In-between Theories is a system for connecting the dots. Race is central to the issues we are investigating, the dots we are connecting. White privilege has also privileged white experiments, even as those experiments attempt to step outside of privilege; to circumvent, ignore, rise above — all those things that don’t actually matter, that have no agency for the privileged. Privilege consumes everything in its wake. Artists are no different. Voices rise, statements arise, when privilege consumes them.
Regarding artmaking, I’ve been confusing “experiment” with “other.” Perhaps because otherness is chiefly a commodity, has value as a commodity rather than as an identifier. Otherness as a trait? That refers to cops and profiling. Centers and margins. We are done with that model. What’s replaced it? No centers, no margins, no “others.” But there is still privilege and there are still quantifiable demographics. Neighborhoods. There are no others, only difference. But privilege likes to have “others,” even when it critiques social ills.
This becomes simpler when you take away everything that’s not part of the experimental. Or put more positively, when you consider what it is that I’m discussing and that we have to work with:
Includes:
- Realness
- Constant change
- Molecules in motion
- Intervention
- Interaction
- Calling out
- Stating the moment
- Venn diagramming
- Same difference
- Same same
- Past lives
- Flowing
- Melding
- Grey areas
- Pentimento
Used to include/previous methodologies:
- Control of context
- Self-realized representations
- First-person narrative
- Coming out story
- Origin story
- Rejection/reaction
- Fighting/resistance
- De-centering
- Marginalization theories
- Depth
- Structural
- Erasure
- Guns
- Commodification
- Post-structural
- Justice-freedom-democracy
- Hierarchies
- Reason
Actors:
- Corporations
- Peasants
- Workers
- Ancestors
- Practitioners of mindfulness
- Outsiders/outliers
- Science-fictionalists
- Crowds
- Inflections
- Fakes
- Infection
- Temporariness
- Height
- Systems
- Animalcules
- Transparency/transpendency
- Ray guns
- Com-oddities
- Non-structuralism
- Re-location
- Justice-freedom-democracy