to move in this direction, and I had no idea what else to do. At the time, I had grown increasingly outspoken about what I was starting to piece together as the moral failings of art school, and in turn the art world it was training us for: namely that there were certain implicit codes of conduct, things you could and couldn’t talk about. For example, if you made work about George W. Bush’s recent “surge” policy in the Iraq War, this would have been dismissed as too obvious, too preachy, too moral—and morals were uncool. However, if you presented even the very same object with a claim to be about “the archive,” for example, this would have fallen completely within the realm of acceptability and praise. Meanwhile, actual people were fucking dying in Iraq, and I was starting to think that we were all accomplices in rendering that violence invisible by carrying on this particular song-anddance-routine and rewarding those who played by the rules of the game. Little did I know then that this line of thought was inadvertently working1 me In his book Social into a position where I’d either have to comply with and Literacies: Languages or disappear from this world altogether, because— Ideology in Discourses, Gee as I would later read in the sociolinguist James frames this ultimatum through Paul Gee’s work about discourse communities the language of being inside such as the art world—to renounce it meant to or out: “Discourses...crucially forfeit my place in it.1 involve a set of values and viewpoints...about who
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is an outsider and who isn’t, often who is ‘normal’ and who isn’t. [They are also] resistant
Comply or disappear—poetically apt parallel to to internal criticism and the “choice” that, as we finally seem to be realizing, self-scrutiny, since uttering so many women have been forced to make inviewpoints the that seriously undermine face of sexual assault and harassment: to shut up them defines one as being outside them. and keep silent and stay in their fields, or to be The Discourse itself defines thrown out, humiliated, punished, erased. what counts as acceptable
criticism.” James Paul Gee, Social Languages and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses (London: Routledge, 2008), 49.