www.maryannefrancis.org

~~Research~~ - beware of the master-signifier or the term that is everywhere and yet serves as a password, or shibboleth. Do we need alternatives?

The question that everyone is asking here is ‘what is research in art / design / etc.?’ I define the 'what' that people are concerned with as the poetics of research(see below).

But the question that we should also ask is: ‘how to understand the will-to-research?’ What interests does research serve - even 'research in the arts'? How does 'art as research' supply and defy the Culture Industry?

When part of the definition of research entails ‘the discovery of new facts', we might want to ask how this resonates with notions of empire and a specific cultural sensibility that confers a negative value on staying still; stasis. What's so wrong with not finding (some) things out?

The nemesis of ‘the researcher’ is, perhaps, Melville’s Bartleby, Scrivener, who refuses the tasks his master assigns him with the constant refrain, 'I'd prefer not to' - much to the latter's vexation and bemusement.

Here is an excerpt from the guide for post-graduate applications to the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK).

The Greek work 'techne', which gives us 'technology', included, in its original use, a notion of art (as 'skill'). In this way, there's a mischievous sense in which 'research' as a 'technology' is not so far removed from 'art'...

And yet, the idea of art as research (on its own) is for some (traditions), hugely problematic. What follows are just two of the objections:

a) 'Art is not a cognitive and / or 'knowing' enterprise'
b) 'Art is multivalent'

a) The idea of the non-cognitive experience of art owes much to the 18th C British empiricist philosophers (e.g. Hume), and to aspects of Kant's Critique of Judgement. In the latter case, 'beauty' generates an 'antimony', as the judgement that a thing is beautiful both seems to make a claim to universality, and yet cannot point to a concept that validates that judgement. Kant's resolution of this paradox discovers a 'conceptual' element to beauty at the level of the 'harmony' between the free play of thoughts and feelings. But what is now a 'shared' conceptual aspect of aesthetic judgement is not to be found in the artwork as the site of communicable knowledge; rather the artwork is the trigger for this universal 'common-sense' (concept) of beauty.

A broadly related argument is proposed by Stephen Scrivener, who claims that 'knowing is not the primary or significant cognitive state when viewing artworks' contra traditional research practices. Rather, he claims, artworks are the source of 'deep insights' or 'apprehensions' which are of a different cognitive order: '"I think that"' rather than "I know that"'. It's not entirely clear from his text, however, if art as such can 'stand alone'. 'The art object does not embody a form of knowledge'.

b) In the transcript of an interview concerning ‘studio doctorates and objective standards for studio practice as research’, Christopher Frayling contends that:

‘The best definition [of research] could be “an enquiry that leads to communicable knowledge” […] and that word “communicable” for me is the key. Art is in its nature multivalent, can be read in a million ways. That’s why it’s great, people bring different things to it, see things in it, come away with different meanings. The range of meanings is potentially almost infinite. Whereas the punchline of research can never be that multivalent, it has to have limits and boundaries somewhere, and say “this is what I’m trying to put over”’. And he adds:

‘Somewhere in that space is fine art research but I must say I find that incredibly difficult to locate.’ From ‘Nourishing the Academy’ in Drawing Fire Vol. 1 No. 3 Winter 1996. And so he proposes that there is a need for a '[...]text, the discussion on process, [that] could take the form of a research diary, or something that communicates what has happened such as the route map.' From 'Transcript of Research Seminar on Practice-based Doctorates in Creative & Performing Arts & Design' (Surrey Institute of Art & Design 1998) (Note that one of the seminar-speakers, Colin Painter, counters Frayling's objections to art-as-research via recourse to A J Ayer. Painter invokes Ayer's 'legitimate doubts about the status of all knowledge and about our capacity to communicate knowledge to one another'.

These prevarications tend to propose the need for art to find a supplement (a health-inducing vitamin). Hence the role of 'writing' (as the medium of 'theory') - which often overlooks the fact that writing in its literary forms returns to art in many of its conditions (e.g. multivalence, undecidability).

That research is an 'epistemology' or literally, a ‘form of knowledge’ is of course not problematic in most disciplines.

Hence, we may think about research as a form of knowledge very broadly via 3 schema that variously address the relationship between ‘knowledge’ and 'what is known'; the ‘concept’ and the ‘thing’. (The schema are borrowed from Richard Rorty, and are best figured by a table):

		philosophy as 'realism' versus 'idealism'	relations of determination
*	Both realism and idealism can be referred to as forms of 'represent-ationalism'		object	> thought
	'anti-represent-ationalism'		object	< thought
				thought is not defined by a relation of determinacy to its object; rather by what it is useful to believe in

Why does this somewhat abstruse abstract philosophy matter? Because it helps us to think about the relation between ‘theory’ (conceptualisation) and ‘practice’ (the thing).

(For a discussion of these schema, see: Richard Rorty, ‘Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism and Liberalism’ in Objectivity, relativism, and truth, Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Or, my fictional-conversation version of this territory in ‘In the Café Flaubert', Journal of Writing in Creative Practice Vol 1.2 2008.)

For some, such as Soren Kjorup, art is already an 'epistemology' - via Baumgarten's aesthetics, that defines art as 'sensuous knowledge'; what Kjorup glosses as 'another kind of knowledge'. So, for him, art as research is not an oxymoron.

Perhaps, as some contend, doctoral research is now, not so much about producing 'original' work, or one's magnum opus, more about an apprenticeship or training in research.