[-empyre-] Process as Paradigm

[Warren Sack]

Hi All,

I've been following the discussion this month and was thinking that I 
didn't need to post since process has been discussed in so many ways:

process as art;
process as performance;
process as "serious shit";
process as image;
process as practice;
process as politics;
process as organism;
process as biology;
process as system;
process as tool;
process as software;
process as program;
process as environment;
process as product;
and many other comparisons.

But, then it occurred to me: the discussion hasn't addressed the title 
of the exhibition; namely,

process as PARADIGM

For the show, I mapped the Empyre list archives from 2002 to the present 
(http://hybrid.ucsc.edu/ConversationMap/EmpyreArchive/Manual/messages.html).  
One thing that is possible to do with these maps is to find every 
instance of a given word in the archive (for a given year).  Thus, this 
URL points to all occurrences of "process" for this year (and provides a 
link to each message in which the word "process" was used):

ASSOCIATIONS FOR PROCESS (2010)
URL: 
http://hybrid.ucsc.edu/ConversationMap/cgi-bin/pprint_associations.pl?terms=process&archivedirectory=Empyre2010&archivename=Empyre2010

You can see, by the number of instances, that "process" has been a 
frequent topic of discussion.  But, compare that list with the list for 
this year's mentions of "paradigm":

ASSOCIATIONS FOR PARADIGM (2010)
URL: 
http://hybrid.ucsc.edu/ConversationMap/cgi-bin/pprint_associations.pl?terms=paradigm&archivedirectory=Empyre2010&archivename=Empyre2010

It contains a few more references to "paradigm" than did the archives of 
2009 and the archives of 2008.

ASSOCIATIONS FOR PARADIGM (2009)
http://hybrid.ucsc.edu/ConversationMap/cgi-bin/pprint_associations.pl?terms=paradigm&archivedirectory=Empyre2009_Thu_Apr_15_18_43_37_2010&archivename=Empyre2009_Thu_Apr_15_18_43_37_2010

ASSOCIATIONS FOR PARADIGM (2008)
http://hybrid.ucsc.edu/ConversationMap/cgi-bin/pprint_associations.pl?terms=paradigm&archivedirectory=Empyre2008_Fri_Apr_16_15_37_02_2010&archivename=Empyre2008_Fri_Apr_16_15_37_02_2010

However, my point is, we haven't really discussed "process as paradigm" 
because we've barely mentioned "paradigm" at all.

If you search through the PDF of the exhibition catalog, you'll find the 
same thing to be true there: outside of usages that are references to 
the title of the exhibition, there is only a handful of occurrences of 
the term "paradigm" in the catalog.

So, what is a "paradigm" anyways?  The first definition one encounters 
in the Oxford English Dictionary is this: "A pattern or model, an 
exemplar; (also) a typical instance of something, an example."  And, 
that definition has references back to the 15th century.  But, I think 
what the title of the exhibition is, at least implicitly, citing is the 
OED's fourth definition: "A conceptual or methodological model 
underlying the theories and practices of a science or discipline at a 
particular time; (hence) a generally accepted world view."  And, this 
definition is illustrated by reference to the work of the historian of 
science, Thomas Kuhn, who, in 1962 wrote a book entitled "The Structure 
of Scientific Revolutions": "'Normal science' means research firmly 
based upon one or more past scientific achievements..that some 
particular scientific community acknowledges..as supplying the 
foundation for its further practice... I..refer to [these achievements] 
as 'paradigms'" (Kuhn)."

In other words, a paradigm, in the Kuhnian sense, is a sort of 
conceptual foundation.  Our discussion comes closest to this in the 
recent exchange between Yann Le Guennec and Julian Oliver on the idea, 
medium, and technologies of computation.  In that exchange, the 
presupposition seems to be that "process" and "computation," or more 
simply "computer," can be taken as synonyms.  Oliver's words resonant 
with the OED's definition of paradigm as a "generally accepted world 
view" (OED): "It's here that the very idea of a computer becomes 
'blurred' in the popular imagination and people start thinking that 
everything's somehow digital or that computers have an all-pervading 
reach" (Oliver).

Yet, what is still unanswered in our discussion to date are the nitty 
gritty details of Kuhn's notion of paradigm.  Kuhn's own definition 
differs from the OED's in several ways.  Kuhn coined the phrase 
"paradigm shift" to talk about the history of science and so his notion 
of "paradigm" was largely restricted to science.  While Kuhnian 
paradigms are not just models or theories (they also comprise data, 
philosophy, rhetorical strategies, various links to knowledge outside of 
a given area of science, etc.), they are quite circumscribed compared 
to, for instance, what one might call a more loosely defined 
"worldview."  Kuhn uses a lot of examples form the history of physics in 
his discussion and so we are told that, for example, the shift from 
Aristotelian mechanics to classical mechanics was a paradigm shift; the 
move from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian Relativity was a paradigm 
shift; etc.  In short, for Kuhn, when science replaces an old paradigm 
with a new one, it is "trading up," it is replacing something inferior 
with something superior; it is replacing something inadequate with 
something better.

Consequently, it's pretty difficult to employ this term outside of 
science per se.  Think about the history of painting: is newer painting 
always better than older painting?  E.g., is Abstract Expressionism 
better than Cubism better than Impressionism?  This kind of claim sounds 
unsound in a way that a discussion about the superiority of Newtonian 
mechanics over Aristotelian mechanics does not.

If process is paradigm in art, as our curators Jaschko and Evers argue 
in their catalog essay, then we might reasonably ask a Kuhnian question: 
Why is "process as paradigm" better than "object as paradigm"?  What is 
better about art that works to create processes rather than objects? 

I don't think Susanne or Lucas want to address this Kuhnian criterion.  
They state the situation, as they see it, in the last paragraph of their 
essay: "In art there is no way back, but more than ever there are 
parallel movements, practices and concepts of which the paradigmatic 
turn to process is one of many, one that unquestionably has the 
potential to have a long-lasting effect on the conception of art.  
Depending upon how momentous the paradigmatic shift to process is, we 
might already have entered a new era in art" (26).

In Kuhn's terms, a paradigm shift is, by definition, momentous; if it's 
just a shift, instead of a paradigm shift, then it might not be so 
consequential.  But, if it merits the name "paradigm," there is no 
significant parallel or practice, there is no serious competition in the 
realm of conceptionalizing the field, "there is no way back," as Susanne 
and Lucas themselves say.

The fields of science studies and the history of science have largely 
moved on from Kuhn's work exactly because the phrase "paradigm shift" 
leaves little room for alternatives, little space for other approaches 
to a given field.  "Process as Foucaultian Épistémè" may have many of 
the same connotations and fewer pifalls, but it hardly has the 
rhetorical punch of "Process as Paradigm."  Nevertheless, I can't help 
thinking that we might want to side step the Kuhnian "paradigm."  And, 
perhaps that is what has been done in the catalog and this discussion -- 
purely through the term's notable exclusion -- until I went and stepped 
right in it.

Oops!

-Warren