The research thematic PERFORMING PROCESS focuses attention towards and advocates a value for the embodied, experiential, relational and material dimensions of artistic making, thinking and knowing. Still, how do we know what we know within our respective practices? How is thinking operative and activated within different practices — for example, how does dance think, how does drawing think, how is material thinking? How do we think-with different media and materials? How might this knowing or confidence in-and-through practice also increase capacity for dwelling in uncertainty and not knowing? Whilst many artistic researchers and practitioners implicitly ‘understand’ and have an embodied felt-sense of practice as ‘intelligent action’, there can sometimes be challenge experienced in ‘finding the words’ for sharing that with others linguistically? Indeed, are words always necessary? How (else) might we communicate the makerly-thinking or thinking-through-doing within artistic practices and processes — the embodied, experiential, dimensions of making, thinking, and knowing? Through what means might the intrinsic, implicit and intuitive aspects of creative practice be communicated and shared?
In one sense, artistic practice and research share a similar problem or challenge to post-cognitivist approaches to knowledge — that is, how does one recognize, advocate for, and communicate embodied, embedded and enacted forms of cognition? How might concepts arising within post-cognitivist approaches to cognition (including situated, enactive, embodied, extended and distributed models of cognition) help contribute to the development of new vocabularies that acknowledge the performative, processual and relational dimensions of creative practice? What can be learnt in the mutual exchange between these two fields of practice? How might practitioners contribute to these wider debates? What might be our distinctiveness? How might a practitioner’s viewpoint be different from (but also perhaps complementary to) perspectives of a more theoretical or philosophical perspective? How might artistic-practitioner-researchers help reorient the academic model from one of abstract cognition towards a more post-cognivitist perspective? Beyond borrowing from postcognitive approaches and languages, how is our own ‘native language’ for communicating the embodied dimension of artistic practice and process? How can we develop more confidence in our own ‘native language’, whilst at the same time looking to other contexts (such as post-cognitivism) to help us develop a wider conceptual vocabulary?
What other contexts could be explored for deepening understanding of embodied knowledges, moreover, of other ways of knowing. What other models of thinking do not differentiate between thought and action, between body and mind, for example, non-dualistic approaches of ‘Eastern’ philosophies and wisdom traditions? How does kinaesthetic knowing operate within artistic processes — how might we further cultivate our proprioceptive (as well as interoceptive and exteroceptive) faculties? What can be learned and shared from the embodied practices of dance, as well as somatic movement practices? What other ways of knowing exist beyond the narrow parameters of Occidental or even Europatriarchal knowledge (to borrow Minna Salami’s term)? What bodily ways of knowing have been forgotten or eclipsed by the privileging of abstract reasoning? What indigenous and subaltern ways of knowing have been marginalised or ignored by western-oriented, rationalist models of knowing? What other ways of thinking-feeling-knowing does a radical reparative understanding of ‘knowledge’ disclose, approached from diverse perspectives including from the standpoint of decoloniality, posthumanism, feminist thinking, alongside considerations of neurodiversity and "autistic perception" (to draw on Erin Manning’s term). Still, how to expand and enrich an understanding of knowing and of knowledge without appropriation of others’ knowledges? Moreover, rather than turning away from language, what languages can be developed for writing with and through practice, as well as with and through the body, writing from the body, writing the body? What modes of language lend themselves to the communication of the experiential and embodied, the pre-reflective and non-propositional?
“For me, writing is a gesture of the body, a gesture of creativity, a working from the inside out. My feminism is grounded not on incorporeal abstractions but on corporeal realities. The material body is centre, and central. The body is the ground of thought”, Gloria E Anzaldúa, ‘Gestures of the Body’ in Light in the Dark: Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, (Duke University Press, 2015).
Introduction, Emma Cocker 2022
Bibliography/links
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, (Vintage Books, 1997).
Gloria E Anzaldúa, ‘Gestures of the Body’ in Light in the Dark: Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spiruality, Reality, ((Duke University Press, 2015)
Alex Arteaga, ‘Embodied and Situated Aesthetics: An enactive approach to a cognitive notion of aesthetics’, in Artnodes, no. 20 (2017)
Rosi Braidotti, (1994). Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, (Polity, 2019)
Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism, (Polity, 2021)
Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays, (Harvard University Press; 1992)
Antonio Damasio, Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, (Robinson, 2021).
Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, in Feminist Studies , Autumn, 1988, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599.
Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives, (Columbia University Press, 2016)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, (Penguin, 2020).
Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture, (Duke University Press, 2016).
Erin Manning, For a Pragmatics of the Useless, (Duke University Press, 2020)
Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, (Columbia University Press, 2013)
Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind, A Theory of Material Engagement, (MIT 2016).
Ezequiel A Di Paolo; Elena Clare Cuffari; Hanne De Jaegher, Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language (The MIT Press, 2018).
Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies, (Bloomsbury, 2007).
Lisa Raphals, Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Cornell Press, 1992).
Minna Salami, Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone, (Zed Books, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)
Alexis Shotwell, Implicit Knowledge: How it is Understood and Used in Feminist Theory, Philosophy Compass 9/5 (2014), 315–324, 10.1111/phc3.12130
Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, (Bloombury, 2016).
Liz. Stanley, (Ed.) Feminist praxis: research, theory and epistemology in feminist sociology (London: Routledge, 1990)
Michael Wiedorn, Think like an Archipelago: Paradox in the Work of Édouard Glissant, (State University of New York Press, 2018).
Reading Group
Other Knowing(s) (25 May 2022)
During this reading group we engaged with two texts for for exploring how concepts arising within post-cognitivist approaches to cognition (including situated, enactive, embodied, extended and distributed models of cognition) might help contribute to the development of new vocabularies that acknowledge the embodied, experiential and relational dimensions of PERFORMING PROCESS. Moreover, how might attending to the value of ‘sensuous knowledge’ help “pries apart the systems of power and privilege that have dominated ways of thinking for centuries”, [from Salami’s, Sensuous Knowledge]
The first text was a paper from NTU Visiting Professor, Simon Penny, How a body knows: Skilled practices, structured spaces, proprioception and experiential knowing (2022)
The second text was Minna Salami, “of knowledge”, in Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone, (Zed Books, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), pp. 11 – 41.
Reading Group Attendees
Emma Cocker
David Eckersley
Tom Fisher
Patricia Francis
Kevin Hunt
Danica Maier
Darren O'Brien
Fu Xing
Gathering of questions arising through discussion:
How does this focus on other knowings extend the conversations around the potential political orientation of this thematic?
How is reality shaped by perception?
How does different perceptions of knowledge shape different realities?
How can we shift towards better listening rather than tending to offer answers?
How is the group experienced as more than a sum of its parts?
Can we stand outside the skills/intelligence dyad, especially within an academic frame?
What is at stake in the attempt to do so?
How might we ‘work around’ that skills/intelligence dyad?
What does it mean to ‘work around’, what is at stake in the attempt to do so, through what means and methods?
What is intelligence? What is skill?
How are ‘tools’ taken up differently and in relation within both texts – how might Penny’s reflections on the embodied dimension of tool use, make it more apparent that “we cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools” to draw on Audre Lorde’s writing?
How are ‘problems’ approached differently and in relation within both texts?
How might the problem-generating or problematising tendency of artistic practice and research be considered in light of both Penny’s and Salami’s reflections?
What new ways of conceiving of cognition emerge in the thresholds between scientific and poetic thinking?
How can we better understand cognition as a collective undertaking or phenomenon?
What models can we engage with from wider contexts such as ‘philosophy of mind’ and neuroscience, what models might we do well to let go of or leave behind?
What models have past their sell by date?
How might exploring the crossovers from different perspectives and other knowings undermine those constituted knowledges, which in turn lead to structures of oppression?
How might narrative and storytelling operate as methods of worldmaking, poetics as a way of imagining things otherwise?
How is the political potential of poetry and the imagination?
How might they have the capacity for reorganising and reimagining the narratives and in turn the structures of power?
What is accepted as valid knowledge?
Through what means might sedimented languages and knowledge structures become undone?
Can we operate counter to Europatriarchal systems whilst still using the tools of that system?
Are we already confined by those Europatriarchal systems? Is there any alternative?
Is the knowledge created within the Europatriarchal system framed by the system? Is there scope for generating alternative narratives and possibilities even whilst remaining within that frame?
How can we generate ‘our’ own knowledge within that system, or does it always get absorbed or assimilated by the wider Europatriarchal frame?
What are the different histories and lineages that have shaped the various diversions, separations and hierarchies between practical knowledge and abstract intelligence?
How might we rewrite or reimagine these histories and lineages?
How might we change the narratives?
How might interspecies relations shift our conception of knowledge from the humancentric to a more entangled understanding?
Where does the art school sit within the broader academy?
How do we negotiate our position of having ‘one foot’ in an artistic realm and ‘one foot’ in academia? Are these false binaries?
How is art and artistic knowing valued beyond the rhetoric of innovation and creative thinking?
How might (or even how do) other disciplines engage in their own ‘art’ of knowing and thinking, their own embodied ways of doing things?
How might wider debates around the situated knowledges of Indigenous communities shape this discussion? How to avoid appropriation, assimilation, or clumsy translation? How to learn from rather than colonise or even steal the knowledges of other cultures and communities?
What kinds of cross-disciplinary and cross-faculty conversations might emerge through attending to other ways of knowing?
How do we protect the sense of excess – that which refuses to be rendered into communicable forms of propositional logic? How is art’s resistance?
What kinds of languages can be developed in fidelity to artistic ways of knowing, how might language itself become inhabited and practised as an artistic way of knowing?
How might embodied knowledge and other ways of knowing be communicated through enaction and performativity, rather than through ‘talking about’?
When you have been raised and trained in a particular system of knowledge and knowing, how do you unlearn those tools?
How might we détourne those tools to other uses, to other ends?
Consider Bourriaud’s Radicant – how might we inhabit or even tenant the ‘master’s house’ without playing by the rules? Consider the squatter or the uninvited house guest or Bourriaud’s motif of ivy – what modes of creative inhabitation could be explored?
Consider de Certeau’s ‘tactics’ of everyday life – how can we tactically inhabit spaces and situations without becoming complicit in the systems and structures of power and privilege therein? Is inhabitation already complicit?
Is it possible to inhabit the ‘master’s house’ without taking on its habits and values?
What is at stake in remaining in the ‘master’s house’ – is change possible, or is as Salami argues, “The only way to be free is to get out of the master’s house” (p.34).
Is the master’s house an ‘environment’ or an attitude, does it have spatial or temporal properties, how is it recognised?
How might we shift from the model of possessing knowledge to a less acquisitional approach – consider different histories of knowledge preservation?
How are certain narratives and histories preserved and produced by specific archival practices, how might they be reimagined?
Is it not a matter of differentiating between acquisition and preservation of knowledge, but rather to ask – how is that system of preservation structured?
Who has control?
How might we differentiate knowledge preservation as a colonialising gesture, a gesture of imperial power, from models based on shared knowledges and living archives?
How might we shift from the privileging of individual knowledge to communities of knowledge and of knowing, towards the cultivation of research communities, environments and ecologies that nurture collective thinking, feeling, knowing?
What knowledges refuse assimilation into systems of power and institutional knowledge?
Are certain environments already coded in gendered and racialised terms – what kinds of knowledge does that enable or inhibit? How might such spaces become reimagined differently?
How is the difference between brain and mind – where are our thoughts located? Are they locatable in any one 'place'?
Is there such a thing as ‘our’ thoughts, ‘my’ knowledge - how do we better acknowledge the entanglement and interconnectedness of our own thinking-knowing with that of others (human and non-human)?
How do we get beyond or let go of possessive individualism?
What forces and pressures shape our thoughts and decisions – what values and ideologies are present yet not noticed in our own actions and behaviours? What unconscious biases?
How is even the notion of ‘what is good’ or ‘what works’ already determined by pre-existing conventions and values? How do we notice the taken-for-granted? What does this taken-for-granted enable or inhibit, allow for or prohibit?
Is ‘mind’ a manifestation of ‘the master’s house’?
Consider the relation of ‘mind’ and ‘mine’ – does the ego-centric nature of mind necessarily lead towards possessive, acquisitional approaches to knowledge?
Consider Kristeva’s writing on abjection – how might ‘mind’ be allowed to leak and seep, mind as a porous, permeable possibility, mind as an emergent relational phenomenon?
Where is consciousness?
Where do I mull? Where does mulling take place?
Consider Ingold’s notion of correspondence – is ‘mulling’ activated at the threshold of correspondence, between artist and materials, even between writer and writing?
Does the term ‘between’ keep the distinct categories of self and other intact?
Is mind manifested differently through different relational configurations and constellations? Is mind an emergent phenomenon or property of the coupling of self and world? How is mind?
How might ‘seeing with new eyes’ operate as a cognitive practice?
How might we invite in surprise and the unexpected into environments set up for supporting habits, efficiency and ease of action?
What environments and tools become necessary for disrupting habits?
What role might collaboration play?
What training and preparations might be required for nurturing our proprioceptive capacities? From whom can we learn?