militant research

(and friendship)
In love, in friendship […] there is neither objectuality nor instrumentalism. Nobody restrains him or herself from what the tie can do, nor is it possible to leave it uncontaminated. One does not experience friendship […] in an innocent way: we all come out from them reconstituted. These potencias – love and friendship – have the power to constitute, qualify, and remake the subjects they catch […] We usually refer to this process of friendship […] with the […] name of composition. Unlike articulation, composition is not merely intellectual […] It is based neither in interests nor in criteria of convenience (political or other). Unlike accords and alliances (strategic or tactic ones, partial or total) founded in textual agreements, composition is more or less inexplicable, and goes beyond anything that can be said about it. In fact, at least while it lasts, it is much more intense than any merely political or ideological compromise (Colectivo Situaciones 2003).
When we speak to one another, something is opened up between the two of us. It is not a coalescion of you and I, it is something else. It is an alterity, an accumulation that always makes an excess of its parts, it is an attribute described by Gilles Deleuze (1987) as an additive: an “and”. It is you and I and our voices and our words and our bodies and our gestures and our gazes and our expressions and the air which we inhale and exhale. And it is more than this. It is our spatial and temporal environment: how our clothes rustle and the faint smell of sweat and snow and my synchronous desire to be warm and to feel the fresh air and the weight of my bag against my leg. It is the irritating song on the radio and the just audible whirr of the tape recorder and the sharp retort of a car door slamming that makes your eye flicker minutes later. It is your curiosity in me and our shared conviviality. It is the flow and stutter of our exchange. It is the research form that I finally worked up the courage to ask you to sign only a few minutes ago and it is the bureaucratic apparatus that it recalls. It is the memory of that disjunctive moment that still resonates between us.
All of these aspects and countless others comprise an ecology that is finite eventually, but in this moment it feels like it has no limit. But apparently, somewhere, is its event horizon.
Without knowing this event horizon, without finding this edge, how does this ecology translate into the relationship between us? The fact that I am interviewing you, my friend, I am asking you questions, I am guiding your answers with subtle movements of approval or confusion that I’m unconscious of as they traverse my face. You are not a stranger to me, we are attuned to one another. And I, as much as you, take my cues from your words and movements. We co-constitute and “contaminate” one another in this dynamic of interviewer and interviewee. Unmaking and reproducing the subjectivities and roles we are performing: roles that, at the same time as they trace out a tension, seem insignificant somehow. And it is this simultaneous dynamic that affects how we relate to one another before, during and after this interviewing process. A way of regarding each other that both syncopates and stretches out the rhythms of our movements, our words and our disclosures, oscillating between the ease of friendship and the unease of intellectual objectification.
When this dynamic signifies the crux of our encounter here, then what are the consequences in the sense of a constructing a method, an ethics of interviewing and of research? How is it possible to navigate between the bonds of friendship and the requirements of critical enquiry? How can I recognise and respect our feelings of camaraderie, our solidarity with one another and dually maintain a distance that doesn’t immediately instrumentalise you as another case study, detached from your own context, your history, your desires and your fears? How can I, at the same time your friend and a researcher, play out these dyadic roles while still being self-reflexive enough to concede the presence of this implicit power struggle. How can I do so without allowing such structures of power to paralyse me or how I relate to you? And how might I communicate this encounter and its myriad tensions and torsions without translating them into the alienating and elitist languages of intellectual discourses (in a manner we might call non-specialist)? 
 
Perhaps one response may be found within militant research: the “theoretical and practical work oriented to co-produce the knowledges and modes of an alternative sociability” (Colectivo Situaciones 2003). The Colectivo Situaciones write that when practicing militant research the researcher (the research collective),
cannot exist without seriously investigating [her]self, without modifying [her]self, without reconfiguring [her]self in the social practices in which [she] takes part, without reviewing the ideals and values [she] holds dear, without permanently criticizing [her] ideas and readings (2003).
During this interview or research encounter, I, like you, am reconfigured in numerous ways. Moving in accord with this reconfiguration I must investigate myself, my investments, my desires and my values. Not only you and I but also our friendship is reconfigured, and our roles and subjectivities within in because we co-produce one another. This in turn effects how my research is assembled and its organisation; shaping how I articulate myself, the content of my writing and vitally, how I distribute and disseminate the material culmination of this labour. In the process of interviewing – in researching – there is, as the Colectivo Situaciones propose, “objectuality” and “instrumentalism”. There are “accords” and “alliances”. There is “political or ideological compromise”.
But there is also “composition”. As in friendship, there is necessarily an inexplicable element to what we create together. A sometimes careful, sometimes careless composition that is a bricolage of intellectual and affective events. Made up of schisms and commons, of self-investments and convenience but also of genuine love, hospitality and fraternity. This ecology engenders and is engendered through the roles we perform in our research encounter, the knowledges we compose together via our conversations and experiences. And it is this, my friend that I might say forms the ethics of our enquiry: layers upon layers of experiences together, of moments and gestures that will always leave an imprint upon whatever comes out of this process. An imprint with a particular bias and a particular virtuosity.
anja kanngieser
Colectivo Situaciones (2003) On the researcher-militant. (trans.) Touza, S. Transversal. <a href="http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivosituaciones/en">http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/col…</a>
Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (1987) Dialogues. (trans) Tomlinson, H. and Habberjam, B. London, Athlone Press. 2008-06-28T09:03:17Z 41 true militant research

2008-07-10T22:29:34Z