Contre\Enquête. Political and Aesthetic Forms of Investigation – Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

3rd meeting of the DFG research network “Global Cultures of Enquête. Towards a Praxeology of Surveying (17th-21st Century)” in cooperation with the research project “The Art of the Counter-Investigation” at the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt am Main.

The enquête has a long history as an instrument of political and moral rule, dating back to antiquity. In Europe, it is closely linked to the emergence of modern nation states and the attempt to create novel systems of regulatory control over processes of economic and social transformation. At the beginning of the 19th century, the enquête became a symbol of a new form of empirical knowledge production in the course of which society emerged as an independent, autonomous and essentially contested reality.

Using the concept of contre\enquête the workshop puts its focus on a particular lineage of antagonistic empirical knowledge practices that persist until the present day. It looks at projects of oppositional knowledge practices not just as mere reactions or somehow secondary forms of knowledge, but also as independent epistemic traditions and political initiatives. The framework of contre\enquête sheds light on the plural and antagonistic politics of description and the connection between knowledge struggles of social movements and the functions of modern statehood. While there is already a large body of research on the history of state enquiries, the historical as well as political dimension of the knowledge practice of social movements is only beginning to be explored.

Focusing on practices of counter\investigations the workshop also explores the complex relationship between political, ethical and aesthetic dimensions of social knowledge production. In addition to surveys and investigations carried out by parliaments, courts or the police, we will look at investigative techniques and procedures used by political actors, journalists and artists – who thus produce new evidence, which can in turn be used in legal struggles against state actors. However, it remains to be shown for specific historical contexts in what way politics of investigation and counter-investigation oppose or react to each other. If the history of empiricism is politically contested, shaped by antagonistic normativities and thus structured hegemonically, how do different descriptions of reality also correspond with different approaches to politics, may they be transformative or not. If enquête and contre-enquête cannot be grasped in terms of “from above” and “from below” or “paternalistic”, “repressive”, “critical” or “emancipatory” as such, how do we understand them as a historically dynamic relationship that encompasses different forms of systematization and organization of knowledge, “counter-knowledge”, and knowledge claims, as well as diverse aesthetic interventions? In the workshop, we wish to discuss this interplay of practices of inquiry, representation and intervention not only as a constitutive dimension of the production of social knowledge – and, not least, of persuasive knowledge – but also as a fundamental element of the practice of investigation itself.

 

Registration and Practical Information:

Please register until May 10 by email: info@enquete-cultures.org

An online participation is also possible.