Excerpt from Katia's 20 minute presentation for Do The Right Thing ! ~ DAI's 3 day graduation lectures marathon, July 2015.

Limiting Metaphors, Enabling Constraints

Summary

Sharing an audio clip from a work-in-progress, Katia Barrett asks:

"If metaphor enables by enlarging the domain of possibilities, linking one kind of phenomenon to another in fruitful comparison, and constraint enables by restricting the space of possibilities so that only the most viable self-organizing systems or models will emerge, how is it possible to use this same methodology within the sphere of art practice?"

Referring to a text by Katherine Hayles, “Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari” which looks into a space between two notions of metaphor and constraints, Barrett shares some background information about the source of the audio clips she played and brings up her research questions. The audio was composed of clips from proceedings from the court case, “State of Florida vs. George Zimmerman” in 2013. The defense attorney Don West repeatedly questioned the victim Trayvon Martin’s only witness Rachel Jeantel in a way that aimed to delegitimize her credibility on account of ‘broken’ English. Repeatedly asked to “speak clearly” and repeat the words Martin (the victim) spoke, this interrogation functioned as a way of changing the voice of the victim to the voice of an aggressor. Barrett’s audio research and ongoing work on how the construction of a voice though a kind of “learning that has no consciousness of being learned” also reveals the way that voice modulation can change the meaning of what is being said. She’s interested in the notion of the extended mind and how the lawyer is a figure who can expand possibilities within a set structure (to include victim as part of expanded self), and asks how it would be possible to utilize the position of the lawyer. Barrett sees “language as a manipulation of the learning process” and sees tools of the lawyer and reformulation of expression as potential tools in an artistic methodology. Connecting this way of extending agency beyond oneself, she considers the natural abilities of the blue fin tuna, which makes its environment conducive and beneficial to its survival.

For Maria Hlavajova, this work-in-progress “sounds like a series of exercises about how to establish truth.” Considering again the “We Are Here” group, where the field of art is the only way to access political life, Hlavajova wonders: who is the audience? Reza Negarestani outlines the idea that under regime of modernity there are exclusive definitions of viewer, observer, and spectator and this prompts Hlavajova to ask, “what subjectivities do we have in mind of those who surround us? Is it a participant? A consumer? A user?” It’s also possible, she concludes, that these subjectivities might be found after the work has been made public.

Marina Vishmidt remarked that by juxtaposing the universality of the law with the situatedness of the individual, Katia makes an argument about power. She makes an analogy between the lawyer and a tuna, turning the lawyer into another biological entity and bringing the ethics of universality behind the law itself to life. This is a universality that exists through inequality and exploitation and Barrett is using “biological, neurological operators to break it down.” In relation to Barrett’s research, Vishmidt brought up another work that used voice analysis to study legal procedures, such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s “Aural Contract”, a work that “addresses the way that norms of language are standardized and used to condemn those in a position where they can’t challenge those norms and are materially dominated.”

Bassam el Baroni remarked that Barrett’s area of research “binding metaphors and constraints together to create a potentiality for reaching one’s goals within constraints is very realistic approach - when it comes to question of the law,” and this brings him back to Lyotard and the idea of the différend. El Baroni clarifies, “the différend, by Lyotard’s definition is when someone suffers a wrong but is deprived of the means to prove it. The legitimating language happens in an idiom that is not compatible with the victim and doesn’t understand each party’s specificity.” Since the différend has to exist, there will never be a universal law and there will always be a victim. El Baroni says that “it will never be perfect. We also have to surrender to this imperfection.” He considers Barrett’s approach as a way of “naturalizing the différend…through this very beautiful metaphor, and seeing this as a constraint, accommodating the idea of a kind of metamorphosis of voice, identity, subjectivity towards surpassing the différend.”

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