Know-how and No-How

Notes from: Know-how and No-How: stopgap notes on “method” in visual art as knowledge production by Sarat Maharaj (published in Art and Research, spring 2009)

“Visual Art as Knowledge Production” involves sundry epistemic engines and contraptions that we might broadly refer to as “Thinking Through the Visual”. What do such modes of knowing entail? Perhaps method is less about given, handed-down procedures than about approaches that have to be thrashed out, forged again and again on the spot, impromptu in the course of the art practice-research effort. Perhaps method is not so much readymade and received as “knocked together for the nonce” - something that has to be invented each time with each research endeavour.

Deleuze came to explore the sense of an unfolding flux between the “poles” in all its phases and variability through the notion of “any space whatever” - drawing on a series of examples from film. In his critique, “any space whatever” takes on the force of method: it embodies the concept of “singularity” that cuts across the poles of the universal and particular dissolving them. This notion seems to lie with Ferdinand Gonseth who had tussled with the “any space whatever” in mathematics, with rules that undergo change, with process and contingency. In the framework of a non-Aristotelian logic, Bachelard uses the term for an alternative tack to the Kantian principle of the “universal” - to bridge the gap between thinking.

It is not only about thinking by means of the visual, via its sticky thick as it were. It is about unpacking it, taking apart its components, scouring its operations. What I am trying to finger eventuates not so much in the well-trodden terrain of the academic disciplines or in the so-called gaps, chinks and cracks between them or in any designated “interdisciplinary/ transdisciplinary” belt. Rather it is a force in its own right, always incipient in “whatever” spaces where intimations of unknown elements, thinking probes, spasms of non-knowledge emerge and come into play. It is distinct from the circuits of know-how. It is the rather unpredictable surge and ebb of potentialities and propensities - the flux of no-how. The term is Samuel Beckett’s. No-how embodies indeterminacy, an “any space whatever” that brews up, spreads, inspissates.

Why speak of “production” when it smacks of factories, surpassed industrial modes, heavy metal sites and plants, the assembly line’s mechanical regime - standardizing components at odds with the vagaries of art practice? The usage is to help distinguish it sharply from the domain of “knowledge transfer”. The latter chugs on primarily with acts of transmission. It is about shifting already-made bodies of thought and data, about handling and filtering existing information. The emphasis is on both reproducing data and passing it on, a DNA Xerox process - the logic of replication. “Production”, on the other hand, centres on a transformative crossover that throws up a surplus, that churns out something more than what was there to begin with. In this sense it harbours the possibility of spawning something “other” than what already exists - the logic of invention and innovation. It is about generating data, new objects and ways of knowing.

The Lab model gives impetus to mapping new, emerging relations between work, labour, creativity and scientific-technological practices - interactions increasingly shaping the structures of contemporary production and living. It tends to show up the Academy more as a “self-organizing space” than as the transmission belt of “knowledge transfer” based on the authority of the master practitioner. This tilt becomes pronounced with “outsourcing” - practitioners plugging into hi-tech know-how beyond the Academy walls for the construction and execution of their work. But it puts into question the Lab model itself - the older view of the Academy as the self-sufficient Pan-Epistemion.