Amateur science in activist performance: towards a slow science

Simon Parry, University of Manchester

Abstract

This article explores what potential activist performance might offer emergent practices of slow science. I argue that the amateur has a central role in the practice of slow science, as theorised by Isabelle Stengers, and that amateur science might offer a slow, critical counterpoint to the dominant, fast discourse of ‘public engagement’ and related notions of ‘citizen science’. The article explores how particular discursive, visual and gestural vocabularies generated through performance might contribute to the development of amateur science, articulate shared experiential knowledge and constitute new collectives and solidarities across cultural, national and disciplinary boundaries. I attempt to locate amateur science in performance as a coherent political aesthetic within the practices of two solo performers: the UK-based artist-activist, James Leadbitter, also known as the vacuum cleaner, and the Japanese artist-activist, Kota Takeuchi.

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Amateur science in activist performance: towards a slow science

Barbara Van Dyck was fired from her post at the University of Leuven in Belgium on 3 rd June 2011 for

digging up potatoes. More precisely, she lost her job because of her role as spokesperson for an

action by a Belgian anti-GMO activist group, the Field Liberation Movement, to dig up and swap

experimental genetically-modified potatoes with an organic variety. The high security potato field

was at the university where she also worked as a researcher, however the action she participated in

took place on a Sunday and did not seem to violate the terms of her contract. The action fuelled

ongoing debates within Belgium about the safety of GMOs, with Van Dyck’s dismissal provoking

further public discussion connecting these debates with questions about academic freedom and the

role of public universities within the so-called knowledge economy.1 Supporters of Van Dyck argued

that the field and its potatoes were not so much involved in producing scientific knowledge as

testing the public acceptability of the potatoes as products.2 The Fortuna potatoes, produced by the

German chemical company BASF, were participating here in a promotional performance.3 The

‘patatistas’, as the FLM activists came to be known, replaced the promotional potatoes with an

organic variety in an intervention that mitigated perceived risks of the GMOs and enacted a critique

of the original performance as public/proper science.4 The activists were posing questions about

what science might be possible within and outwith public universities. They were also, according to

the commentary of the philosopher Isabelle Stengers, speaking shortly after the incident and whilst

the court cases were still ongoing, pointing the way to what she has called a ‘slow science’. 5

Stengers’ plea for slow science constitutes a critique of the knowledge economy and the consequent

normalisation of ‘fast, competitive, benchmarked research’.6 She associates the idea with the

broader slow movement and is critical of the impact of the normalisation of fast research on the

quality and (social) relevance of the science. My article explores what potential activist performance

might offer emergent practices of slow science. I argue that the amateur has a central role in the

practice of slow science and that amateur science might offer a slow, critical counterpoint to the 1 Key press coverage 3 June 2011 – 31 March 2012 is listed on the blog set up by supporters of Van Dyck, Three Rotten Potatoes, ‘Press and Debates’ <https://threerottenpotatoes.wordpress.com/independent-science-2/press-debates/> [accessed 3 December 2015].2 A petition was launched in support of Van Dyck on Three Rotten Potatoes, ‘Reinstate her now’ <https://threerottenpotatoes.wordpress.com/reinstate-her-now/> [accessed 3 December 2015]. 3 Field Liberation Movement, ‘BASF decides to stop GM potato research in Europe’, 30 January 2013 <http://www.fieldliberation.org/en/2013/01/30/basf-decides-to-stop-gmo-potato-project/> [accessed 19 November 2015]. 4 The FLM are registered on Twitter as @patatistas <https://twitter.com/patatistas> [accessed 3 December 2015]. 5 Isabelle Stengers, ‘"Another Science is Possible!" A Plea for Slow Science’, paper presented at the Inaugural Lecture Chair Willy Calewaert, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 13 December 2011. 6 Ibid., p. 2.

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dominant, fast discourse of ‘public engagement’ and related notions of ‘citizen science’. I go on to

explore how particular discursive, visual and gestural vocabularies generated through performance

might contribute to the development of amateur science, articulate shared experiential knowledge

and constitute new collectives and solidarities across cultural, national and disciplinary boundaries. I

attempt to locate amateur science in performance as a coherent political aesthetic within the

practices of two solo performers, the UK-based artist-activist, James Leadbitter, also known as the

vacuum cleaner, and the Japanese artist-activist, Kota Takeuchi.

Slow Science, Performance and the Amateur

Slow science requires new modes of collaborative knowledge production distinguishable from

dominant practices of public engagement or citizen science. Citizen science can be traced back to the

Victorian era and popular contributions to scientific research through Mechanics’ Institutes and

health journals.7 More recently citizen science has become associated with a shift from the

promotion of public understanding of science to greater public engagement with science. Citizen

science within ornithology, health and astronomy amongst other disciplines enables mass

participation in data collection on a large scale and from around the world. For instance, projects

such as eBird and the Backyard Bird Count gather data from hundreds of thousands of amateur

birdwatchers enabling researchers to track bird migration patterns, the spread of avian diseases and

the impacts of environmental changes in bird populations.8 Areas of research are made possible,

that otherwise may attract limited government or commercial funding but can nevertheless mobilise

sections of the public. However, setting research aims or evaluating and interpreting data are still

largely left to professional scientists within established institutions.9 In fact, due to the negative

evaluation by professional scientists of data produced by citizen scientists, interpretation and

publication are often left undone.10 Furthermore, citizen science as a strategy for public engagement

manifests a continuation of the deficit model enshrined in the public understanding of science

movement. If the deficit was previously one of the public’s understanding, as the knowledge

economy meets the affect economy, so the deficit is now one of engagement.

7 Sally Shuttleworth and Sally Frampton, ‘Constructing scientific communities: Citizen science’, The Lancet 385.9987 (2015), 2568-2568.8 See for example Rick Bonney, Caren B. Cooper, Janis Dickinson, Steve Kelling, Tina Phillips, Kenneth V. Rosenberg, and Jennifer Shirk, ‘Citizen science: A developing tool for expanding science knowledge and scientific literacy’, BioScience 59.11 (2009), 977-984.9 An awareness of these limitations is leading to a new wave of ‘extreme citizen science’; see Katherine Rowland, ‘Citizen science goes extreme’, Nature News 17 February 2012. http://www.nature.com/news/citizen-science-goes-extreme-1.10054 [accessed 3 December 2015]10 Rick Bonney, Jennifer L. Shirk, Tina B. Phillips, Andrea Wiggins, Heidi L. Ballard, Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, Julia K. Parrish, ‘Next steps for citizen science’, Science, 343.6178 (2014), 1436-1437.

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In the affect economy, as Patricia Ticineto Clough has explained, ‘capital shifts its domain of

accumulation to life itself, to pre-individual bodily capacities, such that value is produced through

modulating affect’.11 Therapeutic and leisure services, risk management industries and new media

technologies all mobilise affect as a source of capital. This mobilisation is facilitated by what Clough

calls the ‘biomediated body’, that is an understanding of the body as no longer ‘informationally

closed’.12 Citizen science is another manifestation of the way contemporary economies involve the

translation back and forth between bodily affect and (digitised) information. The push to

engagement invites publics, often uncritically, to intensify this translation not just through

participation in the generation of information, but also through engaging in this practice as leisure.

Efforts, like citizen science, to promote engagement through participation tend to leave the

institutions and governance of science untouched, even if they might contribute to and even

influence its conduct. As Brian Wynne has pointed out both in relation to public understanding and

public engagement, there is a misconception at the heart of these movements that it is scientists,

scientific methods or scientific theories that are the objects of public mistrust rather than the

institutions through which science is regulated and governed.13 Thorpe and Gregory, echoing

critiques of the affect economy, go further than this in arguing that efforts to engage the public with

science rather than democratising science actually serve as ‘new forms of social control which utilize

and draw on, rather than repress, the active subjectivity of the ruled’.14 Paradoxically, fast science

maintains strict (exclusive) boundaries around the practice of science at the same time as requiring

greater public understanding or engagement with it.

Stengers associates this tendency specifically with the subsumption of science into the knowledge

economy and the professionalization of science within its institutions. She is drawing on Alfred North

Whitehead’s critical view in 1925 of the way professionalisation and specialisation within modern

industrialisation detached social progress from scientific and technological progress.15 It is not a co-

incidence that the artists/activists discussed in this article develop critiques of food production,

nuclear energy and psychiatry respectively. All these applied sciences have generated repeated

waves of popular feeling, social movements and performative protest critical of their modes of

11 Patricia T. Clough, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke, 2007), p. 29.12 Patricia T. Clough, ‘The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies’, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke, 2010), 206-228, p.207.13 Brian Wynne, ‘Misunderstood misunderstanding: Social identities and public uptake of science’, Public understanding of science: an international journal of research in the public dimensions of science and technology 1.3 (1992), 281-304. Brian Wynne, ‘Public engagement as a means of restoring public trust in science - hitting the notes, but missing the music?’, Community Genetics 9.3 (2006), 211-220.14 Charles Thorpe and Jane Gregory, ‘Producing the Post-Fordist Public: The Political Economy of Public Engagement with Science’, Science as Culture 19.3 (2010), 273-301 (p. 296).15 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: CUP, 1926), p.276-7.

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knowledge production, professionalisation and institutionalisation over the last century. A turn to

the role of the amateur in science is a response to the way that the time and space allowed for

citizen participation can itself operate as a form of social control within the post-Fordist public.

Thinking about an amateur relation to science also provides a way of critically reflecting on the social

consequences of the professionalisation of knowledge production.

The political potential of amateur science in performance lies both in the particular relation of the

amateur to professionalised knowledge production and in certain modes of theatricality within post-

Fordist capitalism. This potential is productively explored by Nicholas Ridout in his work on the

‘passionate amateur’ in the theatre. Ridout shows how some forms of amateur theatrical practices

can open up the time and space between freedom and necessity in particular ways.

On the one hand, the amateur acts out of love, in what Marx calls “the realm of freedom,”

making an unconditional commitment that affirms its own autonomy. On the other hand,

the amateur also acts in relation to “the realm of necessity,” her activity constantly defined

in opposition either to the work of the “professional” who makes her living from theatre, or

to the work she herself does to make her own living.16

The time of the passionate amateur is fleeting, in the moment of commitment, and only located

beyond but in relation to the spaces of professional work.17 According to Ridout, theatre beyond its

professional institutions and infrastructures offers a certain ‘Romantic anti-capitalist’ political

potential when it ‘unsettle[s] our capacity to distinguish between work and nonwork, poesis and

praxis, the professional and the amateur’.18

Barbara Van Dyck is an academic professional who interrupts her work to make an amateur

intervention into science. As Ridout points out, such a move makes the professional ‘subjectively and

structurally hostile to the interests of capital’ and thus Van Dyck’s apparent autonomy as a

professional becomes precarious: she loses her job.19 At the same time though, the theatricality of

her move enables potential solidarities across classes and other boundaries.20 The FLM activists’

staged disruption of the promotional performance being conducted by the Fortuna potatoes relies

for its communicative capacity on a minimal theatricality involving the substitute potatoes but also a

16 Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), p. 29.17 Ibid., p.15.18 Ibid., p.17.19 Ibid., p.47.20 Indian activist Vandana Shiva linked the struggle of the Belgian activists with Indian cotton farmers in a statement of support ‘Vandana Shiva supports Field Liberation Movement: "Stay Strong!"’ 18 September 2013 <https://vimeo.com/75279203> [accessed 20 November 2015].

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particular staking out of time and space that suspends work: the work of the activists and the

scientists. The work of the activists in digging up and planting potatoes briefly mimics that of the

scientists as well as disrupting it.

Amateur science in performance is both a consequence of and a potential political response to the

subjectivities and solidarities associated with the time-space of precarity that are at once ‘unstable,

insecure forms of living’ and ‘new forms of political struggle and solidarity’.21 Performing amateur

science involves using one’s own body as a measure of and metonym for such a state of being.

Through the particular (theatrical) techniques with which such performers make their bodies public,

they model a mode of being and doing that resources knowledge about this state. I am trying to

avoid setting up here an easy opposition between subjectivities and objectivities in knowledge-

making. I consider particular modes of performance as practices of knowledge-making and ways of

being at the same time i.e. ways of making, doing and being. I am proposing the idea of amateur

science in performance as a mode of critical relation to scientific knowledge and technology that

couples both an orientation towards objects large and small with sensitivity towards the ways we

experience our relationships to these objects in time and space. The two solo performers that I

discuss in the rest of this article are distinguished in the way they establish complicities and

solidarities within knowledge-making processes and display a very particular commitment to care. It

is not so much in each case that the performers are objecting to scientific knowledge/theories.

Rather as articulated above they are paying critical attention to the ‘co-production’ of nature and

society within time and space.22

This research builds on critical examination of the role of theatre and performance within eco-

activism23 and also the ways that creative practices have played a significant role within health

activism.24 Amateur science in performance should be seen as developing out of activist-artist

practices such as the amateur science and tactical media of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE)25 and

Compass 26, Platform’s work between activism, art and research and Natalie Jeremijenko’s critical

research practice of ‘biotech hobbyism’.27 28 At the same time, amateur science in performance

21 Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, ‘In the social factory? Immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work’, Theory, Culture & Society 25.7-8 (2008), 1-30 (p. 3).22 Sheila Jasanoff, ‘The idiom of co-production’, States of Knowledge: the co-production of science and social order, ed. Sheila Jasanoff (Oxford: Routledge, 2004), p. 2.23 Baz Kershaw, Theatre Ecology: Environments and performance events (Cambridge: CUP, 2007).24 David Roman, Acts of Intervention: Performance, gay culture, and AIDS (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).25 Critical Art Ensemble, ‘Critical Art Ensemble’ <http://www.critical-art.net/> [accessed 20 November 2015].26 Compass collaborators include the artist Claire Pentecost who has characterised her work as that of a ‘public amateur’ see Compass <http://midwestcompass.org/> and Claire Pentecost <http://www.publicamateur.org/> [accessed 3 December 2015].

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reflects the way that social movements, for example ACT-UP in the 1980s and 1990s, have generated

particular aesthetics in response to particular socio-scientific relations. 29

Conventions established by earlier generations of activists – embodiment of shared feeling, symbolic

vocabularies for making the abstract concrete, cultural jamming through feedback loops created by

re-mediation – persist as viable tactics and yet are continually reworked in response to changing

relations between science and society. ACT-UP, CAE, Compass and Platform have all experimented

with alternative (to dominant professional) modes of collective organisation and determinedly

interdisciplinary modes of knowledge production in developing their political aesthetics over a

number of years. The particular focus here on solo performance as amateur science explores how

contemporary experiences of precarity – at once individual and widely experienced in different parts

of the world – demand ever evolving modes of collectivity, patterns of solidarity and ways of

knowing. Takeuchi and Leadbitter, whose work I now turn to, employ a do-it-yourself approach to

knowledge production, direct critical attention towards specific scientific institutions and yoke

together the environmental, the physiological and the psychological in ways that contribute to such

a critique. However, both these artists also show a reflexive concern with their own precarious

situations in relation to (scientific) professionalism. They invoke their amateurism directly in

performance, presenting embodied acts of love and care set up in opposition to professional work.

Critical complicity: Finger-Pointing Worker

A mysterious figure in a white hazmat suit and protective mask, appeared on a public live video

stream of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) at Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Number 1

on 28 August 2011. On the video, subsequently posted in several places on social media, he is seen

to walk between partly overgrown grey pipework in front of some damaged metal structures and

climb onto a platform.30 He is carrying and looking into what appears to be a smart phone, perhaps

checking his framing by viewing the live stream. When he has found the right position, shuffling

slightly to his left, he straightens his right arm out to the side, and in a careful gesture he slowly

27 Platform, ‘About us’, Platform London <http://platformlondon.org/about-us/> [accessed 20 November 2015]. 28 Natalie Jeremijenko, ‘Amateurity and Biotechnology’, Creative Biotechnology: A User's Manual, ed. Natalie Jeremijenko & Eugene Thacker, (Newcastle: Locus+, 2004) P. 8 < http://www.locusplus.org.uk/projects/2803~Creative+Biotechnology%3A+a+user's+manual> [accessed 29 March 2016]29 Deborah B. Gould, (2009) Moving politics: Emotion and ACT UP's fight against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 403.30 Tokyo Electric Power Company, Fuku 1 Live, 28 August 2011 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3g8L_7cTkM > [accessed 20 November 2015].

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sweeps his arm forwards to point directly at the camera and the viewer. He holds the stance for

about 14 minutes before leaving the frame only to reappear briefly closer to the camera again

pointing. Coverage of the action in Japanese news and social media followed, speculating on the

identity of the figure and his intentions.31 A website claimed the action offering the following

summary explanation:

- I did the action regardless of the company. So I want not to add any sanctions to it.

- I want the government and Tepco to address the labor issue seriously.

- The intention of pointing a finger toward camera was to point out about the labor issue

and observation through the media.32

The website also signalled an aesthetic framework for the action by citing Vito Acconci’s 1971 work

Centers as inspiration.33 The artist Kota Takeuchi subsequently included the video of the finger-

pointing worker in his 2012 exhibition Open Secret at the Snow Contemporary gallery in Tokyo.34

I have no definitive way of knowing the identity of the finger-pointing worker. I am working with a

perhaps credulous set of assumptions here, albeit assumptions shared by other commentators who

have written about him.35 I am assuming that the web post quoted above is indeed authored by or at

least connected to the finger-pointing worker featured in the video and, secondly, that the finger-

pointing worker is (a performance by) the Japanese artist Kota Takeuchi. Takeuchi did not directly

admit to being the finger-pointing worker, although he was working at the plant at the time and has

not directly denied it either. Even if these assumptions turn out to be erroneous this does not

necessarily undermine my argument as the playful, shifting subject is central to the politics of the

particular stance taken here. The figure of the finger-pointing worker, Takeuchi and the circulating

media that connect them up with wider publics combine to constitute the performance. While

pointing, the finger-pointer is, of course, not working; the gesture is only constituted as ‘work’

through its re-mediation as art or activism. The pointing itself is an amateur act.

31 Tokyo Times, ‘Fukushima Daiichi Mystery Man Steps Forward’, Tokyo Times 8 September 2011 <http://www.tokyotimes.com/fukushima-daiichi-mystery-man-steps-forward/> [accessed 20 November 2015]. 32 Anonymous, ‘About the pointing a finger toward fukuichi live cam’, 8 September 2011 <http://pointatfuku1cam.nobody.jp/index.html> [accessed 20 November 2015] 33 Vito Acconci, Centers, Internet Archive <https://archive.org/details/ubu-acconci_centers> [accessed 20 November 2015]. 34 Snow Contemporary, ‘Kota Takeuchi’ <http://snowcontemporary.com/en/artists/takeuchi_kota_cv.html> [accessed 20 November 2015]. 35 Edan Corkill, ‘Are we pointing at the right guy?’ The Japan Times, 8 March 2012 <http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2012/03/08/arts/are-we-pointing-at-the-right-guy-2/#.Vk8eSHbNyM_> [accessed 20 November 2015]

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The finger-pointing worker’s website includes a diagram illustrating the media loop and a section laid

out in verse that seems to refer to the relationship between his gesture, its mediatised circulation

and radioactive materials he is helping to clear up:

We watch ourselves in the camera and laugh

Page views increase

…

Narcissism accelerates

as there are not the others on remote side

The Internet is closed

Radioactive materials

Quarrels of digital data

Which lives long?36

Rosalind Krauss used Acconci’s Centers in her examination of the narcissism of video as a medium

referring to it as a ‘sustained tautology’, that is to say/do the same thing twice, perhaps

unnecessarily.37 The finger-pointing worker is directly employing both the gesture and this critique of

it here in staging his action. He stands in a presumably radioactive area of the damaged plant in a re-

recorded feedback loop of his own making. He looks at himself in his phone pointing at the camera

and through the phone pointing at himself. Even when he leaves, the circulation of the video on the

internet and via Takeuchi’s exhibition continues the endless looping. The repetition of his pointing is

unnecessary and that is the point. In the poem above he reiterates the question posed by his gesture

as to whether the digital data (his circulating image) or the radioactivity will last longer.38

His website suggests that he is pointing at Tepco and the government calling for an improvement in

labour conditions at the plant including low pay, lack of insurance, poor living quarters, overwork

36 Anonymous, ‘About the pointing a finger toward fukuichi live cam’, 8 September 2011 <http://pointatfuku1cam.nobody.jp/index.html> [accessed 20 November 2015] 37 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Video: The aesthetics of narcissism’, October 1 (1976), 50-64 (p. 50).38 The clean-up and decommissioning of Fukushima is estimated to take about 40 years due to contaminated water. See for example Justin McCurry ‘Fukushima £11bn cleanup progresses, but there is no cause for optimism’, The Guardian 13 November 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/13/fukushima-11bn-cleanup-will-take-another-40-years> [accessed 20 November 2015].

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and lack of sleep. 39 The statement also reflects concerns about the health risks of working there,

anxiety about security and concerns relating to the process of sub-contracting and consequent lack

of accountability. A lot of the clean-up work at Fukushima was carried out by casual staff recruited

via the public Hello Work! Agency or one of several contractors and subcontractors.40 His pose

reflects the way that the disaster has brought together debates in Japan about precarious nuclear

safety and precarious labour - temporary, insecure and productive of particular feelings of anxiety.

These conditions are the object of the finger-pointing and the condition of the worker as a subject.

The worker is pointing at Tepco, pointing at himself and pointing out the tautology of the gesture. 41

In a later interview, Takeuchi has alluded to a sense of complicity and responsibility leading him to

apply to work at the plant: ‘I think everyone felt it, that sense of being responsible in a small way for

the problem. I had been using electricity like everyone else’. 42 This is not (just) a case of poorly paid

and trained labour doing risky work – in Takeuchi’s case manning a set of air-lock doors. The finger-

pointing worker’s tautological stance is an articulation of both a sense of complicity in causing the

disaster and an appeal to others to place themselves within his cycle of looking depicted as eyes in

his diagram of the media loop.

In the video the worker is dressed in his Tyvek safety clothes, widely used in the clean-up operation

for their strength and disposability, but here a costume at the same time as protective equipment.

The costume offers a level of mystery and anonymity which is important to the constitution of the

gesture as already discussed, but also because, while he is pointing his finger, the worker is not

actually working. The website asserts that the video was filmed on ‘my holiday’ – time off or a break

from work at the plant.43 At this moment he seems to be neither at work nor at leisure, suspending

as he does all activity apart from his pointing gesture in order to draw attention to the relationship

between his work and the wider set of conditions he feels caught up in. The gesture is notable for its

steady stance rather than vigorous action. A certain strength and stamina must be required to point

39 Despite the actual or perceived risks of working in or near the plant, many workers were being paid less than other similar labourers in nearby areas outside the contaminated zone. See Justin Mccurry, ‘Fukushima fallout continues: Now cleanup workers claim unpaid wages’, The Guardian 9 September 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/09/fukushima-daiichi-operators-face-court-for-unpaid-wages> [accessed 20 November 2015]. 40 Justin McCurry, ‘Life as a Fukushima clean-up worker – radiation, exhaustion, public criticism’, The Guardian 6 March 2013 <http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/06/fukushima-clean-up-radiation-public-criticism> [accessed 20 November 2015].41 A diagram of this tautology can be found on the website, ‘About the pointing a finger toward fukuichi live cam’, 8 September 2011 <http://pointatfuku1cam.nobody.jp/index.html> [accessed 20 November 2015]42 Edan Corkill, ‘Are we pointing at the right guy?’, The Japan Times, 8 March 2012 <http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2012/03/08/arts/are-we-pointing-at-the-right-guy-2/#.Vk8eSHbNyM_> [accessed 20 November 2015]. 43 Anonymous, ‘About the pointing a finger toward fukuichi live cam’, 8 September 2011 <http://pointatfuku1cam.nobody.jp/index.html> [accessed 20 November 2015].

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in this position for nearly 15 minutes, although he demonstrates no elaborate technique. At the

same time the worker sustains a concern with maintaining the visibility of this stillness, to himself via

the phone and to his publics via the live/recorded video, by staying in the frame. Pointing at the

viewer communicates a relation at the same time as transmitting no substantive message.

The action constitutes amateur science in performance as it is framed by its relation to the subject’s

identification as a worker, at the same time as clearly not being work. This is not an organised picket

or other action identifiable within the repertoires of labour or other social movements. Indeed the

assertion that this is holiday time makes it clear that it does not constitute a strike. Until Takeuchi

subsequently exhibits it in Tokyo it does not constitute his work as an artist, and even then he is

claiming the video rather than the gesture itself and maintaining a distance from the identity of the

finger pointing worker. However, this is also not normal leisure. The figure is dressed for work and

appears within the workplace. Insofar as the figure is acting theatrically yet not appearing as a

professional artist, a worker at work, or an activist, his predicament is identifiable with that Ridout’s

amateur in the theatre referred to above.

The finger-pointing is an amateur act, affirming the autonomy of the pointer. However, the act also

stages work as theatrical performance: the object of the pointing is the surveillance camera of the

worker’s employer and at the same time the finger-pointing worker himself, in his workplace,

dressed in his work clothes. At first glance, he could be collecting radiation readings on a Geiger

counter. The autonomous gesture is thus seen in relation to the pointer’s necessary work. At the

same time, the professionalism of this work is itself called into question by the worker’s claim on his

website that he only worked at the plant for ‘a short period’.44 Was the work itself not simply a

direct exchange of labour for money, but rather a theatrical act in itself? He even casts doubt on its

activist potential referring to it as ‘slacktivistic’: it is and is not real activism.

Amateur science in performance here is constituted by the way Takeuchi experiences and mobilises

a feeling of critical complicity, stuck in a loop yet searching for a way to step out or press pause. The

particular time-space staked out by his action is distinct from other modes of antinuclear activism in

Japan, although it is connected politically and aesthetically to the waves of protest that followed

Fukushima. This upsurge in protest culture in Japan included creative participation by artists and a

variety of emergent protest forms fostering solidarities across generations within Japan as well as

making connections with activists in other parts of the world.45 Takeuchi’s performance of amateur

44 ibid. 45 See for example the film by Julia Leser and Clarissa Seidel, Radioactivists: Protest in Japan since Fukushima, 2011, <http://radioactivists.org/> [accessed 20 November 2015].

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science is embodied in the tautological gesture. He adopts a stance that implicates the viewer

through the way he implicates himself in regimes of precarious science and precarious labour. This

implication is both repeated again and again, and, at the same time, somehow masked in an

amateur theatrical costume and caught in a mediatised feedback loop.

Care and Attention: The Vacuum Cleaner

The exploration of complicity through a careful, embodied aesthetic of repetition is also central to

the recent work of James Leadbitter, the vacuum cleaner. In his performance piece Mental,

Leadbitter sits in a bed in the bedroom of a borrowed flat under an over-size duvet and invites a

small audience seated round the bed, some with their feet tucked under the covers, to listen to a

story.46 The telling of the story has involved a heroically slow act of reading and re-reading

documents written by others about him. Over the course of a year through a series of subject access

requests under the Data Protection Act, Leadbitter and his producer, in an act of amateur detective

work and determined commitment to data collection, gathered together documentation held by the

NHS, police intelligence and private companies covering a period of his life since 1999. During this

time, Leadbitter was involved in environmental and anti-capitalist protests including the iconic (and

slow) action of cleaning the length of Wall Street with a second-hand vacuum cleaner that gave him

the name he uses for his website and performance publicity.47 At this time he also experienced

several periods of mental distress, and it is his reflection on this experience that provides the focus

and the title of the piece. The official documentation offers commentary on his personal

relationships, descriptions of his physiological and psychological states and reference to his actions

as a political activist, artist, in and out-patient of various health services, friend, lover, person.

Professional documentation of and intrusion into his life has brought multiple subjective

perspectives to bear on him, multiple ways of knowing about him, but through an apparatus where

these subjectivities (and their identities) are rarely acknowledged or transparent. In the

development of Mental, however, Leadbitter read every word of the approximately 2500 pages of

official documentation he was able to gather about himself. In a twist on contemporary

documentary theatre, in which professional performers perform a script edited from the words of

those with particular life experiences, Leadbitter has edited together text written by professionals on

his own life experience. Within the performance, he reads out several of the documents verbatim,

projecting a photocopy of the original onto the wall behind him. His many performances of the

46 The performance has predominantly been performed in domestic bedrooms; the first performances were in his own flat. Sometimes, where this has not been possible, other spaces have been transformed temporarily to stand in for a bedroom.47 See Jenny Hughes, Performance in a time of terror: critical mimesis and the age of uncertainty (Manchester: MUP, 2011), p. 140-142.

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piece since his first sharing of work in progress in 2012 and ongoing performances since 2013 have

produced multiple re-readings of the documents. Leadbitter stresses the real (and variable) feelings

he experiences during these re-readings including those of pain and distress, so why does he

continue repeatedly to re-read them?

In performance, as Leadbitter works through the (auto)biography that has been co-constructed with

the NHS, the police, and various corporate lawyers, we begin to sense a profound dissonance

between the body we see before us in the bed and feel emotionally and physically close to and his

body as inscribed within a set of professional discourses: medical, legal, economic, national security.

The performance enacts a critique of the way that the self (his self/personhood) is co-constructed by

these discourses and through their modes of knowledge production. Rose, in a development of a

Foucauldian biopolitics, has talked about the ways that new drugs are not just products of ‘biovalue’

– that is particular hegemonic ways of valuing life – but are also molecules with a particular ethics

engineered into them. The self is therefore both something ‘natural’ and produced by what he calls

a medico-industrial complex.48 Through his repeated re-readings of his records, Leadbitter gently

begins to set his self, his audiences who often include other survivors of similar experiences and

medical professionals, the professional archive, the domestic bedroom and other objects, including a

large pile of (his) drugs he tips onto the bed, into new relation. The creation of this new careful

relation is central to amateur science as performance practice.

48 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 221.

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Figure 1 The vacuum cleaner in Mental (drawing by Paul Gent)49

I am identifying Leadbitter’s practice as amateur science to recognise the way that it mirrors but

critiques medical approaches to making knowledge about health. His work has involved

systematically collecting and reading authorised data that constitute a patient’s (his own) case

history. The taking of the case history is a crucial method of data collection used not only in

diagnosis but also in abstracting scientific, medical knowledge from individual doctor/patient

interactions through the production and sharing of case reports as research.50 In this instance

though, his re-reading is exceptionally systematic at the same time as being driven by a passionate

personal commitment. It is highly unlikely, in fact given the legal complexities virtually impossible,

that anyone else, including the professionals he engaged with, would have read all the documents

he gathered. The private and then public re-readings also serve to re-position himself. He is no

longer the patient (subject/object of the case history).

Critical discussion within the medical humanities and patient movements has discussed the

implications of particular designations for those who are or have been ill: patient, survivor, service-

49 This drawing was part of the documentation of Mental as performed in Manchester 7-8 May 201550 Unusual or notable examples of these are published in research journals such as the Journal of Medical Case Reports <http://jmedicalcasereports.biomedcentral.com/about > [accessed 29 March 2016].

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user. In his classic work on stories of illness, Arthur Frank argues that the position of witness, rather

than any of these other designations, conveys a certain sense of responsibility for telling the story.51

Witnesses are ‘passionate amateurs’ in the sense that they tell their stories out of a sense of care

about the truth of what happened. But the kind of witnessing Leadbitter is engaged in here involves

a forensic attention to the range of evidence available beyond his own memory. Frank’s discussion of

the auto-biographical illness story emphasises the way that these stories offer an account ‘not only

about the body but of and through the body’.52 Leadbitter’s account certainly does this. However,

the juxtaposition of his own account with the accounts that he cites offers an additional layer of

reflexivity towards the various positions of the tellers including himself. This is brought into focus

graphically in one moment of the piece when he reads out a report by the Metropolitan Police’s

Forward Intelligence Team (FIT) that refers to detailed and personal information about him including

the fact that he has a particular slogan carved into his back. The critical detail that he provides in his

own commentary, when he pulls up his woollen shift to reveal it to the audience, is a misspelling in

the report. His truth, that ‘this civilization is fucked’, is inscribed on his body. However, the extent to

which authorised information about our bodies is not bounded by them is revealed by the way

police and medical surveillance can construct what might become ‘truths’ about them. Leadbitter’s

narrative is amateur in its passionate commitment and position outside the professional institutions

he critiques; it is scientific in its critical attention to detail.

Leadbitter’s particular critique of medicine, similar in its critical complicity to that of Takeuchi, is not

of recent brain science and accounts of mental distress expressed in terms of brain chemistry. In fact

Leadbitter has commented on the potential of neuroscientific understandings of neurodiversity to

reduce stigma. He is not - unlike many of those critical of psychiatry - anti-diagnostic per se, whilst

remaining critical of the terms of much diagnosis. Nor does he reject the uses of medication –

commenting that he believes that certain medications have saved his life.53 Rather Leadbitter is

critical of the way professionalised, institutional mental ‘healthcare’ actually seems to obstruct or

constrain knowledge (co)production by promoting discourses of professionalism that are complicit in

regimes of social control.54 Leadbitter’s experience of this healthcare is also interwoven with the

deliberately destabilising experience of overt and covert police surveillance he experienced as an

activist referred to above. This includes the kind of under-cover infiltration by police officers of

51 Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2013), p. 137. 52 Ibid., p.140.53 James Leadbitter, Personal Interview, 23 July 2014.54 Leadbitter’s critical perspective is echoed within medical literature, see for example Delese Wear and Mark G. Kuczewski ‘The Professionalism Movement: Can We Pause?’, The American Journal of Bioethics 4.2 (2004), 1-10.

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activist groups that have been exposed in a series of UK press stories.55 It also includes the overt

‘Evidence Gathering’ practice in which police officers make a show of videoing protests and

demonstrate the extent to which they collect and hold personal information about activists as a

means of intimidation.56 Leadbitter’s accounts of these forms of theatrical surveillance offer a

cautionary reminder that performance or theatricality does not itself provide for a careful relation

and can in fact resource a fake amateurism: professionals pretending to be amateurs.57

A key moment of the piece is an account of a crisis episode when a mental health nurse rolled him a

joint and let him sleep on her sofa. Leadbitter’s commentary on this apparently kind, and

unprofessional, act is juxtaposed with a letter between more senior professionals – eliciting laughter

all three times I have seen the piece – which apologises for the lack of professionalism and the

informality of the care provided ‘without funding’.58 Certain forms of kindness seem to constitute

the opposite of professional, institutionalised care.59 Reflecting on this moment, Leadbitter has

referred to the way that his memory of this event makes a break in the accumulation of references

to and about him that otherwise had tended to constitute his relationships with professionals:

you become the accumulation of your diagnoses, you become the accumulation of the

medication that you’re on, you become the accumulation of how the police refer to you, so

when somebody breaks that it’s such a transformative thing it reminds you of that humanity

of the kindness of strangers and random acts of kindness and that kind of thing.60

The acts of kindness Leadbitter refer to here imbue the very particular aesthetic developed within

the performance that is characterised both by Leadbitter’s intimacy with the small audience, but also

by a switching back and forwards between different recording media – the looping remediation of

experience that resonates with Takeuchi’s performance discussed above.

55 See for example Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Martin Wainwright, ‘Second police officer to infiltrate environmental activists unmasked’ The Guardian 12 January 2011 <http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jan/12/second-undercover-police-officer-unmasked> [accessed 20 November 2015] 56 See for example Paul Lewis and Marc Vallée, ‘Caught on film and stored on database: how police keep tabs on activists’ The Guardian 6 March 2009 <http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/mar/06/police-surveillance-database-activists-intelligence> [accessed 29 March 2016]57 Jenny Hughes has written persuasively about the use of covert performance in terrorism and counter-insurgency in Performance in a time of terror: critical mimesis and the age of uncertainty (Manchester: MUP, 2011).58 James Leadbitter, Mental, unpublished script. 59 John Ballatt and Penelope Campling have proposed the notion of ‘intelligent kindness’ as integral to necessary NHS reform in Intelligent Kindness: Reforming the Culture of Healthcare (London: Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2011).60 James Leadbitter, Interview for Contemporary Theatre Review Interventions website July 2015 <http://www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/> [accessed 20 November 2015].

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Leadbitter’s re-reading of the records is enacted within an aesthetic framework that acts as a

survival strategy for himself and a protective structure for the audiences. The kind, supportive

intimacy of the performances starts with the offer of a cup of tea and a piece of carrot cake and

continues through the way Leadbitter invites audiences to share his duvet and participate in the

setting of the rhythm and the pace of the piece. The structure, sequence, conventions such as the

tea and cake, and the script are pre-established and remain reasonably consistent across

performances. This is important for Leadbitter’s ability to make himself and his audiences feel safe.

However, there are significant points at which Leadbitter checks in with his audience, scans faces to

pick up on their feelings and allows for short pauses or breaks. On one occasion, Leadbitter

interrupted a performance to allow a break for an audience member who found the content

upsetting.

Leadbitter has commented that the performance is more akin to documentary film than theatre in

its concern with the experience of real emotion and presentation of his own story as himself not in

character. He is, of course, careful in his documentary attention to the detail of his own and the

professional records.61 However, this slightly underplays how he draws on and creates a repertoire

of theatrical techniques and conventions to establish another kind of careful relation between

himself and the audience group assembled. This relation is constituted by an attitude that is critical

towards the processes of bureaucratic and institutional control that Leadbitter (and audience

members) have experienced, but kind and caring towards the individuals assembled (in a way that a

documentary film could not be) even though many of these may occupy public professional roles

within the health services or police for instance. Leadbitter is careful in his pains-taking and pain-

staking attention to detail in re-reading his records: the hard data. He is equally careful in attending

to the collective context in which this happens: safe in a cosy bedroom, warm under the extra-large

soft duvet, fortified by tea and cake.

What can get lost in the processes of knowledge production and healthcare infrastructure is the

respect with which justice (in legal or social terms) is, to paraphrase the philosopher Nel Noddings,

reliant on ideals of caring about others which are themselves reliant on ideals of caring for others.62

Leadbitter has imaginatively created time and space for audience groups to care about him. This

relies on his reciprocal demonstration of an amateur relation through taking time and making space

to care for us. Out of this sense of reciprocal care begins to emerge another (slower) time and a

more intimate space in which records might be made and knowledge produced. This is an amateur

61 Ibid.62 Nel Noddings, ‘The Caring Relation’, The Maternal Factor: Two Paths to Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p.33-66.

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relation in so far as it emerges from a sense of passionate commitment and, although these

performances now actually constitute a profession for Leadbitter, in the extent to which

work/nonwork distinctions are troubled by the aesthetic he sets up. This is a bedtime story, the

storyteller is in the bed and the care being provided, as outlined above, is reciprocal.

The re-reading of the records prompts critical reflection on the relationship between the careful

making and keeping of records – a hallmark of professionalism within the era of new public

management as well as central to processes of clinical and other scientific knowledge production –

and the practices of professionalised care for vulnerable people. I attended one of the performances

with a group of mental health nurses who remarked that they would remember the performance

whenever they wrote up notes about their patients. The use of the slightly grainy, analogue

overhead projection retains the institutional aesthetic of the original printed records complete with

the uneven font of a type-written letter. Leadbitter shares the confidential, original document but

through a medium and within an aesthetic that he (in collaboration with his audiences) can control

and is transparent. As the NHS moves towards electronic patient records with protocols for sharing

these and the security services foster new relationships with internet communications corporations,

the role of technologies in producing political subjectivities and scientific objectivities become ever

more complex. Leadbitter’s layered use of different, slightly outdated media brings these

complicities into focus.

In a tongue-in-cheek pun, Leadbitter creates a sound-track to his piece by playing a series of vinyl

records on a turntable by the bed. Each time, as he carefully reaches over, removes the disc from its

sleeve places it on the turntable and positions the needle, we and he are able to catch our breath

and reflect for a moment. There is something also about the way you put a record on a turntable

that slows you down and requires care and attention. The changing of discs and transparencies on

the OHP gives an episodic structure and a steady reassuring rhythm. The music tracks themselves

also tend to provide an emotional counter-point to the story. Every time I have seen the piece it has

remained with me partly through the repetition in my head of a five note riff from the Harold Melvin

and the Blue Notes 1975 track Wake Up Everybody. His use of this at the start offers another easy-

going pun as he appears from under his duvet. There is a jazz feel to this recording as different

instruments pick up the melodies – the original recording is over 7 minutes long – and yet it has the

reassuringly catchy melody of soul and structured, danceable rhythm of funk or disco. The song is a

wide-ranging call for social and political action addressed in part directly to specific professionals:

doctors, teachers, builders and businessmen. It is an invitation to cooperate across professional,

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class and racial boundaries that is at once utopian but surprisingly concrete.63 Leadbitter, in contrast,

offers no call to action himself within his piece; there is neither an overt message nor political

slogan. Rather though, the utopianism of the song is actualised, temporarily, in the interruption of

and recreation of the professional regimes of record-keeping. The song is there for the feeling it

invokes – upbeat, together and resilient under oppression – and as an integral part of the piece’s

careful infrastructure.

Tracing the Groove

In Isabelle Stengers’ terms (and she is drawing on Whitehead here) it is not the abstractions involved

in knowledge-making that are the problem with fast science, it is a lack of vigilance and blind

obedience towards them within professional cultures.64 Whitehead calls this ‘minds in a groove’.65

Leadbitter’s enacted critique of fast psychiatry therefore does not problematize the use of

psychiatric diagnoses (however crude) but rather the somewhat fixed implications and

interpretations of these diagnoses determined by so-called professional practice. Leadbitter re-

claims his records to trace this groove and expose the crudeness of the abstracting process - the

way it ignores its embedding in ‘the messy complications of the world.’66 It is not so much that

science is reductive but that its professional and institutionalised practice can lack reflexivity towards

this reduction: it is not careful enough. Mental, as well as other works by the Vacuum Cleaner, such

as Ship of Fools where he detained himself under his own rewritten Mental Health Act in his own flat

and Madlove, a laboratory for the development of a designer asylum, offer exploratory processes of

amateur science in performance. The particular performance aesthetics Leadbitter has developed

abstract from personal experience in a way that remains vigilant to this abstraction by repeated,

iterative attempts to create (make real) the abstraction – mental health laws, psychiatric hospitals –

through the apparent unreality of theatrical processes.

Both Takeuchi and Leadbitter engage in solo acts that appeal for new solidarities to emerge but do

not assume a basis for such solidarity. Takeuchi calls for solidarity through sharing his sense of

complicity with the Japanese progress narrative rather than an outright opposition to nuclear

science and technology. Leadbitter opens his subjective experience – as well as supposedly objective

and certainly objectifying accounts of his experience by others – up to scrutiny by a series of small

63 The song written by Gene McFadden and John Whitehead is associated with black utopianism from the 1970s after the civil rights movement, reflected here in the constructive (rather than entirely critical/oppositional) tone of Leadbitter’s piece. See for example Jeffrey Allen Tucker, ‘Waking Up to the Sound’, American Literary History, 27.3 (2015), p. 599–613.64 Isabelle Stengers, ‘"Another Science is Possible!" A Plea for Slow Science’, paper presented at the Inaugural Lecture Chair Willy Calewaert, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 13 December 2011.65 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: CUP, 1926), p.276-7.66 Isabelle Stengers, ibid., p.10.

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audience groups. The building of new solidarities is integrated with positions that engage with the

facts and objects of technoscience – drugs, energy, radiation, diagnoses – at the same time as

interrogating its values. Both artists figure a mode of amateur science in performance that questions

and slows (rather than resists or opposes) science and, as such, offer potential for a practice of slow

science.

Describing modes of theatre or performance as slow science or amateur science may bring with it

certain problems. Collapsing disciplinary boundaries in this way risks a potential dissolution of the

possibility of knowledge-making at all. However, in the post-Fordist era, boundaries between labour

of different kinds are constantly shifting and collapsing. Paolo Virno has written about the way,

under such conditions, theatrical virtuosity becomes the model for all labour.67 Therefore thinking

through and about careful modes of theatrical knowledge-making might enable a better

understanding of such work and its (collapsing) boundaries. The solo performances discussed here

are particularly useful in their exploration of amateur positions that trouble such boundaries. They

are bodies alone and not working: standing still and lying in bed reading. They seem to be just being

rather than doing or making anything and yet their critical commentary emerges from their very

vulnerability. It is this aesthetic that creates the potential for complicity and solidarity with others.

None of the performance practices of amateur science I talk about here should be understood as

anti-science, whether science is conceived of as epistemology, method or set of practices. Their

agenda is not to denigrate or relativize scientific knowledge about genetically modified organisms,

nuclear power or mental distress. Understanding this relation as amateur draws attention to the way

these activist performances recognise their contingency or complicity in relation to professionalised

or institutionalised science, at the same time as they assert their autonomy from it. They attempt to

interrupt or slow (rather than disrupt) science, not out of nostalgia towards the lost paradise of an

imagined innocent, pre-scientific past, but rather to explore possibilities of knowledge-making that

are reflexive towards its contingencies and complicities. They are passionate acts driven by intense,

personal experience. However, in their concern for contingency and complicity, these performers

model modes of careful knowledge-making: a science that feels with and for others.

I would like to thank Jenny Hughes, James Leadbitter and Erinma Ochu for particularly thought-

provoking conversations that have helped me develop ideas discussed in this article.

67 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext, 2004), p.61.

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