Re: <nettime> Claire Bishop?s Game: Subversive Compliance

[David Garcia <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk>]

Hi Alan, 

I agree that Claire Bishop has made important contributions to scholarship and discussion in this domain, not least in the thorny question of the specator’s position in participatory practice. I think the lively discussions on the list is testimony to the value of her work. However we would be doing Bishop a disservice if her work was simply taken at face value. My interest in engaging with her work was not based on critiquing her work for failing to deliver of some totalising vision. Ommissions are an essental part of any theorisation. In Bishop’s case I think that the ommissions are particularly instructive. My interested was in seeing whether something might be learned from the highly spescific constellation of practices she sidestepped. It led me to wonder whether Bishop’s work ultimately follows the logic of the social turn by seeking to shake the institutional status quo to its foundations. And I concluded that (taken in the round) she does not. I wold go further and argue that (under the guise of radical critique) she uses rhetorical analysis and scholarship to lend institutional power tacit support. We might aply the age old litmus test to Bishop’s work by asking to what extent it succeeds in comforting the aflicted whilst afllicting the comfortable.
       
Best David
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d a v i d  g a r c i a
d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk
http://new-tactical-research.co.uk






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