Activating the present of interdisciplinary methods
Celia Lury
Has not philosophy restricted itself to exploring – inadequately – the ‘on’ with respect to transcendence, the ‘under’, with respect to substance and the subject and the ‘in’ with respect to the immanence of the world and the self? Does this not leave room for expansion, in following out the ‘with’ of communication and contract, the ‘across’ of translation, the ‘among’ and ‘between’ of interferences, the ‘through’ of the channels through which Hermes and the Angels pass, the ‘alongside’ of the parasite, the ‘beyond’ of detachment . . . all the spatio-temporal variations preposed by all the prepositions, declensions and inflections?
Michel Serres (1994: 83) in Steven Connor, www.stevenconnor.com/milieux/
Methods are fundamental to the paradigms that structure the production of knowledge: they contribute to the history of disciplines and inform lines of enquiry. In some cases, methods are part of core disciplinary knowledge; often, the methods used in a discipline contribute to its unity and continuity. This handbook seeks to reflect on and contribute to the ways in which methods might shape the future development of interdisciplinary research.
Of course, what counts as interdisciplinarity is widely contested. On the one hand, ‘the history of intellectual disciplines is longer, more differentiated and more “indisciplined” than has conventionally been presented in the stories that disciplines have told about themselves’ (Osborne 2013: 4). On the other, interdisciplinarity itself has a long history, a variety of definitions, and shifting relations to the multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary (Apostel, Berger, Briggs and Merchaud 1972; Barry and Born 2013; Lykke 2010; Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons 2001; Stenner 2014) while recent years have seen the rise of anti-disciplines (Pickering 1993), non-disciplines and post-disciplinary practices as well as a variety of re-disciplinarizing dynamics (Osborne 2013).
Acknowledging this complex, entangled history, this essay nevertheless proposes some simplified definitions with which to begin. Multidisciplinarity is understood to be an additive approach – using knowledge from more than one discipline which are not themselves transformed by being used in conjunction with one another. Transdisciplinarity aspires to be a more holistic approach, and aims to displace disciplinary formations. Interdisciplinarity is characterized as interaction across and between disciplines. Importantly, this interaction is not oriented toward either a synthesis or a disappearance of disciplines. Instead, interdisciplinarity emerges through interferences between disciplines and between disciplines and other forms of knowledge.
In their study of interdisciplinarity, Barry, Born and Weszkalnys (2008) locate the current interest in interdisciplinary research in terms of its (supposed) ability to make science accountable to society. Understanding this accountability in terms of a curtailment of the autonomy of academic knowledge production linked to an instrumental emphasis on problem solving, they insist that it is both possible and necessary to identify the autonomy of interdisciplinarity:
[Interdisciplinarity] can be associated with the development of fields and initiatives in which new kinds of autonomy are defended against a reduction of research to questions of accountability or innovation. It can generate knowledge practices and forms, and may have effects, that cannot be understood merely as instrumental, or as responses to broader political demands or social and economic transformations. In short, autonomy may be associated as much with interdisciplinary as with disciplinary research.
2008: 23–24
It certainly seems as if a lot is expected from interdisciplinarity today: as Boix Mansilla, Lamont and Sato observe, interdisciplinary research ‘is increasingly viewed by . .. scientific funding agencies and policy makers as the philosopher’s stone, capable of turning vulgar metals into gold’ (2016: 572). This handbook aims to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary methods, not for their ability to turn what they touch into gold, but for the potential they hold to develop the autonomy and accountability of interdisciplinary research. As will be developed in detail below, this potential is understood in terms of the activation of the present.
The working shorthand for the approach to interdisciplinary methods collected together in this handbook was -ing! Our collective aim as editors was to focus discussion on a critical exploration of how the relations between questions and answers, practice, process and outcomes, epistemology and ontology, validity and value, are made anew in the practice of interdisciplinary enquiry. Contributors were asked to describe the do-ing of their chosen methods.
An inspiration for this approach was the artist Richard Serra’s claim that ‘Drawing is a verb’. His art work Verb List (1967–68) serves as a kind of manifesto for this pronouncement. In pencil, on two sheets of paper, in four columns of scripts, the artist lists the infinitives of 84 verbs – to roll, to crease, to fold, to store, for example – and 24 possible states or conditions – of gravity, of entropy, of photosynthesis, of nature. In interview, he says, ‘The problem I was trying to resolve . . . was: How do you apply an activity or a process to a material and arrive at a form that refers back to its own making?’ He continues, ‘That reference was mostly established by line. In a sense you can’t form anything without drawing’ (Garrels 2011: 61). The art critic Rosalind Krauss suggests that the list describes Serra’s practice in terms of action that ‘simply acts, and acts, and acts’ (1985: 101). Serra himself draws attention to the relations in which the action that ‘simply acts’ takes place: he describes the list as a series of ‘actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process’ (Buchloh 2000: 7; emphasis added).
The form of the verbs in Serra’s list is infinitive, that is, they are the basic form of a verb, without an inflection binding the verb to either a specific subject or a specific tense. The word ‘infinitive’ is derived from Late Latin infinitus meaning ‘unlimited’, ‘not finite’ or ‘unfinished’. In using this form of the verb, Serra calls up the possibility that each action might be conducted in an infinite variety of ways. Additionally, the verbs in the list are transitive, that is, in linguistic terms, they can imply or express an object (to roll pastry, to crease paper, to fold metal, to store data, for example). This formulation – of implication or expression – is important; the verbs – methods or doings – are not ‘applied’ to materials – they imply or implicate an object in a process, ‘something/happening’ as Thomas Jellis says in his discussion of Experimenting. This, perhaps, is why 24 examples ‘of’ a variety of objects, conditions or states are also included in the list by Serra: verbs are expressions of objects, conditions or states, and objects, states and conditions are the implication or expression of verbs.
Perhaps most significantly for this handbook, how the verbs Serra lists imply or express an object is a problem, indeed it is ‘the’ problem. As Serra puts it, the problem is how to accomplish a form by or in doing. Drawing on this insight, the proposal advanced here is that the determination or individuation of a problem is an accomplishment of the doing of a method or methods, that is, it is an accomplishment of a practice that involves a referral back to person, place, matter and process. For Serra, this accomplishment cannot be assumed: similarly, the methodological activity of composition, as Emma Uprichard describes it, may or may not arrive at a form, have purchase on a question, or individuate a problem. In short, forming a problem is the always contingent outcome of actions that fold a referral back to person, place, material and process to the referral forward of the doing or practice of methods.
In contrast to Serra’s use of the infinitive form of verbs in Verb List the approach adopted here places emphasis on a specific verb form: what are, in the English language,1 known as gerunds, that is, active present tense forms that function as nouns. This verb form – ending in -ing – is typically the object of prepositions, the variety of which, Serres suggests, philosophy has neglected.2 The suggestion put forward here then is that by pre-posing problems – that is, by ‘following out the “with” of communication and contract, the “across” of translation, the “among” and “between” of interferences, the “through” of the channels through which Hermes and the Angels pass, the “alongside” of the parasite, the “beyond” of detachment’ (Serres 1994: 83) interdisciplinary methods can activate the present. That is, pre-posing problems in the doing of interdisciplinary methods allows for their individuation as ‘figures of suspension and expectation’, able to function as ‘traps for the emergence of compossibility’ (Corsín Jiménez 2014a: 383; see also Prototyping and Dissenting, both this volume and Lury and Wakeford 2012).
Put rather grandly, the handbook’s concern with -ings is intended to identify the potential of interdisciplinary methods to compose problems as interruptions of the (historical) present. That is, the aim is to emphasize the role of interdisciplinary methods in the activation of the present: the determination of a situation as a problem, that is, ‘a state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amidst the usual activity of life’ (Berlant 2008: 4). More prosaically, the aim is to consider how interdisciplinary methods might constitute some aspect of what is given, the present – in all its geo-political complexity – as a problem, which is to say, as a situation that may be methodologically activated in specific, precise ways. This might involve, as Mike Michael suggests, identifying a ‘pattern of pasts and prospects’, or require, as Manuel Tironi puts it, empowering ‘a situation with the capacity to provoke new relations . . . [crafting] a space for being in the presence of [the values of others] and their consequences’.
Approaching interdisciplinary methods as ways of giving a problem the form of the active present necessarily obliges the researcher to be attentive to the methodological potential of complex (spatio-)temporalities. As Matthew Reason says in his discussion of Drawing, ‘Drawing is at once immediate, and yet takes time’. He continues:
When I ask a participant to draw me a picture I am inviting a different dynamic than if I had simply asked them to talk. I do not expect them to respond instantly. Instead drawing imposes a slowing down, a pause for reflection in the returning to memories.
Catherine Ayres and David Bissel use the term Suspending to describe the analytical potential of acknowledging the multiple durations present in an interview. They say:
Different durations resonate at different times, sometimes immediately, and sometimes years after the initial encounter. Following Ingold’s (1993) observations about the multiple co-existent temporalities of landscapes, we want to show how the interview ‘landscape’ is steeped in the pasts and possible futures of researcher and researched alike, a site in which trajectories converge and transform. We want to revisit the interview event between Catherine and John to draw out ‘suspending’ as a methodological intervention filled with theoretical, practical and ethical possibilities for thinking empirical encounters.
Jussi Parikka says of Digging:
As a method, digging opens up historically constructed material reality. It does not merely expose ‘ruins’ but the multiple historical realities where material infrastructures have been layered, revealing different ‘distinctive temporalities and evolutionary paths’ (Mattern 2015: 14). In this sense, digging opens the different temporalities that are all the time layered in infrastructures of cities, in media technological objects and in everyday situations.
While Alex Wilkie observes of Speculating:
Speculation, however, requires a shift in approach from analysing how probabilistic futures are manifested, managed and contested in the present – how actors imagine, model, predict, coordinate and in turn configure the future to the present – to the construction of adequate concepts and devices for exploring possible latent futures that matter. A word of caution is in order here, however: speculation is both prospective and retrospective. It applies as much to the politics of explaining past events (what might have been) as it does to the capturing of future possibilities (what might be).
And Gail Davies says of the diagram, ‘it hasn’t got a beginning, it hasn’t got an end but nonetheless the incommensurable meanings are there, written in, but it hasn’t got to have that linear structure of time’.
In summary, approaching methods as -ings focuses attention on the pre-posing of problems, that is, it understands the role of methods as ways to activate the spatio-temporal variations, the ‘declensions and inflections’ of the present. To push this argument a bit further, the presentation of methods as -ings highlights their methodological potential to not only take but also make (space and) time (Back and Puwar 2012; also see Timing by Barbara Adam, and the discussion of tensing methods by Emma Uprichard).
Lucy Kimbell’s discussion of design(-ing) gives some more indication of what this approach might involve (2015a, 2015b). Kimbell starts by stressing the importance of understanding design as doing or practice, building on Reckwitz’s understanding of practice as
a routinized type of behavior which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge.
Reckwitz 2002: 249 in Kimbell 2015b: 132; see also Rachel Fensham and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s discussion of practice in this volume
To supplement Reckwitz’s understanding, however, Kimbell is concerned to show how relations between designing and design(s) may happen in a variety of ways. To do this, she describes the relations between designing and design(s) as having two forms: design-as-practice, and designs-in-practice. In the terms of approach being developed here, the two forms make visible the methodological potential of exploring a problem through the spatio-temporal variations that emerge when the referral forward of practice is combined with a referral back to relations to person, place, material and process.
To elaborate: Kimbell’s first term – design-as-practice – ‘mobilizes a way of thinking about the work of designing that acknowledges that design practices are habitual, possibly rule-governed, often routinized, conscious or unconscious, and that they are embodied and situated’. In addition, however, Kimbell says, ‘Design-as-practice cannot conceive of designing (the verb) without the artifacts that are created and used by the bodies and minds of people doing designing’ (2015b: 135). The second term – designs-in-practice – ‘acknowledges the emergent nature of design outcomes as they are enacted in practice’ (2015b: 135). Together, these two terms draw attention to how designs emerge from designing, and in doing so provides a way to think about how scale emerges from scaling, a map from mapping, a sample from sampling and a translation from translating.
Such outcomes might appear so inevitable as to need no acknowledgement – what else would emerge from the activity of scaling but a scale? But if we ask what emerges from the method of reading, we can see that as well as a reader, a text and perhaps even a writer (‘the author’) might also be produced in the organization of a referral back to person, material, place and process. When we also remember that the term ‘computers’ historically referred to people (often women) who computed, rather than to machines, we might wonder whether the (alleged) crisis in the humanities stems in part from the fact that reading as a practice is no longer routinely organized to refer back to a person but, increasingly, to machines (Hayles 2005). And we might think again about what relations to person, place, material and process are involved when a document is formatted as ‘read-only’.
Continuing in these terms, we can further reflect on the significance of the privileging of referral back to place (alongside the referral back to person, material and process) in methods of indigeneity. In their contribution to this handbook, Catriona Elder and Jonathon Potskin discuss this privileging in terms of the importance attached in Indigenous methodologies to the inalienable connection of Indigenous peoples to specific geographic spaces. In Australia, they say, it is the custodianship of Indigenous peoples to land – and the responsibility built into that relationship –- that informs Indigenous methodology. Relatedly, they draw on Margaret Kovach to describe the referral that takes place within a Nêhiyaw epistemology: ‘“so while I speak of knowledges (e.g., values, language), it should be assumed that they are nested, created, and re-created within the context of relationships with other living beings”’.
Such accounts compel us to reflect on the significance of the spatio-temporal relations in which problems are pre-posed (and subjects and objects predicated), and acknowledge the important role that feminist, environmental, post-colonial and Indigenous scholars have played in highlighting this significance. In the practices of such scholars the autonomy of interdisciplinarity is explicitly put into diverse relations of accountability (even if this word is avoided because of its association with a requirement to problem-solve in instrumental ways; see Elder and Potskin). This work allows us to see that how method implies or expresses its objects allows the knowledge that is produced to move in particular ways: as evidence that is context-independent, for example, or as local or situated (see Newell et al., this volume); to be protected by intellectual property laws or held in trust collectively (see Corsín Jiménez, this volume); to contribute to the consolidation or dissolution of hierarchies of expertise both between disciplines and between academic and non-academic modes of knowing; and to the definition of ethical and non-ethical ways of conducting research (see Newell et al.).
If we consider the relations between measuring and value in Western epistemologies in this respect, we can see that they do not exist in a simple linear relation to each other, with one, value, as the outcome of the other, measuring; rather, as Brighenti puts it: ‘the relation between measure and value is necessarily circular – better, entangled. In this light, value exists before as well as after measure, and precisely in such “circumnavigation of measure” lies a transformation and concretion of the nature of value’ (2017: 3).
As part of this circumnavigation, Mike Michael suggests, the activity of valuing relates to both value and valuation, while validating relates to validity and validation. He observes:
At base, the former term of each pair implies an ‘external’ or ‘objective’ relation by which some thing or some activity is judged against pre-given standards: value against market forces, validity against scientific or epistemological criteria. Conversely, the latter term of each pair – valuation and validation – points to an intersubjective or interactional relation in which some thing or some activity is assessed by means of standards and criteria. Thus, validation, say of a person’s work within an organization, might entail shared negotiation of criteria as to what is of worth; and valuation of a property might involve the situated weighting and juggling of criteria in the process of moving through a house, say, to come to a proposed money figure.
Michael, this volume
Brighenti summarizes: ‘A whole social imaginary may evolve from, and concrete around, the gap between the cold side of measure (which Dewey called “estimate”) and the hot side of it (“esteem”). Understanding this gap calls for a wide interpretive framework’ (2017: 5) as Manuel Tironi also indicates in his discussion of Dissenting, a method to explore ‘the political capacities that might be unleashed when value mismatches in interdisciplinary projects are not worked through but enhanced as moments of democratic expansion’.
The usefulness of Kimbell’s two terms for the approach to interdisciplinary methods being proposed here, then, is that they draw attention to the importance of a methodologically informed referral back to person, place, material and process in the practice or doing of method. It is in this folding of multiple kinds of relations into the doing of methods – in the work of pre-positioning – that problems are composed, their form making possible the drawing of lines of enquiry involving specific kinds of analysis – whether these analyses involve predictions, the establishing of cause and effect, the refining of concepts, the revision of classifications, or the devising of speculations. Put another way, it is in this folding that methods acquire the capacity to form a problem that has the ability to activate the present, to pause, to de- and re-compose the latency of what is given in relations between past, present and future (see Tahani Nadim, this volume). And such an emphasis is vital if we are to understand and take responsibility for how (disciplinary and interdisciplinary) methods enact the world (see, for example, Annelise Riles’ (2006) discussion of ‘the agency of legal form’). As Ramon Lobato shows in his discussion of Rescaling as a methodological tactic, the activity of scaling always makes a particular kind of scale (this scale rather than that scale), and then, this scale (rather than that scale) contributes, or not, to – for example – economies of scale that require and exploit specific calibrations in time and space.
These points will be developed further below, but for now let me make just one further observation about -ings. It will be obvious from a cursory look at the contents page that most of the methods collected here are not those conventionally described in methods textbooks. This is not simply because they are interdisciplinary, but because they are interdisciplinary in a specific way: they are compound methods, that is, they are a combination of methods (see Emma Uprichard, this volume, for further discussion). So, for example, Visualizing, as described by Greg McInerny, routinely involves the combination of statistical, visual, coding and diagrammatic practices. Experimenting, as described by Thomas Jellis, involves both participating and relaying, with each of these itself composed of a variety of practices.
One of the reasons to focus on compound methods as we do here is to detach techniques from specific disciplinary uses (and related proprietary claims), and describe them instead in terms that can be recognized across disciplines. So, for example, the discussion of sampling below concerns the use of this method in music and film. Nevertheless, it is of relevance to techniques of sampling in social research insofar as it calls attention to the links between representativeness and representation, and to the creative possibilities opened up by activating the relation between parts and wholes. Another reason to describe the methods collected here as compound, however, is to recognize the ways in which methods have deeply affective and political dimensions as well – or as part of – their onto-epistemological agency. This is recognized by Gail Davies and Helen Scalway (this volume) in a discussion of the term ‘recognizing’: ‘[recognizing] implied to me a relationship to the other, a process of knowing, and the two together, of recognizing the implications of this knowledge in the context of the other’.
Describing the methods included here as compound is also designed to demonstrate inter-rather than meta- or trans-disciplinarity: that is, it is to show how methods emerge from within a necessarily contingent, more-or-less enduring interaction between disciplines. Of course, the contributions to the handbook – and this essay itself – describe -ings in terms of the interaction between only some, and not all, disciplines. It could not be otherwise. And while most of the methods discussed here will probably be primarily of interest to scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, the hope is that each -ing is described in such a way that it could be adopted and adapted in movements across (other) disciplines. Indeed, making visible the possibility of what Gay Hawkins (this volume) describes as the Qualifying of methods is one of the ways in which the handbook aims to contribute to the autonomy as well as the accountability of interdisciplinarity.
To consider the value of considering interdisciplinary methods as -ings further, I turn now to four of the most salient vectors of the contemporary configuration of interdisciplinary research. These are: the global formulation of problems, understood in terms of scale, position and depth or perspective; the emphasis on collaboration and the affiliated term participation; the changing infrastructures of research; and futures thinking. While all these aspects of the contemporary formation of interdisciplinary research can be understood in terms of a push to make science accountable to society in instrumental terms, this essay aims to show how they can (also) inform its autonomy.
Recent accounts of interdisciplinary research suggest that it is of special value in relation to what are described as global problems, but the basis of this claim is not always clear.
First, consider some of the ways in which interdisciplinarity and the global are currently being brought into relation with one another (see Angela Last’s chapter in this volume for further discussion of these relations). One is to do with size or magnitude, that is, some problems – such as climate change or disease – are understood to be too ‘big’ to be successfully addressed by single disciplines. Similarly, it is sometimes suggested that a ‘world’ literature cannot be understood by literary studies alone, but requires an engagement with geo-political disciplines. A second way in which the global and interdisciplinarity are brought together concerns the heterogeneity of the actors said to be required to address global problems, and the necessity of including both human and non-human participants. Moreover, as Sasha Engelmann and Derek McCormack say in a discussion of Sensing atmospheres, ‘The atmospheric is not a domain circumscribed by phenomenological modes of conscious sensing . . . Indeed, much of the data and processes that can now be sensed operate below and before thresholds of human awareness’ (see also Clough 2008; Fraser 2009). A further way in which interdisciplinarity is brought into relation with the global is that it is commonly seen to be necessary to address problems insofar as they might be described as complex or wicked problems (Rittel and Webber 1973), or problems that ‘resist telling’ (Crenshaw 1995; and see the discussion by Nina Lykke and Angela Last in this volume) especially insofar as such problems are not seen to be amenable to being fixed once and for all.3
In all these ways, interdisciplinarity and the global might seem to stand in relation to each other in mutually productive ways. Yet, the term global and the related term globalization remain the source of considerable debate in at least some disciplines. It is by no means accepted that they can capture the intensities and unevenness of the variety of mobilities that cross-cut the contemporary world (Büscher, Urry and Witchger 2010; and see Monika Büscher’s discussion of Moving methods). For this reason, some interdisciplinary scholars prefer to explore the unevenness that might be introduced into an understanding of such mobilities by focusing on ‘inter’-relations. In this respect, we might learn from the example of those scholars who drew on the idea of ‘Asia as a method’ (Chen 2010; Yoshimi 2005[1960]) to develop both an intellectual movement – Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) – and a methodology – Inter-Asia methodology.
In these developments, a strong contrast is drawn with area studies (see also Chow 2006): the aim is to emphasize the location from which research questions are articulated, not to compile similar data from different countries. Tejaswini Niranjana (2013) writes, ‘We don’t see [Asia as a method] as taking up a “regional” study, which often means “applying” Western concepts to Asian material, or demonstrating complete and authoritative knowledge about a place in a historical or ethnographic mode’.
She describes how Asia as method was put into circulation in IACS: ‘an intellectual movement, conjoined with social movements in diverse ways in each locale, entailing physical travel and exchanges so as the better to speak across places and to each other’ (2013). So, for example, the Inter-Asia journal on which the project was originally premised was envisaged as a platform for movements traversing all the above, across different planes and points of intersection.
Many members of IACS conduct comparative studies, but the inter- of inter-Asia complicates the practice of comparison (see also Connor Graham on Projecting, this volume), since it involves the exploration of similarities and differences within and between not one but multiple Asias: ‘The name Inter-Asia which has gained so much currency today was proposed as a grammatical impossibility – the term suggests the improbable existence of multiple Asias. But it manages to capture what we had in mind’ (Chua Beng-Huat, quoted in Niranjana 2013).
Niranjana develops this approach as ‘inter-Asia methodology’, a term she develops to describe ‘knowledge production about Asian locations premised on the multiplication of frames of reference’, and on comparative research addressing the conditions of emergence of specific phenomena. Inter-Asia as methodology involves ‘visibilising the normative frame which often has the “West” as its key reference point’ (2013), comparative work (2000), and the identification of terms to become part of a broader conceptual framework. For Niranjana this includes what she calls the ‘pressing’ of concepts, that is a mutual or lateral interrogation of concepts with each other. She gives the examples of Partha Chatterjee’s political society and Kuan-Hsing Chen’s minjian, saying that each involves ‘the analysis of deep historical processes to reveal their interconnections and how they implicate simultaneously different Asian locations, the production of genealogies of the Asian present’ (2013).
Perhaps not surprisingly, interdisciplinary research is routinely understood to require collaboration (although as Angela Last points out it can be conducted by an individual researcher). The dimensions of this collaboration are many and various. So, for example, Boix Mansilla et al. (2016) identify the importance of what they call the cognitive-emotional-interactional platform of interdisciplinary research. They use the term platform to describe what emerges when
researchers practically engage one another to work on a common problem . . . In this shared space, researchers define problems to study, exchange expertise, build personal relations, project and maintain academic self-concepts, and yoke for status; what they create together constitutes a basis that shapes how they collaborate with each other – such as shared language, key concepts, tacit rules of interaction, group culture and identity, and collective mission.
2016: 573
The platform is ‘both a site of and springboard for collaborative activities – a dynamically co-constructed space with a set of rules and objectives that members develop – and both resultant of and contributing to collaboration’ (2016: 574).
Their study highlights the importance of acknowledging the lived reality of interdisciplinary collaboration, along with an acknowledgement of the friction that is often – perhaps always – involved in interdisciplinary research. As Mike Michael observes in Compromising, ‘It goes without saying that interdisciplinary collaboration can be a fraught business’. Friction in collaboration can have many sources, including the difficulty of reconciling different epistemic cultures, styles of thinking and modes of interaction as made clear in the influential formulation of both the potential and the limits of a specific kind of platform for interdisciplinary research – the collaboratory – by the anthropologist Paul Rabinow (2003). These challenges are further multiplied when collaboration extends outside the academy, to involve not only members of different (academic) disciplines but also representatives of business, government and the third sector, social movements and the public.
One currently influential form of collaboration of this kind are what is described as experiments in participation (Lezaun, Marres and Tironi 2017), as experimental participation (Whatmore and Landström 2011), or as a shift in emphasis from the experimental as a knowledge-site to the experimental as a social process (Corsín Jiménez 2014a; see also http://limn.it/prototyping-relationships-on-techno-political-hospitality/; and Engelmann and McCormack this volume). Examples of experimental practices that take the form of social process can be found, Corsín Jiménez suggests, in open access publishing, or in open collaborative scientific exchanges, ‘where sociality and social exchange often become the limit-tests of experimentation itself, such as in debates about interdisciplinary exchanges’ (2014a: 382; see also Shah, Sneya and Chattapadhyay 2016). Other examples he gives include the use of social media to enable ‘new para-sites of collaboration, where researchers and informants mutually co-design and modulate an epistemic space, or, simply, occasions where researchers . .. are drawn into a research problem at the request of their informants’ (Corsín Jiménez 2014a: 382). As he points out, ‘Where researchers once entered the field as outsiders (academics), they are now suddenly and unexpectedly being turned into insiders (colleagues, advisors). The traditional entry and exit points of knowledge-creation now face a permanent threat of abduction and destabilisation’ (2014a: 382).
Another approach to understanding the possibilities for enquiry of collaboration between academics and those outside the academy is described by Noortje Marres (2012) as ‘material participation’. This term draws attention to the fact that while participation traditionally refers to human activity (securing the involvement of people in forms of enquiry), it may also refer to the deployment of seemingly mundane artefacts in settings of public deliberation. Drawing on John Dewey’s understanding of ‘ontological trouble’, Marres describes material participation as the design of objects, devices, or more generally material settings or environments in such a way that publics can form and act in relation to a problem. Given that participation can be more-or-less active, more-or-less deliberative, such devices, she argues, have the capacity to turn everyday activities ‘into an index of public participation’, conscripting subjects into an ‘ecological public’. At the same time, such methods raise issues of accountability (to whom is the research accountable, and how can that accountability be demonstrated?), not least because the sociality of the society to which researchers are required to be accountable is itself being reconfigured in these methods as part of the process of collaboration. As Jussi Parikka observes in his discussion of Digging (this volume):
The collective workshops that are starting to define a methodological – even if most often still outside academic settings – attitude to digital culture indicate an important trend: cryptoparties, hackathons, game jams and other sorts of activities that run over one night or multiple days (and sometimes nights) define a fan-styled enthusiasm which attaches curiosity, dedication and often a critical attitude to working with machines whether in terms of coding, hardware hacking or the social and legal issues around digital culture from surveillance to economy (for example, copyright). Instead of mere Do-It-Yourself (DIY)-ethos, there are suggestions of more socially-oriented hack and other activities of DIWO – Do-It-WithOthers
(Garrett and Catlow 2012).
Marres’ emphasis on material participation leads nicely into a consideration of the ways in which current changes in the research infrastructure afford new possibilities for interdisciplinary research. Let me give two examples to illustrate some of these changes and their relation to interdisciplinary research. The first example concerns the development of a software program for scraping the web for prices (Gross and Lury 2014). It was developed at a time when the accuracy of the Argentinian state-sponsored statistical measure, the Consumer Price Index, was under attack: there were public protests, and many rival measures came into existence as academic economists and representatives of various private institutions started their own independent, non-governmental projects to monitor prices. One of these, the Billion Prices Project (www.thebillionpricesproject.com), provided a challenge not simply to the figures that were being produced by the Argentinian national statistics office but also to the production of the CPI as a national statistic at all, since it involved the use of online or big data from many countries rather than the primary data of national statisticians. Created by two Argentinian economists, the BPP methodology can be used to monitor the daily price fluctuations of approximately 5 million items sold by approximately 300 online retailers in more than 70 countries. It is currently used to inform the production of, among other things, a daily price index and inflation rate for many countries, including Argentina.
The BPP originated in 2007 as part of Cavallo’s PhD thesis at Harvard University which compared the online price variations for Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Colombia. What started as an academic exercise, however, was later subsumed in a company that describes itself as ‘the leading source of daily inflation statistics around the world’, trading under the registered trademark of PriceStats (www.pricestats.com/). The BPP website refers those seeking ‘more high-frequency inflation data across countries and sectors’ to PriceStats, ‘the company that collects the online data we use in our research initiatives and experimental indexes’. The company itself makes its data available in commercial, academic and ‘public’ forms, defined by varying terms of access. For example, the PriceStats website says that it distributes (that is, presumably, sells) its daily inflation statistics through an exclusive partnership with State Street Global Markets, whose target clients manage hedge funds, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. It also describes itself as in partnership with the BPP, introduced by PriceStats as ‘an academic initiative that uses high frequency price information to conduct breakthrough economic research’. Finally, PriceStats says it collaborates with public institutions to improve decisions in public policy: for example, they create special indices that measure the price of specific goods across countries to ‘anticipate the impact of commodity shocks on low income, vulnerable populations’. In short, the scraped data is used by PriceStats for multiple kinds of calculative operations, in relation to diverse clients. In this regard it appears as if, in contrast to the methodology developed by national statisticians to produce the CPI, the scraping methodology has the potential to offer new and different opportunities for many kinds of economic actors.
The second example concerns what Alberto Corsín Jiménez (2014b) calls beta or open source urbanism, a phenomenon he understands in relation to an ongoing transformation in the infrastructural landscapes of cities across the globe. While not ignoring the embedded economic and political interests that continue to dominate such landscapes, he focuses on the ways in which citizens are
wiring the landscape of their communities with the devices, networks, or architectures that they deem worthy of local attention or concern. From community urban gardens to alternative-energy microstations or Wi-Fi networks, open source hardware projects wire-frame the city with new sociotechnical relations. Such interventions in the urban fabric are transforming, and even directly challenging, the public qualities of urban space. Public spaces become technomaterial artefacts that citizens take upon themselves to service and maintain.
2014b: 342
Corsín Jiménez locates these developments in relation to the ‘new economy of open knowledge’ emerging from novel organizational forms, such as peer-to-peer networks of collaboration. In relation to these histories he sees the possibility of what he describes as a right to infrastructure.
He identifies three dimensions to this right. (1) Conceptual: projects in open source urbanism populate urban ecologies with novel digital and material entities whose emergence destabilizes classical regulatory distinctions between public, private or commercial property forms, technologies and spaces. (2) Technical: open source urban projects are built on networks of expertise and skills that traverse localized boundaries: ‘Decentralised communities working in open source projects have to reach prior consensus over the methods, protocols, and standards to be applied. These decisions often generate new designs, techniques, and rules for certification’ (2014b: 343). (3) Political: open source projects transform the stakes in and modes of urban governance. In an open source project, a community may assume political and expert management of its infrastructure (see, for example, www.intheair.es/). By bringing these three dimensions together, he suggests, it becomes possible to read the right to infrastructure as a verb, not a noun: ‘The process of infrastructuring makes visible and legible the languages, media, inscriptions, artefacts, devices, and relations – the betagrams – through which political and social agencies are endowed with any expressive capacity whatsoever’ (2014b: 357).
The two examples given here provide contrasting uses of the opportunities offered by new knowledge infrastructures. However, both attest to the way in which such infrastructures afford the potential to redistribute methodological expertise, and bring a variety of actors into competition with each other for epistemological legitimacy. In relation to this transformed research landscape, interdisciplinarity is unavoidably an integral part of what Mike Savage describes as a ‘messy, competitive context’ in which ‘the roles of different kinds of intellectuals, technical experts, and social groups are at stake’ (2010: 237).
Many recent discussions of interdisciplinary research are preoccupied with the relation of research to the future; that is, they are linked to futures thinking in powerful ways. Of course, this relation has a long methodological history, including debates on the possibility and value of establishing causality and its relation to prediction, practices of foresight, innovation, projection (Connor, this volume) and expectation (Brown and Michael 2003). Mike Savage (2010) has, for example, described the ways in which the use of the survey in social science in the second half of the twentieth century involved statistical analysis designed to produce predictions about the future through the sequencing of (static or discrete) cross-sectional data collected at repeated intervals of time. In contrast, the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern describes ethnography as having a nonlinear methodology. Ethnography, she says, deliberately attempts to ‘generate more data than the investigator is aware of at the time of collection’: that is, rather than devising research protocols
that will purify the data in advance of analysis, the anthropologist embarks on a participatory exercise which yields materials for which analytical protocols are often devised after the fact. In the field the ethnographer may work by indirection, creating tangents from which the principal subject can be observed (through ‘the wider social context’). But what is tangential at one stage may become central at the next.
Strathern 2004: 5
The outcome, she claims, is ‘anticipation by default’.
Recent changes to contemporary research infrastructures – including, notably, the increase in computational capacity, the growing availability of ‘real-time’ data and transformations in what Carolin Gerlitz (this volume) calls the ecosystem of data retrieval – have stimulated discussion as to whether the future can somehow be brought into the present. That is, for example, whether the future can be not just predicted but in some sense anticipated (see also Speculating by Alex Wilkie, this volume). This is part of the contemporary resurgence of interest in design as a methodology (see Michael, DiSalvo, and Akama and Pink, this volume). Traditionally, design and design processes have been seen to be purely practical, that is, as merely applied knowledge, and therefore were not considered as basic research. However, as anticipated by Herbert Simon (1996), design is increasingly being deployed across many disciplines as a method(ology) to make relations to the future a primary concern (Schaffner 2010). This is linked to a concern with the performativity of method, and has contributed to a turn toward praxis, critical making, and synthetic thinking and led to debates on the value of pre-emption, anticipation and speculation (Dunne and Raby 2014; Yelavich and Adam 2014). The appropriation of design methodology is also associated with the making of artefacts of all kinds, including epistemic artefacts, synthetic materials or even smart cities. In research that aims to activate the present in terms of ‘smartness’, for example, such as research linked to smart materials, smart cars or smart cities, design methodology contributes to the creation of cognitive and epistemic artefacts that have the capacity to modulate the present in what is described as real time, bypassing more human forms of governance.
In other methodological practices, multiple futures are anticipated by algorithmic optimization techniques, while in still others, possible futures are pre-empted through methods that extend and revise traditional statistical techniques of probability (Amoore 2013). In some research, the methodological potential of recognizing alternative futures by exploring the possibilities of ‘alternation in phase over time’ is formulated in explicitly political terms. The anthropologist Bill Maurer describes his own practice as ‘building the alternative in the now’. In interview, he says:
I’ve always been trying to get a sense of not ‘where is the alternative?’ but ‘when is the alternative?’ How do we see and hear and feel alternative moments that spring up right in the practice of the everyday, even if they fall out of phase again and back into the conventional? For me, the task is both to elucidate those moments and then from a political standpoint to see if there are things that are worth dilating a little bit, expanding or having last a little bit longer. It’s part of building the alternative in the now, and also part of this commitment to a rich empiricism that is attentive to the alternatives that are going on all around us, at least some of the time. . . . if . . . there are moments or pockets that are coming into phase, where alternatives happen and they work, then you start to get people having a sense of ‘oh, you know, another world is possible, another world is actually already here if we care to pay attention to it’.
Tooker 2014
As a making active of the present, interdisciplinary methods cannot avoid futures thinking.
Having outlined some of the dimensions of the contemporary configuration of interdisciplinarity, I want now to consider their implications for interdisciplinary methods through a discussion of four -ings.
In the introduction to a collection titled Essaying Essays (Kostelanetz, Di Ponio and Bebout 1974), Richard Kostelanetz gives a definition of the essay as ‘a short composition on any particular subject’. Instances of this genre include, he says, not only short pieces of continuous prose, but also lists, aphorisms, interviews, and expository pastiche. Essaying essays, he says
are those printed pieces that essay (i.e. attempt, try) to redefine the genre. . . . By realizing other ways of doing what ‘essays’ have traditionally done, they are essays twice over, confronting not only their particular subjects but, by implication, alternative possibilities for the form itself.
1974: vii–viii
In this instance, the doubling of (essaying) essays is the (literary) activity of problematizing:
Innovative essays are those that confront not just dimensions of extrinsic reality but also the intrinsic, literary problem of how else essays might be written. . . . As essays depend upon organization rather than fabrication, formal changes instill a re-essaying of a chosen subject; precisely because a different form reveals connections and perspectives that were not previously available, structural invention can change the essayist’s thoughtful perception.
1974: xvi
Of course, essaying might not even seem to describe a method from the perspective of some disciplines: matters of form, if considered at all, are considered secondary. But if we think about methods as -ings we can see that methods always involve the composition of a form: the activation of the present as the present-ation and re-present-ation of what is given.
Mapping is a group of methods that is evidently and reflexively undergoing rapid change (Batty et al. 2013; Dodge and Kitchin 2011; Thrift 2008; Hind and Lammes 2016). These changes, notably the move from the desktop to the web, have meant that 2-dimensional mapping has become key to many kinds of spatial (re-)presentation. In these changes, other -ings, notably visualizing have come to play an increasingly important role.
The recent move from desktop to web has had several stages, including the increase in availability of computable devices able to display data; the augmentation of the longstanding use of social data with space-time series generated in real time; the rise of graphic interfaces and the multiplication of software that allows a user to interact with data; and the possibility of remote storage of data in the Cloud. These developments have allowed for the emergence of computationally intensive methods of mapping. They have also contributed to a situation in which relations between mapping and maps are opened up as a site of methodological experimentation. Of course, these relations have always been available for experiment. However, the nature of the current changes has been so profound, and their implications so consequential that previously consolidated methodological relations have been destabilized, and new possibilities given a chance to emerge. Perhaps most significantly, these changes mean that mapping can be put into time (and space) in new ways: that is, different techniques for sequencing time have been developed to supplement static, cross-sectional methods. In addition, however, these changes have also meant both the possibility of more and different actors being involved in the activity of mapping – including commercial actors as well as ‘crowds’ of various kinds – and the possibility for mapping to be linked to more and other methods in new ways (Albuquerque, Herfort and Eckle 2016; see also the discussion of iBordering by Holger Pötzsch in this volume). This is especially clear in the use of a variety of techniques of visualizing as part of mapping, which now routinely also involves data-driven modelling and simulating. As Batty et al. note, ‘the fact that the data volumes are large and the models often compute[r] intensive means that visualisation is of the essence’ (2013: 20).
Perhaps most significantly, as well as being a way to display findings, visualization now plays a generative role in mapping, that is, visualizing is not simply representation, but, recursively, presentation and re-presentation (Calvillo 2012). In his discussion of Visualizing in this volume, Greg McInerny uses the term ‘Design Space’ to envisage ‘a hyper-volume of all possible visualization designs with as many dimensions as there are ways to visualize data using coordinate and mapping systems, visual encodings and formatting, scales and sizing, sampling and aggregation methods’. To consider specific visualizations in relation to such a space makes it possible, he suggests, to see them as both ‘arbitrary and specific’: they could always be otherwise as the necessarily contingent outcome of visualizing, but they are as they are for specific methodological reasons. In such a space, the doubling of visualizing as part of the process of mapping offers the opportunity of a kind of virtuous methodological circle of presentation and re-presentation: the workings of a map or a model can now be exposed in ways that are highly amenable to visualization with the consequence that observations and predictions can be exhaustively compared across many combinations of model calibrations while, ‘linking model processes to outcomes generates novel ways of visualising the relationships between processes and spatial outcomes’ (Batty et al. 2013: 20; McInerny this volume).
The collection Essaying Essays (Kostalanetz et al. 1974) previously discussed was published in the 1970s, at a time when the status of paper as the principal medium or material of print and its associated forms such as the book was just beginning to be challenged. On the one hand, the status of the essay as a form of print media is taken for granted by Kostelanetz in the unremarked oscillation between ‘essay’ and ‘printed essay’. On the other, he notes that some forms of essay cannot be easily reproduced in the material form of a book:
One alternative form that could not be reprinted here, alas, is the modular essay whose physically separate parts can be rearranged, the relationships among them continually changing; for the variable kind of exposition that is possible, say, in a packet of printed cards is simply impossible in a spine-bound book.
1974: ix
Now, however, the materials of essays are no longer routinely assumed to be paper, bound as books. Other materials are possible, even perhaps more likely: ‘Uncreative or conceptual writing is a type of literature that is born of and made possible by the digital’ (Goldsmith 2011; see also Salazar-Sutil (2015) and the chapter in this volume on Notating by Moritz Wedell).
To ensure we do not take for granted the media or materials of methods, we can consider the activity of folding, at least as described by Michael Friedman and Wolfgang Schaffner. The fold, they say, ‘is a material operation or/and an operative material starting at the molecular and ending at the macro level’ (2016: 8). It occurs in nature as when frogs fold leaves to secure their eggs, when chimpanzees fold leaves to swallow them or when trees fold their leaves while it rains. In human culture, folding is constitutive of weaving, knotting, braiding and calculating as well as writing. Friedman and Schaffner suggest that folding understood in this way has the potential to open new relations across disciplines. Discussing examples from materials science, biology, architecture and mathematics to literature and philosophy, they suggest that folding overcomes old dichotomies, such as the organic and the inorganic and nature and culture, and blurs the boundaries between experimental, conceptual and historical approaches.
Each of weaving, knotting, braiding, calculating and writing, they say, ‘might be thought as dealing with a sequential series of signs’ (Friedman and Schaffner 2016: 8). But, so they argue, to understand them as examples of folding allows us to consider the consequential effects of the materiality of the sequencing of signs. Their case is made through a discussion of the relations between folding, folded material and code. Digital code, they say, is normally understood as ‘what codifies operations and processes into an alphanumeric series of signifiers, enabling us to view operations – such as code – as a linear series of transmissible, discrete operations, which can be repeated over and over’ (2016: 9). This abstracted understanding of code derives from a particular history in which, they note:
Starting from the end of the 19th century, code was no longer perceived as what stems from a codex, but rather as what codifies and externalizes thought or meaning through the codification of difference itself. Transmitted alphanumeric code points towards deciphering, reading and writing as what belongs to digital one-dimensional code.
2016: 9
In relation to this history, ‘Digital code is ultimately denuded of any sign of materiality; it represents pure form overcoming not only materiality but also the surrounding material environment and space’ (2016: 9).
To consider code as folding, they claim, overturns this view, since it forces an understanding of the sequencing of signs as always and inevitably materially spatialized. They quote the mathematician and philosopher Rene Thom who says: ‘If, as Paul Valery said, “II n’y a pas de géométrie sans langage,” it is no less true that there is no intelligible language without geometry, an underlying dynamic whose structurally stable states are formalized by the language’ (Friedman and Schaffner 2016: 14).
Explicating this rather abstract claim, they say that to codify folding by imposing on it a single language or one-dimensional linear codification is reductive. Instead, they say, Thom proposes to fold code, a material process in which code enters into more than one dimension. Understanding code as an instance of folding, they conclude, has three benefits:
First, it suggests that codification should be communicated through physical and material effects. Second, it transcends the dichotomy of the codifying symbols, namely, that these symbols can either represent objects or execute actions. A folded code can do both. . . . Third, the materiality of [for example] bending, stretching or twisting does not refer to ideal operations, but rather to mechanics, to the manner in which material itself changes.
2016: 15
To explain further, they say we need to recall the following ‘simple fact’: ‘folding is a spatial operation’. The line (as a kind of series or sequence) that appears as a consequence of folding a piece of paper is a spatial effect. It might appear in two dimensions but, so they suggest, understanding a line in terms of folding allows us to see it as an effect of ‘three-dimensional folding processes that go beyond the mere sequential chain of equally-connected symbols, to include three-dimensional operations, such as bending, stretching, twisting and translating’. In this way – by unfolding folding – they show it to be a constitutive, multi-dimensional activity.
These three examples draw attention to the twists in time and space that enable compound methods to activate the present. Importantly, however, this activation is not normally something that is a one-off, a discrete procedure, but rather, something that itself is conducted as part of a sequence or series in which a problem is (collectively if not collaboratively) individuated. As Hans-Jorg Rheinberger says, ‘research is a cultural configuration endowed with its own temporality’ (Rheinberger, 2010: 21). In other words, problems are the methodologically induced property of what we might call practical fields (one example of which Brighenti (2017) describes as measure-value circuits or measure-value environments), themselves comprising researchers, methods, materials and media, connected to each other in time and space in diverse ways as part of a constantly changing research infrastructure (see also Law 2004).
This has always been the case. Studies of science suggest that single experiments have rarely been the site of significant discovery: ‘What are more typical are series of exploratory experiments that communicate among themselves with varying intensity, constituting an experimental texture in which equally unexpected condensations and eradications can occur at any time’ (Rheinberger 2010: 20).
In other fields too, the sequencing of repetition has been a site of methodological innovation. For example, Zeilinger (2014) proposes that we recognize sampling as a methodological intervention, not simply as borrowing or stealing, but as a purposeful replacement of a recognizable original. He gives two cases. The first concerns a record of the Bobby Darin 1959 hit song Dream Lover, which as a result of the repeated playing of selected passages, is scratched so that the needle gets stuck, repeating certain grooves: ‘the jumping needle transforms the line “Dream lover, where are you— with a love oh so true?” into a loop that sounds like: “Dreamlo-lo-lo-lover where are yo-u-u-u-u . . .?”’ (2014: 163–164). The effect of this stuttering, he says, subtly changes the line’s connotation: ‘The scratched record takes on the quality of a new utterance . . ., and, from its inscribed involuntary repetitions and stammering, the listener may discern the longing for love, the insecurities, and the unfulfilled desires of a whole generation of listeners’ (2014: 164). The second case concerns the film Alone. Zeilinger says:
By my estimation, Arnold’s Alone appropriates a total of around two minutes from several source films and, by inserting countless repetitions of sampled snippets, stretches the source material to roughly eight times its original duration. This intervention allows the filmmaker to focus on a number of archetypical character constellations (such as Father-Son, Father-Mother-Son, and Mother-Son-Love Interest) and to foreground in these constellations psychological issues that the cultural mainstream tends to gloss over.
2014: 164
Through these two cases, Zeilinger argues that sampling can uncover, foreground and repurpose the meanings of original materials. He shows how sampling – or repetition more generally – can return the past to the present and the future. In making this argument he is very much concerned with the ways in which repetition is sequenced, that is, in the terms being developed here, how the organization of the iterative and distributed engagement with the given can individuate a problem in very particular ways:
When we sample, we do not necessarily produce anti-authoritative ruptures (that would be the legal action of the sampling artist as pirate); rather, sampling allows us to become part of circuits of meaningful repetition that can create new intimacies, new rapports between us, the original work, and the sampling piece itself. Sampling simultaneously dismantles and reinstates a work, an idea, or a unit.
2014: 169
However, while the methodological value of repetition has always been central to knowledge production, I want to conclude this section by suggesting that the changes happening now in the research infrastructures are reconfiguring this value in new ways. This is linked to the ways in which iteration or repetition can now more easily be configured as recursion (Totaro and Ninno 2014).
Let me proceed by example once again. Fluidity is an open source computational code that is the key methodological resource of a large group of scientists at the Applied Modelling and Computation Group at Imperial College in London. In his ethnography of this group, Matthew Spencer describes the complex temporalities that are involved in the transformation in use of this code by scientists in different disciplines, working both independently and collaboratively, in syncopated rhythms with each other. He writes:
Research projects carry with them the whole weight of their past. While the trajectory of construction may move from a mathematical model of an analytical solution to a model of a well-studied experiment, the results of these previous stages become concretised in the apparatus as part of a testing system. When a scientist moves on to model something new, it is important to be assured that changes made in doing this have not undone earlier successes that built the foundation for the project. So as a test incorporated into the automated build and test suite, the earlier result will be run every time modifications are made to the code, ensuring that confidence from past success can still hold. . . . When a model is under active development, it is never enough to cite validations and verifications that have been made in the past, because these have been made with respect to a different code. All past verification and validation accreted in the present system of research is thus carried forwards with current research projects, applied over and over again to every new iteration of the code.
Spencer 2013: 107
As Spencer acknowledges, scientific practice has always been recursively distributed in space and time but his study shows the importance of the changing organization of that repetition in a shared computational infrastructure that is itself changing as does the (changing) object of study – fluidity – and the nature of interdisciplinary collaboration. This characteristic – the operationalization of repetition in ways that actively engage and exploit a context that is itself changing – is fundamental to the innovations that are highlighted here.
A second example relates to the use of computer-generated images (CGIs) in urban planning. Rose, Degen and Melhuish (2014) argue that rather than seeing them as still images, as static representations of urban space, they should be understood as interfaces circulating through a dynamic software-supported network space:
the action done on and with CGIs as they are created takes place at a series of interfaces. These interfaces – between and among humans, software, and hardware – are where work is done both to create the CGI and to create the conditions for their circulation.
2014: 386
Crucially, understood as interfaces, the circulation of a CGI is not secondary to its creation, but both a condition and a consequence of its methodological value. Indeed, Rose et al. propose that the study of interfaces demands, ‘a new methodology attentive to the work done as they circulate through software-supported spatialities’ (2014: 402).
A third example concerns the increasing importance attached to search in the conduct of re-search. David Stark observes a shift in the ways in which (so-called dynamic) networks are transforming the processes of classification that are fundamental to many kinds of research (2011: 169). Things changed, he says, when the founders of Google reorganized search from a classificatory to a network logic:
[N]ew social technologies exploit, radically in recombination, the three basic activities of life on the Web: search, link, interact. . . . [S]earch based on the structure of the links . . . Interact based on the structure of searches . . . [L]ink based on the structure of the interactions.
(2011: 171)
Stark introduces Luis Rocha’s TalkMine, an adaptive recommendation system, as an example of the methodological possibilities opened up by the recombinatorics of search, link and interact. Rocha’s aim is to ‘achieve an interesting coupling [of a recommendation system] with users’. Stark emphasizes the capacity of TalkMine to correct the key deficiency of programs that conceive data bases as ‘passive’ and model search as information retrieval, that is, that assume that the existing, often static, structure of an information resource contains all the relevant knowledge to be discovered.
In contrast, Stark says, ‘Once the vast databases are seen as an associative knowledge structure, the goal is to make them accessible as evolving knowledge repositories’ (2011: 171). New categories emerge by treating users themselves as information resources with their own specific contexts. While the concept of category is not abandoned it is reconceived in relation to contexts produced in relation to circulation or movement:
A category is temporarily constructed by integrating knowledge from several information resources and the interests of users expressed in the interactive process. As a temporary container of knowledge, it resembles transient, context-dependent knowledge arrangements characterized by Andy Clark as ‘on the hoof’ category constructions. Such short-term categories bring together a number of possibly highly unrelated contexts, which in turn create new associations in the individual information resources that would never occur with their own limited context.
Stark 2011: 173
In each of these instances, it is the organization of iteration or repetition as recursion that provides new kinds of methodological affordance, including, perhaps most significantly, supporting practices of contexting (including users or participants) to provide new kinds of resource for knowledge production (Seaver 2015). As such, the ability to configure repetition as recursion challenges those forms of knowledge that are accomplished in forms of repetition (such as replication) that secure their value in terms of context-independence. Certainly, the rise of recursion provides many opportunities for researchers to participate in what Martin Savransky (2016) calls ‘the adventure of relevance’. In short, the examples indicate the profound implication of contemporary changes in the research infrastructure for inter-disciplining,4 that is, for the securing of both the autonomy and accountability of interdisciplinary methods in relation to what we might call the infra-empirical (to adopt and adapt Patricia Clough’s (2008) use of the term), an empirical that is always caught up in infrastructuring.
It is because of the significance of this inter-disciplining that I want to point to the importance of what I will call rendering (Day and Lury 2017). Rendering or rendition is a term with many everyday as well as technical definitions, including: a performance, a translation, an artistic depiction, a representation of a building or an interior executed in perspective, as well as meaning to return, to make a payment in money, kind or service as by a tenant to a superior, to pay in due (a tax or tribute) and, in legal terms, to transfer persons from one jurisdiction to another. The origin for all these uses of the term is the Latin reddere: ‘to give back’. Its use here thus speaks directly to the understanding of methods as -ings: it directs attention to the notion of the present as the given, not simply as that which is fixed or obdurate, but, in anthropological terms, as a gift, and thus makes it possible to see all -ings as emergent in circuits of giving or giving back. However, the contemporary salience of extraordinary, irregular or forced rendition also suggests we need to be especially sensitive to the political dimensions of what it means to ‘give back’ in contemporary research infrastructures.
Consider, in this respect, the artist Hito Steyerl’s description of how the practice of film editing is being transformed in relation to changes in the knowledge infrastructure. It is, she says,
being expanded by techniques of encryption – techniques of selection – and ways to keep material safe and to distribute information. Not only making it public, divulging or disclosing, but really finding new formats and circuits for it. I think this is an art that has not yet been defined as such, but it is, well, aesthetic. It’s a form. . . . Now it’s not only about narration but also about navigation, translation, braving serious personal risk, and evading a whole bunch of military spooks. It’s about handling transparency as well as opacity, in a new way, in a new, vastly extended kind of filmmaking that requires vastly extended skills.
Steyerl and Poitras 2015: 311
Steyerl proposes that the question of how information is ‘stored, secured, circulated, redacted, checked, and so on . .. [the] entire art of withholding and disseminating information and carefully determining the circumstances’ is a ‘formal decision’. She emphasizes that this decision has an unstable temporality:
When I’m working with After Effects,5 there is hardly any real-time play back. So much information is being processed, it might take two hours or longer before you see the result. So editing is replaced by rendering. Rendering, rendering, staring at the render bar. It feels like I’m being rendered all the time.
What do you do if you don’t really see what you edit while you’re doing it? You speculate. It’s speculative editing. You try to guess what it’s going to look like if you put key frames here and here and here. Then there are the many algorithms that do this kind of speculation for you.
Steyerl and Poitras 2015: 312
In dialogue with Steyerl, the filmmaker Laura Poitras discusses the program TREASUREMAP used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to provide analysts with ‘a near-real-time map of the Internet and every device connected to it’. She suggests that at the core of the NSA’s approach to data collection is another kind of activation of the present, a ‘retrospective querying – how to see narrative after the fact’ (Steyerl and Poitras 2015: 312).6
Given the significance of the issues that Steyerl raises for how (interdisciplinary) methods make time and space, it is apparent that one of the most important questions facing interdisciplinary research today is how the doing of methods can activate the present in ways that do not render each instance ‘merely’ historical, but instead develop what Tahani Nadim calls the ‘talent to return’. Suggestions put forward in this handbook include Arranging or enchaînement, what Harmony Bench describes as the ‘crafting of relationships of contingent interdependency’. Enchaînement, she says, is
a type of classroom exercise in ballet technique in which a series of travelling steps are linked (literally chained) together as a phrase or combination that moves across the dance floor. Enchaînements are built, or arranged, from a discrete vocabulary and syntax that determines which movements or steps may logically precede or follow others. Connections among individual step-units are not wholly predetermined, nor are they wholly open to any connection whatsoever.
Sensitised to the importance of such connections, participating in interdisciplinary enquiry in a time of rendition requires researchers to be attentive to how they participate in a relay, as Jellis describes it, and to think about how they can pass on the baton as Olutoyosi Tokun puts it in the chapter on Dirty methods in this volume. As Abdoumaliq Simone points out, ‘A practice is more than a particular way of doing something, more than simply technique, for it entails obligations to others who have also “practiced”’ (2015: 18). As such interdisciplinary research can only benefit from – and perhaps especially now requires – the cultivation of what Yoko Akama and Sarah Pink describe as companionship, what Corsín Jiménez describes as trajectories of apprenticeship, and what Michael calls the staging of care.
This essay has proposed that considering methods as -ings enables us to consider them as ways to intervene in and make the present active. It further suggests that to use methods in this way contributes to both the autonomy and accountability of interdisciplinarity. Let me conclude by pulling together the different strands of this approach in a discussion of interdisciplinary methods as methods of the lateral.
As Gad and Bruun Jensen (2016) observe in their discussion of lateral concepts, in a broad sense the lateral observes a many-to-many relation between domains of knowledge and practice (see also Maurer 2005; Dalsgaard 2016). To describe interdisciplinary methods as methods of the lateral is thus to draw attention to the many-to-many relations that are made across and between disciplines. In one sense, the term speaks to the general observation that domains of knowledge and practice influence each other in unpredictable ways. However, in the presentation of interdisciplinary methods made here, this influence is shown to be immanent to the individuation of problems. In other words, as -ings, interdisciplinary methods are not mere links or associations between disciplines that somehow stand above or outside their objects of study, but dynamic conduits for relations of interference in which differences and asymmetries between disciplines are explored and exploited in relation to specific problems, in specific places, with specific materials.
What Gad and Bruun Jensen say of lateral concepts is also true of lateral methods:
their development begins with the recognition of specific kinds of movement between forms of knowledge within a particular field of concern. If movements and modifications of forms of knowledge happen continuously, the lateral question becomes one of activation: how might researchers draw energy from something that is happening in front of our eyes anyway.
2016: 5
In particular, the approach to interdisciplinary methods presented here proposes that they be understood in terms of their potential to activate the present. Highlighting how methods make as well as take time and space, the emphasis has been on the form of methodological relations in which the practices of method take place. This was understood as a process of composition: the folding of relations to person, place, material and process into the doing of a method, or the folding of a compositional methodology into the practice of method (Lury forthcoming).
Importantly, while activating the present was understood as a way to develop the autonomy of interdisciplinarity, the approach proposed here does not understand autonomy in terms of a complete independence of methods from their context of implementation, or indeed a desire for a lack of accountability. Instead the autonomy of interdisciplinary research is understood as an achievement of the real time of practice, and as such is always situated, always also a matter of accountability. But – and this is perhaps especially important in what one might call a time of rendition, by real time is not (only) meant the computationally driven temporalities of digital computation, but all the times made real in situated methodological practices of presentation and re-presentation. As Gad and Bruun Jensen observe, ‘The risks and possibilities of the lateral . . . are about nurturing an attention to what it takes to establish relative forms of compatibility between divergent forms of knowing and acting in . . . a decentered world’ (2016: 12). In other words, developing the autonomy and accountability of interdisciplinary methods involves an obligation to pursue a particular path, precisely insofar as it is ‘a means to induce thinking, to build up a perspective over time, to generate a sense of efficacy, and a sense of belonging to something capable of absorbing individual action and effort’ (Simone 2015: 18). As an activation of the present, interdisciplinary methods may contribute to the autonomy of interdisciplinary research but this self-direction need not be at odds with at least some forms of accountability. Autonomy and accountability can both be accomplished if questions of epistemology are reflexively and recursively implicated with ontological awareness. To understand interdisciplinary methods as -ings is to understand them as an activation of the present that is ‘a practice of rootedness in processual awareness that can give shape amidst the unpeaceful, uninhabitable and unknowable state of crisis in which living is also taking place’. And while ‘giving shape is not the same as solving the problem of crisis [interdisciplinary methods have the potential] to find form without distracting from the gravity of the real’ (Berlant 2008: 7).
The field of interdisciplinary research methods is not new. However, it has few shared texts that give researchers specific guidance and an empowering sense of what is possible in interdisciplinary enquiry. This is the ambition of this handbook. Yet, given the dispersed and dynamic nature of this field, comprehensiveness is not best provided by either a premature standardization of terms, or the separation out of methodological issues from those of either theory or method. For this reason, following this introduction, the contributory -ings are grouped in the following sections, each of which is contextualized by one or more of the co-editors: 1. Making and Assembling – Rachel Fensham and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas; 2. Capturing and Composing – Emma Uprichard; 3. Engaging and Distributing – Sybille Lammes; and 5. Valuing and Validating – Mike Michael. The entries in each section address theory and methodology as well as methods, in order that the issues they illustrate are not disconnected from wider debates. They are typically presented as -ings, but some (also) speak to the relation between verbs and states or conditions. Importantly, however, they all focus on a specific research practice, ensuring that what can be quite abstract matters of epistemology and ontology are addressed concretely. The fourth section – 4. Of Interdisciplinarity is introduced by Angela Last, and consists in a series of interrogations of recent collaborative projects, relating to some of the most significant recent sites of interdisciplinarity. All the co-editors introduce their section with an essay, outlining their own distinctive perspective on interdisciplinary enquiry.
I want to end this introduction by thanking them, the editorial assistant, Tuur Driesser, Steven Connor for permission to use his translation of the poem by Serres that is the Preface to this volume, and all the contributors for giving their time(s) – their patience, their drive, their persistence, imagination and care – to the project of interdisciplinarity.
1 As Rachel Fensham observed in our discussion of this term, not all languages have a similar syntax: a reminder that serves to draw attention to the complex geo-politics of methodology and their relation to the historical present.
2 For Serres an engagement with an expanded vocabulary of prepositions is necessary at a time when ‘the milieu [the middle or the in-between] arises in every place’ (Serres 1994: 128). For Serres – like many other contemporary thinkers, milieu does not just refer to media, but speaks instead to the ways in which the occupation of in-between has become a defining characteristic of contemporary life. The discussion of rendering below builds on this view to suggest that rendition is one of the most powerful ways in which milieux are occupied today.
3 In this respect, interdisciplinary methods as described here do not contribute to what has been called technological solutionism (Morozov 2013), an approach in which solutions are identified for problems that do not yet exist.
4 Andrew Pickering stresses ‘the disciplining of human agency’ that is part of scientific practice, referring to the ways in which practices are ‘interactively stabilised together with other cultural elements in practice’ (1995: 102).
5 Adobe After Effects is a software tool for video compositing, motion graphics design and animation.
6 Following this line of thought, phenomena such as ‘fake news’ can be understood as epistemic artefacts of an era of rendition.
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