Performing Interdisciplinarity

Working Across Disciplinary Boundaries Through an Active Aesthetic

Experience Bryon, Experience Bryon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317192244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Performing Interdisciplinarity proposes new ways of engaging with performance as it crosses, collides with, integrates and/or disturbs other disciplinary concerns. From Activism and Political Philosophy to Cognitive Science and Forensics, each chapter explores the relationships between performance and another discipline.

Including cross-chapter discussions which address the intersections between fields, Performing Interdisciplinarity truly examines the making of meaning across disciplinary conventions. This is a volume for performance practitioners and scholars who are living, learning, writing, teaching, making and thinking at the edges of their specialisms.

PART I

active aesthetic

Knowledge Performing

Experience Bryon

The episteme is not a general developmental stage of reason, it is a complex relationship of successive displacements.

Foucault 1991: 55

This book is an object made of paper and ink, or, if you are reading this online, it could be reduced to a series of 1s and 0s. However, if you were to understand or capture the various knowledges that this book might offer – to explore it actively, as an event, with an embedded series of happenings, resistances, disturbances, actions, and possible emergent ideas, rather than as an object of knowledge, you would be more likely to capture, even briefly, some of the knowledge within it. You would be actively engaging with it as an active aesthetic, rather than arbitrarily looking at or possessing it as an aesthetic object. The ways in which we engage with books or other objects, artifacts or modes of documentation largely determine what we get from them. The ways in which objects engage with us may also make a difference; for instance, there is research that suggests that reading print rather than digital expressions offers different types of retrieval results (Mangen, Walgermo and Brønnick 2013). It is in the leaning into the idea of disciplinarity and knowledge as active and processual that we begin to understand the basis of the active aesthetic – and with this a slightly different way of knowledging.

When we engage with this book as more than a mere object of knowledge we may see there are things happening within the pages of it, various crosses, collisions and intertwinings occurring as nine practitioners/researchers who come from different fields of performance cross disciplinary boundaries to engage with other fields of study. At the end of each chapter, these authors further leave their interdisciplinary spheres to visit another’s, sharing in informal discussions and grappling with some of the vocabularies and skillsets that emerged from their own interdisciplinary project while contributing a new layer of complexity to the inter/transdisciplinary nexus.

Before we go further, as this is a book partially about crossing disciplinary boundaries, it will be useful to briefly explore what disciplinary-ness even is: some of the ways in which it is enacted, how it has acted upon us, and how we have acted upon it throughout the centuries, including some of the ways we have organised, captured, evaluated, expressed and disseminated knowledge, a key currency of this problematic word – discipline.

Disciplinarity

It is not the point of this section to offer a new definition or a comprehensive history of the tricky concept we call discipline. There are many excellent ways to tell the story, each with its own merits and correlative agendas. Some of the finest can be found in: Klein 1990; Shumway and Messer-Davidow 1991; Messer-Davidow, Shumway and Sylvan 1993; Fuller 1993; Fuller and Collier 2004; Krishnan 2009; Gould 2011; Moran 2010; Weingart 2010 and Frodeman 2010 & 2014. This selective and brief reading of the story functions to highlight some of the instances that have made disciplinarity resistant to a conceptual and analytical framework such as the active aesthetic while at the same time primed for such a shift:

Socially and conceptually, we are disciplined by our disciplines. First, they help produce our world. They specify the objects we can study (genes, deviant persons, classic texts) and the relations that obtain among them (mutation, criminality, canonicity). They provide criteria for our knowledge (truth, significance, impact) and the methods (quantification, interpretation, analysis) that regulate our access to it.

Messer-Davidow, Shumway and Sylvan 1993: vii

If we agree with this as a basic starting point, it does not take us much further to see how we both practice our disciplines and are likewise disciplined into our practices, and that perhaps disciplinarity is at its core a process – as suggested in the introductory quote, a successive set of displacements of the ways in which we organise and capture knowledge(s) or engage in an act of Knowledging. With this we can begin to look at disciplines not only as a set of categories of human knowledge, sometimes defined as ‘a particular branch of learning or body of knowledge’ (Moran 2010: 2), ‘knowledge territories’ (Krishnan 2009: 12), ‘division of knowledge into units’ (Frodeman 2014: 19) or ‘branches of knowledge’, but also as practices of ‘generally accepted methods and truths’ (Shumway and Messer-Davidow 1991: 202). Of course truth is always a problematic word, but when we consider, as imbedded in the concept of discipline, the parallel definition that speaks to issues of both punishment and order, we see how the vying for truth may be the defining practice of the concept of discipline as it is ‘caught up in questions about the relationship between knowledge and power’ (Moran 2010: 2). This was most famously articulated by Foucault as a practiced ‘system of control in the production of discourse’ (Foucault 1972: 224) and aptly interpreted as a ‘process aimed at limiting the freedom of individuals and as a way of constraining discourses’ (Bridges 2006: 268).

All of these definitions and conceptual understandings become particularly interesting when we examine what happens when we actively engage across disciplinary boundaries. Metaphors of war are not unusual when discussing disciplinarity. So many writings on interdisciplinarity speak of ‘turf wars’ across ‘territories’, ‘factions’ and ‘borders’, with ‘boundaries’ defended by those ‘entrenched’ in their own disciplinary ‘silos’ or ‘fiefdoms’, ‘fortified’ by validating knowledge within their closed epistemological perspectives. There are also disciplinary ‘revolutions’ and ‘migrations’. We will speak later about the ‘science wars’ as a pivotal turning point during the onset of postmodernism, and question whether a conceptual and analytical mechanism like the active aesthetic might have come sooner if there had been such a strange occurrence as ‘performance practice wars’.

For now, however, as a counterproposal to metaphorically killing each other, in this chapter we explore how can we most effectively capture, document and/or comprehend knowledges that come from or emerge from the inter-relationships of different paradigms and thought styles (two terms that will be explored in more detail further on). What would a conceptual mechanism born of performance practice look like? Could it shake us from the kind of thought styles that rest on the martial metaphors towards more of an agonistic¹ epistemological pluralism that does not dilute or compromise rigour nor, as Lyotard warned about interdisciplinarity, erode disciplinary authority? (Lyotard 1984: 53)

Knowledge, its organisation, practice and capture, occurs across other cultural contexts and has existed since before antiquity, evidenced for instance as sophisticated chemistry in the practice of embalming and tools made of complex metal compositions, and also the geography and design of ancient maps. The following brief dip into Western disciplinary culture stays in the West largely because the active aesthetic was developed in response to and within this story as part of an interdisciplinary proposition across Western performance practice(s). (However, as we will learn later, the active aesthetic, when used with responsibility, can be applied across non-Western constructs too.)

Our Western notions of discipline start with the ancient Greeks, namely Plato and Aristotle. Where Plato framed philosophy as a force for unifying knowledge and its scholarly practice as a synthesiser for all branches of learning, Aristotle was the first to designate knowledge into categories and, importantly, also hierarchies of importance. His three intellectual virtues, episteme, techne and phronesis, set the stage for a series of separations. Where episteme can be aligned to theory, thinking, the understanding of a matter, or more generally knowledge, techne is more about the technical, technology, the practical, suggesting the act of making, skill, art and workmanship. Phronesis, a concept that goes beyond episteme and techne, is a hard concept to align to a discrete discipline or subject. It can translate to ‘prudence’ or ‘practical wisdom’, having to do with what is good and/or bad for mankind.² What is important is that there were divisions perpetrated and with this values placed on activities of knowledge. ‘This first division of “philosophical” knowledge prepared the way for the uncountable further divisions of knowledge into more and more specialised fields of science. The unity of knowledge was apparently lost irreversibly’ (Krishnan 2009: 13).

The notion of unity with some grounding utopian communion among disciplinary knowledge(s) is not the goal of this book. Rather, the uncomfortable places, the friction, and the occurrences of obstacles encountered while engaging across disciplines are largely where I will later show that the active aesthetic helps us to witness and capture those chosen moments before the landing, the grounding and the naming of knowledge(s): a middle space, where I will argue that knowledge happens as an act of practising.

Aristotle’s categorising, whether he quashed any hope for a unity of knowledge or not, did set us on the path towards exponential drilldowns of specialisms, with specialisms of specialisms being delineated along correlative vyings for power that set up a series of value distinctions. This, I will argue, remains with us as part of an ongoing prejudice against the act of practice as a field of knowledge generation, rather than a mere skill or activity of creativity and representation serving mostly within the bounds of hermeneutics:

In episteme, the resolving power of the mind is stretched to the limit in the quest for truth. In techne, the ingenuity of the mind may be extended beyond the yield-point in the search for self-expression. Thus a major difference emerges, and with it the awareness that ‘understanding’ and ‘workmanship’ are, from this angle, incommensurable.

Rawlins 1950: 390; added emphasis

With Aristotle, episteme came to represent a higher categorisation of subjects, with theology, mathematics, and physics more important than practical subjects such as ethics and politics, for instance. The lowest in the rung were attributed to the techne category, which included arts, poetics, and other activities of making, including engineering. As Moran points out, this categorisation was conflicted even back then, as he did not completely drop the Platonic meta-positioning of philosophy:

[Aristotle] positioned philosophy as the universal field of inquiry which brought together all the different branches of learning, a notion of unity in difference which also influenced the formation of the disciplines within the modern university. As Aristotle’s system makes clear, anxieties about the harmful specialization of knowledge are as old as the scholarly disciplines themselves.

Moran 2010: 4

However, specialisation had been set on its way, plotting a path of a hierarchal development in which those aspects aligned with the Aristotelian category techne were consistently pushed down to a lower rung every time they began to climb in relevance. The Stoics (c.300bc), developing philosophy not so much as an intellectual pastime but rather as a form of ‘practice or an exercise (askêsis) in the expertise concerning what is beneficial’ (Baltzly 2014: 4), overlapped with the Aristotelian view. The medieval trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) were born in the concept of the artes liberals, a system of knowledge that was thought to be the most comprehensive.

However, as Frodeman astutely reminds us, ‘understanding “discipline” as merely a taxonomic or analytic category neglects historical, institutional, and political elements that are central to the concept’ (2014: 19).

When we think about how knowledge exchanges are enacted in practice rather than situated as discipline, we get another take on the story. For instance, from the first university structure of education (circa 1088, Bologna) up until the eighteenth century, there were ‘faculties’. They included the ‘higher’, comprising those of medicine, theology and law and a ‘lower’, comprising that of a combination of philosophy and humanities. Interestingly:

Professors would cycle through these faculties across the course of their careers, moving from the lower faculty of philosophy to the three higher faculties. Such movement discouraged specialization and narrowly focused conversations and encouraged an orientation toward broad-based learning.

(Frodeman 2014: 20

Important, also, is that the ways knowledge was evaluated and captured were distinctly different from our current labours of knowledge, which favour new knowledge evidenced through citation accumulation and research outputs and are judged against mercurial definitions of ‘innovation’ and ‘impact’. In the first university structures:

professors lectured (from the Latin lectus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword — Claire Colebrook
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Index