As argued by Celia Lury^[1]1Lury, Celia: Problem Spaces: How and Why Methodologies Matter (New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2020)., we as scholars need to consider the practice of composition in relation to contemporary epistemic structures and infrastructures due to several developments. Following Peter Slotjerdijk and Bruno Latour, Lury expresses how both modern and postmodern Western knowledge production has been substantially challenged by its own drive towards explicitation. As Latour writes: “History was never about ‘modernization’ or ‘revolution,’ but was rather about another phenomenon…. ‘explicitation.’ As we moved through our scientific inquiries, through the extension of our global empires, we rendered more and more explicit the fragility of the life support systems that make our ‘spheres of existence’ possible. Everything that earlier was merely ‘given’ becomes ‘explicit.’”^[2]2Latour, Bruno (2007): A plea for earthly sciences, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/102-BSA-GB_0.pdf. Lury unfolds how this fundamental strive within modern and postmodern knowledge production to make explicit the once taken-for-granted structures and infrastructures that maintain our life support systems has subsequently come to expose the fragility of our knowledge production systems system as well. To use a popular formulation from Latour, knowledge itself has moved from “matter of fact to matter of concern,” implying a situation in which “... knowing is, ever more so, an attempt to know how knowledge itself comes into being.”^[3]3Chow, Rey (2006): The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 3.

The process through which we as scholars attempt to make explicit how knowledge itself comes into being – our attempt to lay bare the practices, structures and infrastructures that come to define how we define problems and analyse them – is what Lury calls composition. This implies that the “how” of an analytic situation, encounter, object, subject, context etc. becomes the center of analysis, since it relates to the very construction of a problem – or matter of concern – that deserves our scholarly attention.

Closely associated with such efforts is the abandonment of the idea of an objective or external observer in Western sciences. In Lury’s exposition, the contemporary attention towards the processes of composition within epistemic practices, structures and infrastructures has contributed to an intensified interest in the geopolitics of methodology. Referring to thinkers such as Walter Mignolo – and many many more – Lury detects a renewed call for a recalibration of knowledge practices that counter the knowing subject as neutral, strives to move past universalism, and develops a critical analytical agency by practicing what Mignolo calls epistemological disobedience^[4]4Mignolo, Walter: "Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom," in: Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 26: 7-8 (2015), 159-181.. As such, the constitutive work of the observer – the composition of the position of the observer – has also been put to the forefront of epistemic work.

The result is - here I completely agree with Lury – that the key task for contemporary epistemic practices is to skillfully socialize the way in which we compose our analysis. I suggest doing so according to the following dimensions (maybe there are more, this is not an exhaustive list):

1) Composing the object of analysis: To formulate the problem of the problem.

2) Composing the subject of analysis: To stage and perform the situatedness of the analyst.

3) Composing the analytic situation: Delimiting the space, time and aesthetic-cultural context of the analysis.

4) Composing the form and approach of analysis: To temporarily complete the incompletable.

Ideally, such compositions reveal the research process as a dynamic and non-linear, distributed, human- and non-human-lead process and interrupt the givenness of any problem as problem. I am aware that the practice of composition as laid out here contributes to further expose the fundamental fragility and unprovability of our knowledge production systems, but I say: wonderful! Fragility and unprovability is what foster and stimulate and justify our professions (the “we” I refer to here is humanistic researchers in general and art researchers in particular). So: let’s celebrate.