[-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise

[I. J.]

Dear all, thank you for your thought-provoking contributions and responses. Will follow up.

I'll start with Magda:

Interesting point below. 

>
Thanks for bringing up this question again. This is a hard one, and I am a
bit stuck on its language indeed, so I will reiterate it again: how do we
preserve, what is difficult to preserve (represent) in a widely accepted
form in academia which is written text, but what might also be lost when
going through that process? I don't want to be romantic about it, but what I
would want to preserve for my own practice is the recognition that there is
knowledge that is hard to categorise and then that it might become something
else (another knowledge) after the process of translation into what we can
understand through language. I think that as important for the future too. >

This is something that concerns me, as well,
especially given that the medium I work with is theatre/performance, which
seems to resist "preservation" by its very nature (or so
theatre/performance theorists have sometimes argued). I wonder if what is
needed in relation to the problem of preservation as it's been posed in the empyre exchanges this week is the possibility of other epistemologies, different from
the dominant way of knowing in the academy, characterized by performance
studies scholar Dwight Conquergood as: "that
of empirical observation and
critical analysis from a distanced perspective: 'knowing that,' and 'knowing about.' This
is a view from above the object of inquiry: knowledge that is anchored
in
paradigm and secured in print."* 
Perhaps
embodied epistemologies? But what shapes would they take? And how would we
legitimize them in the academia? (do we need to?) 
 
I'd be curious to learn more about what
you (Magda)are thinking about what you called "another knowledge" in your
post (highlighted in the passage I cited above). And how the rest of you feel/think about the kinds of knowledges you are (de)constructing in your academic work pursued in-between theory and practice.. 



* Conquergood,
Dwight. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” The Drama Review, 46.2 (Summer 2002): p.146.

all best,

Ioana




________________________________
 From: Magda Tyzlik-Carver <magda at thecommonpractice.org>
To: 'soft_skinned_space' <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> 
Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 11:56 AM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise
 
> I wonder if this implies that what is specific to academic work is just a
particular way of accounting for 
> anything - coming down, precisely (purely?), to an issue of language and
form. Could it be? (Menotti)

I wonder that too. I don't know much about scientific research at all, but I
would guess that's very much the case in sciences.  I came across a
statement that 'engineers don't discover, but they invent' which in itself
is an interesting use of language. Another thing would be that  many (most?)
of science phd's are practice based, often attached to a specific project
with defined aims and objectives.  So what's the difference between science
and art practice-based research and how it is articulated in academia? I
would say that is where 'discipline' comes in as an institutionalising
factor and language is one of the tools for that.  

> And going back to a question from previous weeks: how do we preserve 
> what could not be written down in the first place, and will inevitably get
lost in the bureaucratic translation? 
> Is part of the work of the researcher to make more graspable the less
visible structures s/he tackles 
> and employs? Should one provide to his/her examiners the means for his/her
own assessment?
> What about the posterity?

Thanks for bringing up this question again. This is a hard one, and I am a
bit stuck on its language indeed, so I will reiterate it again: how do we
preserve, what is difficult to preserve (represent) in a widely accepted
form in academia which is written text, but what might also be lost when
going through that process? I don't want to be romantic about it, but what I
would want to preserve for my own practice is the recognition that there is
knowledge that is hard to categorise and then that it might become something
else (another knowledge) after the process of translation into what we can
understand through language. I think that as important for the future too. 

Magda  


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