A Residual
The Glossary of Common Knowledge (GCK) is the first volume of a compilation of art terminology that differs substantially from what is found in the existing literature on art. It constitutes a five-year research project by Moderna Galerija (MG+MSUM) in the framework of L’Internationale’s program “The Uses of Art.” The text is a transcription of my contribution to the seminar on “Other Institutionality.” 2017
As a non-capitalist institution in a late-capitalist society that is managed by different regulatory funding bodies, I have to think about who assesses us, how we get assessed, how our production is measured and quantified, who has the authority to decide, and on whose behalf those decisions are made. How do we make decisions when the public does not have an agency? And who claims that agency? I do not regard institutions and museums as having inalienable rights to keep existing and go on ad infinitum regardless of what they do. My questions are not institution-centered; they are not posed from the inside, and it is not about survival or preparing for more challenging times. My question is immaterial. It is about curiosity—a state of not knowing and being fragile.
The institution must constantly perform and be available to the present, not to enlighten as its history would have it, but to be under the light, a representative and neophiliac, lacking urgency. So this kind of “presencing” suppresses time and prefers a perfunctory treatment of its interests, where there is little possibility for an institution to allow itself to be transformed by the activities it commits to. If institutional time is not only the present, how do we tell stories in it?
Institutional opacity could be registered as a sign of a retreat from the public, and we can no longer do certain things the way we did four years ago; we had to move some activities away from the spotlight. It is how we have been operating at SALT. and many institutions are in a similar predicament. Having a mental construct of an institution as a sturdy and steady distribution of functions of research and output, similar to a monastery and a church—the dark and the light—brackets out the question of constituents within that opposition. What can stay hidden in what is opaque from the public? How long should it remain invisible and protected from public scrutiny? Should that urgent necessity absorb it? What is visible in the light, and if it is a concession, what form of a concession may the visible be? However, withdrawal is not disgraceful; we are not to be ashamed of fermenting away from the threatening gaze of the Order. Our problem may be how the programs we pursue in the shade and the dark come back to us and how we are considered. Like any privately funded public service institution, we are in a paradox. Those who fund us are not those to whom we are accountable.
Furthermore, those you care for are not sufficiently equipped to impact those who fund you. The situation is more opaque within the public domain, even if the mechanisms are similar. Both operate in a field with no public endorsement and abide by the particulars of instant assessment; short-term efficiency changes priorities and attends to the moments in which they operate.
There is no resolution to the tension between opposing ideas and models of historical institutions, contemporary capitalism, and conceptions of the public good. How do we become aligned with the public? The point is not to interpret and present the world as a commodity but to be a part of it. We need to accept the consequences of this co-ownership and be a part of it.
I doubt that the significant question is about private or public initiatives as long as the overwhelming concept is about the receiver and audience, a viewer or a visitor who lacks the capacity and tools to articulate their desires. This absence of a reciprocal transmission between an institution and its outside constantly needs addressing. What remains outside doesn’t have a place for the desire to be recognized unless it’s invited to perform in the image of itself for a designated time. Seamless spaces are offered between the customer and the provider in the charade of market-tested projects as the possible public is extracted from the equation and replaced by the processes of managerial quantification. Our “benchmark” is not media coverage, a head count, or aggregated data analysis. We cannot assess the complexity of a program at the moment of its actualization. This is not a murky relativism that makes the most of each subjectivity because it exists. It is all about stimulating and provoking undisciplined curiosity. I want to speak briefly about a concept to reflect on our practice. The hardest thing is to know what you are from behind your desk and well behind the entrance door of the institution. Worse, we have a normalized, naturalized capacity for self-affirmation and counter-affirmation through colleagues, our sense of self-righteousness, and our clinging to narratives in which we carry a robust tradition of practice and the burden of history.
I’m curious to determine what accumulates outside our self-appointed authority and the conditions we constantly suppress. At the same time, despite all odds, our attendance at SALT has been impressive and has increased each year since we opened. We were recently analyzed by an independent research company on the so-called “social return on the investment.” The results were phenomenal. And don’t ask me what this all means. I’ve been told it is apparently great, yet I ask how these results may translate into wrong ideas about funding and capitalization. Press and social media, along with a long-form essay once or twice a year, are beneficial, but is that all? What is it that we cannot measure? Is that something an institution can question? That we are not alone in the world? Did our ideas have more impact than expected? Have we touched those we never expected? We may be a part of the environments we are hardly aware of. Our users benefit from things we don’t even know we are offering. Their accumulations of knowledge, their accumulations of sense, and their accumulations of curiosity—we are unable to quantify most of these experiences. So, I’m not interested in the big picture or the professional-to-professional activity today.
Looking for this thing that I cannot name, I stumbled on the idea of “a residual,” not “the residual,” yet “a residual.” I wanted to pick up on an amorphous concept, a residual risk, that can be considered a negligible error. As they use it in mathematics, a residual is a variance between an observation and a computation or between two observations—a negligible differential. It is the kind of differential that does not affect the outcome and is not computable, so it can’t be foreseen. So, this variance is often expected and disregarded. It escapes evaluation because it’s negligible. Hence, a residual is overlooked by an assessment methodology and ignored by the narrative machinery.
When I started to seek other uses of residual, my ignorance hit me. How could I forget Raymond Williams and his use of residual in the book Marxism and Literature (1977)? For him, a residual is about the complex layering and the process of sedimentation of culture as it faces change. In his short essay, he uses, rather broadly, two other terms, the concepts of “the emergent” and “the dominant.” The majority of society embodies dominant understandings, such as heterosexual normativity. According to Williams, the dominant could embody aspects of a residual, that is, elements of the dominant that are normalized and projected onto the contemporary. Let us not mistake Williams’ residual with heritage. A residual is more challenging to place. It is not merely a question of language. A residual can continue to linger because it can be neglected or ignored. In this case, a residual could be marginal. A residual in Williams’ view is a range of beliefs and customs that look quite antediluvian. These beliefs and customs often stem from various social formations, political and religious orientations, life positions, and ideologies. The social conditions may not be around any longer. The authority may be removed, yet a residual lingers through. They may be ancient, coming from history. Yet a residual has a very particular trait of staying through change. I don’t intend to level the potential of the concept.
The difference between a residual and a heritage is obvious. Heritage can be turned into an apparatus or an ideological weapon, which can become an instrument of oppression, whereas a residual escapes the capacity to impact harm similarly. You may not take the argument seriously. What good is it? If you cannot name it and turn it into a tool, this may be precisely the position that I hope to offer here. According to Williams, a residual is the influence old cultural practices—consciously or unconsciously—have when existing in a contemporary moment. What is the fundamental difference between the residual and the archaic? The archaic may be abandoned or silenced and may have an object status.
Meanwhile, residuals may be active in shaping things without being dominant. I would say that a residual has an effect on the notion of the private and public—not in terms of space ownership but in terms of public realm practices retained. So, the dominant culture can’t do anything about this, whether it approves or not.
Trying to figure out different uses of the term in other fields, I came upon a use that satisfied me most; in chemistry, the residue is what remains after a chemical process, like the substance that remains on the surface, in a container, or in a test tube that cannot be removed easily. So the term itself comes from the Latin residuum (“a remainder”), which refers to its qualities not only as a reminder but also as what is left behind. There’s a difference between what remains (residuus) and residue, which is what is left behind (which comes from residēre). I have no intention of engaging in this kind of exotic, self-serving discussion about the etymology or defining borders so I can present an alternative to them. Here, critical thinking lies in distinguishing between the agency of residuus, which persists, and residere, which lingers. This is the difference between Raymond Williams’ notion of cultural residue. Williams understands a residual as a remainder and always throws itself forward. If I get back to mathematics and sum it up, a residual is the difference between some quantity’s measured and predicted values. Understand a residual as a negligible problem. Hence, a residual is overlooked by assessment methodologies and ignored by narrative machines.
I am more interested in the apparent inconsequentiality of a residual. You may say it is inconsequential, yet it is not incidental. Not being tangible and limited to language alone, a residual exists in the relationship between subjects and time. It refers to the institution’s weakness and its narrative and singularity. So the question is how to make a conversation that turns and returns, each time building consciously towards a residual that is not embedded in the situation, yet it uses the culture of doing things. One cannot program a residual. How can we create registers that are sensitive to its recognition?
vasıf kortun 