Manning’s ‘Against Method’ begins with the claim that artistic research (what she calls ‘research-creation’) ‘was adopted into academic language through the very question of methodology’, and she specifically implicates transdisciplinarity in this question (2016: 52). Her description earlier — of a research inquiry beginning ‘in the midst’, with ambiguity of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, and an ‘opposition between real and unreal’ — makes direct reference to key concepts within the methodology of transdisciplinarity, including the existence of different Levels of Reality (Max-Neef 2005; Nicolescu 2010).
Of primary relevance to this exposition is transdisciplinarity’s ‘complexity axiom’, and to describe this I shall quote Edgar Morin, who is cited frequently in the writings of both Max-Neef and Nicolescu:
To understand the problem of complexity, we must first know that there is a paradigm of simplicity. The word paradigm is used frequently. In our conception, a paradigm is made up of a certain kind of extremely strong logical relation between master notions, key notions, key principles. This relation and these principles command all propositions that unconsciously obey its empire.
The paradigm of simplicity puts order in the universe and chases out disorder. Order is reduced to one law, one principle. Simplicity can see either the one or the many, but it can’t see that the One is perhaps at the same time Many. The principle of simplicity either separates that which is linked (disjunction), or unifies that which is diverse (reduction). (Morin 2008: 39)
Certainly, reductionism and disjunction are not the aims of either artistic or transdisciplinary research and it is these tendencies in traditional approaches to research methods that are at the root of the alternative proposals presented here. Perhaps the most important thing to observe in the context of this exposition is that the methodology of transdisciplinarity, like the approaches to method proposed by Manning and Law, is non-prescriptive. Ultimately, Law answers his initial question ‘How might method deal with mess?’ quite simply. It is not about a ‘set of techniques’ or ‘a philosophy of method, a methodology’ but rather ‘about a way of being’: ‘To live more in and through slow method, or vulnerable method, or quiet method. Multiple method. Modest method. Uncertain method. Diverse method’ (2004: 10–11). In the context of artistic research — by its nature a space between arts practice and academic research — methods are always and necessarily transdisciplinary. It is impossible to predetermine such methods without eliminating the space of emergence, the multiplicities, the coexistence of different levels of reality, the ‘included middle’, all varieties of complexity, and the occasional messiness that accompanies them. All of these things, and more, are partners in what I call the ‘second dance’.
Theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg (best known for his uncertainty principle and theory of quantum mechanics) notes near the beginning of his essay ‘Reality and Its Order’ that ‘Whenever a new, fundamental insight enters human consciousness at a particular moment of intellectual life, one must re-examine the question of what reality truly is’ ([1941] 2019: 19). In this way, Heisenberg describes reality — or realities — as existing both historically and in relation to one’s own experience and context. This is extremely important to my metaphorical methodology. Throughout his book, Law convincingly argues that ‘method is not […] a more or less successful set of procedures for reporting on a given reality. Rather it is performative. It helps to produce realities’ (2004: 143). If this is the case, and I suspect Heisenberg would agree that it is, it greatly enriches the ‘Levels of Reality’ component of transdisciplinarity’s methodology. In other words, in addition to the macro levels of reality explainable by classical or quantum physics, or additional macro levels relating to religion, philosophy, and art (Max-Neef 2005: 11), the methods we employ to create each macro level can also create unique micro-realities. These are the details and nuances of what I like to think of as the ‘micro-active-subjective’, the mini-realities that make artistic practice so interesting, not just because there are so many of them but because — through breathing in the ‘included middle’ (my metaphorical mycorrhizal network where the second dance occurs) — they are in constant and ever-changing dialogue with each other. Even by traditional academic standards of new contributions to knowledge, the production of realities and their related knowledges through method, simultaneously emphasizes, celebrates, and (if necessary) justifies the importance of the qualitative and phenomenological approaches that artistic research proposes.
Often it is about manifesting realities out-there ...
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