north/south (see Bhambra and de Sousa Santos 2017). The live art of sociology enacts a different set of pedagogical expectations that reject the (usual) presumptions of intellectual inequality (Rancière 1991). Different expectations call forth different methodologies.

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Live art and experimental research: methodological reflections Mindful of the importance of critique to sociological investigations, I nonetheless advocate the supplementation of our ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Sedgwick 2003) with a reparative approach as a generative methodological strategy for live sociology. Reparative reading is important for both ethical and epistemological reasons. The nature of the live event and the uncertain, partial knowledges it offers requires that we dwell with encounters rather than always seeking to move beyond them and speak on their behalf (Lomax 2005). Such a stance demands a particular attentiveness, occupying a position in the middle of things (Stewart 2007; Lury 2012), open to collaboration and co-­production with others. A reparative approach asks us to accept, if necessary, ambivalent and contradictory outcomes and to presume a degree of discomfort in letting go of some of the reassurances and certainties of critique and analysis. In the methodological approach underpinning the arguments throughout preceding chapters, reparative impulses operate alongside ethnography and practice-­based research. The discussion in this book presents and enacts the potentialities of a live art of sociology by drawing on, or drawing attention to, practices developed in the context of live art. These art encounters stage, sometimes in quite powerful ways, some of the key problematics facing contemporary sociology. I do not seek to reify practices from within the (contested) field of live art; rather, by working with these examples, I demonstrate the generative as well as representational possibilities of a wide range of live encounters. My relationship with the art itself remains productively ambivalent. As the discussion throughout this book illustrates, I have had some wonderful, beautiful, challenging and deeply affecting experiences of live art; I have also been left indifferent, disgusted, distressed, bemused. In part, my range of responses doubtless stems from the fact that some of the artists presented here produce what Jennifer Doyle (2013: x) describes as ‘difficult works’. These are pieces that engage audiences by working with and through affect, often producing contradictory outcomes: ‘they leave us in a strange space’, as Doyle (2013) puts it. To research and write about such works requires an entanglement with affect: ‘If we want to hear what this work is about, we need to listen to it more carefully and allow ourselves to be moved’ (Doyle 2013: xvii). My development and use of live sociological methods are similarly driven by a desire to listen carefully, to experience and understand what it is to be ‘moved’ in emotional, ontological, epistemological and embodied ways. Alongside the presentation and analysis of selected cases from live art practice, I have also drawn upon empirical examples from my own practice-­based research experiments. Using the notion of ‘curating sociology’ elaborated by Puwar and Sharma (2012), I introduced (in Chapter 3) a series of research exhibitions that I have devised in collaboration with others. These exhibitions deliberately use aesthetics, including space and time, as resources in order to generate

196   Conclusions

different kinds of epistemological encounters. What unites the different projects is that they eschew didactic or explicatory approaches and aim instead to create space for the generation of knowledges though sensory and experiential, as well as intellectual, engagements with research materials. These practices respond to C Wright Mills’ (1959) call for the ‘craft’ as well as the methodology of sociology to reflect empirical problems (see Gane and Back 2012). I call such practices experimental to draw attention to the lack of certainties implicated in using them. A politics of uncertainty is necessary if we are to research to the brink of intelligibility. Back (2012: 20) asks ‘how might we make sociological texts that are open and invite users and readers to conclude the argument or participate in the project of making a political judgement?’ and these examples offer a response to this question. They deploy an analytical framework that, in alignment with the pedagogical politics outlined above, presumes equality of intellectual and creative capacities and seeks to activate engagement (whether of readers, spectators or students) rather than explicate or expound a pre-­determined reality (Rancière 1991). Together with examples of performance and spoken-­ word poetry, all these approaches engage a wide range of senses as modes of generating experiential, affective and embodied knowledges.

Embodying the art of live sociology I have used the diverse practices of body artists, alongside the conceptual resources of queer feminist theory, to support the argument that bodies and processes of embodiment should be central to live sociology. The analyses of live body art in Chapter 5 drew attention to the use of bodies as sites for staging intersubjective crises and possibilities. For example, the artist Cassils’ performance of Inextinguishable Fire (2015) makes visible the politics of spectatorship, empathy and ethical witnessing. Such a politics cannot be understood without explicit attention to bodies, those that suffer as well as those that bear witness. The political potential of embodiment is evident in relation to activism, where artists’ bodies are used as canvases for staging protests about social injustice (violence, war, racism, sexism, disability) and in ‘extreme’ body art in which the artist’s body is subjected to pain and harm. I contend that empathy does not reside in knowing how others feel or ‘feeling their pain’ with them but rather, in being able to recognise our own affective response to others’ suffering, a recognition which situates us as a witness. For live sociology, this involves an ethics of beholding and accounting for what we see, hear, feel and understand from our research encounters. The politics of resistance and the generation of alternative, embodied knowledges has been explored through the work of body artists Ron Athey and Martin O’Brien, whose practices utilise endurance and pain as queer strategies, fighting ‘pain with pain’ and ‘sickness with sickness’ (O’Brien 2012; Johnson 2013). The analysis also attends to audiences’ bodies, in particular the role of touch in enabling a different mode of embodied language to be expressed.

Conclusions   197

Research-­based art encounters devised and performed by Adrian Howells (see Chapter 5) demonstrate this, resonating with Back’s (2007) call for sociologists to expand the frequencies through which we are able to ‘listen’ to people and the world around us.

Live temporalities: becoming anachronistic and askance Back and Puwar’s (2012) manifesto features a number of aspirations relating to time, such as to ‘develop new tools for “real-­time” and “live” investigation’, to ‘avoid the “trap of the now” and be attentive to the larger scale and longer-­ historical time frame’, to ‘develop capacities to see the whole, without a totalizing perspective’ and to ‘take time, think carefully and slowly’. The live art practices that I have considered offer varied and stimulating perspectives and resources for working on these aspirations. In particular, they highlight the impossible time of live: as soon as we attend to a live event it has slipped into the past, and at the same time any present moment is full of its emergence, its becoming something else in the immediate future. Graeme Miller’s installation Track (2012) ‘frames the present’ and so enables participants to experience and pay attention to an aspect of the material world (in this case, the underneath of Birmingham’s ‘Spaghetti Junction’ road exchange). Such strategies for helping people ‘look at reality’ align with Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) focus on ordinary affects and offer creative resources for utilising time itself in method (Uprichard 2012). A different deployment of temporality can be seen in the durational work of Martin O’Brien, whose performance of Breathe for Me (2016) enables the audience to feel time passing as he endures the pain and discomfort of routine and repetitive medical interventions on his body. An explicit awareness of duration challenges the fallacy of time as an objective measure. Endurance (thankfully) is not the only way to attend to temporality, and as the consideration of documentary and archival practices at the end of the previous chapter demonstrated, there are generative possibilities for utilising past and future in the ‘present’ of live sociological enquiries. Queer engagements with temporalities, such as the rich provocations of Heather Love’s (2007) concept of ‘feeling backwards’ (see also Halberstam 2005; Muñoz 2009; Freeman 2010), highlight the political role of affect in providing an account of the present that acknowledges the histories and becomings it contains. Whilst some histories and becomings are rendered visible and intelligible, others are denied and ‘disappeared’. Live art works performing the role of memory (such as the work of Mette Edvardsen and Monica Ross, highlighted in Chapter 6) draw attention to the ethical and political work of mis/remembering. This ethical and political work invokes the archive and the role of documenting the non/representational experiences and knowledges generated by live encounters. Live art and queer archives offer conceptual and political resources for doing archival work around partial, fleeting, fragmented and fluid knowledges.

198   Conclusions

These are important for a live sociology attuned to absent, erased and silent voices and stories, as the silence resonates in the present and in potential becomings. Echoing the emphasis within live sociology of working with and in the middle of things, parallels emerge between the enactment of spatial and temporal method/ologies, suggesting that sociologists should avoid seeking to occupy either the limelight or the precision of the present or the centre position but rather, queerly, remain untimely and anachronistic, askance and askew.1

Towards a cartography of live sociology To write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map; ‘I am a cartographer’. (Deleuze citing Foucault, 1988: 38) The empirical examples of live practice used throughout Live Art of Sociology have been designed to enable participants to watch and listen, to move about and encounter materials through embodied proximity and touch. Forms of knowledge generation and exchange other than the written word have been examined and celebrated. There is much more work to be done in understanding and using such methods in a range of different contexts. My experimental practices aspire, in line with Back and Puwar’s (2012) manifesto, to enable the generation of knowledge through all the senses, an ambition that is necessary if we are to engage seriously with barely perceptible and non- (or scarcely) representational social realities (Gunaratnam 2013). However, despite a growing number of sociologists working in this way, it remains an underdeveloped and marginalised area of practice, such that, unless it is written about in the ‘major’ languages and media, that is to say in books (such as this) or peer-­reviewed journal articles (see Puwar 2011), such interventions remain novel, individualised and at the periphery of mainstream methodologies. I anticipate inevitable critique that my call for experimental, sensory and non-­ representational methods takes the form of a traditional book. The reasons for this are partly indicated above: I want the ideas to be considered in ‘mainstream’ contexts; I need to produce work in such formats in order to maintain an academic career. I also do not deny or seek to displace the value, power and pleasure of words but rather, highlight the impossibilities of reliance on them if we are to fulfil the commitments of live sociology. Writing is a powerful tool for social scientists, and can be used not just to say something about social realities but to intervene in them. Groups and individuals experiencing oppression use writing as a means of survival or combat, ‘a fighting literature’, as Frantz Fanon (1963/2001: 179) puts it, describing the struggle against colonialism in The Wretched of The Earth. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 3), writing is less about measuring or signifying something than it is concerned with surveying and mapping, ‘even realms that are yet to come’. The craft of writing needs to be reconfigured as generative as well as representational: ‘to write is to become’,

Conclusions   199

says Deleuze (1988). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe and, in their wider outputs, perform writing as an act of resistance and a cartographic exercise in finding and making new routes through knowledge. Map-­making is inherently problematic (Dodge et al. 2011); however, it is also too important a task to be left to the dominant. If our research practices are to generate and occupy alternative aesthetic landscapes, then new maps are needed, or perhaps new concepts of maps and mapping. What kind of maps, for example, can help us remain askance and askew? What maps can guide us towards the brink of intelligibility? Our cartographic practices need to reflect the productive imbrications of space/time, paying more explicit and critical attention to the temporalities of research and writing. What kind of maps might help us ‘rethink the relationship between time and scholarship’, as Back and Puwar’s (2012: 13) tenth manifesto aspiration puts it? These will be minor maps indeed, deterritorialising the powerful cartographies of neoliberal academia. In Chapter 4, I discussed the academic interventions of the FAAB feminist collective. Every performance included Moving On (Lambert 2005), a spoken-­word poem that I wrote for FAAB but that also speaks to the hopes and fears of The Live Art of Sociology: we seek the right words the right ways to say them and they taunt us haunt us as we try to be critical to seek a politics that does not have us turning at night this way and that how do we find the right words free our language free our texts from the litany of best practice excellence inclusion how can we reclaim renew create new ways to narrate new stories here we try something different for there is nothing linear about life as our lives shift back and forth through memory and dreaming and hoping and yet we pretend our fine linear texts chronological structures holding back our resources and censoring our collective dreams

200   Conclusions

we are not in isolation our social existence is born through others shared language and the necessity of reciprocity lest our stories echo in a void so why oh why do we think and write and struggle alone by the flicker of the screen seeking answers from within and angry with the disillusion that we find there working to produce little gods this is not accusatory we all know why we comply we know that which holds us back makes us serious makes us respect and enforce a norm we do not create or endorse there is a fear of laughter or worse silence but when we stop smiling we have lost thus into the listening void we throw a smile for they are tricky to resist we seek out cracks where the sticky fingers of the market where the breath down our backs of neo-­liberal greed has not seeped into our practice our minds our teaching writing

thinking

we shout we care about social justice we feel strung out crucified on a straight crossed line between the just and the success we must prove to remain in the game but we the inclusive we cannot be wished away wished out of pedagogic spaces corridors texts spaces must be made  we cry we insist

Conclusions   201

for every landscape shifts in play we resist there are new geographies we seek a new position and we remember that compliance and resistance do not sit in opposition we offer this stance as a brief respite a slip of hope though there is not one answer it is not carnival or protest or ethical research it is all of these and more we open to the floor in disguise poor disguise as masquerade this is a heartfelt struggle pressing at boundaries and feeling the sickening liberatory fear of transgression which takes our longing and makes it public flinging us from the secret intimacies of what we feel and practice into a dialogue with the social the economic the political and back again and back again caught in the wind of a dialogic freedom furrowing the tracks of resistance digging tracks digging tracks here we do not end we capture somewhere in the middle and then let go and in this parting we  are optimistic are we can our optimism sit with the pain of recognition that the small and large injustices are all part of the same horrendous game but the state we are in is process and we are not standing still This poem articulates the frustrations and desires of seeking new languages, ‘the  right words/ the right ways to say them’, from within the ‘litany of best practice excellence inclusion’, which, within higher education (as elsewhere),

202   Conclusions

we increasingly find ourselves reciting and performing. The poem expresses the dualities of laughter and rage as we try to find and create ‘cracks’, texts and spaces, ‘new geographies’, recognising that there is not one strategy for achieving this but many, including carnival, protest, ethical research ‘and more’. We must work to elevate sensory research practices such that they sit alongside and entangle with existing representational repertoires. Part of the challenge is to work with words in different ways as well as to recognise the generative capacities of aesthetic encounters to produce alternative ways of knowing. Where representational and generative methods produce dissensual outcomes, we need to tolerate a degree of discomfort (Jones 2015). Donna Haraway (in Harvey and Haraway 1995: 521–522) notes that If we have learnt anything out of the last years of splitting among ourselves, it’s the necessity to learn to speak to the simultaneity of the trouble, in poesis as well as in analysis. And that means we need to have a much broader metaphoric palate for talking about modes of change, modes of relationalities, describing scale. There is no call for adversarial or defensive positioning, in that a commitment to poesis as well as analysis underpins the live art of sociology. Live methods, attuned and attentive to the power of aesthetics, to different temporalities and scales, different languages and silences, offer theoretical as well as practical responses to these challenges.

A hopeful art The poem also speaks critically of the ethical compromises that increasingly feature as business-­as-usual within higher education. Since 2004, when Moving On was first performed, the intensification of neoliberal discourses and practices within the sector has been well documented, highlighting what many see as an abandonment of the principles that should underpin universities in the face of the imperatives of competition and marketisation (Canaan and Shumar 2011; Collini 2012; Holmwood 2017). Amongst other outcomes, this leads to employees being subjected to punitive regimes of value and measurement (Kelly and Burrows 2012; Sayer 2015). The shifting politics of higher education reflect, necessarily, wider social, political and economic trajectories and pressures. As such, these practices and the damaging intra- and intersubjective effects they can have are widely experienced by many working in other sectors or settings as well as those subjected to procedures of government (housing, welfare, education, health) at national and global levels. Powerful economies of contemporary knowledge production and representation are integral to these operations of authority. In a world where ‘fake news’ has political and material effects, and the hyper-­ performativity of knowledge processes in higher education shapes our words and actions, where and how should live sociology be put to work?

Conclusions   203

For Back (2007), the live in live sociology denotes both adjective and verb, committing us simultaneously to the intellectual craft of enacting lively methods whilst foregrounding sociology as a way of life and a way to sustain life. These are big ambitions, and I hope the discussion in The Live Art of Sociology fuels them. In emphasising the political and generative capacities of live sociological practice, I have staked out a role for live sociology, with/in and beyond the academy, in not only engaging with the social world but also creating it. I hope to have demonstrated that the methodological temporalities of live practice provide some political purchase in working within and against the logics and ethics of time/space compression, digital immediacy and a lack of representational accountability, which increasingly configure contemporary social relations. In academic work, this entails a renewed commitment to valuing culture, widening and deepening our range of knowledge production and communication, and seeking to democratise our senses by recognising the aesthetic operations of politics, power and possibility. Live sociological practice must aspire to be inclusive and collaborative, devising and enacting ways of knowing and being in and with the world that accept the uncertainty and discomfort of multiple, often contradictory and inconclusive, social realities, whilst tenaciously attending to the empirical. Such an aspiration emphasises the temporalities of liveness, dwelling and researching with the social world and with others, refusing to extract knowledge from its source but rather, being present at the vital time/ space of generation. Despite such big ambitions, the operational remit of live sociology as I configure it here is small. Resisting the ever-­powerful lure of discovering and speaking the ‘Truth’, live sociology needs to be true to the world as it plays out in people’s intellectual, embodied and affective experiences. The modus operandi of live sociology is its vitality: in emphasising process, movement, emergence, it seeks a hopeful tenor. This is a queer kind of hopefulness: that is to say, a hope that does not stand in opposition to despair, but rather, attends to the damages inflicted by despair in order to accept, understand and reconfigure alternative ways of being and becoming. Such becomings may not be linear or progressive; they may require aesthetic reconfiguration in order that new ways of being and knowing, new subjectivities, can be seen, heard and rendered intelligible. The Live Art of Sociology proposes methods for possible reconfigurations and argues that the development of such methods in relation to specific contexts is a key task for the live sociological imagination. Such an imagination is a vital resource in accounting for the manifold, contradictory, uncertain experiences of being alive in troubling times.

Note 1 For a distinction between middle and centre, see Lury (2012: 191) and discussion in Chapter 3 of this book.

204   Conclusions

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206   Conclusions Sedgwick, E K (2003) Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or you’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you, in E K Sedgwick (ed.) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 123–151. Stewart, K (2007) Ordinary Affects, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tilley, L (2017) Resisting piratic method by doing research otherwise, Sociology, 51(1): 27–42. Uprichard, E (2012) Being stuck in (live) time: The sticky sociological imagination, in L Back and N Puwar (eds) Live Methods, Wiley-­Blackwell, pp. 124–138.

Index

Page numbers in bold denote figures. 1960s 65; auto-destructive art 39; discourse of participation 6; feminist body-art 128; feminist practice 126; undocumented live practice prior to 175; work produced 38 1970s 175; feminist body-art 128; work produced 38 1980s 179; homophobic atmosphere 147; live art 38 academia 194; neoliberal 199 academic 64, 81, 121n10; career 198; conferences 112–13, 194; context 165; endeavours 94; interventions 199; knowledge production 95, 114, 194; practice 109, 112, 144; practitioners 174; pretensions 193; references 184n1; subjectivity 119; work 129, 203 academics 110, 112, 121n3, 180; feminist 112; male 115; women 114, 118 Acts of Memory 32–3, 156, 172–3, 183; see also Monica Ross Adkins, L 58, 60 aesthetic encounters 33; generative capacities of 202; live materiality 95 aesthetics 3, 52, 95, 192–3; durational 164; enactments of pain embody 141–2; of everyday life 2; exhibitions using 195; of FAAB’s performances 113; of hair styling 110; of hairdressing salon 101; imbrication with politics 24, 32; politics of 3, 34–5, 96; power of 202; of Ron Athey’s performances 139; sociological 2–3; temporal 164; traditional forms 39; of university classroom 64; urban 165

aesthetics, role of 94, 97; in subjective codings 35 affect 84, 88, 109, 126, 135, 147, 154, 195; across time 161; contemporary understandings of 36; flow in performative space 144; of learning 98; making sense of the past 178; negative 160, 162–3; of non-human forms 89; ordinary 163, 182, 183, 197; political 136; queer and feminist art practices 74; role in enabling aesthetic shifts 115; role of 197; theory 72; work of 162, 182 affective 5, 22, 64, 88, 98; capacities of art 68; conditions 7, 194; contours of hope and astonishment 163; dimension 15; dynamic 20–1; economies 72–3; embodied life 59; engagement 4, 82; entitlement 109; environment 14, 120; implications 119; journeys 50; knowledge of real-world horrors 136; knowledges generated 196; line of flight 118; methodologies, difficult 24; modes of interaction 49; possibilities, alternative 52; practices 73; reaction 21, 134; re/distribution of bodies/ideas 192; repertoires 162; sensation of something happening 88; sense-making 135; shift 15; stakes 161; structures of time 161; understandings 126, 160; wound 136 affective encounters 101, 126, 130; intersubjective, dimensions of 138 affective experiences 90, 111, 120, 203; impact of 135; of living and becoming 74; shared 80; spectator’s 133 affective responses 72, 81, 88, 133–4, 196; to artwork 66

208   Index affective space 180; artwork 19; create new 72; display of completed works 105; generating 59, 66; of suffering, loss, endurance and resistance 126; workshop 77; of young people’s experiences 82, 90 Agamben, G 100, 154 Ahmed, S 10, 72, 110, 114, 144, 156, 177, 179 AIDS 139; epidemic 160; homophobia and panic around 140; Ron Athey 162; postAIDS era 139; post-AIDS US/UK culture 147 alternative knowledges 42; capacity to produce 139; generation of 5, 95–6; potential to produce 25 American Educational Research Association (AERA) 116, 117, 121n11 Archer, L 11, 112, 117 archive 14, 39, 47, 156, 159, 163, 173–4, 183; Fierce 12, 18, 25n8, 4–7, 180, 181; Vincent Dance Theatre 102, 104; see also queer; Vincent Dance Theatre Archive Artsadmin 40, 101 Athey, Ron 18, 21, 25, 40–1, 48, 130, 134, 138–42, 147, 160, 162, 176, 196 Atkinson, D 98, 119 Atkinson, P 17–18 audience(s) 1, 15, 18–21, 25, 39, 40–5, 47–51, 53, 62, 64, 66, 71, 80, 82, 97, 114–16, 118, 120, 121n3, 126, 128–32, 134–6, 138, 140–5, 148, 148n11, 154–6, 174, 179, 180, 195–7 Auge, M 101, 172 Back, L 2, 5, 7–9, 58, 60–1, 63–6, 72, 84, 89–90, 116, 125–6, 135, 145–6, 153, 163, 182–3, 190–3, 196–9, 203 Bakhtin, M 49, 118 Ball, Mark 47–8 Bassline 169, 173, 184n18; see also Miller, Graeme Becoming an Image 132, 179, 185n26; see also Cassils becoming(s) 114, 197, 203; aesthetic 192; anachronistic 197; a commodity 137; concept of 37; death 75; enables 36; endless 148, 155, 191; experiences of 74; generate new ways of 98; human 190; ignorant 172; immanence of 89; linear or progressive 203; living books

170; minor 37, 51, 98, 192–3; mired in nostalgia 161; new modes of 156; potential 198; process of 137; at risk of 131, 137; site of 126; social and political 4; something else/otherwise 9, 197; state of 5, 25, 138; a subject 127; subjective 35, 37, 94, 193; temporal dimension of 10 Beecroft, Vanessa 44–5 Beheld 62, 90n1, 154, 166; see also Miller, Graeme Benjamin, W 104, 161 Bennett, Jane 34, 49, 89 Bennett, Jill 83–4, 131, 141 Bhambra, G 7, 23, 194 Bishop, C 5–6, 20–1, 34, 42, 96 body/bodies 1, 23, 83, 125, 169; anonymous 62; artist’s 130; audiences’ 144–6; becoming a commodity 137; contested matter 126; cultural politics 140; dysmorphia 44; endurance of routine 155; experiences felt in 68; gendered 39; human 39, 89, 132; inscribe political message on 128; knowing 146–8; leaves traces behind 127; live practice 144; memories 183; modification 126, 139; political technology of the 126; of practice 166; practices 25; related practices 48; relationship with fertility 104; at risk 130; role 147; as witness 146; work 101; of work 165, 169 body, another’s: listen to 145; physical touch of 144; tending 102 body art 129; activist possibilities 25; aestheticised 128; development as political intervention 146; experiments 126; extreme 131, 145, 196; feminist 129; new art-politics relationships 128; see also live body art body artists 129; diverse practices of 196; queer 40, 48; queer, live 130, 162 body experiments/experimentation 146; feminist 128; live 139 body, medicalised 140–1; cancer treatment effects 71; repetitive interventions 197 body, queer 137–9; art practices 74 body subjected to pain and harm 196; burning 33, 132–3, 135, 138; wounding 134, 136 Boltanski, L 131, 135 Brandon Teena 177

Index   209 Breathe for Me 139–40, 155, 197; see also O’Brien, Martin British Education Research Association (BERA) 114, 121n11 Buckland, F 46, 50–1 Burawoy, M 66, 95, 193 Butler, J 10, 37, 67, 118, 127, 191 Canaan, J 96, 202 cancer 77, 79–80, 82, 85, 87, 89; cells 88; charity 84; encounters with 84; made visible 88; patients 70–1, 78, 83, 176; personifying 88–9; politics of representation around 176; professionals, interview data 90; stories 81, 83; talking about 69, 88; thoughts and feelings about 75; treatment for 19, 69–71, 83–4 Cancer Friends 69–71, 72, 80, 83, 91n11; 175–6; see also Fun with Cancer Patients Carland, T R 178 Cassils 1, 19, 21, 45, 138–9, 148n1, 148n2, 179, 185n26, 196; burning body 33, 141; live body art 25; live performance 131–2, 135; set alight 133–4, 136; work 130, 137, 148; see also Becoming an Image, Inextinguishable Fire Centre for Cultural Studies (CCCS) 5; see also cultural studies Clegg, S 114 Clifford, J 17, 137 Clough, P 5, 36, 60, 72 Connell, R 23, 184n3 contradictory 169, 175, 191; experiences 78; investments 112; nature of subjective experiences 90; outcomes 195; queer theory 10; role of documentation 156; social realities 203; written responses 88–9 Creative Partnerships 48, 54n10 Critchley, S 119 Crossick, G 4, 6 cultural 67, 135; body politics 140; centres 41; change 32; climate 42; codes 177; contemporary circulations 161; contexts 45, 74; contradictions 112; co-productions 63; counter 89; dynamics 58; effects of sexual shame 161; embodiments 164; established provision 49; exclusion 6; fabric of society 33; force 128; forms 4–5, 25, 38,

95; geometries 95; government policy 6; identity 48; institutions 49; left-oriented critics 14; mainstream 47; mechanisms 119; milieu 7; normativity 137; norms 74; practice 53; practice hit hard by austerity 41; practitioners 4, 180; procapital language 51; producer 12; production 58, 129, 174; production, state-funded 119; relations 43; repertoires of media and policy-makers 40; representations 136; sector 24, 32, 40, 52, 53n2; shifts 160; site 17, 19; space and time 39; strategy 42; terrain 120; theory 129; theory of relevance 177; value 4–6; worlds 7, 19; see also queer cultural; subcultural cultural studies 4, 17, 95, 194; antidiscipline of 5; queer 13 Cultural Value Network 4 culture 5, 12, 17, 72, 125; binary with nature 127, 129; digital 58, 190; dominant 137; founding act of power 67; high 2–3; of live art 175; mass-mediated 146; outcome-obsessed/time-poor 171; pedagogisation of 194; post-AIDS US/ UK 147; queer 47; renewed commitment to valuing 203; US 1990s wars 139; Western 164; works to secure identities 96; see also subcultures Cvetkovich, A 178 Dachshund U.N. 49, 52, 54n11 Davis, O 35, 162–3 death 60, 74, 77, 127, 148, 154; AIDS epidemic 160; critical consideration of 24; drive 139, 142, 160; effects of aestheticising 138; fear of 162; iconography 78; images 77; inevitability of 139; live sociology of 74; relationship with 75, 79; sentence 140; talking about 76, 79, 88; threats 47, 184n16; understandings of 90 de la Fuente, E 2 Deleuze, G 10, 33, 37, 51–2, 59, 68, 98, 192–3, 198–9 Denzin, N K 17, 68, 114 de Sousa Santos, B 23, 172, 184n11, 194 digital 7, 58, 154; access to knowledge 171; capture 39, 175; culture 190; emerging multimedia 35; forms of knowledge production 60; immediacy 184n20, 203; live-stream 174; media 131;

210   Index digital continued networks 18; storage 171; pre-digital era 20; representations 21; technologies 52, 174–5; work 1, 38 Diprose, R 144 Downe, P 112, 118 Doyle, J 4, 127, 129, 133–4, 140, 144, 195 Edelman, L 142, 160–1, 184n5 Edensor, T 17, 50, 144 education 95–6, 109; effects of politics 202; free 173; LGBT discrimination 184n17; marketisation of 117; neoliberal policies 112; poetics of 119; postcompulsory 113–14; systems 117; UK compulsory 184n20; world 118; see also higher education; university educational ambition 159; authority, critique of 96; feminist collective 112, 120; feminist critiques of policy 113; policy-making 117; policy and practice, contemporary 112; vision 118 educational research 17, 96, 112, 114 Edvardsen, Mette 1, 25, 43, 45, 156, 170–2, 183, 197; see also Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine Ellsworth, E 109, 120 embodied 126, 129; action 2, 141; activism 128; act of pain 128; dis/investments 125; emergence and existence 125; enactment of social injustice 33; impact 135; interactions 144; issues 140; knowledge 196; labour in service environments 101; learning 120; life 12, 59, 75; live methods 146; location 17; methodologies 121n3; methods 125; presence 45; research 146; sensation 109; spectatorship 15; suffering 132 embodied emotions 21; collective, expression of 114; experience of 195 embodied encounters 25, 51, 126, 130; through embodied proximity and touch 198; political possibilities interrogated 146 embodied experiences 125, 196, 203; language 196; proximity and touch 198 embodied knowledges 16, 108; exchange of 109; potentialities of 120; senses as modes of generating 196 embodied memory 83, 183; role of 155 embodied responses 133–4; to aesthetic events 98; empathetic 135; situated 132

embodiment 25, 90, 127, 155, 164, 196; aesthetics through enactments of pain 141; as cultural and political force 128; denial of 74; diverse and multiple 146; gendered 148; non-normative 147; normalised conception of 125; pain 139; phenomenological account of 144; political affects of performing 172; politics of 125; queer 48; queer feminist approach to 126 embodying: act of memory 172; art of live sociology 196; dying 160 encounter(s) 7, 20, 24, 60, 73, 134, 143, 165, 168, 183, 195, 198; accessible 49; affective 111; affective and embodied 126, 130; artistic 49–50; blurring 128; with cancer 84; certain to 74; complicated 82–3; durational 155–6; emotional 83; epistemological 196; ethnographic 22; everyday 5; experiential 42, 176, 194; fleeting 136; generated 39; hair-cutting 100–1, 109; individual, temporalities of 173; intersubjective 25, 138, 156; knowledge 89; learning 98; making possible 51; with materiality of things 50; one-to-one 145, 171–2; pedagogic 111, 194; providing 71; representational 32, 69; research 3, 25, 60, 196; research-based art 197; rupturing 7–8; spaces of 40; touching 144–5; understanding 126; ways of being 120; see also aesthetic encounters; embodied encounters; live encounters; queer encounters; social encounters Eng, D L 11, 127, 137, 159 ethnography 17, 51, 68, 179, 195 ethnographic/ethnographically 10, 13, 15, 17–20, 22–4, 42, 45, 60, 68, 102, 127, 155, 194 exhibition(s) 11, 25n4, 53n7, 77, 81, 86, 90n2; affective space 180; contagious affect 84; emotional provocations 83; engagement with knowledges offered by 67; ethical imperatives 89; experiment embedded in art 60; Fun with Cancer Patients 19, 71, 82, 179; generated new material 66, 90; materials challenged visitors 70, 80; multimedia and sitespecific 64; open to emotional responses 80; piece around death 75–6; planning 66; presentation of research findings 59,

Index   211 66; research 18, 64, 90, 195; researchbased 24; space 18, 65–6; university and art gallery-based 22; use aesthetics 195; visitor responses to materials 84, 88, 107, 179 exhibition(s), public 18, 75, 80, 180; cancer friends day 72; experiment with live sociological methods 19; Fun with Cancer Patients 90; of materials from archive 47; see also The Idea of a University; Sociologists Talking; What Happens at the Festival Stays at the Festival explicatory 59, 67, 196; explication 66, 97 FAAB 22, 95, 113, 116, 117, 121n10; educational feminist collective 99, 112, 120; 194, 199; interventions 119; performances 49, 112–14, 118, 120 failure 134, 158–9, 171, 173, 177; to account for live experiences and feelings 72; to acknowledge pain 135; aesthetic, risk of 66; art deemed 34; asynchronous 164; to capture reality 68; to capture young people’s experiences 72; chronic 157; of friendship 83; generative 13; to have political effects 135; of language 105; productive 47, 69; to provoke affect 135; to secure documentation 174; of sociology 60; of speech 85; of support 83; systemic 87 failure of representation 24, 60, 68–9, 70, 72; in relation to live sociology 47 feminism 11, 40, 118; queer 148 feminist 128; academics 112; approaches to knowledge production 120; art practices 37, 74; body-art 128–9; engagements with bodies 147; literature 13; methodologies 20, 127; pedagogies 94; positive representations of women’s and queer bodies 137; poststructuralist 11; practice from the 1960s 126; pride 105; research 12, 46; scholars 176; subjectivity 119; work 125, 190 feminist collectives 194, 199; art 45; educational 112, 120; performance 95, 99 feminist critiques 17, 129; of educational policy and practice 113; of essentialist accounts of identity 37; of the male gaze 44; queer essentialist accounts of identity 37

feminist queer 14; approach to embodiment 126; critiques of essentialist accounts of identity 37; politics 9, 11; poststructuralism 126; resources 12; scholarship 25; theory 10–11, 13, 191, 196 feminist theories 192; affect, reworkings of 72; poststructural theory 126; queer 10–11, 13, 191, 196 feminists 12, 16, 121n10 ‘Fertility works’ 106–8; see also Vincent Dance Theatre festivals 19, 20, 23, 33, 39–42, 45, 49–51, 101, 110; see also Fierce festival fierce: competition 42; queer clubspeak 46; struggle 159, 182 Fierce 33, 39, 41, 43, 46, 51; activities, past 180; archive 180; archive project 47; artistic directors of 18, 47, 66; artistic practice 33; artworks 50; collaboration with 19; commitment to people and places of Birmingham 45; interventions in queer politics 53; live activities 18; opportunity for mainstream organisations 48; pedagogy/ pedagogies 24–5, 94–5, 98–9, 120, 193–4; performances 47, 172; personnel received death threats 47; pioneered work 48; political interventions 38; Press Gang 18; public works 52; queers time and space 53; radical site of queer production 49; work 54n8 Fierce live art festival 12, 18–19, 24, 45–7, 51, 91n7, 100–1, 127, 132, 145, 148n12, 172–3, 180, 181, 183; curation of 50; excitement in prospective audiences 143; joint director 142; perspective on live art 53 Foucault, M 15, 37, 126, 174, 184n14, 198 Frade, C 7, 190 Franko B 18, 47–8, 130, 134, 144, 148n4 Freeman, E 14–15, 51, 156, 163–4, 182, 197 Freire, P 96, 109, 190 Friedman, K 39, 49 Fun with Cancer Patients 12, 19, 24, 25n2, 60, 66, 69–71, 75, 76, 79–80, 82, 85, 88, 90, 134, 140, 175–6, 179 Gane, N 7–8, 16, 146, 183, 190, 192, 196 Gender and Education Association conference 113, 121n10, 121n11

212   Index gendered 39, 158; demands of capitalist economy 51; demands on the worker 101; embodiments, counter-hegemonic representations of 148; knowledges 110–11, 121n6; reading disrupted 178 genderqueer 132, 137 generative 12, 59, 159, 183, 195; affects 53; archive 179; capabilities of live art 7, 60; craft of writing 163, 198; cultural resource 193; definition of politics 36; disenchantment 23; disruption of live art 24–5; encounters 32, 69; failure 13; force of live art 32, 42, 68; strategy for live sociology 195; modalities of the art 90; mode of sociological research 17; moments 60; possibilities 3, 84, 197; process 99; role of audience bodies 25; slipperiness of live art 52; uncertainty and contradiction 8 generative capacities 24; of aesthetic encounters 202; of liveness 191; of live sociological practice 73, 203 Giffney, N 11, 127 Giroux, H 96, 120, 194 Gordon, A 34, 183 Gray, A 5, 12 Grenfell Tower 138, 148n6 Grey, K 137–8 Grosz, E 37, 125, 126–7, 184n15 Guerrilla Girls 118 Gunaratnam, Y 8, 58–9, 68, 73–4, 84, 90, 125, 155, 182, 190, 198 Gund, C (S) 139, 162 Halberstam, J 12, 21, 50, 137, 156, 160, 162, 177–9, 184n2, 184n10, 197 Hall, S 5, 10, 96, 169, 183 Halperin, D 11, 127, 138 happenings 1, 37–9, 51, 128 Haraway, D 16, 35, 61, 127, 129, 135, 153, 154–5, 190, 202 Harvey, D 35, 127, 153, 155, 202 Haver, W 190–1, 193 Heathfield, A 2, 4, 32, 58, 155–6, 164, 176, 180, 192 Heddon, D 4, 38, 43, 145–6, 192 Hey, V 112, 115 higher education 9, 42, 96, 201, 202; cultural and intellectual production in 119; elitism of 114; Funding Council 121n5; interventions in 64; language of 194; performativity in 112; Society for

Research into 121n11; UK landscape 116 HIV 130; diagnosis 139; positive status 140 Holmwood, J 7, 183, 202 hospital 71, 72, 83, 87, 176 Howells, Adrian 25, 48, 143, 145–6, 197 Human Rights Watch 184n16 humour 68, 90, 101, 112, 120, 194 Hynes, M 45, 66, 72, 95, 193 imbrications: aesthetics and politics 24, 32; Fierce 33; human and non-human 190; imagination and political will 191; memories and identities 181; pedagogy and research in academic knowledge production 95; representation and power 67; space/time 199 im/possibilities 25; of documenting the live 69; of ethical and empathetic relations 146; of live time 182; temporal 153 Inextinguishable Fire 1, 21, 33, 132, 138, 196; see also Cassils Ingold, T 10, 105 installations 19, 43–5, 90, 197; aesthetic of 179; art 25n3; interactive 64; mixedmedia 66 interdisciplinarity 9, 10, 11, 111, 121n6, 148n8 inter-subjective/intersubjective 25; authority 177; bridging, attempts at 73; communication and understanding 74; crises and possibilities 196; effects, damaging 202; encounters 138, 146, 156; exchange 120; experiences 146; mode of artistic production and reception 129; responsibility and accountability 130; space of suffering 126; time/space 84 intra-subjective effects 202 Johnson, D 4, 20–1, 41, 45, 48, 53n2, 113, 119, 130, 138–40, 142–3, 148n2, 175–6, 196 Johnstone, N 44 Jones, A 4, 20–1, 128–9, 131, 133–7, 146, 176 Jones, H 6, 202 Kaszynska, P 4, 6 Keiden, L 32, 41

Index   213 Kester, G 41–2, 99, 120, 194 Klein, J 4, 38–9 knowledge production 22, 59, 75, 94–5, 102, 112–13, 129, 176, 203; academic 114, 194; affective modes of 49; bodies as central to 127; challenges to theories of 190; in collaborative and multisensory ways 66; digital or artistic forms of 60; dissatisfaction with extant regimes of 13; economies of contemporary 202; ethnographic modes of 127; experimenting with 111; in higher education 119; practice-based modes 98; problematic temporality of 194; queer and feminist approaches to 120; reparative approach to 15; stages of 23; traditional modes of 63 knowledge(s) 9, 14–15, 25, 32, 72, 161, 172, 176, 203; accepted 98; aesthetic shifts making 115; affective 136, 196; alternative and oppositional 42; archival 183; claims 16, 22, 68, 147, 193; conferring of 97; contemporary 175; control and regulation of 52; conventional 95; digital access to 171; disciplinary 81, 140; dissensual 24, 94; economy 35; emerges through discovery 59; empathetic 74; encounter 89; engagement with 67; exchange 99, 109, 120, 146, 194; experiential and sensory 191; feminist approach to 120, 147; fragmented and fluid 197; gendered 110–11, 121n6; generated by research 179–80; hegemonic repertoires challenged 128; hyper-performativity of processes 202; medical 141; as movement 10; new routes through 199; non-canonical 5; normative and mainstream 46; objective 16–17; oppositional 42, 95; overlapped 109; partial/half 104, 195; powerful source 174; preserve 170; radically different forms of 42; reification of 23; relationships with pleasure and values 96; representational 191; researching with 13; settings, traditional 104; situated 16, 127, 135, 154; sociological 59, 63; spaces 120; spatio-temporal organisation of 113; structures 129; subject to revisions 180; systems of 7; that slips 73, 98, 191; uncertain 195;

unsettling 11; valuation and reproduction 194 knowledge(s) bodies of 177; queer and feminist engagements with of 147 knowledge(s) embodied 16, 120, 196; and emotional 108; potentialities of 120; re-embodied 140 knowledge(s) generation 198; alternative 5, 95–6; modes of 2, 42; tools of 190 knowledge(s), produced 21–3, 36, 114; co/ producers of 193; produced by social agents 17; production of 36 knowledge(s), queer: approaches to 11, 120; engagement with 147 knowledge(s) regimes 67, 98; powerful 140; representational, limiting to 137 Lambert, C 3, 15, 18–19, 22, 43, 46, 48, 52, 66, 72, 81–2, 90, 94–6, 98, 102, 107–8, 110, 132, 137, 144, 165, 173, 179–80, 182, 194, 199 Lather, P 17, 68 Lauzon, C 178–9 Law, J 11, 183, 191 Leathwood, C 112, 115, 117 Lewis, T E 95–6 LGBT 184n16; culture 47; experiences of discrimination, research on 184n17; festivals and conferences 110; politics 46 Live Art 4, 42, 46, 53n2; Development Agency (LADA) 32, 38, 40, 47, 68; generative force for artists 68; knowledge and political processes 191; methodological problems posed 20; National Review of 39; symposium 26; UK conference 132, 157 live art 20–1, 33, 45, 50, 62, 74; affecting experiences of 195; archives 39, 47, 180; audience motivations for engaging with 143; challenges to the authority of archive 174; counter-hegemonic register 42, 59; development as distinct cultural form 38, 52; difficult 4; documentation of 179; dominant themes 2; in Eastern Asia 23; embeddedness 154; expression beyond language 147; festival 12, 18, 33, 46, 53, 91n7, 193; future of 132; as generative disruption 24–5; institutionalisation 41; interventions 112; nourishment for the imagination 35; organisations dedicated to 40;

214   Index live art continued practice of 32; project 79; refuses easy commodification 175; research 17, 19; roles of 68, 121n3; scenes 139; of sociology 7, 32, 154, 165, 194–5, 202; status 38; traced to the 1960s 39; visibility and reach 41; works 183; see also live body art live art, contemporary 40; audiences 19; counter-hegemonic register 42; cultural world of 12; dramatises social and political concerns 129; festival 46; between marginality and potential 42; practice 33; research on 4; wider landscape 19 live art, encounters with 1, 3, 22, 36; space/time of 130 live art, political role 23; interventions 38; politico-aesthetic resources 3; potential 24, 43; work 37 live art practices 2–3, 10, 43, 53, 53n2, 61, 94, 162, 191, 195, 197; deploying bodies 129; dialogue or dissensus 194; disrupt normalcy 192; exploration of 194; function of 41; partial documentation of 20; performative use of political technology of the body 126; political lifeblood of 52; radical 40; relationship with day-to-day politics 33; time-based, political work of 182; urgency of being 160; utilising temporality 156 live art, queer 46; (d)alliance with 13 Live Art Research Hub 19, 24, 60, 66, 80–1, 82, 90 live art resources 24; politico-aesthetic 3 live art, time-based 164; approach to normative temporalities 63; explorations of different temporalities 165; temporal gifts of 162; messes about with time 176 live artistic practice resources 68; processes 2 live artists 20, 23, 36, 38, 43, 52, 126 live body art 25, 52, 196; alternative ways of being and knowing 146; embodied suffering 132; extreme 130; political work of 126 live encounters 17, 21, 23, 25, 52–3, 67, 94–5, 120, 127, 174–6, 183, 195, 197; art 1, 3, 18, 22, 36; aesthetic materiality 95; dissident and destabilising 127; documentation of 174–5; enacted 94;

facilitated by knowledge spaces 120; public 63; representation in multiple ways 176 live sociology 2–3, 7–8, 14, 47, 82, 125, 190, 202–3; aesthetics at the heart of practice 52; art of 25, 34; banal affects 182; cartography of 198; challenge for 68; commitments 53, 59; construction of 61; of death 74, 79; desire to construct 17; embodying the art 196; engaging with social realities 191; frameworks for 73; generative capacities of 73, 203; generative strategy for 195; incorporating death 90; key place in pedagogy 120; knowledge that slips 191; methodological tools of 58; methods of 164; multiple takes on live 60; needs live bodies 146; operational remit 203; pedagogies of 193; queering 10; representational capabilities 60; situated knowledges in relation to 16; spatio/temporal politics of 89; working with/in the middle of things 198 Lobel, Brian 19, 24, 25n2, 60, 66, 69–71, 75, 76, 80, 90, 140, 175; see also Fun with Cancer Patients Lomax, Y 8–9, 73, 98, 173, 191, 195 Look at Me Now Mummy 102; see also Vincent Dance Theatre Love, H 11–12, 14–15, 25, 138, 142, 156, 160–3, 171, 184n4, 197 Lury, C 58, 60–2, 79, 154, 195, 203n1 Lytton, Constance 128 Mahony, E 119 Massey, D 63, 154 Massumi, B 5, 36, 72, 88 McWilliam, E 118 memory 63, 109, 125, 134, 135, 155–6, 169–74, 176–7, 184, 197; boxes 78; sense 83–4, 134, 146; studies 131; see also Acts of Memory method(s) 10, 17, 19, 23–4, 53, 67–81, 90, 114, 183, 202; colonial 24; creative 88, 120; curatorial 66; digital 154; embodied 125; feminist critique of 17; heteronormative 24; live sociological 4, 7, 9, 15–16, 19, 58–61, 63, 73, 74–5, 89–90, 94–6, 146, 153, 156, 162, 164, 175–6, 182, 191–3, 195, 198, 203; queer 12, 161; new/alternative 11, 23; practicebased 165–6; reparative 13; time in 154–6, 163, 168, 197–8; walking 169

Index   215 methodological 2, 8, 20, 22, 23, 58; 67, 72–4, 79, 84, 88–9, 94, 154, 163, 183, 190–1, 194–5; crises 190; feminist 12, 20, 127; problems of live art 20; reparative 15 methodology/methodologies 16, 59–60, 75, 156, 196, 198; affective 24; feminist 127; live sociological 6, 24, 95; new/ alternative 11; performative 145; practice-based 22, 104, 156, 165; queer 11–12; scavenger 21 Metherell, L 64, 121n8, 127, 142 Metzger, Gustav 39 Mills, C W 16, 146, 192, 196 Miller, Graeme 1, 25, 32, 43, 50, 62, 147, 154, 156, 165–8, 166–8, 173, 183, 197; see also Track, Beheld, Bassline minor 59; affects 163, 182; becoming 37, 98, 192–3; function 51, 68; key 38, 51; language 193; literature 37, 68, 192–3; maps 199; political work of 193; practices 37–8, 51; register 37, 51 minor art 37–8; political status of 51; potentialities of 68 Morley, L 112–13 Muñoz, J E 15, 142, 156, 160, 163, 177, 184n7, 197 National Review of Live Art 39 neoliberal 5–6; academia 199; cityscape 50; discourses 202; education policies 112; governmentality 24, 36; ideals 41; individualism 118; managerial approaches to progress 171; performance indicators 193; politics 137; regimes of funding distribution 42 neoliberalism 6; late/post-neoliberalism 165 New Labour 54n10, 117 Noise of the Past 63–4 norm(s) 200; aesthetics of hair styling 110; commercial public space 100; disciplinary 19; of ethical practice 81; pedagogical 184n20; social and cultural 74 normalcy: disrupt 192; neoliberal 6 North America 44 North American artists 128, 139 O’Brien, Martin 25, 130, 138–42, 148n9, 155, 160, 196–7; see also Breathe for Me Oliver, S A 128, 131, 134

Open Barbers 110, 111, 121n7 Opie, Catherine 137 O’Sullivan, S 7, 37–8, 51, 67–8, 156, 168 Panagia, D 33, 36, 52, 192 pedagogical 194; artists 96; cultural forms 5, 95; event 110; expectations 194; experiments 10; fiction of progress 97; force of social encounters 99; norm 184n20; politics 196; possibilities 120; project 101; spaces 104 pedagogy/pedagogies 94, 99; aesthetic dimensions 97; against the state 98, 119; collision with aesthetics 95; experience in making 109; experimenting with 111; fierce 24–5, 94–5, 98–9, 120, 193–4; of gender and sexuality 109; ideas on 64; implicate bodies 120; modes of discovery 90; open up new 98; politicised conceptualisation of 193; prescriptive 112; public 5; in public spaces 96; queer 193; radical interdisciplinary 121n6; of social justice 119; space, potential to influence 108 pedagogy/pedagogies, critical 25, 96, 98; debates in 94; in live art and live sociology 120, 193; questions of complicity and dis/stance 119; theoretical tools of 64; tools of 120; traditional 96 pedagogy/pedagogies in live sociology: critical 193 performance 1, 12, 19, 21, 22, 24, 37, 38, 40, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 63, 90, 95, 102, 104, 111–15, 118, 120, 126, 128, 129, 132, 134–6, 138–40, 143, 144, 146, 155, 164, 172, 173, 174, 176, 180, 194, 196, 197; see also FAAB performance art 18, 38, 39, 46, 130, 131 performance artist(s) 21, 41, 47, 118, 132 performance poetry 22, 119, 156, 182, 199–202 Performance Studies 20, 22, 26n8, 126 Phelan, P 67, 130, 136, 174, 176 photographed 20, 44, 71; performances 172–3 photographer 70, 179; French-Hungarian 177; official festival 20; queer 178 photograph(s) 18, 20, 47, 76, 81, 101, 136, 175–6, 178, 180; displayed in public exhibition 70; emotional response from 175; with fish-eye lens 62; viewing 21

216   Index poem 84–9, 119, 156, 157–60, 182, 184n1, 199–202 poetry 22, 90, 112, 114, 194, 196 politicised 45–6; commitment to challenge inequalities and suffering 191; concept of pedagogy 5, 193; practice of pedagogy 95 politics 24, 52, 60, 70, 99, 119, 132, 190, 199; activist 11–12; anti-war, antibourgeois 39; articulation of 173; of the classroom 120; conceptualisations of 192; counter 5; cultural body 140; dayto-day 33; dominant forms of 2, 42; of duration 155; of embodiment 125; of ethical spectatorship 131; global and local 117; global north 23; of the haircut 110; of higher education 202; of hope and encouragement 112; identity 137–8; inseparability from culture 5; LGBT 46; micro- 33, 63, 97; of modern subjectivity 138; neoliberal 137; of (non)representation 71; of participation and presence 43; pedagogical 196; of presence 44, 53; of refusal 114; relationship with art 128; of representation around cancer 176; of selection and valuation 15; sexual 47, 53, 110, 127; small-scale 43; spatio/ temporal, of live sociology 89; of spectatorship 196; trans 137; transform understanding of 162; of uncertainty 196; of witness 130; work of live artists 38; of writing 183 politics of aesthetics 3, 35, 96, 192; definition of 36; operations of 203 politics, queer 46, 51, 53, 59, 159; based on gay pride 161; feminist 9; and generative cultural resource 193 politics, radical 43; counter-hegemonic 32; left 101; of resistance 139 politics of resistance 196; radical 139 pop-up: park (Edible Eastside) 50; salon 100, 110 poststructuralism 68; feminist and queer 126 poststructuralist 11 praxis 11, 13, 22, 24, 38, 112, 159, 191, 193 Puar, J K 138, 147, 159 Puwar, N 9, 15, 22, 58, 60–1, 63, 65–6, 82, 89–90, 125, 153, 182–3, 190–1, 195, 197–9

queer 4, 8, 13, 38; aesthetic 110; affects 156; archives 177, 197; art 74, 137; artists 126, 156, 178; bodies 127, 137–9; cants and cultural codes 177; clubspeak 46; cultural and political identities, expression of 46; culture 47; embodiment 48; engagements with bodies 147; experience for the audience 138; feminism 148; fluid and inclusive mobilisation 47; future 157; game 159; histories 24, 161; hopefulness 203; interruptions 99; liberalism 138, 159; memory 171; modalities 160; past 160–1; photographer 177–8; place to be 51; post-punk scene 130; poststructuralism 126; production, radical site of 49; representation or identity 110; representations 137; resources 191; scholars 176; shaming 182; spaces 41; strategies 142, 196; subjects 51, 138, 161, 163, 177; theorists 11–13, 160, 162–3, 182; time and place 157–8; ways of knowing 98; work 25, 180, 190; writers 50; young person 18 queer approach 53; to knowledge 11; to knowledge production and exchange 120; to temporality 156 queer body artists 40, 48; live 130, 162 queer cultural: expression 48; forms 142; generative resource 193; identities 46; LGBT 47; studies 13; theorists 12 queer encounters 110; space-time 127 queer feminism: conceptual strengths 148 queer feminist approach to embodiment 126; archive 14; approaches to knowledge production and exchange 120; art-based and sociological theories 192; critiques of essentialist accounts of identity 37; left-oriented cultural critics 14; literature 13; politics 9; scholarship 25; theory, resources of 191, 196; theory and practice 10 queer pedagogy 193; fierce 94; Fierce 193 queer politics 46, 59; feminist 9; Fierce interventions 53; time-less spaces vital for 51; UK 159 queer research 190–1; ethnographic 13 Queer Salon 109–10, 111, 120, 121n6, 194 queer temporalities 50, 157, 160, 163; approach to 156; engagements with 197 queer theory 10–13, 25, 38, 98, 127, 156,

Index   217 160, 162, 182; radical political aspirations 159 Queerfest 18, 46–7, 180 queerness 98, 141, 147, 163, 177 queers 158, 160; of colour 177 Rancière, J 3, 15, 33, 35–6, 52, 67, 96–7, 99–100, 121n1, 162, 173, 184n12, 192, 194, 196 reading 14–15, 156, 161, 165, 169, 195; theory 14; turn 13 Reay, D 112, 116, 119 Reinvention Centre 11, 110, 111, 121n5, 194 Reinvention: a Journal for Undergraduate Research 64 reparative approach 169, 195; approach to knowledge production 15; approach to time 156; impulses 195; mode 15, 183; modes of engagement 4, 9, 163, 178; politics 59 representation(s) 5, 7, 8, 20, 21, 24, 32, 36–8, 48, 60, 67–8, 71–3, 90, 94, 98, 105, 174, 176, 191, 202; crisis of 17; failure 24, 60, 68–9, 72; of death 75; queer 110; of pain or suffering 136–7; of cancer 176 representational/unrepresentational 4, 7, 24–5, 32, 52, 59–60, 68–70, 90, 98, 109, 136, 183, 191, 195, 197–8, 202–3; anti13, 32, 137; of queer bodies 127, 137–8; of trauma or suffering 131, 135 Rogoff, I 23, 99, 169, 182, 184n13 Roms, H 38–9 Ross, Monica 25, 33, 156, 170, 172–3, 183, 197 Salcedo, Doris 178–9 satire 112, 194 Savage, M 7, 60, 183, 190 Sayer, D 116, 202 Schneemann, C 128–9 Schneider, R 176, 179 Searle, C 74, 78 Sedgwick, E K 2, 8–9, 13–14, 67, 156, 165, 169, 190, 195 sensory 5, 22, 32, 35, 52, 59, 63–4, 66, 68, 71, 89, 90, 95, 97–8, 104, 111, 120, 125–6, 134, 141, 143–4, 191–2, 194, 196, 198, 202 Serres, M 154 shame 157–8, 160; sexual 161

share(s) 158; concerns 58, 64; difficult affective histories 24; excellence 117; experiences 20, 48–9, 75, 80; investment in liveness 59; live art 2, 13; problems 97; reflections 69; sense of political responsibility180 shared 82; action 119; activities 120; concerns 193; empathy 105; endeavours 4; exhibition space 18, 66; experience 99; findings 90; language 200; perspectives 99; qualities 13; spaces 81; temporality 118; world 158 sharing 80; co-sharing of space 81; image 18; opinions and experiences 109; the research process 65; resisting didactic modes of 66; of stories 81, 180 Shildrick, M 144 Simmel, G 2 Situationist International 49 social encounters 48, 99, 111, 192; adjusting the spatio-temporal rhythms 192; aesthetically informed 99; world 65 Sofaer, Joshua 42, 176 Sointu, E 72, 144, 182 Sontag, S 131, 174 spatio-temporalities: alternative 42; disturbing 12; normative 182; single system of 153 spectator 15, 25, 43, 45, 67, 80, 94, 131–4, 136, 141, 145–6, 176, 194, 196 spectatorship 15, 97, 126, 130–2, 139, 144, 196 Spivak, G 137, 174 Stan’s Cafe 19, 25n8, 50 Stengers, I 114–15, 119 Stewart, K 162–3, 168, 195, 197 Students at Work: Learning to Labour in Higher Education 64 subcultural: producers 12; production 13; scene 13 subcultures 13, 178; gay 184n6; LGBT 47; minority 12 subjective becomings 35, 37, 94, 193; codings 35; experiences 90, 109; ontologies 160; possibilities 47, 52; space/time 80 teenaged patients 71; workshop participants 75 teenager(s) 173; transgender 177; treatment for cancer 69; see also Fierce Press Gang

218   Index Tell the Kitchen 69–70, 72, 80, 175–6 temporality/temporalities 15, 52, 90, 173, 183, 202; access to other 164; alternative 23, 63; archive, analytic 47; capitalist 164; coming to terms with 162; delayed 102; of diverse media 181; of durational encounters 156; of endurance 141; flow of 111; interwoven 182; linear 162; live 197; of liveness 203; methodological 163; multiple 155; normative 63; potential to run counter to the chrononormative 182; problematic 194; queer 50, 156–7, 160; queer engagements with 197; ramifications beyond pedagogic relations 97; routine 51; shared 118; of trauma 155; unpredictable 9; usual markers suspended 169; work creatively with 34; see also spatiotemporalities temporality/temporalities, exploration of 17; live art’s 165 temporality/temporalities of live practice 25, 62–3, 148, 153, 203; engaged in documenting 174 temporality/temporalities of research and writing 199; of live research 79, 154 textual: representations 21; valorised over somatic epistemologies 176 The Atlas Group 174 The Class Sketch 115, 116, 117 The Hair Cut Before the Party (THCBTP) 1, 100, 102, 110 The Idea of a University 18, 22, 65–6, 90 Tilley, L 23, 67, 190 Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine 1, 43, 156, 170–3, 183; see also Edvardsen, Mette Tolia-Kelly, D P 75, 182 touch 1, 101–2, 126, 143–5, 147, 196, 198 Toxic Titties 45 Track 1, 43–4, 50, 147, 156, 165, 166–9, 173, 183, 197; see also Miller, Graeme trans 132; content 138; friendly 110; politics 137 uncertain 195; experiences 203; opinions 104; outcomes 108; queer ways of knowing 98; renditions 173; time 153

uncertainty 8–9, 67, 90; of multiple social realities 203; politics of 196 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights 33, 172–3 university 64, 115; Birmingham 5; of Bristol 39; classrooms 194; exhibitions 22; formal ethics 20; picket lines 101; spatial organisation of classrooms 110; staff and students 66; tuition fees 184n23; see also The Idea of a University University of Warwick 111, 121n5; Department of Sociology 26n8; Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL) 121n6; political generation and regeneration 65; Research Development Fund 25n5; Sociologists Talking 65; Teaching Grid 64; see also Reinvention Centre Uprichard, E 154, 197 Urry, J 2, 58 Vass, Greygory 110 VB46 45; see also Beecroft, Vanessa Vincent, C 102, 104, 121n3 Vincent Dance Theatre (VDT) 19, 95, 102, 103, 104, 106–8, 120, 194; Archive and Engagement workshops 107, 111 Vives, M 23 Volcano, Del LaGrace 137, 178, 185n24 Warwick Commission 4 Wetherell, M 72–3, 98, 144 What Happens at the Festival Stays at the Festival 18, 22, 47, 180–1 Whiteread, Rachel 178–9 Wiegman, R 13–15, 169 Williams, R 5, 36, 120, 153, 155, 161 Willis, P 5, 17 witness(ing) 1, 13, 15, 25, 33, 35, 45, 74, 80–1, 84, 86, 126, 130–2, 134–6, 138, 141, 146, 155, 176, 179, 196 Wolkowitz, C 101 Women’s Studies Quarterly 12 Young, Ann Liv 49, 143 Young, I M 127 young people with cancer 70; professionals supporting 78