Thomas Jellis
The notion of experiment is increasingly attracting a certain cachet within and beyond academia. Perhaps what is most striking about this interest in, and proliferation of, experiments is that they are no longer understood to be the domain of the sciences, nor of a narrowly exclusive range of avant-garde aesthetic practices. Although experiments are still sometimes looked upon as ethically ambiguous (if not dangerous), various spaces, practices and events are increasingly being described as experimental. This is as pervasive in pop culture as it is in academia. For instance, turn on the TV and witness the fawning over the latest experimental chef. Or look at the huge grant for the recently established social science ‘lab’ at your university. It might even be claimed that, like the injunction to be critical in the 1990s, the injunction to be experimental has become one of the defining refrains of the early twenty-first century and certainly contemporary research in the social sciences.
Within this context, it becomes important to investigate the ways in which experiment is mobilized and to what ends. There are many things at stake here, not least of which is the value of experiment, especially when its currency is in danger of being devalued through the proliferation of the term. That is to say, if the notion of experiment is expanded to include ever more things, what happens to its specificity? Moreover, what kind of analytical purchase does it provide? My own research has sought to bear witness to this ever-increasing plurality of experimenting, a ‘something/happening’ that is gathering force and gaining traction through diverse energies. Crucially, I have sought to position myself as both investigator of how this experimental inflection is taking place and, in a very real sense through my own experimenting, to become a vector of the inflection itself. As much as my research seeks to foreground the new spaces and logics of experiments that are emerging, I am also interested in putting these ideas to work – to see how I too can experiment.
I am drawn to the notion of reclamation to think through this burgeoning experimentalism. By this I do not mean ‘taking back what was confiscated, but rather learning what it takes to inhabit’ (Stengers 2008a: 58); learning what can be done anew, with an experimental approach that is no longer tethered to the sciences. Crucial to what follows is an acknowledgement that these alternative experiments, however considered – ‘extra-scientific’ (Vasudevan 2007), ‘ethico-aesthetic’ (Guattari 1995), ‘wild’ (Lorimer and Driessen 2014) or simply uncategorizable – do not conform to the model of experiment as concerned with hypothesis testing. Such experiments disrupt the very notion of what it means to experiment, making no ‘clear distinction between the terms “experience” and “experiment”’ (Stengers 2008b: 109).
Although it carries with it a good deal of epistemic baggage, not least its association with positivism, reclaiming experiment is an opportunity to reflect on the ends of experiment and to think about how certain forms of experimentation serve to redefine problems for researchers. In this essay I want to outline how experiment may facilitate a flexing, or disruption, of ways of thinking. Following calls to document and reflect on ‘innovative forms of methodological experimentations’ (Dwyer and Davies 2010: 95), what follows is an attempt to consolidate outputs from an ever-increasing methodological repertoire to suggest how an experimental approach might be cultivated. I do so by reflecting on two examples of my own modest experiments, which might be characterized as participating and relaying. This comes out of a research project that examined the relations between geography and experiment (Jellis 2013, 2015). In large part, the impetus for this was my contention that there are new spaces of experimenting that are worthy of examination as a part of a renewal of experimentation within geographical thinking. The empirical remit of such a project consisted of ethnographic investigations of a loose constellation of laboratories, across Berlin (Insititut für Raumexperimente), Brussels (FoAM), London (Office of Experiments) and Montreal (SenseLab and Topological Media Lab), through which to examine experimenting.
The first way I want to explore my own attempts at experimenting is by way of participation. Much has been written about participatory research and related ideas of co-production, not to mention engagement and inclusivity. Yet this kind of work has rarely theorized how any research is always already an ongoing participation with the world, rather than something that can be chosen or selected. This is a participation that unfolds by ‘becoming affected and inflected by encounters’ (McCormack 2008: 2). Participating at sites, for me, involved a range of activities – talking, reading, designing, cooking, walking, foraging, choreographing – and I came to embrace the awkward role of not knowing quite what I was attending to, which others who have undertaken ethnographic research may relate to. My affirmative stance was quite literal; I always said ‘yes’ to suggestions and became involved in all kinds of projects. As such, I was enrolled into these experimental spaces in a number of ways. Some of my work appeared at an art exhibition in Berlin; an essay I had written was published in a collaborative book; I became part of an editorial board for one of the lab’s journals, where I was also involved in the translation of texts; I represented another collective at a book launch and produced internal reports of events; I was also involved in copy-editing on a manuscript from another experimental group. Much of this work, then, was textual, but nevertheless it indicates the ways in which I became part of – if only temporarily – these experimental groups and practices. More than this, though, it is about not imposing arbitrary limits on participation; we do not need to stick to what we are comfortable with (and for me, this included, in particular, foraging and dancing). It is also important to remind ourselves that participation precedes recognition, it preceded me saying ‘yes’, as ‘our awareness is always of an already ongoing participation in an unfolding relation’ (Massumi 2002: 231). Whether we like it or not we are always already participating, and so the very question of what it means to participate is something with which one can but experiment.
How then to respond to such a suggestion? My way of working this through has been with the invocation of attentive participation, which builds on work to recalibrate participant observation (see Thrift 2000). Although we might look to extend what counts as participation, it is crucial that it is not participation just for the sake of it. As such, I tried to experiment with participant observation by questioning what I could participate in and how this might be refashioned to foreground attention in particular ways. This follows through any research process, such that any attempt to outline the unfolding relations and emergent events involves constructing lures for attention – where attention is a means of ‘becoming able to add, not subtract’ (Stengers 2008b: 99) – to make more of ‘the feelings, the codes, the awkward intensities, the architected space, the architecture of time’ of fieldwork (Dewsbury 2009: 326). Building on ethnographic research and its descriptive qualities, such an approach looks to amplify the manifold experiences of any kind of fieldwork in a way that does not seek recourse to fidelity but to re-animation. This is part of an ‘ethos of stretching the means by which research is done and striving to continue as experiments fail or always come short in the attempt’ (Dewsbury 2009: 323). Research outcomes might, then, be less about what we have found or extracted, and more about what we have done – and struggled with – and the affective swash of these encounters and their after-effects.
The second, and related, way I have been thinking about experimenting is about the researcher as a relay, or an impresario. In my own research on experimental spaces, one thing that I could contribute to the sites was my awareness of other, similar organizations that I was already working with or in the process of negotiating access of some sort. Something that emerged as an important way of experimenting was the modest undertaking of connecting disparate experimental groups. This kind of work does not fall within the criteria for measured outputs that many of us worry about – or at least those of us based in the UK – and yet it can serve to radically reconfigure the working practices of hitherto only loosely associated sites. Of course, this might well not be the case; there is every chance that an encounter will result in silence; not necessarily failure but certainly no follow-up or future connections. The researcher as impresario might, at first blush, sound grand – portentous even – and yet it is a risky, uncelebrated, decidedly unsexy endeavour that offers a profoundly different way of thinking about comparative research.
In this sense, this process of connecting made explicit that these various labs are not so much distinct sites as different ways in which the things I am interested in can relate to one another. And it was through this process of connecting that my research started to trouble the notion of a coherent ‘experimental space’ across these seemingly distinct ‘field-sites’. By putting in touch one experimental lab with another, they were able to seek out synergies, highlight differences, and pool techniques for experimenting. But it also helped me to think differently about these groups – through what I termed experimental ecologies. To think experiment ecologically is to attend to the ways in which experiment always escapes particular sites. And so by fostering these connections between ‘my’ different field-sites, or put differently, relaying the various matters of concern from one to the next, I was able to amplify the ways in which experimental hubs exceed particular locales.
While it might be a big claim for an interdisciplinary method, experimenting can serve as an instance of – and an ethos for – reclaiming or shifting the energies of a field in productive ways. To be sure, experimenting has the potential to be disruptive of repertoires of practices and of modes of thinking. While it has been invoked in sometimes uncritical ways, which can suggest a certain heroism, a focus on experiment and the experimental cannot be dismissed as a passing intellectual fad as it raises crucial questions for how the social sciences proceed methodologically. More specifically, my concern has been with how experiment is a ‘searching for a new way of going on’ (Thrift 2008: 223). The question of experiment might continue to remain elusive, but this is no bad thing. Instead, in this age of ‘experimentality’, to experiment in thought and method is to reconfigure what constitutes the world.
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