Preface

Salomé Voegelin Preface

In 2018, Anna Barney and I travelled to Derry/ Londonderry in Northern Ireland to give a joint paper, or rather stage a conversation, on crossdisciplinary working: ‘Accessing Disciplinary Hinterlands through Listening’, in the context of the ISSTA (Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association) Conference ‘Who’s Listening? Sound and Public Space’.

Anna is a Professor in Biomedical Acoustic Engineering who listens to lungs and speech patterns. I am a Professor of Sound who writes about the ‘sonic’ in relation to its invisible and relational materialisations. Together we are working on a project entitled ‘Listening across Disciplines’, which sets out to investigate whether listening could be used to work across disciplinary barriers; open a different sphere for collaboration and conversation; and reach different knowledges from the ‘in-between’.

The term ‘Hinterland’ in the title of our paper was inspired by a Welsh detective-drama programmed on the BBC at the time. It set the scene for crime and its investigation at the margins, not only geographically but also politically and psychologically. Filmed both in Welsh and in English, the series kept itself deliberately troubled and remote. It performed investigative actions behind the main stage and out of view of a conventional set. It played with and on the periphery, which, measured from the centre, seems always slightly precarious and fraught, while also revealing and enabling a different view: a different way of performing conventional roles. Similarly, working in the Hinterland and in the ‘in-between’ of academic disciplines involves risks, which makes room for a different imagination, and for scholarly protagonists to play a different part.

Derry seemed an opportune place for our conversation about accessing disciplinary ‘Hinterlands’; where science and art can meet beyond the agreed methodologies, vocabularies and processes that stand as certainties of a particular discipline, but which, in their specificity, impede trans- and interdisciplinary sharing. To instead consider the space ‘behind’ the discipline, its blind-spots and methodological wilderness, so that we might step into the unknown together and reach new ‘information variables’, which, as knowledge possibilities, make new connections and interrelations accessible, and therefore thinkable, for scientific and artistic research.

What was apposite about staging this conversation in Derry was its prominent place in the ‘Troubles’, the sectarian violence between republicans and unionists, marking a contested site; as well as its fame as the last remaining completely intact medieval walled city in Ireland. It provided the perfect background to metaphorise trans- and interdisciplinarity as a site of contestation, and to think of disciplines as ‘walled cities of knowledge’, whose alliances stand in conflict and competition, but whose vested interests can be breached by listening as a form of activism and interference. Paying attention to the invisible ‘in-between’ in which we might share a common interest; to hear what might appear beyond a particular domain, but where the purpose of the discipline can stretch to attain new understandings and aims.

This ‘listening’ does not have to be an actual, “ear listening”, but also works as a metaphor and invitation to embrace the invisible ‘in-between’ of disciplinary lines, sonic or otherwise, to work with their intangible relationalities. Sound, as material and as concept, transgresses walls and provides 12

access to a discipline’s ‘Hinterland’, which is not demarcated by a particular field’s concepts, methodologies, procedures, epistemology, terminology, and data, but circumscribes an unknown sphere that hovers behind and between disciplines. Thus it offers opportunities for new thinking and cross-disciplinary collaborations, and another way to see the frames given to us by conventional academic infrastructures and expectations.

I have since moved to Berlin, where I live in the gap between the Wall and the Hinterlandmauer, the secondary wall that was built by consolidating barricades that were erected contingently, in a gerrymandering fashion, every time there was a breach. Disciplinary ambitions seem just like that, protecting a consolidated field, and confirming where the centre ends: what belongs legitimately inside the discipline and its esoteric knowledge, and what articulates as marginal activities, breaching its lines. Trans- and interdisciplinary working is reframed again and again, inside disciplinary boundaries. And breaches are met, at least eventually, with another barricade of disciplinary specificity, ensuring consolidation and a legitimate voice. By contrast, sounding and listening, as practice and as sensibility, enable a sustainable way to think beyond the wall, without breaching it, and thus without engaging the dichotomy of discipline and ‘not-discipline’. Instead, they invite a collaboration that accepts the distinction of disciplines, enabling a co-working and novel crossdisciplinarity through a common focus on the invisible ‘in-between’.

Salomé Voegelin with Anna Barney