Trust and Be Open to Unexpected Possibilities

Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke & Erik Rietveld Trust and Be Open to Unexpected Possibilities

In January 2021 editors Jeroen Boomgaard, and Katie Clarke interviewed philosopher Erik Rietveld in a video chat to discuss the question of this book: How to do Transdisciplinarity? All three sat somewhere in Amsterdam, yet seemingly separated as in the context of a COVID-19 lockdown. Erik Rietveld offered insight from his career as a philosopher that always puts arts and research at the forefront of his thinking. This conversation is a good introduction to unpacking transdisciplinarity, how to make such projects come to life, and of the risks and challenges that arise along the way.

Erik Rietveld I had difficulties fully grasping the word or concept of Hinterlands, so perhaps you can say one or two more sentences on that?

Katie Clarke Yes. I wonder if there is a Dutch translation? It has a German etymology. ARIAS has been exploring the relationship between art and knowledge for some time, and the concept cemented itself for us in a symposium which took place in 2019 called ‘Shadow of Knowledge’, where we presented a lot of “alternative knowledge” found in the margins of the ARIAS network. And in a really plain way of saying it, Hinterlands is this place for the alternative; a place for researchers that are using different methods for understanding something.

Jeroen Boomgaard I think, you know, in the Dutch translation of the notion of Achterland, you could say that it means that we usually look at the concentration of activity somewhere in the cities, and the Achterland is the condition for the functioning of the focal points that we look at. So it is this background noise, the white noise that doesn’t have a clear voice, that is really important as a condition for the things that we live in or discuss. Okay?

ER Okay, this helps, because there’s a lot of work on this philosophy, on the notion of background. In phenomenological philosophy in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, it’s an important concept.

KC We borrowed its application from one art researcher at the London College of Communications, Salomé Voegelin. Alongside others, she is building a platform for listening as a methodology to tune into other disciplines. From their perspective, it’s very much about white noise, like you said Jeroen, though in a more literal way too.

ER I heard that, at the end of last year, white noise was in quite a lot of people’s ‘most played tracks’ on Spotify. It ranked very highly because people had been listening to it in order to try to calm down or to sleep in the stressful 2020 COVID year.

KC I also often need noise to sleep, it’s helpful to drown out your own thoughts. What I have also been listening to, with some level of tuning out to tune in, is a sort of discouraged art research community finding faults with certain linguistics. Art researchers seem, to me, to be steering away from using words that could interpret whether their work is either interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary. I think there is a worry that it’s being used incorrectly, because it’s such a desirable status people want to be associated with, it becomes overused and misinterpreted. And so at a certain point it doesn’t actually hold very much meaning. It has morphed and become a bit memetic. So I was first wondering, do you have any sort of anxieties with certain terminology 78

within your fields? And maybe, what is your experience of this inter- or trans- culture? Since you’ve always seen yourself across different disciplines, how do you move within that?

ER Good questions, given that “transdisciplinarity” is in the title of your publication. So I do have some shyness of using all of these words: transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and multidisciplinarity. Mainly, that is because many people use them in different ways. And then there’s also all sorts of connotations. I think the one I use most is multidisciplinarity. But, when I use it, I explain what I mean with it, or how I use it, like in philosophy. So that it means that disciplines are doing something together: several disciplines being involved. And yes, I’ve organised that in different ways but it’s more depending on the needs of a certain project.

The kind of philosophy I do at the University of Amsterdam with my entire team is very, let’s now use the word, multidisciplinary. There, it means that all of my team members have a background in my particular branch of philosophy, which is philosophy of embodied cognitive science, and then also a background in another field. So, for example, one of them also is a Psychiatrist, another is a Neuroscientist, while another is an Ecological Psychologist. If people name that either interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary or transdisciplinarity, I don’t care much. But that’s the kind of collaboration that’s going on there. What I do think is important about transdisciplinarity in my team is that the people involved all have a strong stance in their own disciplinary fields as well. I don’t think it would work if they didn’t have any particular deep form of ‘knowhow’ or ‘know-that’ that they could contribute.

And then with RAAAF (Rietveld ArchitectureArt-Affordances), it gets even more complex, because there, when we try to make something, we know first of all that RAAAF is more than just the arts. With me being there, it already has academics inside. And then when we make something we always have these collaborations with other visual artists like Barbara Visser, for instance, or Erick de Lyon, as well as with crafts people. Every work of ours involves crafts people, like ‘Still Life’, for example, where we had to collaborate with church-bellmakers. And then for ‘Bunker 599’ we had to collaborate with concrete cutters, people who normally work in doing construction. I think working across disciplines is crucial, but how you call it is less important.

JB Of course, at a certain moment, a lot of us started avoiding the word interdisciplinarity because it didn’t mean anything. There is no ‘inter-’: the disciplines involved stick to their own methods and discourses and an intermediate common ground remains absent. And the problem with the ‘multi-disciplinarity’ is, it feels like if you add more and more it becomes better, which, of course, it doesn’t. And I think the way you explain it, that you work with people from different disciplines that are all at least familiar with a certain philosophical discourse, that really turns that philosophical discourse into a form of transdisciplinarity. That is the ‘transdisciplinary layer’. Like how a project is when you work on a collaborative artist project, the project is itself a ‘transdisciplinary layer’ that, you know, has the possibility of uniting.

ER Yes, and I also always think that it’s so important that, when you do these kinds of collaborations, there is a firm 80

grounding in each other’s fields. If someone is only transdisciplinary without knowing each other’s disciplines, that doesn’t work. I know the sensitivities of these concepts: they shift over time. Which is why I’m always a bit aware that using the word can cause confusion. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that’s with many words”; actually, at the moment, you need to be a bit careful with how people can misunderstand them. Perhaps you could say something about why you chose the working title ‘How To Do Transdisciplinarity?’?

KC We see transdisciplinarity as something that is built, rather than something that already exists.

ER Yes, that’s similar to what Jeroen said, that the result of the collaboration is the transdisciplinary artwork, for instance.

KC It is an ongoing contention in doing transdisciplinarity between the arts and sciences: the written word. As Jeroen knows, and you probably also recognise, a lot of the time, artist-researcher PhD candidates in the Amsterdam universities, for example, have to write a very long thesis for their research output alongside an artwork, if they choose to take that pathway. And there are many people critical about this assessment and highlighting the value of art in itself and its processes as research. You too have explored this, and have built philosophical worldviews in material forms, rather than written. Is ‘Breaking Habits’ the name of one?

ER Yes, it’s in several projects, but ‘Breaking Habits’ illustrates that, or at least makes it tangible, and the same is for ‘The

End of Sitting’. ‘Breaking Habits’ is a new spatial installation at the crossroads of visual art, architecture, and philosophy, commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund for the Visual Arts. This experimental landscape inside a classic Dutch canal house breaks with entrenched living habits like sitting, which people tend to take for granted. RAAAF explores with ‘Breaking Habits’ how a world without chairs and couches could look like in ten years from now. This installation materialises my philosophical worldview and makes it tangible: a diagonal landscape of ‘affordances’ (action possibilities offered by the environment), supporting a more active lifestyle by inviting people to change positions and explore new diagonal standing postures. “Will diagonal living become the new norm?”, it seems to ask. I’ve written about our different philosophical worldview projects, and in what ways they materialise my philosophical worldview. Also, in our most recent artwork, ‘Still Life’, there’s something quite crucial to this way of thinking. Have you been to Het Hem, Katie? I know Jeroen has been there.

KC Het Hem, yes, the old bullet factory. The space is really interesting. In the basement there is this extremely long and dark room once used to practice shooting bullets. One Sandberg Instituut design student Emirhan Akin, in his 2020 graduation piece, layered the floor with ceramic masks, and as you entered the dark space all of this cracking became beneath your feet. It was very harrowing.

ER Yeah. And the four moving plates above that on the ground floor, that’s the installation ‘Still Life’ that we made. It’s a large, moving installation 70 metres long, with four plates 82

that are very heavy, which move through the space slowly. And one of the things that it does is bring danger in the space, given that they are 1500 kilogram each. You feel the force when they come close to you. When you’re in the installation, you will always be on the move. Because in the installation, these plates shift, and the heavy plates can push you away. Their details are calling your attention. But then, on the other hand, you want to get an overview of all four plates, because that’s the work. So you’re basically constantly shifting positions to get a grip on the work. And this ‘tendency to get a better grip’ on a work of art is a concept that has been described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist.1 The typical example is someone in a museum going to a painting and getting some distance to see it well. But the ‘Still Life’ installation basically always disturbs that tendency towards a grip because it’s pushing you away, if you stand still. And then there’s four plates, not only one, and they each have an interesting backside as well, so if you look at the front side, well you can’t see the backside. So for us, the art installation is also an attempt to explore this philosophical notion of the tendency towards grip on an artwork. Which is another dimension of describing what we’re up to, basically trying to make people break out of one established or taken for granted perspective, and to create openness for a multiplicity of perspectives and for exploration.

JB Why is it called ‘Still Life’? Why the title Erik?

ER It’s actually referring to the history of Het Hem. Because the bullets that were made at the bullet factory have killed lives. So they made lives still.

JB

ER Quite literal!

Yes, yes.

KC But then what does the absence of the written word, in that case, mean?

ER Yes, to be honest it is something that I am still exploring: if it’s possible to do philosophy without words at all. And that’s partly because ‘Still Life’ still has a title: ‘Still Life’. It has a short description. Besides that, we often tell a lot about it to people visiting. So there’s still language involved. For me, it’s an open question, if it is possible to do philosophy without language at all, particularly because the title of a work is often so guiding in how people see it. There are of course also a lot of works untitled, which work perfectly fine as well.

JB It’s not so much about, you know, the words or using text, but the way the text becomes too dominant, too amending, or too prescriptive. And in collaborations, that is often the problem: that in whatever you call it, multidisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, it’s only possible as long as there is space. If there is an opening.

ER Text is super dominant in academia, and it’s good and important to try to show that different ways of knowing exist and are important, and that artists have a lot of skills in generating all sorts of knowledge. That’s also important. So I understood the question as being about the absence of a written word. So that was where my hesitation was. It would be interesting if it’s possible. Do you think it’s possible Jeroen, you have been thinking about it? 84

JB Well, we’ve been working on it, of course, with the ‘Creator Doctus’ research by Yael Davids, and I think it depends. If you also want to present something as research, and, as such, as a form of communication that is open but not completely open, as even Yael said so, we shouldn’t mystify the absence of words, and I agree with her. It is not about avoiding text at all cost; it is just avoiding the point where the text takes over completely.

ER

JB is important. Yes, yes.

I think that

ER Yes. And I think that’s a more; I’ll not say it’s more productive, but it’s at least an easier perspective in order to make progress in a collaboration with people from academia, because there are quite a lot of people who understand this.

JB Yes. It depends on the direction and discipline, that’s right.

ER Yes. There’s one more thing that I find important in relation to the question that was posed. So an installation like ‘Breaking Habits’, which was commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund, allows people to experience through their body (we say “aan den lijve” in Dutch) certain kinds of things that are taken for granted. Like when you’re in a waiting room and you’re sitting. Or when you’re in a living room of a house, that there’s a couch and chairs; but what if there was not? So it confronts the visitor with their own habits, by just not collaborating with the taken for

granted habit and by presenting different possibilities. So that’s one thing. But then, at a simpler level, for me, it also helps to explain to people what an ‘affordance’ is. What is a possibility for action actually?

JB in a certain sense, right? It’s very educational

ER Yes, there is an educational dimension there, but it’s not just that. It’s also about questioning the practices in society of doing things with chairs. And what’s very interesting is that you see that as soon as there are chairs standing nearby the ‘Breaking Habits’ installation, perhaps outside that space, then people are attracted to what they are used to. They’re attracted to these old-fashioned chairs again. So it also shows us you need to be quite radical, if you want to have people experience how things could be different.

JB Control the context, you also have to consider the context.

ER control the Hinterlands. Yes, we need to

KC Erik, I also saw you and Ronald talk at a presentation about the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project at the Rietveld Academie. And there you were talking about openness to risks: ski slopes and the riskiness of different slopes, and how you wanted to implement this concept of ‘riskiness’ more into public space, which, from what I can see, exists in a lot of your previous work too. So I wonder if you could tell me about the imaginaries of risk that you have encountered during your academic artistic practices and disciplines? 86

ER When I am with RAAAF making fire installations that people can enter, we are typically worried about risks, also. The nice thing about our ‘ski-slope approach’ to risk is that we can offer a whole landscape of many different possibilities. Then people can explore based on the amount of risk they want to take. And that’s similar to what happens in the ski places: there’s different slopes, the black and other colours. And then, if someone wants to go to a black slope, then they are free to just do it. And if someone doesn’t, then they don’t. So by offering a spectrum of possibilities people get more freedom. I think in our society, the different governments often want to limit risks for people and for themselves. Questioning that risk aversion has been an important issue in our work over the course of years.

After our art installation on the potential of vacancy, ‘Vacant NL’ at the Venice Biennale 2010, we were invited to make another art installation in a large vacant building in the center of Maastricht. In the past, a ceramic toilet brand called Sphinx used to bake toilets there. It’s a huge building, a beautiful building. Seven floors high, very deep, very industrial. It was empty at that time, because the local governments are always very afraid that there is a fire risk. So then we decided to join forces with the fire department of Maastricht so that we could make a large fire installation in collaboration with them. We wanted to show that the risk of fire is not a reason to leave 10,000 Dutch public and government buildings empty, it’s just a reason to collaborate better with the fire departments and see what is possible if you organise things better.

So we made the Firemen installation, though, as always in the process of making the work, there

were still a lot of risks that we had to take. In this case, for instance, on the first night of the show, there was so much smoke coming from the fire installation that it got dangerous for people. It was getting in your throat, and the firemen said the fire was taking away all the oxygen. So then they closed down the installation. The next day we had to smash out windows from the building, so that there would be more fresh air. Now you can imagine that smashing out windows from a monument is a quite risky thing to do, because you can get into trouble with cultural heritage authorities. But it was the only way to make the installation work. So we decided to do it. And yes, later on, we were fortunate that we were saved by the Dutch National Heritage Agency: they wanted to replace the windows anyway, they said. We didn’t know that in advance. And actually, often when we make something, there’s somewhere in the process, a moment that a tricky decision has to be made, risks to be accepted that can often be very high. Also personal risk, because in the Maastricht case, for instance, there was a potential liability of, say, 100,000 euros! That’s not money that we have, of course, so there’s always a substantial amount of risk to be managed in the process of making large works.

KC I’d like to pick up on something you mentioned a little earlier, in that “artists have a lot of skills in generating all sorts of knowledge”. In another conversation for Hinterlands, the Head of DAS Graduate School Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, also talks about how artists are very good at “knowing differently”2 or, more so, how artists “know how to not know”. She talks about how this “not knowing” is extremely valuable in making artistic research. I was just 88

wondering then, because you exist between spaces, being an artist and being an academic, what would your response be to this? What are your contentions with needing to know something, and being okay with “not knowing”?

ER About “knowing how not to know”. Yes, I think that’s important. Science is typically about describing the world as it is. What we try to do at RAAAF, by contrast, is about a different way of knowing: exploring the world as it could be, and what is possible. And I think in exploration there is already a lot of “not knowing”: you don’t know what you will enter. And often, when we embark on making something, we have no clue what the end result will be. We just start exploring the cultural history of a site and generate ideas, sketch, make models and discuss and then, step by step, you test and you get further. People in the arts are used to dealing with the uncertainty that comes with being not so clear about where we’re going.

On the other hand, we also do it on the basis of many years of experience. So when we are asked to make an installation somewhere, we trust that when we go to the site, we will find aspects of the environment that fascinate us, and we trust that we will come up with something for the particular place. In that sense, this skill set you have developed on the basis of earlier experiences helps a lot in “not knowing”, while still trusting that something will come, and in being open for unexpected possibilities showing up. I think that’s also one thing that’s very interesting, that in the process of making, you’re often on a particular track testing things out, and then suddenly something unexpected happens with a material that is better than you

anticipated. Then, often the trick is to be able to be flexible enough to switch to that new track, as it were, and not to remain stuck in what you thought you were doing. Because the unexpected material discovery can lead to something considerably more interesting.

JB Actually, the difference between art and science is not that significant because you know both sides rely on expertise, that you know what you do, on the one hand, and the excitement, or even seduction, of the not knowing on the other. The difference between the ‘screen’ that we have in front of us, in the terms of Jacques Lacan, and the way we understand the world, and the feeling of the chaos behind it, which is always like a “scary seduction” in a certain sense. The excitement from making art, or writing a scientific article, is the same. Stepping into something without knowing where you’re going.

ER I think there’s more of a method in science, and I’m not speaking about philosophy, but about experimental science: it’s often more constraining in terms of reducing that complexity, or making the ‘screen’ smaller, say.

JB Yes, yes. To be able to stay within the framework of the paradigm, or to be able to communicate and be understood.

ER And not questioning the paradigm, whereas I think what we like most in making artworks is to question the paradigm that’s taken for granted.

JB But of course, all the exciting scientists that you know always question the paradigm.

ER Yes, indeed. And they will be looking for the key experiments, say, to make their point.

1 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002/1945) Phenomenology of Perception, Hove: Psychology Press. 2 Sher Doruff and Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca (2021) Utopian? Perhaps. Impossible? I would not bet against it. Hinterlands, ARIAS, p. 16.

Ektor Ntourakos Rhizomatic Transdisciplinarity in Contemporary Commoning

Transdisciplinary research is becoming increasingly popular within both academia and research projects to approach complex problems. In this paper, I will not focus on the different interpretations and applications of transdisciplinarity, but on the principles for creating an effective transdisciplinary research project. I investigate the constitution of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project, which took off last year and runs from a cabin at the centre of the newly developed area of Zeeburgereiland in Amsterdam. The purpose of this two-year research project is to discover and apply forms of ‘commoning’ in the area through art and design. The research project is a collaboration between the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Sandberg Institute, Waag: Technology and Society, University of Amsterdam’s Center for Urban Studies, Casco Art Institute, RAAAF (Rietveld Architecture-Art Affordances) and Studio René Boer. The project is a composition of multiple discourses and research fields and as such it gives enough space to embrace transdisciplinarity and combine a plurality of research methods and practices.

In this paper I apply the concept of rhizome to the way the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project is composed, in order to sketch a fresh perspective on transdisciplinary research and the potentials that grow within it. The concept of transdisciplinarity was already used by Félix Guattari in his paper ‘Transdisciplinarity must become Transversality’, originally written in French in 1992, in which he longed for a meaningful, radical, and spontaneous transdisciplinarity.1 One of his main arguments for establishing contemporary transdisciplinary research was to escape the old-fashioned and well-maintained approach of the white, adult male, which was characteristic of the academic world.

It is often thought in academia that transdisciplinarity is achieved by including cross-interactions between different fields, while this configuration on its own does not provide anything more than the usual research standards.

Although Gilles Deleuze did not refer to the concept of transdisciplinarity in his writings, his work with Guattari has played an essential role in the application of it. In the following, I address the principles of rhizome as described by Deleuze and Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus, and I present examples of this arising from the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project.2

Why Rhizomatic Transdisciplinarity?

Disciplines such as geography that deal with complex problems increasingly tend to follow a transdisciplinary approach. Transdisciplinarity differs from multi- and interdisciplinarity due to its high degree of integrated “methods, techniques, data and other knowledge” and its participation in the “design, delivery and interpretation of the research process”, according to Nicholas Clifford et al.3 However, many research projects and designs which adopt transdisciplinarity maintain the usual, rational and pragmatic way of thinking, which neglects rhizomatic structures and modes of knowledge production based on Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas.4 Complex problems require complex approaches, in which there is enough room for the different discourses involved to experiment and create new concepts and solutions. Deleuzoguattarian thought applied in a transdisciplinary research project can produce non-hierarchical relationships and tackle problems from different perspectives which do not reproduce, for instance, “the State” and the 94

“governments as monolithic entities”.5 Or as Strom and Martin put it in their paper ‘Thinking with theory in an era of Trump’: “rational, linear logic and common-sense narratives are too narrow to attend to the complexity of human and social phenomena”.6 Snir also highlights this by saying that:

[t]he problem for Deleuze [and Guattari] lies in the imperialism of common sense, in the way it takes over thought and action, casting them in conformist patterns… even when trying to be critical, common sense thought in fact reaffirms and reproduces the prevailing political order and the meanings it assigns to subjects and objects.7

I apply the Deleuzoguattarian concept of rhizome in order to provide new ways of approaching a research project and conducting research. That is, to avoid the usual, traditional way of thinking and working in research projects, and to think outside the box. The concept of ‘commoning’ by itself is a complex concept, and its application implies many different levels of understanding: from a simple sharing of goods between a small community in Zeeburgereiland, to a common distribution of the island’s goods in the basis of energy consuming and distribution. In this regard, a structuralist or ethnographic approach alone would have been problematic, because it would fail to take account of the many understandings at play within the project.

Contemporary Commoning as a Rhizome

Before I move towards the way rhizomatic thinking is brought into play in the composition of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research team, I

should explain here that the research project consists of five work packages, each involving different practitioners or researchers and their unique research methods and practices.

Work Package 1 is supervised by Dr. Jeroen Boomgaard (Lector Art & Public Space, Gerrit Rietveld Academie) and is carried out by RAAAF. Through the creation of temporary interventions, it explores the enhancing capacities of design and art in establishing processes of commoning in the zone between private and public space.

Work Package 2 is supervised by Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman (Professor of Economic Geography and Planning at the University of Amsterdam) and Dr. Claartje Rasterhoff (Assistant Professor of Cultural Policy & Management at the University of Maastricht). The research is conducted by Zsuzsanna Tomor (Postdoctoral researcher in Geographies of Globalisation at the University of Amsterdam). It highlights how the commons are dependent on broader social and institutional contexts. In addition, this work package dives into various designs through which the social act of commoning in public spaces has historically been facilitated or hampered.

Work Package 3 is supervised by Dr. Jeroen Boomgaard (Lector Art & Public Space, Gerrit Rietveld Academie) and Chris Julien (research director at Waag). It is executed by Socrates Schouten (Head of Commons Lab at Waag) and Jeffrey Bolhuis (architect and co-founder of AP+E). 96

It focuses on the engagement of the ‘third sector’, of citizens and collectives, to assume an active role in co-governing the smart city and co-authoring digital transformations.

Work Package 4 is implemented by Casco Art Institute. Its role is to openly re-share and communicate the results and outcomes of Work Packages 1-3 for future use in similar urban contexts. This becomes possible through the creation of a ‘toolbox’ which operates beyond the scheduled timeframe of the project and makes available all the ‘recipes’ gathered from the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project for establishing commoning practices.

Work Package 5 is implemented by Studio René Boer. This operates as a research facilitator, functioning as a connecting element between the various projects. It also investigates the extent to which processes of commoning in art and design can bring about changes in the ‘smoothness’ (welldesigned, controlled and monitored urban environments) of an urban area.

Note that all the Work Packages are related and dependent on each other despite their own research objective and method. For example, Work Package 1 operates closely with Work Packages 3, 4 and 5, and Work Package 2 provides input for the interventions of Work Packages 1 and 2, and so on.8

In this paper I approach ‘research’ as a rhizome, in order to perceive research as an open-ended process or, to be more precise, as a ‘decentered

multiplicity or network’.9 Using examples from the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project, I develop a rhizomatic thinking driven by transdisciplinary relations, as well as the Deleuzoguattarian anti-metaphorical attitude to describe things. When Deleuze and Guattari discuss rhizomatic thinking in A Thousand Plateaus, they give many examples originating from nature or the environment that surrounds us. However, they avoid and dislike metaphors, and define philosophy “as the creation of concepts: [it] is the creation of inexact words to designate something exactly, ‘literally’”.10

So, there is a specific reason why Deleuze and Guattari refer to the “subterranean nature of the botanical rhizome”:11 the rhizome has been chosen because it evokes “the hidden quality of interlinked forces that have adapted to resist the striating forces of the surface and air, and particularly the hierarchized State”.12 That is not say that the particles, or the components, of a rhizome are hierarchically constituted. On the contrary, the rhizome is characterised by flatness and all the constitutive parts can move in novel ways from one point to the other without having to trespass any barriers or hierarchical relations.13 Seen from this perspective, the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project as a rhizome facilitates a non-hierarchical, decentralised environment, in which different researchers, practitioners, and fields can take part and (re)establish themselves. In that sense, the research project is made:

not by […] adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available — always n - 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted).14 98

That is not to eliminate the uniqueness of a researcher or research, a practitioner or a discourse, but to instead eliminate the hierarchical effect that one can have on the multiple.

At this point, I will describe the conditions for a rhizomatic research project such as the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project, based on the six principles of a rhizome as they were discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus:

1 and 2 The rhizomatic ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project is characterised by heterogeneity and open-ended connections. 15 I should mention here that the research project components, such as the urban geographer who focuses on the collective practices of Zeeburgereiland in order to explore modes of commoning, are also rhizomatic in their ontology. The urban geographer is a component entity of a rhizome which also includes, for instance, the collective initiatives of the Zeeburgertuin, or the Nautilus residential community when they are interviewed, or when they become part of the research analysis. In this regard, “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other [anytime], and must be”.16 Nevertheless, in this paper I focus on the bigger scale of the whole research project and the connections between the different researchers and practitioners.

3 The Contemporary Commoning of many commons (or of many multiplicities). 17 A rhizome is constructed from multiplicities (for example, the art multiplicity, the urban geography multiplicity, and the ecology multiplicity). Those multiplicities, as I said before, are essentially rhizomatic, and what makes them differ from any

other form of unity is that they do not possess any subject or object, but “determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows)”.18 In that sense, the rhizome is not grounded in the will of the researcher – the human entity who operates in the research project – but rather in the research itself. A weave is formed between the research idea, the to-be-defined concept of ‘commoning’, and the researchers of UvA, Waag, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, and RAAAF, and these links are exactly what Deleuzoguattarian thinking describes as assemblages.

4 Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. 19 A research in its rhizomatic synthesis can “be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines’.20 A research project can be altered, or, as Deleuze and Guattari conceptualise it, can be ‘deterritorialised’ and ‘reterritorialised’, in the sense that a research component might quit or change perspective or a new one might be added to the original synthesis of the project, something which was discussed already in the open-ended character of the rhizome. Rhizomatic research entails a certain organic flexibility as part of the process of becoming (something I am going to elaborate on later). Deleuze and Guattari give the example of a colony of ants who form a rhizome which is easily and effectively reformed even after it is undone. Within the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project, the researchers and practitioners are heterogeneous elements in principle who operate independently. However, when one of these independent elements interacts with another in order to perform common research or on the basis of exchanging ideas, 100

let’s say, for example, RAAAF with the urban geographer of the UvA, they constitute a rhizome. According to Deleuze and Guattari this rhizomatic relationship constructs a “veritable becoming”.21 Furthermore, each of these elements-researcherspractitioners (such as RAAAF and UvA, or Waag and Casco Institute) causes the “deterritorialization of one […] and the reterritorialization of the other”:22

the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further.23

As such, RAAAF deterritorialises when it forms a discussion with the urban geographer, and the urban geographer reterritorialises that discussion by becoming part of it. At the same time, the urban geographer is deterritorialised by becoming part of the research apparatus of RAAAF. It is, as the Deleuzoguattarian thought would describe it, the ‘becoming-art’ of geography and the ‘becominggeography’ of art. These rhizomatic relationships are continuous transitions of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation: each of the research fields of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project brings about the deterritorialisation and the reterritorialisation of the other.

5 and 6 Principles of car-

tography and decalcomania.

24 As Deleuze and Guattari describe it, the assemblages of different multiplicities create a sort of ‘map’. Not the kind of map by which you can find your way in the city, nor the genealogical map to find hierarchies and generations. Such maps are what Deleuze and Guattari call traces: “genetic axis and profound structure are above all infinitely reproducible principles of tracing”.25 A rhizomatic map, on the contrary,

is not a tracing, affiliated with the description of an unconscious which lies in the intersubjective relations between the research and the researchers, and which reproduces a ready-made unconscious, memory, language, and structures. A rhizomatic map is embodied in the interconnection of heterogeneous multiplicities. Research as a map does not reproduce the route (tracing) of the research of the urban geographer, for instance. A rhizomatic map is flexible, easy to become detached from and to become part of again, maybe with newly established narratives, or even with the old ones. In sum, the map is:

open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.26

The rhizomatic map approves of the process of deterritorialisation. The map is something which “constructs the unconscious”, embraces the connections between different research fields and professions, and opens up the way for “bodies without organs” to operate on the “plane of consistency”.27 The plane of consistency is the immanent virtual field which is available for experimentation and horizontal relationships. It is characterised by flatness and “possesses only the number of dimensions of the assemblages or multiplicities that inhabit it”.28 It is constructed by modes of deterritorialisation and embraces heterogeneity between the researchers and between research units and objectives. The plane exists abstractly, and it is opposed 102

to any mode of organisation and substance: it gives space to heterogenous elements, multiplicities and unformed elements to correspond in different times and speeds. It is where all the experiences and knowledges of the researchers, research units, research objectives, ideas, and arguments sprawl. They do not form totalisations or any type of unification, but rather “consistencies or consolidations”.29 It is where the possibilities of the rhizomatic assemblages are potentialised, it is where ideas of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project are triggered.

Research as a Body Without Organs

The ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project can be seen as what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a “body without organs”, immanent to experimentation. A body as such is not an actual body but a virtual one, and the virtual is the real. 30 Nevertheless, the virtual should not be confused with the possible nor with the potential: the potential is “what might become or might have become real, but as yet has not”.31 In Bergsonism, Deleuze establishes the distinctions between virtual and actual, and potential and real, in which the virtual and the actual are part of the real.32 He and Guattari give the example of someone who makes love: when someone “really makes love, that person constitutes a body without organs, alone and with the other person or people”.33 A less shiny but more accurate term to describe this concept would have been: “a non-organismic body”.34 Deleuze and Guattari make clear that the problem is not the organs, but the organism: a body without organs is opposed “not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called organism” and the hierarchies entailed.35 To think of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project as a body without organs is to think of the research

process as an entity. The virtual facilitates all the experiments and creative thinking of the researchers and the practitioners; the actualisation of those virtualities, or the “movement from the virtual to its actualization [is] the movement of becoming”.36 As has become clear, ‘becoming’ (devenir) is one of the key themes in Deleuzoguattarian thought, and is the most important element in understanding rhizomatic transdisciplinary research in the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project.

To become part of ‘becoming’ is to affiliate with differences, differences which live in the process of concept creation, in this case, for example, in the attempts to define ‘commoning’. Note that ‘difference’ here does not entail any negative qualities, something which is recognised in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. 37 With ‘becoming’ Deleuze and Guattari describe the “continual production (or ‘return’) of difference immanent within the constitution of events, whether physical or otherwise”.38 Here, I should clarify that ‘becoming’ does not suggest a phase between two different states which indicates a beginning and an end. ‘Becoming’ represents “the very dynamism of change, situated between heterogeneous terms and tending towards no particular goal or end-state”.39 The research of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project is formed in the process of becoming, in the procedure of changes and differences during the production of events and practices. For example, the conceptualisation of ‘commoning’ and what ‘commons’ means has passed many different phases since the beginning of the project: the concept is developing; sometimes it is abstract, sometimes more radical, or more inclusive, sometimes it returns to its first meaning. All these phases establish a procedure in which research is real, and it is 104

recognised as ‘becoming-research’. In this sense, the transdisciplinary relations between the different researchers (such as RAAAF, UvA, and Waag) facilitate a procedure seen as research, which has a greater academic and societal importance than a project goal or an outcome.

Thus, the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project, which is constituted by transdisciplinary principles, represents a ‘becoming-research’. This means that as a research project it is not eager to follow the usual research methods and analyses, but to become different and distant from the stereotypical ways of conducting research.

The only way to get outside the dualism is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo.40

This ‘being-between’ is what ‘becoming-research’ means: a state which is always in transition, in continuity, in constant change. It exists in the preliminary constitution of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project, it is in all the constraints, the uncertainties, and the performing plans. Only in that way can transdisciplinary research create new becomings, and therefore new concepts. The ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project transforms into ‘becoming-research’ by embracing the differences which are shared between the researchers, the practitioners, and the research units.

In the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project the researchers have to deal with the concept of ‘commoning’, a concept which has been used in political, economic, social thinking by urban theorists and urban users. It is “at once a paradigm, a discourse, an ethic, and a set of social practices”.41

This acknowledges that ‘commons’, and its practice (‘commoning’), is a considerably complex concept, not only to apply but also to substantially define. Already from their first meetings onwards, the researchers of ‘Contemporary Commoning’ attempted to give a clear definition of ‘commoning’. However, due to the different types of knowledges and professions, it proved nearly impossible to reach one solid definition. Researchers gave their own perception of ‘commoning’ based on their knowledges and experiences. Although each of the definitions had similarities with each other, still they were not on the same line. What is ‘commoning’ then? Is each definition an independent and solid approach to commoning? Or do all the definitions of ‘commoning’, expressed in parallel in the open-ended process of the research, together establish the concept of ‘commoning’? Some researchers clarify ‘commons’ and its practice through the lens of governance, while others try to define it through processes of collectivity and shareability.

Zsuzsanna Tomor conceptualises ‘commoning’ as a practice in which resources are shared (something becomes common) and a collective governance is involved.41 RAAAF hold a critical standpoint towards governance as they define ‘commoning’ as the practice of sharing “resources of nature or society that people choose to use and govern through self-organising, instead of relying on the state or market for doing so”.43 Jeroen Boomgaard adds that commons are characterised as “open process” rather than as closed-off goods.44 The concept of ‘commoning’ as a rhizome is constructed by the myriads of territorialisations and deterriotorialisations that occur in the becoming of the project, in the multiple definitions that the researchers give to it. It would be a poor choice for such a complex 106

concept to be narrowed down to a simplified definition, while the plurality onthe definitions provides more insights and discoveries.

Another example of a rhizomatic inquiry within the transdisciplinary structures of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project is the use of the word ‘recipes’. In daily life, the word has specific meanings attached to it: that of a) medical prescription, b) a set of instructions for cooking a dish, including a list of ingredients needed, c) a method or a procedure for doing something. However, encouraging different applications of the use of the word from those mentioned above, the ones we commonly use, enables us to open up the space “to appreciate new features of the same event”.45 Deleuze and Guattari stress that by:

relinquishing the power of the ‘sign’ which crystallises the experience of reality into a given word, is the equivalent of a deterritorialization, which enables new points of conjunction to be found, as happens in dialogue, when two different ideas are compared and shared.46

The idea of using the word ‘recipes’ came from Casco Art Institute. The role of Casco in the research project is to create an online platform, named COMMONS.ART, through which Casco will create a toolbox, emerging from the project itself, that can be applied in similar urban development contexts. However, instead of tools it provides ‘recipes’ for supporting the practice of the commons, the members and membership, the communicative facilitation. It would have been different if the word ‘tools’ was used in the same situation, for the ‘recipes’ provided by Casco remain an open-ended

process. Although they suggest a method or a procedure for accomplishing a commoning practice, they remain open similar to a cooking recipe: when people look for a cooking recipe to create a new dish, they often find themselves, while reading the set of instructions and ingredients, in a position where they can choose and adjust the quantity or the use of some ingredients or even to alter some of the cooking steps. In the same principle, the ‘recipes’ in COMMONS.ART operate as openended tools which can be used exactly as they are or can be altered based on the needs of each future project to accomplish a commoning practice.

Note that not every research project formed in transdisciplinary principles is a rhizomatic one. On the other hand, a rhizomatic project is always formed in transdisciplinarity. Transdisciplinary research projects can effectively bridge the gap between sciences and policies by including diverse stakeholders, knowledges, and experiences.47 However, that does not necessarily mean that transdisciplinarity on its own can create new and effective solutions in urban developments. By focusing on the process of ‘becoming-research’, a rhizomatic scheme such as the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ project gives enough room for all participants to embrace each other’s knowledges and experiences, but also to include diverse stakeholders. This can eliminate “the lack of integration across knowledge types, organizational structures, communicative styles, or technical aspects” that is seen in many transdisciplinary research projects.48

Conclusion

This paper is written in favour of transdisciplinary research that operates hand in hand with rhizomatic 108

thinking for the creation of new concepts coping with complex problematics. I approach transdisciplinary research from the same point of view that Deleuze and Guattari share for philosophy: “is a constructivism, and constructivism has two qualitatively different aspects: the creation of concepts and the laying out of a plane”.49 Based on this idea, transdisciplinary research forms concepts which “are molded from already existing ones” rather than creating newly thought ones.50 This happens by the laying out of a plane, a plane which allows for virtualities to become actualised and create new ‘becomings’. Each of the researchers and practitioners of the ‘Contemporary Commoning’ research project have their own perspectives on and definitions of ‘commoning’. These ideas interact in a virtual plane and create new ‘becomings’, new interpretations of ‘commoning’.

However, challenges such as conflicting methodological standards, discontinuous participation, fear to fail, or limited case-specific solution options, can be generated in a rhizomatic transdisciplinary research, especially due to the ‘openness’ and ‘abstractness’ that entails in a rhizomatic scheme.51 I therefore want to highlight the importance of a facilitator, similar to Work Package 5, which helps the researchers and the various stakeholders involved to cope with any such challenges.

Transdisciplinarity alone is not enough to generate concepts which reflect on complex social phenomena, and there is no real guidebook on how to constitute an effective and meaningful transdisciplinary research team. A rhizomatic thinking, however, can deepen a transdisciplinary research project by implying an organic interaction and a continuous experimentation between different disciplines.

1 Guattari, F. (2015) ‘Transdisciplinarity Must Become Transversality’, Theory, Culture & Society, 32(5-6). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415597045. 2 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2013) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Bloomsbury Academic. 3 Clifford, N.J. et al. (2016) Key methods in geography, Third edition. London: SAGE, p.13. 4 Lang, D. et al. (2012) ‘Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: practice, principles, and challenges’, Sustainability Science, 7(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11625-011-0149-x, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-011-0149-x; Polk, M. (2014) ‘Achieving the promise of transdisciplinarity: a critical exploration of the relationship between transdisciplinary research and societal problem solving’, Sustainability Science, 9(4). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-014-0247-7. 5 DeLanda, M. (2010) Deleuze: History and Science, New York: Atropos Press, p. 8. 6 Strom, K. & Martin, A. (2017) ‘Thinking with Theory in an Era of Trump’, Issues in Teacher Education, 26(3), p. 5. 7 Snir, I. (2018) ‘Making sense in education: Deleuze on thinking against common sense’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(3), p.302. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0013185 7.2017.1344537, https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2017.1344537. 8 Based on the original application form of 2019 in Creative Industries: Smart Culture - Arts and Culture. 9 Bonta, M. & Protevi, J. (2004) Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 10 Smith, D. (2019) ‘Why There Are No Metaphors in Deleuze’s Philosophy’, in Olkowski, D. et al. (eds) Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of Freedom: Freedom’s Refrains, New York: Routledge, p. 44. 11 Bonta, M. & Protevi, J. (2004) Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary, Deleuze Connections, Paperback, p. 136. 12 Ibidem. 13 Ibidem. 14 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone Press, p. 5. 15 Ibidem. 16 Ibidem. 17 Ibid., 7. 18 Ibid., 5. 19 Ibid., 8. 20 Ibidem. 21 Ibid., 9. 22 Ibidem. 23 Ibidem. 24 Ibid., 11. 25 Ibidem. 26 Ibid., 12. 110

27 Ibidem. 28 Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 125. 29 Ibid., p. 589. 30 Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 34. 31 May, T. (2005) Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 48. 32 Deleuze, G. (1988) Bergsonism, trans. Tomlinson, H. & Habberjam, B., New York: Zone Books. 33 Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 34. 34 Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 62. 35 Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 184. 36 May, T. (2003) ‘When is a Deleuzian becoming?’, Continental Philosophy Review, 36(2). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026036516963, https://doi. org/10.1023/A:1026036516963. 37 Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition trans. Patton, P., New York: Athlone. 38 Stagoll, C. (2005) ‘Becoming’ in Parr, A. (ed.) The Deleuze Dictionary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 21. 39 Ibidem. 40 Ibid., p. 322-3. 41 Bollier, D. (2020) ‘Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm’ in Speth, J.G. & Courrier, K. (eds) The New Systems Reader, New York: Routledge, p. 5. 42 Contemporary Commoning internal meeting, Jan. 2021. 43 Ibid., Feb. 2021. 44 Ibid., Feb. 2021. 45 Burnard, P., Colucci-Gray, L. & Sinha, P. (2021) ‘Transdisciplinarity: letting arts and science teach together’, Curriculum Perspectives, 41(1), p.114. Available at: https://doi. org/10.1007/s41297-020-00128-y. 46 Ibidem. 47 Polk, 2014. 48 Lang et al., 2012, p. 37. 49 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. Burchill, G. & Tomlinson, H., New York: Columbia University Press, p. 35-36. 50 May, 2003, p. 141. 51 Lang et al., 2012.