INTERPRETATION AND INTERVENTION

This book is the result of a longstanding concern with the status and modalities of contemporary theoretical practice and, more specifically, the ways in which it engages with the intertwining themes of history, politics and aesthetics. Written over the course of nearly a decade, all of the chapters testify – to varying degrees and from diverse vantage points – to a profound and unresolved malaise with many of the established models of philosophical thinking. They each address particular issues and were written in specific contexts, as well as in two different languages and cultural milieus (francophone and anglophone). For this reason, they can very much be read autonomously. However, they all bear the marks of an ongoing preoccupation with the logic of practice of intellectual work, as well as with the possibility of radically reconfiguring it. In the pages that follow, I would like to tease out some of these deeper methodological concerns, as well as articulate the ways in which they contribute to a rethinking of the historical relationship between art and politics.

One of the central preoccupations of this book can best be described in terms of a heuristic distinction between two types of theoretical practice. An interpretation, first of all, abides by the rules of an established discourse. It works within the general normative, praxeological and epistemological framework of an institutionalised set of activities. An intervention, by contrast, seeks to contest these operative norms and guiding parameters in order to introduce alternative forms of intellectual practice. There are, of course, varying degrees of interpretation and intervention. The major difference between them remains, however, that an interpretation plays by the rules of a recognisable social ritual, whereas an intervention challenges them.

The activity that we might schematically refer to as normal theory strongly encourages the work of interpretation, and a weighty set of institutional mechanisms, social norms and professional pressures profoundly and often imperceptibly format intellectual work. These forces are anchored in a deep history that has normalised particular activities in which a set of self-evident givens has become sedimented. Interpretations, as innovative as they may be, nevertheless work within the implicit and unquestioned boundaries of a particular theoretical universe.