[-empyre-] practice-led (art/science/writing)

[Danny Butt]

Hi Adrian

Thanks for the questions and the engagement  - apologies for being slow on the response but I've been enjoying the holiday weekend, hope you had a good one.

Of course, as you identify I was rhetorically pushing a limited argument on what 'science' is that does not match up to the diverse practices that pass under the name 'science'. On the other hand, as you also point out, scientific publishing operates in a restricted vocabulary of justification (truth-making) that does not capture all the ambiguity, intuition, craft, funding and ideological messiness etc. that goes into research. This vocabulary is my main target as I think it is the scientific vocabulary of knowledge rather than scientific practices that underpin the bureaucratic organisation of research degrees in the fine arts, and increasingly in the arts and humanities generally. This is a downstream function of the incorporation of research into techno-scientific paradigm in the 'multiversity' and the development of the managerial-output model. The questions of funding are not far from the organisation of big science practice either, as many complaints by scientists have identified!

I believe we would do well to take the history and anthropology of science rather than the philosophy of science as our guide in the discussions of research and creative practice, and this would mean avoiding thin but authoritative pronouncements of what research is or isn't, or what knowledge is or isn't. The more political theorisations of qualitiative research (Laurel Richardson in particular) have shown us that accepting institutional constraints on the genre of research writing precisely fails to practice the questioning of categories and taxonomies that a 'writing lab' as you put it should foster. 

A lineage of conceptual artistic practice - one that I think artists as researchers could be held accountable to as a point of departure, in the absence of other disciplinary identifications - would take those questions of the form of knowledge as the very material of their research. This may be an area where artists can identify better than scientists what epistemological presuppositions are at work in the kinds of knowledge validated in the research paradigm.

It is precisely for the reasons of furthering art as a university discipline that I would question the value of 'research reportage' as a distinct form of writing that must be sharply differentiated from the forms of writing customary in the visual arts. From my point of view, our failure to critically validate the forms of writing customary in artistic enquiry, with epistemologists proposing practice-based research as an entirely different domain has led to a cleavage between the art star and the knowledge-making "creative researcher", and the bad-faith administrative decisions involved in rewarding what Sally Jane calls "high-impact" individuals, or indeed "lower-impact" individuals who are good at forms of writing (and writing as filling out forms) that are primarily accountable to a bureaucratic calculation rather than a disciplinary dialogue. Neither of these modes help the visual arts feed and extend its distinct disciplinary terrain of evaluation of singularities against the mathematisation of the impact factor, something I see as most urgent for most colleagues working in university-based art schools right now.

x.d

--
http://www.dannybutt.net
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 +61 428 820 766

On 25/01/2013, at 1:43 PM, Adrian Miles wrote:

> hi Danny
> 
> nice to see you here! :-)
> 
> got some questions for you. I like your points but I increasingly find the distinction made between the sciences and what, thesis humanities writing, creative practice, questionable. First of all science in these terms gets rendered as a highly reductive Other that bears little relation to the actual practice of all the different sciences as research. Scientists all have a research practice first, the reporting of their research, which is how they communicate the outcomes of this practice, is not what scientists think of when they think about research and practice. In this research practice they deal with different sorts of things but there certainly seems to be a great deal of ambiguity, intuition, and so on in this practice. This is not present in how they may perform an experiment (though it might) but in everything around the experiment. 
> 
> A thought experiment. Imagine I am a painter. I am dealing with ambiguity in my subject matter and practice. But when it comes to putting paint to my canvas, I am very careful, I am highly methodological, incredibly disciplined and, compared to that painter over there, very rigid. Or I use code in my art. And when it comes to writing that code I must follow strict protocols and procedures if I want it to work. In my reading of the literature around the philosophy and sociology of science it seems quite trivial to replace the artist in this thought experiment with a scientist. Some are messy, some aren't. etc. 
> 
> The minor detail in the examples is simply to begin to unpack the reductiveness of simply declaring that 'science' does x, and we don't. 
> 
> On Friday, 25 January 2013 at 8:13 AM, Danny Butt wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 2. Importation of scientific terminology (propositional questions, consensually defined methods, falsifiable results) corrodes knowledge in creative disciplines, except as far as it is treated as content, rather than method. Scientific objectivity's moral economy is based on a fear of idolatory, seduction, and projection on the part of the researcher - these are exactly the means by which the creative artist makes their contribution to knowledge.
> to knowledge yes, but the terms of the argument are not whether art creates knowledge (it does) but its contribution to research. The distinction matters in the political economy of the university because it is about epistemology and merely making a knowledge claim does not make it research. 
>> The scientific model of knowledge rests on an author who is fully in control of their work, whereas in the creative arts such authors are boring, and therefore useless, however academically justifiable.
> No. the scientific model of writing up the *practice* of research rests on an author fully in control of their work. This confuses the practice of actually doing the research with its reportage, which in the sciences is generally 'reportage'. In the humanities our writing is different not because the practice of research is fundamentally or qualitatively different, but because for many of us writing is in fact our 'lab' - that is the site of our practice. This argument relies on slippage which is easily seen in creative practice. How I make could be rigid or very open and fluid, either are legitimate. But when it comes to reporting on this as research, and not just as knowledge or as an aesthetic category, then for better or worse all sorts of scholarly norms apply and, particularly currently in the humanities, it is often attributed to a sole author who is understood to be in control of this research communication. 
> 
> The thing that communicates the research outcome is generally not the same thing as the practice (there are exceptions of course) for both the creative practitioner and the scientist. And before someone says the writing economies are different, I know of a computer scientist who presented an academic, scholarly *scientific* paper to scientists in verse (to a standing ovation).
>> 
>> 3. Since Alberti, visual arts practices have been erratically theorised as a mode of world-making that can be classed as writing in the broad sense. Despite the efforts of the protestant sciences to make an individual responsible for their own knowledge, a writer is inevitably dependent on a suitably prepared reader, and it is this other reader, not the writer, who can account for the knowledge-effects generated. Respect for the reader or viewer requires that the work be available for independent critical interpretation, a freedom and independence that since Kant has been essential to the operation of the aesthetic. Exegetical writings are thus counter-productive except as far as they enhance or constitute the freedom and independence of the work. These writings may be particularly useful in resisting the synchronisation of the art work to the art market, but probably less so in resisting the synchronisation of the artistic practice to the academic market.
> If the role of the writing is to demonstrate or participate in the aesthetic integrity of the art work but none of this holds if the role of writing or other communicative forms is to participate in the translation of the aesthetic event into/as research.  
>> 
>> 4. The archive of university knowledge is not a flat globe of knowledge to be "contributed to" but a contradictory historical tangle, resting on material and political assumptions that can never be escaped or accounted for in the aftermath of colonial capitalism. One value of practice-led research might be in de-framing knowledge through formal analysis in order to make the materiality of various forms of knowledge perceivable.
> Absolutely.  
>> 
>> 5. Any creative practice worth the title of a doctor of philosophy should have wrestled with the potential of its own death, including the death of its discipline. Artists, unlike scientists, are not licensed to practice.
> 
> Scientists are not licensed to practice. Doctors, lawyers, accountants psychologists are, and in each case these are disciplines that are regarded as professional 'practices'. This is one reason why science can use 'amateur' research. 
> 
> thoughts? 
> -- 
> an appropriate closing
> Adrian Miles
> Program Director Bachelor of Media and Communication (Honours)
> RMIT University - www.rmit.edu.au
> http://vogmae.net.au/
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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