I am interested in the concept of unlearning since I am looking for a term that descriptively encapsulates two interrelated processes that interest me. First, it helps to determine what is at stake in the artistic practices that I work with. In each of their elaborate way, these practices problematize, deconstruct, overrule, activate, deactivate, or unfold the otherwise inconspicuous conditions that structure the production, circulation and instrumentalization of knowledge today; in particular, those that contribute to maintaining “the Middle East” as unifying epistemological, geographical, historical, cultural, aesthetic, and sociopolitical construct invented by modern imperialism. I find that these artistic practices are not only striving to reflexively transform and exhibit the consequences of imperial modernity upon the region, but they furthermore claim that any such transformation begins from the practice of reflexively unlearning modern imperial knowledge practices as such.

Since, in the context of the artistic practices that interest me, the practice of unlearning relates directly to the production, circulation and instrumentalization of knowledge, I also find the concept of unlearning to be a key methodological stance to think, write and practice through when interacting analytically with these works. Or, to say it a bit differently: if I hope to think through the ways in which these works problematize, deconstruct, overrule, activate, deactivate, and unfold otherwise inconspicuous conditions that structure knowledge practices, I am committed to relate these inconspicuous conditions to my own practice – to how I produce, circulate and instrumentalize knowledge of and with these works. Or, to say it like my seven years old son: if I wish to learn how to draw with my left hand, I must begin by unlearning any impulse towards drawing with the right (which includes gestures such as: how I position myself on the chair and in front of the paper, how I pick up the pencil etc.)

Given the motivation above, I am particularly interested in the concept of unlearning when put into contact with concepts such as imperialism, modernity, history, or knowledge. Edward Said^[1]1Said, Edward: Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). distinguishes between imperialism and colonialism by stating that imperialism involves: “the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory,” while colonialism refers to the more delimited practice of “implanting settlements on a distant territory."Modern imperialism – understood here as a political, economic, social, aesthetic, epistemic programmatic force – is intrinsically bound to ideas of its own progress and progressiveness: anti traditional at its bones, always on the move towards unknown lands inside or outside the borders of human perception in the name of science, the future, the radical, the truth, the beautiful, growth, happiness. Ariella Aîsha Azoulay^[2]2Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha: Potential History: Unlearning Imperalism (New York: Verso Books, 2019). writes that wherever the imperial forces of progress hit, they impose new political institutions and practices, through the destruction of already existing norms and systems for producing, circulating and instrumentalizing knowledge, and through: “the normalization of the need to constantly and infinitely invent more of the new to justify the destruction of what exists”^[3]3Ibid, p. 26..

As a response to this, it seems urgent to state that rehearsals in non-imperial, non-progressive, non-dominant thinking and practice are not undertaken in preparation for an imminent day of reckoning and revolution. Rather, such gestures are a way of rehearsing an on-going sensibility towards the immanent instability of any relation. In Azoulay’s understanding, the unlearning of imperialism and its ways of conditioning the production, circulation, and instrumentalization of knowledge do not spring from the question: how can it be opposed tomorrow? Rather, we as researchers must start by asking how it is opposed today, how it was opposed yesterday, last year, fifty years ago, two hundred years ago?

We must not pretend that we can progress past the imperial strive towards progress – that is the temporal problem imperialism (and large parts of the Modern Western project as such) has devised for us^[4]4Ibid, p. 20.. We must strive to find a methodological framework that allows us to show how deeply ideological most claims to progress are; a methodology which allows us to unfold how modern knowledge production, its implied criticality and claim to neutrality can become (has become, historically and today) a means for reproducing problematic ideological programs; not only imperialism, but also programs such as fascism and hyper capitalism. I believe that such a methodological framework must, as a very first step, be aware of its own contradiction (how to criticize criticality? as Nora Sternfeld asked at Pernille Lystlund Matzen’s recent Ph.D. defense) and thereby become able to enforce situated analytic practices that are aware of their own problematic contribution to the programs they are criticizing. In my opinion, such a methodology centers around the concept and practice of unlearning.