Ellis von Sternberg: I would like to open this up with a question regarding artistic practice: your work is embedded in a rigorous study of art’s enlightenment philosophical forebears and the subsequent continental critics of that philosophical project in the 20th century. As I understand it, the practical category of a given research, in its scientic tradition, is inherently specic to the areas of study the method of that research pertains to. This is to say that the specialized rules dening a given method constrain research, at the level of practice, to the specialized area that it studies. If research, then, has rules and norms it must adhere to in order to minimally qualify as relevant in its eld, do you believe artistic research is also rule bound? If so, would it be accurate to say art and art practices are the ends of an artist’s given research method rather than an end unto themselves? How then do your philosophical studies come to inform the way you work as an artist? Is it part of the art itself or does it preempt, and possibly preclude, the work?

Amanda Beech: That’s a big opening question, but this is great because it’s something that I’ve been grappling with a long time. I think that the rst part of the question highlights how a discipline that claims any kind of scienticity becomes self-aware of its own bias or subjectivism. For some, that spelled the end of the possibility of a science, because it says that everything becomes subjective. There was no hope anymore for objectivity, everything is contextual, everything is contingent, everything is psychological or perspectival. This kind of hand-wringing response is something that I see to have been over-determined, for it misses out on the objective conditions that are also at play within any situation. The idea that everything is subjective holds the fallacy of open possibilities. But as we know full well, in the context of capitalism the myth of openness and plurality is very much the core to its ideological framework. We nd that the legacy of critique has actually brought us to a form of subjective idealism that is really reective of the core principles of capitalist ideology itself. This is plainly unsatisfactory. So what I’m really interested in is how we can think through a productive self consciousness rather than this debilitating form.