Inquiry

The tendency to turn discourses into monoliths (“science,” “technology,” “the economy”) evades reckoning with the layered foundations that underpin all forms of knowledge. In becoming monolithic, knowledge systems are posited as rational, natural, or innocent, obscuring their often patchy, unstable, or extractive origins. Even if these simplified terms can be useful fictions, artists and scholars resist their entrenchment by using varied strategies: questioning the neutrality with which such knowledge is imparted; impeding its progress by causing friction or failing to participate; reappropriating its most common tools; or adding uninvited contributions to the dominant knowledge base. Whose voices flow seamlessly into dominant paradigms, and whose are out of tune? How can the cultures that have produced these knowledges be made visible?