“Utopian? Perhaps. Impossible? I would not bet against it.”

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca & Sher Doruff “Utopian? Perhaps. Impossible? I would not bet against it.”

The following conversation took place over email in the early winter of 2021. Much has changed and is changing, both in the institution and in all our respective lives, since this discussion was initiated. It represents a bout of spontaneous thinking within a one-month time capsule contained in various lockdown modalities. At that time Sher Doruff was Head of the ‘DAS THIRD’ programme, while Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca was in the inaugural phase of her position as Lector of the Academy of Theatre and Dance (ATD) and Head of DAS Graduate School (DGS), Amsterdam.

4 January 2021

On the role of a-, un-, non- and transdisciplinarity in 3rd Cycle Artistic Research: how transdisciplinarity requires us to think differently about (rather than to simply abandon) notions of expertise and specialism, while simultaneously encompassing forms of ‘not knowing’; and how to navigate the risk of transdisciplinarity as some new ‘master discourse’ that thinks of itself as capable of capturing ‘the whole’.

Sher Doruff First of all Laura, I want to welcome you again to the Amsterdam University of the Arts as Lector of the School for Theater and Dance. Your first five months have been anything but easy given the COVID conditions you inherited. Talk about hard landings! We’re all hoping for a break in the turbulent weather soon.

You bring with you many years of experience in the UK system of 3rd Cycle Artistic Research. It’s a nearly four decades old PhD model that’s influenced the design, both mimetically and reactionarily, of

new programmes in the EU and elsewhere since the Bologna Accord began its slow crawl. I am also aware that your scholarship is rooted in continental process philosophies. In kicking off this discussion of the ‘transdisciplinary ethos’ in Artistic Research, through the institutional lens of the University of Surrey, your former home, how might you frame your experience of supervising the multiplicitous praxes that artists bring to research? It seems to me, though I might be off-track in this supposition, that institutional perspectives will play a pragmatic role in our discussion of the variegated empirical and discursive ‘methods’ that artists bring to the doctoral table.

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca Thanks Sher. Yes, it’s certainly been a strange time to land in my new role, but also very clearly a really challenging time for doctoral researchers. I am supervising a number of students at the moment who have been put under extraordinary new pressures by COVID through home-schooling, caring responsibilities, loss of income, impacts of increased isolation, the list goes on. It has very much brought home the importance of community, including peer-to-peer community and support, which I know is a key aspect of what the THIRD programme that you lead seeks to provide too.

To come to your question, my past and present PhD students have indeed brought with them complex and varied praxes that work across conventional disciplinary categories. Interestingly, in my experience, this includes people coming from scholarly rather than artistic backgrounds; philosophers, for instance, rather than artists, who have found themselves developing a creative practice that has struggled to find a home elsewhere, often 20

accompanied by a performative rather than standardly ‘academic’ approach to writing.

At Surrey, PhD students still apply to disciplinespecific programmes: PhD Theatre, PhD Dance, PhD Music, and so on. However, in practice, individual projects often range across areas, and supervisory teams combine staff from different departments. For example, I just had the great pleasure to cosupervise with a colleague from Music: the composer and pianist, Steve Tromans, to the completion of his doctorate. This was a practice-as-research project investigating the notion of rhythmicity through a dialogue between solo piano improvisation and Deleuze’s philosophy of time. Methods of scoring, chance procedures, creative constraints, and experiments with the contraction and expansion of duration in Steve’s practice have a cross-disciplinary legacy in art, through figures like John Cage, which allowed for an exciting discussion around the work between us. It was interesting to be drawn back into reflection on the very deep investment, collaboration, and mutual influence of theatremakers, choreographers, composers, and visual artists on each other in the Happenings era, and how that sits in relation to our contemporary moment.

Institutional frames, per se, have not been a problem for these practices. We haven’t come up against rules that didn’t work for the richness of artistic methodologies. However, there is still a tendency for a sense of ‘proper’ methods for research to haunt the experience of artistic researchers, I think. In a number of cases, people have needed to overcome a sense of institutional or academic propriety in order to locate and inhabit their own ‘voice’ (or ‘voices’, plural) in writing from, or about, their practices, and struggle to own the legitimacy of

these embodied voices that speak from the studio, from the piano, from the workshop space, and so on. In my experience, artistic researchers often need a lot of encouragement to let these voices speak. And this is partly to do with the tacit knowledge that they express. For example, it can be that these voices express a deeply embedded practical knowledge or training that the artist to some extent takes for granted or thinks of as ‘obvious’ in its relation to the practice. But often there are real insights to be found here, including for the artist themselves, wherein the voicing of that tacit knowledge can allow new ideas to emerge. It’s a brilliant moment when we can all hear those voices confidently speaking through the PhD, but it can take a long time to find the specific language, tone, and voice that really allows practitioner-knowledge to be articulated on its own terms, particularly if you are also trying to integrate that voice with more standardly academic voices.

I know that ARIAS has been working on this question too, not only in terms of how artists voice their research, but also in how they practice research as modes of listening, specifically in the thematic of ‘The Art of Listening to the Matter’ and the question of the different ways in which interdisciplinary researchers ‘tune in’ to key social urgencies. From my side, I’ve also been really brought into this work by thinking alongside Rajni Shah, who has joined us as an associate researcher at DAS. Their practice is very much about the politics of the act of listening across difference, and of listening as a kind of ‘knowing’ beyond mastery.

In terms of my background in process philosophies, which often also informs the approaches of the researchers I supervise, a particular resonance is 22

brought to the question of ‘method’. In many cases, people are working both from and with the tension between conventional notions of ‘method’ and the investment in thinking as encounter. This is often unpredictable and in contact with the unconscious: less something a subject does to an object, and more something that is reciprocally determined through specific, embodied relations. As Deleuze talked about it, the point is not to have a method, but to create thinking – and approaches to knowledgemaking – anew in and as encounter with the world.

And yet, at the same time, there is a methodology (or methodologies) to this notion of encounter itself. There are specific techniques and practices for a processual and relational approach to knowledge-making that artists generate. This can feel like, and perhaps indeed become, a bit of a paradox, and there is always the risk that even methods that are geared towards some kind of ‘openness’ or ‘not knowing’ themselves become sedimented or reified, and only produce their own premises. Process philosophy or process-based artistic research has to itself remain in process! They can’t get stuck in one vocabulary or set of techniques, or else you end up in a contradiction. Of course, there are points when a process arrives at a more or less stable form; points when something seems to ‘end’. But, from my perspective, this is always only relative: processes don’t end, they just change or continue at different speeds or different registers.

But what about you, how have institutional perspectives impacted on the manifestation of artistic research methods in the context of THIRD? One interesting thing, of course, is that THIRD participants are often doing their research across a range of institutional contexts, rather than a shared one,

as can be the case for other doctoral communities. Is this very much a strength of the programme for you? Does it also have challenges?

SD I agree with you on the importance of nurturing the artist’s path towards finding the “specific language, tone and voice” for the discursive and artistic elements of PhD research. Often, but not always, artists pursuing a PhD are already engaged in theoretical practices such as close reading of scholarly texts adjacent to and/or embedded in their artistic interests, and writing from practice in a variety of styles, be it descriptive, conceptual, speculative, poetic, pragmatic, fabulative, etc. The very application to a PhD programme reveals entangled cosmologies attendant to the aspiring candidate. In optimal circumstances, the artist researcher would enroll in an institution with supervision immanent to the artist’s unfolding processes. The trajectory would be malleable, open to a nuanced approach to assessment criteria relative to the artist’s praxes. Homogenised standards are rarely applicable to artistic research. It’s perhaps why artistic research’s disciplinary inclusion in ‘the academy’ is still contested. I’ve witnessed the intensity of finelyhoned, empirically-engaged supervision as deeply satisfying over the long haul of a research project. I’ve also witnessed, sadly, detached, box-ticking supervision by professors, oversaturated with doctoral candidates, that pretty much suffocates the emergence of the artist’s voice in favor of marching towards the degree in the prescribed timeframe.

Perhaps this isn’t the place to emphasise supervision or mentoring, and rather take up your remarks on the exigencies of ‘method’, though the two are seemingly entwined when it comes to satisfying the 24

demands of PhD assessment. You know, the question “Do your methods/methodology ascribe to institutional standards for 3rd Cycle Research? For the ‘original contribution to knowledge’?” Unpacking the slippery nuance between methods, approaches, techniques, and practices can be complex: rarely is there consensus on the efficacy of these terms. I completely agree with your emphasis on a Deleuzian consideration of ‘method as encounter’. I might add a touch of what Erin Manning calls “the minor gesture” in research-creation; the transformative potential of the non-majoritarian, the nonnormative. Will an examining committee see the results that way? Will they applaud the explication of difference as an unconventional contribution to knowledges?

You ask about institutional impacts on artistic research methods in the context of THIRD, the 3rd Cycle research programme at DAS Graduate School. Good question! It cuts straight to the heart of this point. THIRD is indubitably idiosyncratic in its structure, its goals, its raison d’etre. It’s an odd duck in the small pond that is 3rd Cycle European Artistic Research. Established in 2016 as a pre-PhD programme to facilitate performing artists in preparing for applications to research universities and universities of the arts within the EU (according to the Bologna Agreement), the project has morphed over time. The three extant, seven member cohorts include artists from choreography, theater, film, and visual arts. Some are in the middle of PhD projects, others are working towards 3rd Cycle applications, while others teach and lead masters programmes with little time to undertake full or even part-time research responsibilities. What is common among them, in my opinion, is the desire for trusted, care-full peer exchange on the concerns, tactics and ‘minor gestures’ that drive their research praxes. It’s this

simple framework, the rigorous, committed facilitation of peer engagement, that underpins THIRD’s motivations.

As to your question regarding THIRD’s researchers as unaligned with a mutual university, you ask if this is a strength or a challenge? I feel confident in saying that the diverse institutional affiliations, the disparate experiences regarding benchmarks, dissertation criteria, access to practice resources such as studios and equipment, and access to varied supervision, all enhances the experience of our regular comings-together. Currently, eight universities are represented in the cohorts, each with varying support structures. Some researchers are generously funded; others, not at all. Interestingly, the disparity between resources is acknowledged, but not central to group discourse. An organic emphasis on the sharing and intra-acting of praxes tends to concern our engagements rather than institutional critique, since formal conditions and evaluations are not imposed on them. I cannot speak for the THIRD researchers of course. For myself, I can say I have never before encountered such sustained quality of both feedback and collegial care as I have with these three groups of researchers.

But perhaps we have drifted from the original conversation starter. I am really curious to hear more of your thoughts on the risks of transdisciplinarity as the emergence of a “new master discourse that thinks of itself as capable of capturing ‘the whole’.” I have not yet heard it defined as a totalising construct. More often it’s critiqued for its diffusiveness, its variegated, slippery onto-epistemological tendencies. For myself, I would term transdisciplinarity as a ‘risk’ only within the context of irritating academic faculties, eluding academic credibility. If 26

artistic research is necessarily interested in expanding the fields of knowledge creation, pushing against disciplinary confines with an insistence on speculative aesthico-politico methods, then it would seem some sort of prefix – like a-, un-, non-, trans- – may suit the occasion of this fuzzy specialised field. I long ago adopted the gerund “fieldings” as a means of expressing this fluidity of praxes. It has an unsettled gathering, a permaculture sensibility of collectivising necessity in its tone and effort. As a community, THIRD has opted for the term as the title of our forthcoming book on Artistic Research. But please do say more about your ‘transdisciplinary’ doubts.

LCÓM Let me return to the question of supervision briefly first. You’re a much more experienced supervisor than me I suspect. I’ve seen four people through to the end now, two of whom were doing artistic research. But along with the people I’m currently supervising, my growing sense is that much of the process of “what it is to supervise” has to be invented anew each time. There are certain things that come up again and again: this question of the (il)legitimacy of artistic research in the academy, for instance; or the fear that transdisciplinary work constitutes a kind of dilettantism. But in many other ways, it feels as though I need to learn how to be a good supervisor all over again for each new project, because the needs of the student and the research vary so widely.

In terms of methods, one of the things I continue to find most problematic is the way in which standardised frameworks for research – not just at doctoral level, but also in terms of post-doctoral research funding applications – impose the sense of methods as needing to be determined in advance, in ways that

leave so many artistic researchers feeling insecure or fraudulent in their awareness of the emergent nature of their methodologies. I know this is obvious and well-worn territory in artistic research, but somehow the normative model of methods as that which must be decided and laid out in advance still seems to be pervasive, particularly if PhD students are required to participate in more generic, non-discipline-specific trainings that enforce this view. The same goes, perhaps, for how to even think about the notion of an “original contribution to knowledge” within a process-based perspective! In most cases, in dialogue with students, we tend to arrive at a kind of acceptance of this criterion as a kind of necessary fallacy within the PhD context, while we simultaneously critique the cumulative rather than eventual model of knowledge it seems to rest upon.

Responding to your further comments on THIRD, I hope you will forgive me if I ask a rather provocative additional question, one that I trust you know comes from a deep sense of how beautiful, utopian even, the “odd duck” that is THIRD might be considered. My question is whether you have ever worried that programmes like THIRD could in fact be seen as contributing to the persistence of “bad” supervision practices in other institutions? That is, one way to see THIRD is as a clearly much-needed provision of the kinds of community and peer-topeer mentoring that universities fail to offer PhD students doing artistic research. By providing what they fail to provide, are we supporting that system to continue? In the same way, with respect to artists, especially those who are pre-PhD and whom THIRD might support in their transitioning onto a PhD programme, is there a sense that we are doing the universities’ work for them? Perhaps in 28

ways that, it could be argued, allows the universities not to change how they work, to really include artists as researchers?

And then yes, finally, to the topic we are meant to be discussing: transdisciplinarity! I think perhaps I just have doubts insofar as I am aware of transdisciplinarity becoming a ‘buzzword’. We are told increasingly that we need transdisciplinary solutions to solve the ‘grand challenges’ of the day: something that is easy to say, but often seems to me to be said without much acknowledgement of the radical restructuring or transformation of the academy that would need to take place to really allow this approach to flourish. But my doubt is also perhaps specific to contexts where transdisciplinarity is associated with some kind of possibility of a unity of knowledge. That is, I hope that the transdisciplinary signals a movement across disciplines, but not in a way that implies a kind of ‘transcendence’, akin to the way that philosophy has sometimes understood itself as the ‘meta-’ or ‘master’ discipline, that somehow goes beyond and coordinates the knowledge of all the others, for instance.

Certainly, like you, I support the resistance to the “disciplining of knowledge”. Rancière’s articulation of the academic discipline as a “double operation of exclusion” and call for an “a-disciplinary” stance has certainly influenced my work and practice in performance philosophy (which is not a new discipline!).1 Rancière writes compellingly, I think, against any fundamental distinction of competencies, methods, objects, and intelligences along disciplinary lines; something that is still so hard to cultivate on a terrain where knowledge-creation is still so often structured in these exclusive and exclusionary ways. As someone who likes to

wander around and trespass into others’ fields, there is always the risk of exclusion on the grounds of competence. Interdisciplinary dialogue is okay; it’s acceptable because, in the end, each one stays in their place. But we encountered some more difficult moments in the project I did with Fevered Sleep, a UK-based arts company, at the Veterinary School in Surrey, for example, in the clash of cultures between how artists and some scientists do research, or the criteria they use to judge what even counts as research in the first place.2 There was a moment in one of the conversations we staged with the participants who came to our open sessions, where a frustrated researcher in Veterinary Science exclaimed, “Yes, but what’s your hypothesis?”. Immediately, Fevered Sleep felt compelled to answer, to defend themselves by coming up with some succinct hypotheses that would justify and explain the research process we had invited the participants into. But, in fact, what instead needed to be acknowledged was that the framework of the ‘hypothesis’, a cornerstone of scientific method, was only one model of research, and not the operative one in our project. Fevered Sleep’s work is very much about inquiry and experiment, but one that uses conversation itself as method, partly because of its concern with holding predicted outcomes at bay.

SD Thank you, Laura. So much to respond to here. I think this is a testament to all the unresolved issues – and I say this positively! – in the field of artistic research. Regarding your question on the role a programme such as THIRD plays in easing the responseability of the university, are we invigorating the problem by troubling it?

Well, it seems to me an analogue could be the relation of socially-engaged artistic work to neoliberal capitalism. Do artists that take up concerns and matters of care where governments fail communities, participate in the global, economic super-structure of late capitalism? Surely. Resistance to the capitalist paradigm is endemic to its survival. Do we all participate in the injustices of free market ideology and structural racism with every purchase we make? It’s difficult, if not impossible, to escape complicity in the system. So, what to do? Nothing? Reform from the inside? Practice non-cooperation? Opt out? Or, as Moten and Harney continue to assert in their critique of the university: “Fuck sharing governance, or the slightly more equitable distribution of extracted surplus; let’s share needs.”3

When we began THIRD, we identified a need and acted. Is this type of mini-structural ethical response to a weakness in the overall structure of artistic research in the 3rd Cycle sustainable? Probably not. Kunst Hogescholen [Art Schools] in the Netherlands and elsewhere should not be expected to buffer the university’s inability to support artistic practice without augmented ministerial financing; and here, of course, we are embedded in the neoliberal educational regime. THIRD is pointing out these conditions of ‘lack’ and testing provisional formats. It’s my belief that this is a purposeful endeavor.

All that said, even as THIRD actively encourages and enables artists who seek doctoral degrees for their research trajectories, we continue to support in tandem the viability of non-institutionally affiliated research. That is, life-long study that eschews the ‘degree’, while embracing the experience of

rigourous peer-exchange and access to practicerelated infrastructural resources such as studios and technology, etc. You use the word “utopian”, which I want to resist as I do feel there’s very real, percolating movement underfoot. A reassessing, or reclaiming of practice, as Lucy Cotter points out;4 a thriving ‘undercommons’.5

These aspirations trouble the hegemony of ‘disciplinarity’, even as they insist on the validation of their “own” expert plurality of praxes. Utopian? Perhaps. Impossible? I would not bet against it.

1 Rancière, J., McNamara, A.E., & Ross, T. (2007) ‘On Medium Specificity And Discipline Crossovers In Modern Art’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 8, p. 85. 2 The project, ‘Sheep Pig Goat’ (2020) took place at Surrey in February 2020. For more information, see https://www.feveredsleep.co.uk/project/sheep-pig-goat. 3 Moten, F., & Harney, S. (2020) ‘the university: last words’, available at: https://www.are.na/block/7921022. 4 Cotter, L., (ed.) (2019) Reclaiming Artistic Research, Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag. 5 Moten, F., & Harney, S. (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.