Composing Collaborationist Collages about Commercial Security

What is it about?

Plain Language Summary This article introduces an analytical strategy or method: composing collaborationist collages. Such a strategy is helpful in problematizing issues marginalized in established research. A classic example would be gender. The article focuses on the politics of commercial security. I make the point that much academic research is “applicationist”; it applies theoretical frameworks. This by definition excludes issues for which no theoretical framework exists. The alternative I suggest is one working bottom up from the empirical observation composing an image of what one problematizes, a collage of radically heterogeneous things that may only partially hang together, and being clear on the importance of collaborating to make this process feasible and to avoid bias. Composing collaborationist collages makes it possible draw attention to the dis-connections and non-linear temporalities mostly assumed away. It also demands acknowledging the uncertain standing of any knowledge, including the own. The discomforting modesty this imposes, may be more effective than an ostrich strategy of pretending that existing theoretical frameworks know it all. The article presents this argument in the form that it advocates, that is as a collage that is composed in collaboration with feminist science and technology studies and installations by Martha Rosler and Hito Steyerl in the exhibition War Games (Kunstmuseum Basel Gegenwart, 2018).

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