The Differend marks that ineradicable gap at the heart of the incommensurability of ‘language games’ that has resigned the grand narratives of politics and knowledge to the dustbin of history – in particular the idea (even the possibility) of communicative transparency. When considering “phrases in dispute”, as philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called them (a few years after publication of The Postmodern Condition, where he had claimed the end of the “grand narratives”), a conflict appears between two parties “that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a single rule of judgment applicable to both arguments” (Lyotard, 1988, p. xi).

Language games, understood as particular “genres of discourse”, become incommensurable when a shared rule of judgment is absent. Applying a single rule of judgment in such cases will lead to a wrong inflicted upon one or more of these genres of discourse when one or more do not admit this rule of judgment. Litigation breaks down in such cases of conflict because “the rules of the genre of discourse by which one judges are not those of the judged genre or genres of discourse” (Lyotard, 1988, p. xi). Lyotard asserts that the naming of The Differend suggests that a universal rule of judgment between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general.

So which conflicting language games (or genres of discourse), which phrases in dispute, might be of interest here? One could perhaps think of stories from the global north versus stories from the global south, or feminist epistemologies versus universalist knowledge claims, or embodied knowledge versus formalist argumentation, or aesthetic judgment versus explicit or definite judgements (as Kant had already shown that aesthetic judgments are fundamentally subjective, bound to a non-transferrable feeling that can neither be measured nor proven), patriarchal versus emancipatory value judgements, or climate science versus climate change denialism, to name just a few.

When Lyotard proposed in The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard, 1984/’79), his “report on knowledge” commissioned by the French government, that the grand narratives of knowledge (production) had lost their rightful appeal to universal validity, the end of the grand narratives of politics was directly woven into this (failed) universalist appeal. It is this double crisis of knowledge and politics that has come back to haunt us in the era of new authoritarianism, which is curiously characterised by epistemological uncertainty – i.e. a deep-seated uncertainty about the question what counts as valid / legitimate knowledge?

Lyotard’s uncommonly influential report on knowledge highlighted the problems of legitimacy in late capitalism (as Habermas phrased it in his Modernity an Incomplete Project). It ignited a flaming debate between these two towering figures that would dominate discussions in continental philosophy and political theory for two decades to come – centring on the im/possibility of communicative transparency.

Meanwhile the day to day practices of knowledge production and politics continued unabated and seemingly unfettered. Including their universalist and supposedly emancipatory claims. In hindsight the ‘post-modern’, though excessively popular in the domains of the arts, design, popular culture and cultural theory (admittedly often transformed, profaned, and to some extent ‘debased’), could be seen as something of a misnomer. Rather than postModernism the last two decades of the preceding millennium might actually be better characterised as a period of hyperModernism: the modern project lived on but in a state of ontological and epistemological uncertainty

REALLY?

Against this backdrop of epistemological uncertainty, i.e. the questions, what can (still) count as valid and legitimate knowledge? And the double crisis of knowledge and politics, the exhibition project REALLY? Art and Knowledge in Crisis (2024) has been conceived.^[1]

In his preliminary curatorial statement artist, researcher and main curator of the project David Garcia states:

“[REALLY? Art and Knowledge in Crisis] addresses the core theme, of a crisis of knowledge, and a crisis of politics that have become one and the same thing.

[REALLY? Art and Knowledge in Crisis] charts the ways in which a response to this dual epistemic and political crisis has been the emergence of a radical intergenerational art movement whose work is founded on forensic methods, data analytics and multi-visual research, applied to realizing progressive social and political goals. The exhibition also examines how this movement runs parallel to alternative approaches to fact and evidence, including non-western taxonomies, feminist and queer epistemologies, tactical ambiguities, hoaxes, ruses and all manner of rational and irrational tropes in the ongoing battle for the social mind.

More broadly [REALLY? Art and Knowledge in Crisis] is working with artists who are finding new ways to navigate the void that has opened-up at the heart of liberal democracy. The political space once occupied by the clash of left and right has been hollowed out leaving a void in which knowledge (both technocratic and populist) has displaced ideology at the center of what we take democratic politics to be.”^[2] (Garcia, 2023)

Curiously in the arts this epistemological turn, the turn towards knowledge, through the application of investigative, forensic, and documentary practices, emerges exactly when the double crisis of politics and knowledge starts to dominate public discourse (the endless debates about ‘post-truth’, ‘alternative facts’, ‘climate science / denialism’ and the rise of new forms of populist authoritarian politics in supposedly ‘democratic’ societies). With this epistemological turn, also diagnosed by Tom Holert in his book Knowledge Besides Itself (Holert, 2020), the artists involved enter a deeply ambiguous terrain engendered by this crisis of knowledge and politics.

In the final curatorial statement Art and the Battle for Truth^[3] the co-curators of the exhibition, Mi You and David Garcia, show themselves acutely aware of these ambiguities that accompany a new ‘realist’ approach in the arts, which cannot easily be resolved:

“The new realists do not persuade through evidence and analysis alone but also through extensive visualization of data analytics; this work has a tendency to project an aura of the irrefutable. It is a visual language with a powerful aesthetic appeal to modernist sensibilities. But, to what end? Haven’t we learned to be sceptical about anything that resembles a universal and uncomplicated scientific empiricism? The counterargument is that despite the risks, these new realists offer a combative response to the widespread accusation that contemporary art is part of a wider cultural relativism that has lost belief in the truth. This exhibition could be seen as a space for unpacking and contesting these claims and counterclaims.” (You & Garcia, 2024)

A simple return to Realism is clearly not possible, though the curators observe that Realism, historically, was never ‘simple’. They trace the application of (idealised) scientific methods to art intending to bring about social progress to 19th Century Naturalism, which they state “was a political project as much as an investigative or aesthetic one” (You & Garcia, 2024). What Lyotard’s Differend demonstrates convincingly is that universalist claims to knowledge are irreconcilable with ethical politics. A simple recourse to technologically enhanced scientific methods will not resolve this dilemma for these new investigative, forensic and documentary artistic practices.

Evidentiary Realism

Forensic Architecture and its many off-shoots, collaborations, and progeny can be regarded as the most prominent torchbearer for this new epistemological and investigative turn in the arts. Among these artist Paolo Cirio’s Evidentiary Realism project (Cirio, 2017) is of particular interest here as his work is part of the exhibition project of Mi You and David Garcia.

In the introductory essay for the Evidentiary Realism project, which was both an exhibition and publication in Berlin in 2017, Cirio asserts that “The real is present and concrete, yet complexity, scale, speed, and opacity hide it from sight.” (Cirio, 2017) While Realism had traditionally always portrayed social oppression, according to Cirio “realism today can be conceptualised as an expansion of ways of seeing and portraying contemporary social complexities, while maintaining the concern of presenting subject matter factually within the aesthetics of visual language.” (Cirio, 2017). However, Cirio asserts, this particular realism looks beyond visible social conditions. Evidentiary Realism according to him, “examines the underpinning economic, political, legal, linguistic, and cultural structures that impact society at large”. (Cirio, 2017)

Referring to earlier artists exploring ‘realist’ practices critiquing systemic complexity (such as Hans Haacke, Jack Burnham, Martha Rosler, Harun Farocky, and of a more recent generation Trevor Paglen, as well as theorists Roland Barthes and Hal Foster), Cirio observes a passage from deconstruction of systemic complexity to a reconstruction of the epistemological:

“The tendency of evidentiary realist artists to show evidence is in effect about the impulse and urgency of reassembling fragments from our entangled and opaque reality and in doing so it reconciles with the original legacy of realism and documentary practices.” (Cirio, 2017)

Besides the assimilation of epistemological examination, Cirio also sees how “today realism in art is also enhanced by advancing technological and cognitive capability, which allows artists to capture, access, and process reality as never before.” (Cirio, 2017)

This new way of approaching ‘The Real’ in the arts (and the sciences) should allow according to Cirio for a more unambiguous access to the systemic complexities underpinning current political and societal structures. This type of work is described aesthetically by Cirio as mostly “post-spectacular”, which also indicates a broader artistic program:

“Similar to how the French Realists moved away from Romanticism, we now see the exhaustion of postmodernist relativism and its paradigm losing its representational relevance. At its apex, realist aesthetics may want to refuse subjectivity, ambiguity, allegory, and spectacle.” (Cirio, 2017)

Contrary to this concluding statement in Cirio’s introductory essay, however, the problems highlighted by the debate about the ‘postmodern condition’ were never about cultural relativism— the notion that any cultural expression exacts the same value judgements as any other, which then implies that all these expressions operate on the same axiological plane. On the contrary, what Lyotard’s deeper analysis in The Differend showed was exactly the ineradicable difference and incommensurability of conflicting language games. This is in essence an ethical and political dilemma. Enhanced technological and cognitive capabilities (by themselves) do not resolve or eradicate this problem.

Documentation

One problem lies in the use of terms. ‘Evidence’ situates Evidentiary Realism inevitably in a legalist semantic field. This may in part be deliberate for the protagonists of this approach: to bring the culprits to justice, sometimes even literally in a court of law (where also literally imposing value judgements are made). Whereas a more ‘modest’ term such as ‘documentation’ might imply a practice that avoids claims to such imposing value judgements, and opts for a more situational, localised, perspective. Cirio himself also refers to ‘documentary’ practices as part of the ‘evidentiary’, and his reference to Harun Farocky – whose work is informed by a strong documentary approach – further underscores this.

‘Documentation’ also stands in some contrast to the more authoritarian notion of ‘The Archive’ and its hierarchical classification schemes and taxonomies (Dublin Core) that suggest an overly static conception of what counts as knowledge (inclusion in the archive), and what not (exclusion of the archive). In Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge the politics of the archive are critically examined and transformed. The Archive is no longer a collection of documents, but rather the total collection of clear and definite statements that underpin and delineate what is accepted in any given discursive context as ‘knowledge’.

Foucault's understanding of the term ‘archive’ shifts the principal focus onto what he calls the statement and the system of (discursive) rules that bring these statements into being in the first place. These systems include not only the explicit discourse in a particular period and knowledge domain, but also the institutional arrangements, the implicit rules that operate in a given period and domain (of which the actors involved may themselves not be fully conscious), and even the physical architectures in which these collections are brought together. It is this system of rules in a given period and domain that the archaeological method tries to excavate and understand. The documents and objects in the real-world collections for Foucault merely embody the statements these systems of rules bring about.

The archive in his own words is:

“the general system of the formation and transformation of statements”,^[4] “the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events”, and simultaneously it is that which “determines that all (these) things said do not accumulate in an amorphous mass”.^[5] The archive is the system that groups ‘all these things said’ together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained in accordance with specific regularities”, which at the outset and at the “very root of the statement-event” defines what can be expressed in clear and definite terms (‘enunciated’) (Foucault, 2003 / 1969).

Thus the traditional idea of the archive as a repository of documents and objects is rewritten as a system of rules governing the appearance of definite and clear statements that these documents and objects embody.

Importantly, Foucault understands discourse formation (based on the statements included in the archive) as an active process in which existing rules, ideas and concepts are continuously transformed. Rather than a static image, his is one of continuous dispersal, which already hints at the later emphasis he puts on fearless speech, ‘parrhesia’. Understanding the politics of the archive then aims primarily at undoing the authority of the archive.

However, how then to prevent the cultural relativism that Cirio rightfully critiques?

Documentation as a term and a practice might be of help here. The term avoids the authoritarian politics and hierarchical knowledge classifications of The Archive. Yet it maintains a link to a material underpinning, a temporal specificity, of exactly that which is ‘documented’. As Roland Barthes phrased it in his study of photography Camera Lucida, “the referent adheres” (Barthes, 1980). Even though the process here is far less straightforward than how Barthes constructed it in his ideal model of photography as a causal optical / chemical process, governed by an immediate material causality – the emulsion on the photographic film exposed by the light passing through the lens, capturing ‘what has been’ in front of the lens.

What the documentary mode retains from Barthes’ idealised version of photography is this direct connection to an event that has unfolded, to a presence of humans, living beings, built environments, technological objects, as well as more abstract apparatuses.

The situational is of greatest importance here. Documentation happens not only from the outside, it also involves the protagonists themselves, and the ones on whom an influence is enacted. The ones who suffer the consequences of such acts. A multiplicity of viewpoints can be involved, ranging from amateur-recordings, citizen science, observation systems, web and security cameras, advanced technological sensing systems, right up to satellite observation. The documentary mode cuts right across all these different scales, from the quotidian dwellings to the strategic halls of power.

This multiplicity of viewing points is exactly the point. Techniques of open source intelligence (OSINT) as championed by the investigative journalistic agency Bellingcat rely on this multi-perspective approach. By correlating different viewing points, areas of convergence and divergence are brought into view, tracing what happened, emphasising im-/plausibility, without imposing a final authoritative reading.

Final questions (for now)

Returning to the ‘evidentiary’ practices in the arts and politics in the context of epistemological uncertainty a number of critical questions emerge:

To whom is this evidence addressed?

In an ideal democratic society evidenced concerns of the citizens are addressed to an elected and accountable council, staking a claim to a commonly held body of knowledge about the world, underpinned by expert insights. However, it is exactly those systems of expert-knowledge that are in crisis. In part because they have been recognised as a blockage for justified emancipatory claims by those who remain on the edges or the outside of those societies. In conjunction with this newly emboldened reactionary and authoritarian political formations increasingly reject and deny any such knowledge claims altogether and construct what Lyotard would call para-logical language games.^[6]

In which ‘court’ is the evidence presented?

With the crisis of knowledge and politics, the courts are also threatened by a crisis. This crisis cannot be resolved by purely epistemological means. The real threat is the recourse to suppression to impose the authority of the courts over other systems of validation. As referenced at the outset of the text, litigation breaks down in cases of conflict between heterogeneous language games because “the rules of the genre of discourse by which one judges are not those of the judged genre or genres of discourse” (Lyotard, 1988) Imposing a ‘terror’ (violence, both symbolic and physical) may then be the only recourse left to these courts.

How is evidence understood?

Without a uniting grand narrative evidence is given meaning differently within different language games, as they each follow different rules of judgment. Or sometimes it is simply denied, negated, rejected. When the evidence is thus called into question at its root (bearing evidence of what, to whom?) narrative structures, identity formations and mytho-motoric activation come into play. The implication here is that ideology re-enters the public and political arena, and now frames and overrides the evidential and the legal. Hence the attacks on the judiciary by both extra-parliamentary groups and movements, and by reactionary governing factions.

In a context of epistemological uncertainty no one individual or group has a final say. Multi-angle, multi-perspective documentary practices (in the broadest sense) may help to ‘ground’ debates in an otherwise exclusively symbolic hyperspace. Pointing out convergences across different political group formations and across the different language games enacted in them can to some extent counter the singularity of ideological preconceptions. This might aid in avoiding, if at all possible, a recourse to violent suppression.

At the heart of this deeply entangled dynamic is the question: what counts as legitimate, validated knowledge and what not? - and this question in its very essence is a political one.

References

• Barthes, Roland (1980): Camera Lucida, Editions dus Seuil, Paris.
• Cirio, Paolo (2017): Evidentiary Realism, Nome, Berlin.
• Foucault, Michel (2003 / 1969): The Archaeology of Knowledge, Routledge, London (original, Paris 1969).
• Garcia, David (2023): Updated curatorial concept Knowledge Wars / Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis, received by e-mail November 18, 2023.
• Habermas, Jürgen (1980): Modernity and Incomplete Project, in: Foster, Hal. Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press. (1985) (pp.3-15).
• Holert, Tom (2020): Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art's Epistemic Politics, Sternberg Press, Berlin.
• Lyotard, Jean-François (1984): The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, Manchester (French original: (1979) La Condition Postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris.)
• Lyotard, Jean-François (1988): The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (French original: (1983) Le Differend, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris.)
• Mi You & David Garcia (2024): Art and the Battle for Truth, in: Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis, Framer Framed, Amsterdam, June 2024 (exhibition brochure).