On âmeadow meandersâ and transdisciplinarity
JH: On 17 June 2015 we had a symposium event at the University of Warwick2 that focussed on your âMeadow Meanderâ project. I wonder in what ways this project represents how PAR transcends or transgresses forms of knowledge.
BK: First of all, readers need to understand that a Meadow Meander is a path in a field of meadowland (or other grasses and flowers) that is marked out with a grid of posts, and the grid represents the world. Also, that Meadow Meanders are a key part of my broader long-term project called Earthrise Repair Shop, which explores the notions and practices of performance ecology and â to a lesser extent â performance conservation (Kershaw, 2011). The path is modelled on a global ecological system, deliberately kept secret, but it only approximately follows the model. Visitors are told about the modelling, but not what it is based on, unless they are desperate to know. Also, they canât see the path because the grass is quite long, so from ground level it looks like an untouched field. So âmeanderersâ start with a lack of knowledge in approaching this particular outdoor artefact, but also with the knowledge that perhaps it is a rough analogue of some global ecological feature. Therefore, the path is not meaningless, itâs not random, although it does weave around and appears not to be going anywhere specific and ends up back where it started. So itâs a meaningless path in one sense but in another sense itâs saturated with meaning. Anyone entering the path has a problem to solve, but hopefully one thatâs been framed in a friendly way so that they can try to work out what it might stand for if theyâd like to. However, the meandering of the path is at least as important as its ecological analogue, because its apparent aimlessness constitutes a lacuna or gap in experience for the meanderer that is potentially profound.
Immediately the path is about becoming. Deliberately abandoning knowledge, purposefully leaving knowledge behind, is a major way of becoming that isnât just about thinking, about what we think we know or donât know, but also about an embodied experience through which something significant that the traveller engages with is undefinable, inaccessible, mysterious, and so on. Thatâs a first step towards a transdisciplinary experience.
JH: And from my own experience of meandering in the meadow, there is a sense that it privileges movement as much as cognition.
BK: Thatâs the aim: an immersive experience which puts the walker/traveller/meanderer into a space that is comfortable because youâre not going to get lost if you stay on the path, even though you might be lost as to where you are metaphorically and otherwise, and what that means. But youâre not completely lost because the path takes you only in the direction that it needs to go. At the same time, you are surrounded by the Earthâs environment â it is an outdoor situation after all â that can range from a field of commonplace agricultural grass, through a wildflower meadow in the countryside, to an urban city square or a former graveyard or an ex-airport or any kind of place where an invisible or indistinct pathway can be made. So youâre always surrounded again by other kinds of saturation experiences. Those environments are always more or less rich and the meanders Iâve made tend to be placed deliberately in contextually dense places (Bottoms, 2015), such as a former urban graveyard of the nineteenth century in Leeds (2012) or a major ex-airport of a twentieth-century city in Berlin (2013). Youâre surrounded by matters that you might know something about, but you donât know why youâre on this path and/or why itâs shaped as it is. The knowledge that youâve got becomes a kind of free-for-all playground because you can shift your attention from one thing to another to anything thatâs around you while youâre walking. But you can also simply forget about all that and just immerse yourself and enjoy the walking and the richness of the environment that you are a part of for its own sake. I am suggesting that is a transdisciplinary âspaceâ (or at least a quasi-transdisciplinary space) (see Kershaw and Nicholson, 2011: 6â12).
JH: I would like to stay with that idea of transdisciplinary methods, which weâll be addressing further in the next section of our dialogue. Youâve described this space as a playground, and in certain forms of play there is a ânot-yet-knowingâ (Borgdorff, 2012: 194), which I see as an interplay between knowing and a kind of wilful ignorance. So I wonder how this might relate to transdisciplinary research as an alternative form of knowing and how we might encourage play within a research process.
BK: I think you have to start by turning that question on its head in a sense, because the kind of unknowing that you enter into in a transdisciplinary space is radically different than the kind of unknowing or ignorance that any significant research question or hunch might provide for you. From that point of departure the implication, just before you start your research process proper, is that youâve got a problem that you canât extract a question from. So therefore youâre stepping into the unknown, unless you decide you know where youâre stepping from as a continuation of historical knowledge. That is clearly not a first step into a potential transdisciplinary space, where you donât even have those reference points, or even those questions and hunches that you donât yet know the answers to. The radical difference, I think, is similar to that between your becoming aware of an environmental lacuna â say as produced by a heavy mist or a black hole â and you actually entering into it, being part of or integral to that lacuna. Because in engaging a transdisciplinary space, at least initially, nothing is known for sure. Therefore itâs a very open, flexible, and complex â but also a very common and simple (because apparently empty) â kind of space to explore. Possibly that refracts what Borgdorff calls ânot-yet-knowingâ, which you link to play: a type of non-thing, which practice as researchers might encounter in some kinds of play and improvisation, as you suggest. An embodied, immersive experience, through which your attention has to be totally focussed outwards towards the environment, at least initially, for a large portion of the time.
One paradigm for those processes could be Gregory Batesonâs view that âIn the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been exploredâ (Bateson, 2000/1972: xxiv). Thatâs a very hard place to define because youâre trying to avoid defining âthingsâ; you need to do this in order to discover other âthingsâ that you might never have encountered if you hadnât entered that kind of ânon-spaceâ. âWilful ignoranceâ might be one way among many to account for transdisciplinary affects/effects, but âradical failureâ might account for it even better: âFail again. Fail betterâ (Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983: 1).
JH: There seems to be a very important distinction here between multidisciplinarity (where various disciplines contribute to a process without blurring epistemic boundaries), interdisciplinarity (where disciplines still claim to know through an exchange between different disciplines or ways of knowing), and TD, which youâre describing in terms of practical or ludic knowledge, which seems to be a completely different thing.
BK: TD is some sort of awareness of un-knowledge, which is a completely different kind of experience than learning about knowing through multi- or interdisciplinarity, because by definition you canât define what (or why) it is. Your experience evokes a kind of un-learning, achieved through some sort of deliberate immersion in a state of complete ignorance or, perhaps more accurately, you become involved in an unavoidable lacuna. Oneâs experience is different if youâre âoutsideâ such un-learning, as with various types of multi/interdisciplinary space, and the knowledge they create can become a prelude to TD. When you first âenterâ a transdisciplinary space its inherent lack of definition is an inevitable vector for experiencing its uncanny qualities (Kershaw et al., 2011: 63â85).
JH: This raises some fascinating questions about the terms of engagement between the disciplinary academics and the non-disciplinary artists, and the possibility of being âundisciplinedâ when we approach our practice (see Halberstam, 2011).
BK: Letâs go back to traditions of theatre to consider that. Itâs often relatively easy to say historically what different disciplines are engaged in a particular theatre production and/or building, because in that sort of making you have contrasting knowledge domains which are coordinated in relation to each other and that, perhaps inevitably, creates knowledge. So in the usual situation of theatre youâre not escaping knowledge directly through inter-disciplinarity, at least in the ways that you can in what Iâm describing as a radically transdisciplinary space. I say âradicallyâ because in such a space you have no option but to experience it, at least initially, as un-knowledge.
JH: And does this model of TD represent a more âsustainableâ approach to knowledge, as has been recently suggested by Robert Frodeman (2014: 7)?
BK: Although youâre in what Iâve been calling a âspaceâ (other metaphors could serve just as well), although youâre in a transdisciplinary domain and you donât know where (or even what) you are, that transdisciplinary zone is not a vacuum. Itâs not entirely empty of, letâs say, âthingsâ; itâs potentially full of âthingsâ because youâre still presumably aware of becoming a part of whatâs around you (Kershaw, 2009a: 4â5). But you donât know the reality or the unreality of what youâre in, in the same way as generally one does inâletâs call it âeveryday lifeââbecause you leave behind normative assumptions. A transdisciplinary space encourages you or causes you to abandon assumptions that you usually make about the nature of whatâs around you. Its ânatureâ is there, still, but you canât know what its ânatureâ is without engaging with it interactively or, as I prefer to say, econnectively (Kershaw, 2012: 11).3
This is where you leave knowing behind and enter an environment in which you are freer to shift between thinking (cognition) and not thinking (ignorance, abandoning knowledge). Youâre free to move in and out of those modes of becoming, and many others. That then gives you more latitude for how you engage with whatever is around you, which you can do from many different kinds of angles than those that exist in normative, everyday situations where weâre conventionally imbued by âknowledgeâ, even constructed from knowledge. The difference is that in a transdisciplinary space you are entering into a relationship with your surroundings that potentially leaves you more open to what is happening in those surroundings and the forces, energies, and so forth that are circulating there. In this relationship the environment is likely to be influencing you as much as you are influencing it. TD becomes a meta-interactive space and experience where the nature of whatâs around you announces itself to you in ways that you havenât otherwise conceived of, or experienced, before. In other words, the environment becomes in you, as it were, fl owing through you. And also you become part of that environment in unpredictable ways because it is performing you even as you perform it (Kershaw, 2015).4
On âformless hunchesâ and failure-as-resistance
JH: My own PAR project5 began with a âformless hunchâ (Peter Brook, 1987: 3) rather than the framing of a question. I responded to your definition of PAR as âa method and methodology in search of results across disciplines: a collection of transdisciplinary research âtoolsââ (Kershaw, 2009a: 5). From this perspective, I conducted practical experiments that crossed disciplinary boundaries (including the arts, humanities, sciences, and philosophy). My PAR therefore engages with theatre practice in order to address experimental performance studies, specifically in relation to TD. While theatre has been one of the greatest resources for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary encounters between the arts and the sciences, as scholars including Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (2006) and Helen Nicholson (2011) have shown, it has also failed to be consistently transdisciplinary. While a significant part of my work has focused on the experimental theatre of Samuel Beckett, Peter Brook, and Joan Littlewood, my broader analysis considered performance practice in relation to the ânot-yet-knowingâ of artistic research (see Borgdorff, 2012). How does this relate to your own interest in TD?
BK: Your description underlines in various ways the crucial function of indeterminacy in attempts to encounter TD through theatre and performance studies, and even in drama as well. While Peter Brookâs âformless hunchâ seems like something akin to intuition or âintuitive feelingâ, its oxymoronic status works to compromise the more common meanings of âhunchâ as a push or nudge toward, say, an entirely undefined encounter. Thus the strengths of theatre as a multi- or interdisciplinary phenomenon â especially as it connects with scientific investigation â become a problem of unsustainable access to transdisciplinarity. The genealogical strengths of theatre historically become a weakness in attempts to completely abandon knowledge and knowing, beyond Borgdorffâs ânot yet knowingâ. For theatre, in almost all its guises, makes the past a burden that it has commonly looked for over its shoulder, so to speak, even as it may aim to totally dispel it. I interpret your primary PAR focus on Beckett as an acknowledgement that he is one of the few theatre makers to strip back the art form to a point of un-disciplinarity, which could well be considered as crucially articulated to TD as a paradoxical shadowing of its profound potentials for ambivalence and indeterminacy.
JH: I found that both performance-as-research and transdisciplinary research enable cultural and epistemological transgressions th...