CathERi NE RyaN

Writing as Praxis
An Interview with Nina Power

Nina Power is a UK-based writer, lecturer, and activist who

has written on a wide range of topics including European
philosophy, feminism, art, politics, and music. She teaches
Philosophy at Roehampton University and Critical Writing
in Art and Design at the Royal College of Art, and is a co-
founding member of Defend the Right to Protest, a campaign
group that opposes police brutality and the use of violence
against protestors. She was a member of the faculty at the
2015 Banff Research in Culture (BRiC).
Powers seminar at the BRiC considered the possibility of
resurrecting certain sorts of political writing, particularly the
short, assertoric slogan, in order to address the contemporary
political circumstance in which there is, she argues, no real
public sphere, only an agreeable ghost public invoked by the
state in the name of the preservation of public order.1
Following this seminar, I was interested to find out more
about Powers perspective on the practical and strategic
capacities of different sorts of political writing and creative
intervention. What considerations might govern, for exam-
ple, the choice to write in one genre over another? How might
recent changes in the media landscape, such as the eclipse of
newspapers and television by online media, shape these
choices? And what factors might govern artists interventions
into contemporary political situations?

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CathERiNE RyaN (CR): Lets talk about writing as praxis. There are many forms, genres, or
styles of writing one could choose if one wanted to engage in writing as a political activity or to
intervene somehow in ones present. For example, one could write axiomatic slogans, polemics,
genealogies, or philosophical treatises. Im interested in thinking about what might make one par-
ticular strategy appealing or what grants one form different capacities compared to others.
In the seminars you offered at the 2015 BRiC program, you asked participants to take part in
an exercise in which they generated axiomatic statements about the presentshort, pithy phrases
describing our present socio-political order and capturing the state of things in a slogan. Why did
you ask participants to write in the form of axiomatic statements?

NiNa pOwER (Np): Partly because its quite difficult and people dont necessarily like doing it. It
forces people to think and write in a succinct way, and come up with declarative statements about
how things are. Its paradoxical, I suppose, because we are surrounded by the short statement: the
tweet, the newspaper headline, the listicle, etc. But people are often very resistant to coming up
with their own declarative statement, even as an exercise, because people shy away from the
axiomatic, committed statement. If you ask people to write in their natural style, they will often
write quite self-indulgently, referring to themselves quite liberally, even if rather self-effacingly.
The cold, hard statement puts a different kind of pressure on writers. Im also interested in those
political forms of writing that have this kind of sloganistic or declarative quality.

CR: From my experience, it was a confronting exercise to write in that way, in part because it
forced one to be upfront and straightforward. Do you conceive of this exercise as of primary
benefit to the writer? What power or particular capacity might the slogan have for the reader? Is
there something about the slogan that recommends it as a method of communicating ideas?

Np: I think so. In recent years, Ive been interested in political genres of writing in general, and in
thinking about ways of communicating in terms of the pamphlet or the polemic in particular. Slogans
are rather ambivalent, given that they find their contemporary purchase primarily in advertising, as a
commercial medium or tool. Can we strip the slogan of its consumerist content and association, or is
it indelibly bound to advertising as a form? I think its interesting to push for a rebirth of ideas, or even
the Idea, as Alain Badiou might have it, as a kind of counter-advertising, demarcating a concept
Communism, saythat perhaps cannot ultimately be sold in the same way.2
There are interesting studies regarding contemporary modes of reading. People are actually
reading a lot more, in the sense of reading many different things online. So the average number of
words read is probably far higher than it would have been before the Internet.3 But its a slightly
different form of readinga slightly distracted mode of engaging with words. One might have 15
different articles open that one flicks back and forth between, which might encourage readers to
put aside longer articles to read later. So theres always this pressure to write in such a way that you
grab somebodys attention. And I think for me that definitely developed during the time I was
writing a blog, when lots of people were writing blogs, particularly 20042010, and there was a
certain openness to them. Its like writing into the void, writing and wondering, why would
anyone care about this? You have to consider why someone might care to read it.

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 Im interested in those types of writing that genuinely aim to have an effect on the reader.
Such writing might make for a blunter writing style, and a desire to engage might also index a lack
of confidence, that is, an assumption that readers wouldnt want to read something you write
unless you made it particularly exciting for them.
There is a reader-oriented way of thinking about political writing, then. This is especially true
if one is attempting to advance a particular argument: whether its who should be denounced
or overthrown or what political action should happen, it has to have this direct quality. Which
is not to say that there arent amazing political poems, for example, that might move you in dif-
ferent ways. But I think, in the case of polemical writing, theres a specific relation to time. Its
writing with a sense of urgency, like, something is wrong with the world and it must be changed
immediately!

CR: So its a type of writing that has its objective already given to it. It needs to facilitate some par-
ticular action or event as urgently as possible.

Np: Yes. But of course that can fall into parody because its also a form that people can recognize
and to which they might be averse. So I think one has to be playful with argument as well. Theres
not just one way of writing politically or urgently. Consider The Communist Manifesto, for exam-
ple; its written with an urgent tone but it only had real historical impact quite a bit after its initial
publication. It had a delayed effect. Obviously, one can never predict what a text is going to do.
You are still sending it into the void. Most texts are simply ignored and fail to generate any
response whatsoever.

CR: Or alternatively, the pieces one thinks are important flop, while some silly other thing that
youve hurriedly plopped out at some point becomes the thing.

Np: Yes, totally.

CR: Because my own research has explored Michel Foucaults articulation of how he understood
the praxis of writing, my next few questions will start, as a sort of counterexample, with some
quotes from Foucault about the practical effects of different approaches to writing.
Foucault spoke about how he preferred to write indirectly about the present. Obviously there
are many interviews where he states his political position explicitly, but in all of his books he
almost never characterizes the present directly. He suggested that he did this because he wasnt
writing with a particular objective in mind. He wanted the experience of reading his books to be
a way of problematizing attitudes towards, or the acceptance of, the present, but he had no defined
prescription about the specific practical consequences or political applications of these texts.
Given what youve argued above about readers tendencies to avoid longer or less direct texts, its
worth observing that Foucaults approach assumes that people are going to read entire books.
Whereas I would say that the history of Foucaults reception is that people dont read entire books
by him, but rather quote what he said in an interview.

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Np: There are lots of really bad Foucauldians. Foucault has unintentionally generated vast quan-
tities of bad academic writing that often have no useful political effects and are in fact quite
deadening. I certainly think the way in which Foucault talks about different epistemological
frameworks and reveals the lack of natural kinds is crucial for questioning the reality of particular
structures that one might assume are permanent, like prisons or police. At the same time, there is
a kind of possibility of generalizing about power, in particular, that you get from Foucault, which
is why so many Foucauldians often neglect specifics. So someone might write about the police as
a concept, but neglect to mention anything about specific police tactics. I dont think Foucaults
analysis of power necessarily leads to this sweeping approach, but something about his style might
encourage it.
On the other hand, Foucault was an activist and a journalist. His writing from Iran is very
direct and certainly his activism around prisons constitutes a direct intervention into the present.
So I think history, or a certain kind of history, does give you the tools for questioning contempo-
rary forms, institutions, and epistemological frameworks. But this is not necessarily sufficient, and
may not necessarily address the specificities of a particular situation. There are many people who
do Foucauldian readings of power or policing but then fail to talk about actual police, how the
police actually work, or what their tactics for crushing protest actually are. I think its quite diffi-
cult to get the balance between an insightful history and a specific political action in the present.
There has to be more of a link between the history and the present.

CR: In Foucaults case, this direct intervention largely occurs outside the form of historical writing
that is found in his books. It exists, as you say, in his activism, journalism, and interviews about
contemporary politics. Foucault conceives both his indirect, historical writing and his more
overtly political engagements to have practical intentions, but their modes of operation are differ-
ent, such that its generally not the case that the two types of intervention are found within a single
work (although, arguably, one informs the other). At the risk of oversimplifying, for Foucault,
there is a type of genealogical writing that has one job and theres immediate political intervention
that has another.

Np: Theres also the question of time. To do that kind of research takes a lot of time and money,
or someone willing and able to pay you to sit in the Bibliothque Nationale for four years. In fact,
if you have been asked to write something briefly in very little time, such constraints might be
communicated also in the tone of the writing.

CR: Perhaps the erosion of public funding has also eroded the possibility of new Foucaults. No
one can find the justification for funding these types of projects or approaches anymore.

Np: Its just obvious to me that the conditions of production of writing actually affect what is being
written. Sometimes its easier to write polemic in a short space of time than it is to write something
thats measured or indirect.

CR: That makes sense. Another Foucault remark: in a late interview, he argues that polemics have
a stifling or sterilizing effect on thought, because the polemic is a text that you write when you

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already have an objective in mind and youre merely executing that objective (these arent pre-
cisely his words), whereas hes interested in forms of writing that might generate new ideas.4 Do
you think new ideas can emerge from polemic? Is it the case that you write the polemic when you
already have an objective?

Np: Not necessarily. Many people may not necessarily know what it is they think until they have
written it down. And it often turns out to be different from what you initially thought you thought.
I think this idea of polemic being always dogmatic is simply false. A lot of polemic is in fact really
funny. Many of the older, revolutionary pamphlets and similar texts are just hilarious. Theyre not
really dogmatic in the sense of badgering someone into believing something. Obviously there are
polemics like that. But I think polemic, especially if its funny and energetic, does actually open up
different ways of thinking. And some of my favourite writing, especially when I was younger, was
the very highly opinionated music writing that you would sometimes get in the NME and Melody
Makercompletely partisan, completely unfair, in some ways, an excoriating rant or screed about
some band or some pop cultural trend that would genuinely change the way you thought about
the world.
Foucault and Deleuze both have this thing about how discussion is for idiots. In What is
Philosophy? Deleuze writes, Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say,
Lets discuss this.5 I think this is quite an amusing thing to say, especially if we have a liberal
understanding of the history of philosophy as a series of democratic dialogues or an ontological
debating society, or whatever. They also had problems, quite rightly, with the dogmatism and
social conservatism of the French Communist Party, who had dreadful positions on homosexual-
ity, for example, and a terrible style. You can see why Foucault would have a problem with both of
these things.
I dont know whether or not new ideas come out of polemic. If you read a polemic about
something that you only had the faintest idea about and it changes your mind or opens up a way
of thinking about it, then that surely does seem to be generative. Do you think what Foucault
means is that a polemic is overly entangled with its object?

CR: The polemic remark refers to the French Communist Party, but also, I think, to Foucaults ini-
tial reception in Canada and the US, where liberal academics like Charles Taylor or Michael
Walzer6 characterized Foucaults writing as deliberate obscurantism, as if he has no right to speak
at all because he refuses to provide a clear moral foundation for judging what constitutes a good
or a bad society.

Np: Obviously those sorts of critiques of Foucault are ridiculous.

CR: Foucault is defending discussionand his reasons are different from those of Deleuzeinso-
far as a pair of interlocutors share the same rights in a conversation. Theyre tied to what they say,
they can clarify each other, and so theres a dialectic. Foucault objects to the polemic because the
correctness of the polemicist is set out before the whole discussion happens. He doesnt want this
hierarchy. I can see a similarity to Jacques Rancires position here, in that he and Foucault share
a sort of sensitivity or allergy towards hierarchical modes of communication.

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Np: But then you get into all this stuff about the metaphysics of presence. Derrida notes that
theres something deeply exclusionary and exclusive about the model of the dialogue. Even in
ancient Greece, where we often imagine the practice of philosophical dialogue to have been born,
not everybody gets to have a dialogue. Theres something much more democratic about text in
the sense that it can circulate widely and potentially be read by anyone. Whereas actually having
a conversation or a dialogue, especially a privileged one, is actually not possible for a lot of people.
And I think for Rancire, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, its the text that is the democratic, democ-
ratizing object. So I dont think a polemic is arrogant. If anything, its mostly coming from a
position of weakness, like, there is this thing in the world that is awful, or this thing upsets me
and I must communicate it, rather than one of arrogance or assertion. It often involves working
through something as you go.
In Britain we have this debate modelthe ruling class model of how discussion should
happen. Take parliamentary debate, for example, in which posh people shout at each other.
Theyve all done debating society, where one arbitrarily takes up one side of a motion against the
otherit doesnt really matter whichbecause its all about ones rhetoric, ones ability to argue
anything. So there are obviously modes of dialogue that are not democratic or egalitarian at all.

CR: Theres also this figure of the debate or the discussion thats invoked by politicians, like we
need to have a national conversation about x, which you always know means theyre just softening
up the public. Theyre parroting a language of discussion and debate about x so that they can cut
funding to x a few weeks later. So they mention the words discussion and debate a lot.

Np: I think most consultations are never actually consultations. They are not two-way discus-
sions at all, I agree. You also encounter this idea that certain ideas are being censored. At the
moment there are myriad discussions in Britain about what people can and cannot say, particu-
larly regarding speakers being no-platformed, that is to say, a priori blocked from invitation, at
universities. Many people are objecting to the framing of debates, asking why some questions are
even being posed in a way that completely prejudges the outcome, e.g., The Muslim Community
has a Problem with Terrorism. Discuss. There is a sense in which these types of events are not
even pretending to ask serious questions.
That demand for free speech and to be able to speak publicly is often a way of not talking
about certain things and also of making offensive claims. Which would have to be, maybe, slightly
more nuanced if it were written down. There are anti-democratic elements to both writing and
speaking in that sense. I wouldnt want to necessarily privilege one over the other.

CR: And of course, thinking of no-platforming, when people go on about how the left or pro-
gressivesoverly sensitive progressivesare now engaging in censorship, you have to
remember, the majority of censorship is conservative censorship. A billionaire with significant
stakes in influential media empires compels a television station to prevent unflattering scenes in a
drama series about them from going to air.7

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Np: And all the things that we never talk about, like Britains relationship to colonialism or slav-
erythere are loads of things that arent discussed all the time. And thats deliberate. Who is it that
doesnt want to speak about these things? Who doesnt want to speak about wealth inequality?
Indeed, certain people have a massively vested interest in not speaking about the iniquities of cap-
italism. So a lot of the time these debates are like, yeah, lets talk about this thing so that we dont
have to talk about this other thing.

CR: In a recent response to the film Marxism Today, a work by the artist Phil Collins, you ask
whether it isnt time to return to analyses of the political present that mobilize superstructural, sys-
temic frameworks.8 There, you draw attention to the hypocritical inconsistency of disavowing
grand narratives, given that there are already a number of grand narratives circulating at the fore-
front of public discourse, like climate change. Foucault states, from his position in the early 1980s,
that attempts to think in terms of a totality have proven a hindrance to research. He argues that
we should reject projects that claim to be global in favour of what he calls specific, partial trans-
formations, by which he is referring to feminism, changes in the perceptions of mental illness, and
so on that he thinks have actually been successful.9 Now, as we have noted above, these remarks
are particular to an assessment of a certain political moment when neoliberalism wasnt as domi-
nant as it is today. Could you say a bit more about this need to write in systemic terms again? Do
you feel that this is necessary because local, specific approaches are somehow more susceptible to
appropriation by and complicity with neoliberalism?

Np: That text is a specific response to Phils film, which consists of interviews with women who
taught Marxism before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here was an education system that did actually
teach you to think in terms of capital, exploitation, and labour, and offered a framework for think-
ing about the world which explains certain things, as opposed to what happens after the collapse
of communism, which is really a celebration of partial and postmodern forms of knowledge.
Its not really so much against Foucaults point about specific, partial transformations. If we
were still talking about feminism as a way of perceiving the world or understanding the world in
grand terms, that would be good, too. Or thinking about mental illness in bigger, structural, socio-
political terms as well as personally and individually. The problem arises when you simply have
the idea that all knowledges are equally competingthis is my truth, tell me yours. This is a prob-
lem because such an approach is unable to explain why things like capitalism persist or why the
rich continue to get richer. It becomes too specific. The point about things like global warming is
not that theyre narratives, its that theyre processes that clearly require a global response. There
are no micro-solutions to global warming. Again, terms like patriarchythese are terms that
have a great explanatory value. Or sexism or racism. Whereas if you abandon those terms, you
end up with a series of people feeling the same form of oppression but feeling it individually like,
somehow this must be my fault, or why is this always happening to me?
We cannot do without those terms and I dont think theyve been superseded. The world
remains as sexist, capitalist, and racist as ever. Those arent ways of thinking in a totalizing way
those arent totalities. They are critical terms that are more diagnostic. And theyre certainly open

115
to discussion. You would have to talk about how patriarchy manifests itself. Is it everything from
mansplaining to ownership of property to capitalism itself? They are terms that allow for a discus-
sion of scale, precisely, and in that sense are open to debate. Whereas if we avoid such terminology
then it would appear as though we were contingently confronting identical problems without a
means to analyze them.
You were saying that neoliberalism is more compatible with local analyses. Its very useful,
right, if lots of people are beating each other up over misuses of language when the ruling class are
doing whatever the fuck they want. I do think there is a problem with too much of a micro-focus
on wording or identity and an avoidance of grand narratives. The processes that grand narratives
attempted to capture havent gone away, its just that people got scared about using grand narra-
tives to talk about them.

CR: Which is also what Lyotard says, reallyits not that grand narratives went away, its just that
there was incredulity towards them.10

Np: Yeah, but I dont think that grand narratives or superstructural analyses are supposed to be
truths in that way. It might be better to think of them as scientific hypotheses in the sense of
working theories. And insofar as they stop working because the situation has changed, then you
replace them with something else. I dont think theyre blockages or limits to thought. I dont think
they prevent thought. I dont think theyre totalizing. I think theyre necessary.

CR: So Im curious if you have any sense, as a public intellectual, of what people want or expect
from public intellectuals.

Np: Lots of free work, usually. [Laughs]

CR: Foucault, for example, was very sensitive towards the expectation he perceived that public
intellectuals should be prophets that deliver truths or predictions about the future.11 I feel like this
still happens. This is anecdotal, but often at talks or conferences theres an irate questioner who
demands, but what should we do! What does this mean for what we should do! Id be curious to
hear if you have any reflections on the expectations of public intellectuals.

Np: Obviously Foucault is having a go at Jean-Paul Sartre. When Foucault and Deleuze are talking
about micropolitics and the death of the public intellectual, I think to some extent they are iden-
tifying a real phenomenon. I dont think that theres the same kind of examining or dissemination
of ideas by so-called public intellectuals today.
I think that with the death of TV and print media, you are left with a number of non-over-
lapping spheres of influence. Its not clear precisely what it would mean to be a public intellectual
without TV or newspapers. I think a lot of the time public speaking occurs within a closed sphere.
So if I get asked to talk about protests or policing I will be talking to people, 99 per cent of whom
will share my views already. Its not like youre on TV and 70 per cent of the people watching will
be against what you say but you nevertheless manage to convince some of them. Its not like that.

116 PUBLIC 55 RYAN + POWER

I dont know if theres a public intellectual in that way anymore; probably because there isnt a
public in the same way, because media and dissemination have changed so much. I think there are
non-overlapping spheres of mutually reinforcing beliefs.

CR: The last topic I want to address is the writing you do about art, including essays in publica-
tions like Frieze or e-flux, as well as texts for artists projects. When you talk about artand I know
this is an indefensible distinction to makeyou appear to be interested in art when its most like
politics. For example, you say that you dream of a Turbine Hall filled with stolen horses.12 To be
blunt, it seems like youre interested in the real theft and subtraction of police power that would
result from such a project, with art acting as an alibi. And youre interested in artists when they
organize politically or when they work as activists. So, I am curious as to whether you think this
characterization is unfair. Are you only interested in art when its least like art and when its most
like politics?

Np: No, I dont think so. The Turbine Hall police horse thing is obviously a reference to Tania
Bruguera, right, so thats an art piece, so

CR: You want her to get more horses. She shouldnt have just had a few horses, she should have
had all of the police horses locked up in the Turbine Hall, as this would be more politically effec-
tive.

Np: Well, its a massive space.

CR: You could fit a lot of horses in there, thats true.

Np: Exactly.
Most of the art criticism I write tends to be about music and film. And most of those things
I write about are not straightforwardly political. So not at all. Theres lots of art I dont write about,
but that would go for any sort of critic. And obviously if you have written about political art then
youre more likely to be asked to write about political art again. Its one of those self-fulfilling
things. So I absolutely dont in principle have any demand that art be political or artists be activists.
I think, though, that there are a lot of artists who are activists. Certainly the working artists that I
know in London and the UK tend to be. I think thats partly because of the recent context, in
which it was arts and humanities that were the most affected by the education cuts. So these things
became politicized, because that avenue of existence was being directly attacked.
Put your question exactly againam I only interested in art when its not like art, when its
more like activism or politics?

CR: I know thats not really a fair distinction to make.

Np: It depends very much on the specific thing, doesnt it? Theres lots of political art thats very
badbad as art and bad as politics. Its not like every political artist or artwork is somehow

117
redeemed by virtue of its political qualities. On the contrary. And then there are plenty of artworks
that arent directly political that nevertheless have huge political ramifications.

CR: My question assumes that theres a clear divide between art and politics in the first place,
whereas the notion of art becoming part of life and therefore, presumably, part of politics has been
well established over the last five decades, at least. It is commonplace to think that the aesthetic
and the political are inextricably bound up with one another.

Np: I probably do make throwaway polemical statements in art contexts, because there are gen-
uine problems with the art world in the sense of the sheer hierarchies of money involved, the way
in which art circulates, and is sometimes used as a kind of whitewash or cover story behind which
rich people or corporations can hide their arms business. If youve got a gallery, this somehow
excuses you because you must have a soul because you like art, even though youre a murdering
arms dealer.

CR: Or you run an offshore detention centre.13

Np: Yeah, exactly. So, I do think the art world should be politicized, if you want to say that. I do
think we should be talking about where the money comes from, especially because now so many
things are privately funded because theres no public money, which raises questions about trans-
parency. If youre a poor, struggling artist and you get some money from an evil art gallery, the
decision about whether you should refuse is very different morally than it would be for someone
who has a salary who is asked to speak at the same place. There are many discussions of this sort
happening with lots of groups in Britain about the art world and complicity and so on. The
Liberate Tate campaign, for example, which sought to make BP pull out of its sponsorship of the
Tate, has just won.14
So, there are several separate questions here about where art and politics lie together or how
they relate. But Im not simply only interested in art if its political or if the artists making the
work are activists. And I think some of the favourite writing that I do is about music, and often its
about music that has no lyrical content and is much less easy to directly politicize in that sense.
But its actually the most enjoyable thing, in a way, to try to write about. So perhaps theres a way
in which its a sort of escape from thinking about political pressures as well, in a good way. You
cant be angry or working on something political all the time.

CR: No, youd run out of juice.

Np: And then where would we be?!

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NOTES
1 Nina Power, The Only Good Public is a Moving
Public, in TkH 20: Art and the Public Good, ed.
Bojana Cvejic and Marko Kostanic (June 2012):
http://www.tkh-generator.net/wp-content/
uploads/2014/04/tkh-20eng-web.pdf.
2 Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, New
Left Review 49 (2008): 35.
3 Adrienne LaFrance, The Golden Age of Reading the
News, The Atlantic, 6 May 2016, http://www.the
atlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/oh-internet-
you-wonderful-newsy-readable-lovely-internet/481500/.
4 Michel Foucault, Polemics, Politics and
Problematizations: an Interview with Michel Foucault,
in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of
Michel Foucault, 19541984, ed. Paul Rabinow
(London: Penguin, 2000), 113.
5 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What is
Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 28.
6 Charles Taylor, Foucault on Freedom and Truth, in
Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 69102; Michael Walzer,
The Politics of Michel Foucault, in Foucault: A
Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1986), 5168.
7 Jamelle Wells and Claire Aird, Gina Rinehart and
Channel Nine Reach Confidential Agreement on
House of Hancock TV series, ABC News, 14 February
14 2015, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-14/
gina-rinehart-house-of-hancock-tv-series-confidential-
agreement/6100042.
8 Nina Power, This World Is Not Enough: Pedagogy
Against Capitalism, The White Review, August,
2015, http://www.thewhitereview.org/white-screen/
this-world-is-not-enough/.
9 Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment? in Ethics,
Subjectivity and Truth, 316.
10 Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition,
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press,
1984), xxiv.
11 Michel Foucault, The Minimalist Self, in Politics,
Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings,
1977-1984, ed. L. Kritzman (New York: Routledge,
1988), 16.
12 Nina Power, On Claims of Radicality in
Contemporary Art, e-flux, 28 January 2015,
http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/on-claims-of-
radicality-in-contemporary-art/959/3.
13 Libia Castro, lafur lafsson, Charlie Sofo, Gabrielle
de Vietri, and Ahmet gt, Statement of Withdrawal
from 19th Biennale of Sydney, 26 February 2014,
https://19boswg.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/statement-
of-withdrawal-from-19th.html.
14 Nadia Khomami, BP to end Tate Sponsorship after
26 Years, The Guardian, 11 March 2016, http://www.
theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/mar/11/bp-to-
end-tate-sponsorship-climate-protests.
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