Towards a conjectural paradigm for interdisciplinary research
Rachel Fensham and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Making and assembling produce an odd pairing of terms. Making derives from the short vocalization ‘mek’ from an Anglo-Saxon word, and hearkens to the Germanic verb ‘machen’ meaning to do or to make. It has both a universal application, in the sense that everyone from children to adults makes sound, while on the other hand, it aligns with specialists who form unique or distinctive works, such as a fine machine or a beautiful painting. Making, or doing, also leads us directly to processes whereby materials become transformed by an action, such as a person making a cocktail or the weather making us feel hot. On the other hand, assembling is Latinate, as with the French verb ‘assembler’, in English also to assemble, as in the putting together or gathering of people, objects or things. Etymologically, this latter term relates then to the important notion of ‘assembly’ as a site of public cultural enactment, as well as to the assembly line of Fordist manufacturing. We might also have a more prosaic view of assembling in contemporary culture when we consume the plasticity of a robotics toy, a piece of IKEA furniture, or a Facebook page. Thus, we might conceive of a sharp contrast between making and assembling as methods, in the sense that making suggests creating, and something more primal, fashioned even from mud, whereas assembling tends towards order, and something more civilized, or institutional. We do not assert this dichotomy in any cultural hierarchy because we prefer to examine these terms operating in relation to one another, and as moving generatively between the social and linguistic, or human and non-human, in contemporary research.
It is possible to assemble a range of theorists – experimental thinkers – who become touchstones for different ways of making and assembling in interdisciplinary research, and scholars have become increasingly attuned to the ways in which theories of practice might differ from one discipline to another (Schatzki 2001: 11). Thomas Kuhn, for instance, acknowledges this when he writes about both the specificity of science as a knowledge practice and the generalizing power of a paradigm shaped by practice. In the process of narrating interdisciplinary research, and its potential admixture of norms equating to disciplines, alongside the entanglement of the practical, social and conceptual for this essay, we have arrived at Carlo Ginzburg’s notion of the conjectural paradigm – what he has called ‘the lightning recapitulation of rational processes’ (1989: 117). This is a concept that allows us to find a space in-between disciplines, as well as to do research work that makes and assembles the ethical, political, creative, socially engaged and fun.
Such research may also be productive of a distinctive ontology, one that embraces both the history and power of representations as well as embodied social relations. To return to our key terms by way of exemplifying this ontology, the tensions between the primal and the civil recall in part Elaine Scarry’s foundational book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985). Scarry’s privileging of the word ‘making’ and its antonym in her subtitle offer a fruitful starting place to rethink these opposing ideas and their impact on systems of thought more broadly. In her analysis of war and torture, for instance, Scarry notes that ‘physical pain . .. is language-destroying’ (1985: 19): thus invoking the political dimension inherent when pain is deliberately employed as an ideological tool designed to dehumanize. For Scarry there is ample evidence of how regimes seek to ‘unmake’ their victims and their experience of the world. The act of making, then – specifically through the act of creative expression (song, literature, film) – also has a concrete ideological function of re-making, or re-assembling, of putting together and creating anew that which has previously been unmade. Making, in Scarry’s terms, involves both imaginative work, as well as an ‘activity extended into the external world, and has as its outcome a verbal or material artefact’ (1985: 177). Whether the making of a political structure, encompassing legal texts and border police, or the making of structural or sensory objects, this complex proposition includes ‘obligations’:
For made things do incur large responsibilities to their human makers (and their continued existence depends on their abilities to fulfil those responsibilities: a useless artefact whether a failed god or a failed table, will be discarded); just as, of course, human makers also incur very large obligations to the objects they have made.
1985: 182
When we make – whatever we make – the ‘responsibility’ we take for the act itself is, from Scarry’s perspective therefore, intrinsically ideological.
Going beyond this humanistic concept of creation, the notion of assemblage is regarded as central to the ontology of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (2004). The use of the term assemblage, as Ian Buchanan points out, has however been derived from the (mis)translation by Brian Massumi of their term, agencement from French and he proposes a more suitable term might be arrangement (Buchanan 2015: 383). In this sense, an assemblage might involve reorganizing diverse elements from across disciplines to create something unpredictable or with new valorizations. Emphasizing the dynamic process rather than the final product itself, for Deleuze and Guattari, all assemblages are historicized through combination, and as such they also have agency: for instance, any given political formation authorizes the circulation of bodies, the expression or repression of affects, and the production or reproduction of collectives and institutions. An assemblage, such as a research problem or task, can therefore be driven both by processes of territorialization and deterritorialization, and in its analysis, by coding and decoding such arrangements. An assemblage functions then through the deliberative fusion of multiple aspects of a situation. For Deleuze and Guattari: ‘An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously (independently of any recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus)’ (2004: 25).
Guattari’s experiments in the psychiatric clinic, for instance, ‘used the grid as a tool to transversalise’ and to lead all staff, residents and visitors ‘towards the apprehension of the singular scenes composed and modified by each participant in relation to the relevant collective constraints and institutional matters that emerged in the process’ (Genosko 2009: 61). For the ethico-political development of how we conceive methodologies to be ‘made’ in this introduction, Deleuze and Guattari vitally consider an assemblage to involve re-conceptualizing the components of a research project by allowing for a critical heterogeneity, both of logic and aesthetics, to emerge.
In comparison with these radical deconstructive methods of making and assembling, the conventional heuristics of academic knowledge claim the actualization of fields of knowledge, constituted by historically defined sets of relationalities, positions, or lines of argument. Scholars of disciplinary modes of researching mostly occupy a discursive space, an institutional or subject position in relation to other thinkers via established patterns of citational linking. Within a discipline, these arguments are supported by evidence, which in turn develop lines of argument. In interdisciplinary discourse, however, these elements that make spatial sense of theory-making are sometimes characterized by an in-between-ness, and a not-quite-belonging. So, rather than making a space of knowledge for ourselves from a centralized location of discursive action, or in terms of unidirectional lines and stable shapes that serve as basic elements of a rather geometric way of modelling an argument, the interdisciplinary turn leads, we would suggest, towards a more dynamic, spatialized understanding of what a field of knowledge is and, by extension, who the specialists in the field might be, such as the authors assembled here, some well known and others less so.
If in response to new conditions, the research processes of interdisciplinarity foster the particular space of ideation as limen, as threshold, or as interstice, then they also function like nodes in a network, as spaces inter or in-between. Movement, as Nicolas Salazar-Sutil argues, might be about the physical locatedness of human movement, but it might also be conceived ‘in terms of electronic location within global networks’ (2015: 211). In this shifting of positions beyond the linear accumulation of ideas, our argument goes further: interdisciplinarity implies more than space, it implies movement, what we might define as the multi-dimensional properties of images, objects or thought changing in time and space. As such, this alternative paradigm involves a spatial and temporal realization of any movement that precedes or follows it, as well as a recognition of mobility as a process of sensitizing research to a particular situation within discourse, within art, within the social.1 We are not alone in mounting this argument for movement, and experience, as critical to the new formations of interdisciplinary research in cultural studies, science studies, social and political theory. For Bruno Latour:
In my view, ecology is only very rarely a politicized form. Usually the questions I am interested in – about sensitizing, about an Anthropocenic recognition of mobility, of process – these questions are sealed off by politics, and, surrounded by well-meaning self-righteousness . . . [as a] metaphor for complete control, the puppet actually makes its puppeteer carry it somewhere else. It gets modified, mobilized, or moved – and you are then moved by the thing you move, which is the most interesting relation we have with the world.
2016: 321
This realization of academic thinking as movement in terms of interdisciplinary research is dependent, then, upon acts of making or assembling (or, likewise, unmaking and disassembling).
In this essay, the notion of movement as a pre-eminent paradigm and method also serves as an invitation to adopt a kinetic way of ‘doing’ ideas in the academy that will allow scholars to build new and specific models for interdisciplinary research that are appropriate to the challenges of our time. In the movement from one field to another, such research will test and corroborate theory, enable comparison of different forms of evidence, and require the construction of new kinds of research artefact, instance or residue. The contributions assembled in this section argue and exemplify a range of approaches to interdisciplinarity that have been encouraged by a fundamental change in the way they make theory and assemble alliances through research: they are conjecturing projects and processes within a spatiality of communication, and a horizon of social transformation, that sees knowledge production happen in electronically and increasingly mediated ways with, however, an ongoing sense of the unevenness of distributions of power, wealth and access. They therefore practise research through making and unmaking, assembling and disassembling.
All the authors here stake a claim on interdisciplinarity, flagged by backgrounds that link and diverge. In spite of the interdisciplinary framework, these people are also located within disciplines – even if and when the focus is to work beyond ‘just’ finding something new or different. Their methods include the attempt to interrogate/interrupt/interpolate the restrictions of disciplines to work towards remaining open to new practices, ideas and methodologies, by embracing the conjectural paradigm over the restrictions implied by any traditional privileging of the general. We know this not only based on the entries themselves, but because we asked some of these authors by email to articulate their relationships to interdisciplinarity and how it helps to model their identity as researchers and we found their answers most illuminating.
For Catherine Ayres:
Being an interdisciplinary researcher to me requires an ethos of generous critique. I try as hard as I can to appreciate the contributions various disciplines are trying to make to our intellectual world, even when this means directly challenging the core tenets of my ‘home’ discipline.
Thomas Jellis offers a different approach in terms of how he moves beyond disciplinarity in his professional practice. ‘I’m inclined to think in terms of disciplinary matters of concern – or refrains – and how these might also speak to other fields; the task is to work out how to enable temporarily shared trajectories between them.’ Harmony Bench reflects upon how this process changes her academic identity:
My understanding and framing of myself as within a discipline or as adhering to a methodology has shifted over the past several years. Since all of my training has been interdisciplinary (with the exception of a degree in ballet), disciplinarity was not a concern of mine until going on the job market, at which point I described myself as a generalist in the field of dance.
In contrast, Margaret Wertheim has spent a career outside of academia, peripatetically challenging the disciplines of science and mathematics to rethink its models, calculations and designs as hand-made, collective formations. And yet she notes:
[W]e all benefit in our daily lives from the knowledges produced and acquired by these specialists, and we should all applaud the dedication and commitment it takes to achieve this kind of work. Every academic discipline has been subject to such diversification and subdivision, which seems to be one of the characteristics of our intellectual age.
Matthew Reason, on the other hand, acknowledges an important subjectivity in the very term discipline, noting that it ‘looks very different according to where you are standing’. He continues, ‘I have found the real challenge of cross-disciplinary work is when the methodologies don’t align, when there are not only different discourses or points of reference but different understandings of what knowledge is.’ So, whether a researcher works in the physical or social sciences, the arts or the humanities, there are paradigms that constrain and constitute a disciplinary subjectivity and methodologies of practice. Ramon Lobato positions his own research as being based in one discipline, while reaching out productively to others: ‘I work between media and cultural studies, and also draw a lot on economic and geographic modes of analysis and thinking.’ Moving from cultural texts to hard data, Lobato continues,
I feel my core disciplines provide a useful home-space that can be moved through and pushed back at when needed, so I have a fairly comfortable and pragmatic relationship with those – and tend to view other disciplines as providing useful ideas to be ransacked and raided as needed.
We concur with Lobato, because it is how we ourselves ‘do’ ideas. While many of our research interests and practices overlap, notably around bodies, feminism and mediated genres, we have found that we make and assemble in strikingly different ways. The field of performance studies, for Rachel, straddles forms of analysis that read historicized alignments between embodiment and culture, text and agency, nature and representation, while on the other hand, she is concerned with the messiness of experience, akin to what Jane Bennett has called ‘vibrant matter’: the ‘earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness’ of things (2010: 3). As such, contemporary performance research maps relations that are simultaneously semiotic (between concepts) and material (between things), or both. Derived from theatre studies (initially literary studies of drama), anthropology, film and cultural studies, the interdisciplinarity of performance research has never asserted fixed relations between subject and object, nor one singular perspective on reality. On one level, its method evolves like the Freudian analysis of signs, and on another it examines a Foucauldian archaeology of power within disciplinary structures, however, performance studies also gives agency to artists and scholars to improvise and play with the dynamics of theatrical forms of expression and communication. An event, and its multiple unfoldings, might thus involve intransigent actors, accumulated objects and hybrid structures, whether it is a choreography, a festival or the arduous ascent of a mountain range. In research terms, in this contested field, both participant and observer become challenged by the presence of diverse subjects and the mediation of experience.
Rachel’s own research addresses modernist and contemporary theatre aesthetics, particularly in relation to dance histories, with an acknowledgement that both archival and repertory sources provide valuable insights into the transnational significance of cultural production.2 Since Diana Taylor’s (2003) interleaving of documents and embodied performance that transmit ‘cultural memory’ in Latin America, many performance scholars have stressed the remaking of political, cultural and social traditions as well as the complexity of performances that transmit new and embodied meanings, whether in the performance of protest or, as dancer Deborah Hay (2000) would contend, in the choreography of cellular movement in the body.
This background came to the fore in a recent digital arts project Rachel conducted, which involved archivists, a dancer, cultural theorists, computing engineers, a games designer and dance scholars in the making of a digital avatar from a silk 1920s’ dance costume. The making of this ‘daffodil dress’ provoked consideration of why we seek to collaborate in interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary projects (Fensham and Collomosse 2015: 148–161). Of course, such scientist-artist collaborations are increasingly common but such projects require the assembling of a team who can find some common ground over different questions. For instance, why do historians think about the costume as a singular representation in a dance repertoire? Or, why do archivists inscribe its details in a catalogue entry? Or, how do computer scientists abstract it as algorithms in a software program? In each of these sites, what happens to the affective labour or embodied history of the garment? Given that there is always something at stake in a method, these questions of how the garment might deliver an experience of movement, rather than be relegated to tissue paper in an archive box, could only be answered by an interdisciplinary methodology.
Formatively the dress itself became the agent of a shared enquiry that moved between historical contexts, folding and interacting with women’s bodies, escaping from corsets and constraining social values in the early twentieth century, into the refrain of liquid, slower, on-screen mobilities. Compared favourably with more masculinist avatars and surveillance technologies, the dress also offered its own reconfiguring of computer vision research. As an inquiry into the visual regimes of cultural history (early twentieth century and the present), the methodology confronted materialities that arise from wearing a particular dance costume at a given historical moment as steps towards the virtuality of an idea about movement with wider consequences. ‘The ruffle on a dress’, as Walter Benjamin suggests somewhat cryptically, might produce an image, or conceptualization, of the secular desire for an ‘eternal’ (1989: 69), and so the research presses against the temporal and sensory properties of costume in relation to performance history.
While Rachel’s primary area of focus is on Dance and Theatre Studies, Alexandra is primarily a Cinema Studies scholar, whose research incorporates aspects of art history, anthropology, performance studies and gender studies in work that primarily focuses on horror, cult and exploitation cinema traditions. As, however, a practising radio and film critic, her ideas about and around cinema manifest in a less formal way than academia traditionally dictates, and as part of this more public facing engagement with screen cultures she maintains an active Twitter account that she uses as a forum to post film stills: a kind of informal digital scrapbooking. The image sets that receive the most attention are those constructed loosely around the idea of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas project (1924–1929): four film stills are arranged in a grid, connected by motifs pertaining to composition, colour or mise en scène.
As Cornelia Zumbusch (2010) notes, ‘between 1926 and 1939 Warburg’s work on the Atlas consisted of arranging and mounting photographs of artworks, as well as commercial art, playing cards, or stamps, in various ways on canvas covered wooden panels’. Zumbusch continues that, like Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk (1927–40), ‘both view visualization – not only on the level of the object, but also in terms of a representational principle – as an irreducible aspect of historical research’ (2010: 119). From this perspective, although initially intended to be a fun, light-hearted way to present eye-catching film-related visual material, these sets have opened seemingly endless new ways into thinking about film, not only in terms of its formal qualities, but also in regard to its myriad histories and the ideological mechanics of representation. In the context of social media, it has also opened up new collaborative possibilities with fields she would not previously have thought to have located in a shared critical space: most recently, philosophy, fashion theory and political science.
From a formal perspective, the discipline of Cinema Studies has had a long-held bad habit of reducing the representation of sexual violence in cinema to simplistic generic notions of codes and conventions relating to this trope. A broader historical overview of how screen images of sexual violence and retribution fit into art historical traditions, particularly the so-called ‘heroic’ rape imagery of the Italian Renaissance has been missing and Alexandra has sought to redress this gap in her earlier monograph on the broadly dismissed category of rape-revenge cinema (Heller-Nicholas 2011). For most critics, images of rape on film were historically understood in relation to the so-called ‘media effects’ model about the potentially harmful influence of screen violence on its audiences,3 or – more foundationally – to rely heavily on the psychoanalytic model instigated by Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975). Although art history is not a radically new interdisciplinary combination with Cinema Studies, it is particularly uncommon in terms of representations of gender on film, and through this perspective Alexandra re-assembled an alternative history: through art iconography, she could investigate what part these films played in wider confusion about sexual violence across a range of different cultures more generally. Adopting Diane Wolfthal’s observation that ‘diverse notions’ of sexual violence in medieval and early modern art ‘coexisted contemporaneously’ (1999: 182) beyond the privileged domain of Italian painting, Alexandra found a similar phenomenon in the contemporary rape-revenge film. Wolfthal’s critical model of sampling the contemporaneous thus offered a framework that permitted a remaking of how the intersection of rape and revenge could be conceived, right back to cinema’s earliest days. The act of exploring differences between rape-revenge films from Japan, Argentina, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Germany, France and Britain as well as the dominant Hollywood film industry constructs an act of critical assembling and making. Aligned with insights from the playful and popular assemblages of her Twitter account, these complementary discursive frames have encouraged a more geo-political reading, well beyond traditional psychoanalytic and media effects approaches, of how violent films become manifest in a range of cultural and historical contexts.
In these accounts of interdisciplinarity from our contributors, we have identified a shifting of researcher as subject, a kind of conceptual movement, whereby disciplines and their methods undertake subtle realignments. Nowhere is this more demanding, and potentially exhilarating, when making and assembling the materials, problems and persons for a research project, than when the demands of practice shape the development of concept-formation.
To a certain extent, the methodology of assembling and making is predicated upon the ‘practice-turn’ in social and applied research. Theodore Schatzki has defined this as ‘the belief that such phenomena as knowledge, meaning, human activity, science, power, language, social institutions and transformations occur within and are aspects or components of the field of practices’ (2001: 11). Beyond the social sciences, however, this shift towards recognition of embodied human activity has dominated the discourse that has arisen in art schools around ‘practice-as-research’, a now well-theorized approach to undertaking research in and through the materials and historically attuned methods of distinctive art practices (Roms 2010). Without rehearsing at length these arguments, which have ranged from the phenomenological to the critical, to the interweaving of ideas with processes of production, they lead above all to an emphasis on iterative experimentation. The concept that is most productive in this context arises not from the recognition of research as a distinct form of creative thinking, or even from the institutional imperatives that have required the establishment of a separate qualifier for artistic research, but rather for its revaluing of practice as a form of knowledge production that can be creative and critical, affective and cognitive (Borgdorff 2012).
The Marxist notion of praxis complements this question of practice as it relates to making or performance as research because it shifts the focus from the individual artist’s productive performance of technique and back to the role of human practices as a form of reproduction or assembly in the workings of a social system or order of knowledge. Additional approaches to practice draw from the emphasis in Bourdieu’s educational sociology on fields of practice, an acknowledgement that cultural production is itself always embedded in a social formation that is not fixed but forms an interlinked network of practices, ways of moving, being and shaping the world, or habitus (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977: 31). Practice, for Bourdieu, connotes a ‘durable training’ and ‘internalisation’ of cultural values that produce both the inculcation of ideas, as well as the agency, that is important not only to artists but social theory.
Another move that might be made from practice-as-research is to the mastery of those practices acquired through the repetition and learning requirements of a new or higher level of technical competency or performance capacity. Appropriate scholarly skills need also to be ‘supplemented by some combination of perception, propositional knowledge, reasons and goals’ that formalize order or express attitudes and positions, in short as an assemblage, whether making a painting or establishing an ethnographic study (Schatzki, 2001: 17). Practice is therefore not accidental, but rather a form of doing which requires attention to the activity of acquisition, the necessity of rendering and re-rendering in order to shape the outlines of knowledge over time. From a critical perspective, a practice may become stultifying and lead to the passivity of a normative horizon of understanding, or the acquiescence to a social and political ideology and regime, but alternatively it can generate new alignments and distancing from habit, pattern and variation.
In his book on Material Thinking (2004), the cultural theorist, Paul Carter writes of methodologies of creative practice aligned both with ‘craft’, the technologies required and acquired through working with materials, whether they be celluloid film, dance gestures, clay or paint; and that of the thinking in and with artists whose own methods rub up against the sociality of knowledge production in such a way that materials and their signs become discursive, as they enter into historical, social and political formations. As he writes, there is ‘a propensity of materials to form into significant spatio-temporal groupings. Some of these are instantaneous and registered eidetically; others depend on calibrating the relations between things that happen, and holding in mind (and place) the Brownian notion of multiplicity’ (2004: 180).
For Carter, this relationality of materials demands of the researcher a range of responses, that include remembering, waiting, tracing, assembling, mimicry, evaluating, decoding, etc. And the researcher may or may not find their labours are successful, since there will be events and ‘non-events’, as well as institutional structures that ‘bracket(ed) off the environment of making’ (2004: 52). Carter seeks to reinstate a value within the practice of making that is respectful of these attributes of sensory and critical juxtaposition; for the artist is always situated within formal constraints, they have a body, as well as methods for making and remaking, placing and replacing or recording and re-arranging.
For the researcher who is not an artist, the need to emphasize practice as a method sounds like a tautology since all processes of research arise not only from practising thought, but they also involve the technologies and techniques of a disciplinary or interdisciplinary set of knowledges. Examples of this in science might be the biochemist who studies the contents of their Petri dish but also feeds the insects that go under the microscope, organizes the coloured dyes into bottles and jars, and takes the photographs that record changes on the surface of the glass. Organizationally, these methods of assembling and disassembling precede the critical tools required to read and interpret variations within a system. How equally intricate the methodologies of the humanities or social science researcher, with their assembling of file cards, bibliographic notes, interview schedules, film footage, and the like. These practices involve finding a method or series of methods to work on or with materials (paper, sand, crochet, people, postcards, data, maps, etc.) within a critical framework that has now displaced the dichotomy between objects of study and the subject as researcher.
To formalize this notion of method as movement and practice more fully, we contend that what is at play in the doing of interdisciplinary research is what Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has identified as the ‘conjectural paradigm’. Ginzburg’s ‘conjectural paradigm’ might appear to fly against dominant scientific trends for cultural and social analysis, but he has identified its precedents: from primitive hunters to modern scientists. This conjectural paradigm allows the utilization of a broad range of critical tools, in which the selection and application of these various approaches are governed by a defining, dynamic instinct. While Ginzburg identifies intuition as being essential to this process of deduction, he uses the term cautiously: ‘I have scrupulously refrained up to now from bandying about this dangerous term, intuition. But if we really insist on using it, [it is] . .. synonymous with the lightning recapitulation of rational processes’ (1989: 117). Ginzburg states that this type of intuition lies at the heart of a vast range of eclectic but equally rigorous and important intellectual enquiries – from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis to Francis Galton’s fingerprint technology, from Sherlock Holmes to art historian Giovanni Morelli, from modern medicine to traditional folkloric practices. The conjectural paradigm is therefore an ‘epistemological model’ (1989: 96) positioned in opposition to the dominant ‘scientific paradigm’ that he claims has governed the
quantitative and anti-anthropocentric orientation of natural sciences from Galileo on (that) forced an unpleasant dilemma on the humane sciences: either assume a lax scientific system in order to attain noteworthy results, or assume a meticulous, scientific one to achieve results of scant significance.
1989: 124
As demonstrated by his eclectic range of examples, this conjectural paradigm is not new, and ‘it is very much operative in spite of never having become explicit theory’ (Ginzburg 1989: 96). Its value, he claims, is that ‘such a study may help us break out of the fruitless opposition between the “rationalism” and “irrationalism”’ (1989: 96) dichotomy that marks the scientific paradigm.
The importance of Ginzburg’s conjectural paradigm to making and assembling in research lies as much in its ‘rational’ aspects as its ‘lightning’ component. The notion of speed is vital to the conjectural paradigm but it is not that there is a total absence of rational thought processes involved; rather they are identifiable only after those initial connections have been made in the ‘lightning’ flash of cognition. Once the skills are attained (be they the deductive skills of Sherlock Holmes, Giovanni Morelli or the Neolithic hunter), the conjectural model does not reject reason and rationality as such, but insists that real intellectual insight can be most effectively produced in this instinctive, instinctual flash. Spawned from rational knowledge, and the labour of a rigorous chiselling at an intractable problem, the effort of making has a ‘gut’ moment of clarity that defines the conjectural paradigm. Ginzburg’s approach asks the researcher not to merely trust the process, but specifically to trust our own process as it emerges from what has been assembled.
This claim does not imply simply an individual justification of an intuitive idea, dramatized in an instant of revelation, but rather a conceptual willingness to engage with new understandings of how we do research, and of how the social manifestations of making a research culture require the assembling of new configurations of people, skills and technologies. In the methodological acts of making and assembling of our contributors to this collection, we see the conjectural paradigm at work, manifesting as a ‘general impulse’, to invoke Ramon Lobato’s term, that drives each researcher towards their chosen methodologies, not naively but with an orientation towards what might mould or stratify their research paradigm.
Each of the contributors to this section offer, through their use of a singular present participle, a concept (and sometimes more than one) that builds a vocabulary and introduces skills that might shape the kind of research we are proposing. Catherine Ayres and David Bissell, for example, champion the notion of ‘suspending’ as a valuable methodological intervention in interview methodologies – of putting on hold, of pausing, of acknowledging acts of repression typical of traditional research practices. ‘Introducing “suspending” as part of a researcher’s toolkit may enable radically different practices, politics, and ethics of research’, they state. ‘But doing so also in some ways demands more of researchers’. This ‘more’ requires an opening up to the critical potential of ‘discomfort’, and a turn towards insight over learned professional practice. Their willingness to conjecture fights against the idea of an in-process research topic being somehow ‘unfinished’.
By employing the ballet classroom exercise enchaînement, Harmony Bench considers the methodological benefits of arranging in data visualizations, which itself requires an intuitive combination of a range of other practices: gathering, collecting, generating, evaluating, filtering, sorting, cleaning, charting, scoping, curating, assembling, visualizing, correcting, testing, juxtaposing, modelling and crafting. For Bench, mapping a touring repertoire demands a combination of scholarly composition with ‘arrangements ... [that] offer internally coherent, yet potentially inexhaustible combinations’. As Bench argues, this interdisciplinary methodology enables the global circulation of social, political and cultural mobilities.
For Thomas Jellis, his model of experimentation shifts away from both the fashionable deployment of the term and its scientific origins. His approach is twofold: first through ‘the invocation of attentive participation’ and the researcher’s experimental incorporation of a range of activities in their practice (for him, these include ‘talking, reading, designing, cooking, walking, foraging, choreographing’). Second, the researcher as impresario – one who makes unusual connections – potentially shifts ‘the energies of a field in productive ways’. Jellis issues an invitation to become an experimental subject in interdisciplinary research so that we ‘amplify the ways in which experimental hubs exceed particular locales’.
Margaret Wertheim’s entry on figuring usefully produces a gendered analysis of symbolic language and its use in scientific research. Extending feminist critiques of science, Wertheim notes that ‘figuring calls our attention to the wisdom of embodied objects, whose qualities are not merely reducible to, or predictable from, their descriptive codes’. For Wertheim, this critique informs a methodology of tactile geometric construction akin to handiwork in an eco-critical method. While natural forms such as corals, kelp and sea-slugs have long existed, mathematicians spent centuries formalizing structural logics that could not describe such phenomena. Even now, with our greatly expanded understanding of geometry, many natural structures still cannot be wholly articulated by this apparatus.
Rebecca Coleman seeks to rethink imaging as an encounter with her research subjects, and as a site of establishing the researcher explicitly as a maker. Coleman explores ‘some of the ways that the social sciences might work with practices developed in, and/or inspired by, art and design, and as a consequence might draw attention to making images as a research practice’. Developing a series of practical and conceptual questions, she focuses on two of her own research projects – one around making collages and the other on making and sending postcards. By doing so, Coleman raises urgent questions around participation and the status of the participant, in terms of both researchers and their subjects. Coleman frankly confronts the complexities of participatory research.
For Matthew Reason, drawing as an act of making is at its most practical level itself a methodological process. ‘Marks made on paper – with pencil, crayon, ink, pen – appear instantly, they are real and absolute’, he says. They demand we ‘spend time with our thoughts, memories or experiences as we begin, develop and complete a drawing’. The phenomenology of drawing – of making an impression – for Reason is not a philosophical abstraction but linked to an immediate awareness of presence and possibility. Rather than a pure theory of affect, he values the discomfort and pleasures of drawing both in and for his research. Experiences that appear ephemeral, intangible and ineffable through this methodology are brought into being by the process of reflection: crucially, ‘experience here isn’t only had, but also made’.
Accompanied by found objects, gestures and vocalizations, for Jennifer Green sand drawings constitute a multimodality that communicates ‘important information, coding movement, habitation and histories’ of Australian Indigenous communities. In interdisciplinary research, linguists require a greater responsiveness to the complexity of ‘verbal art-forms’ and their narrative locality. Green recognizes that while traditional methods might disassemble sand stories into a series of semantic units, taken as a whole, they become a ‘small repertoire of linear, curvilinear, circular and spiral forms represent[ing] people, plants, artefacts, domestic items and other aspects of local environments’. For Green, ‘delineating the similarities and differences between sand story songs and other song repertoires from Central Australia leads to a more sophisticated understanding of the ethnopoetics of the verbal arts’.
Ramon Lobato employs the concept of ‘rescaling’ to address methodological tensions between micro and macro in relation to his research on media industries. For Lobato, rescaling ‘involves manipulating notions of scale in research design’, an approach that he has found useful in addressing a tension in his area of research where traditionally ‘methods used to study industry do not always work well in the world of media’ (for example, textual analysis or reception studies), and vice versa. Lobato steps back to address how the logic of contexts (corporate, legal, commercial, cultural, institutional, etc.) affect methods and the research we make. Through contrast and inversion, rescaling reveals the problematic and reductive logic of binaries such as big/small and micro/macro.
We are struck in reading through the essays in this section, how much the conceptions of assemblage and making are resistant towards the certainty of historical conceptions of singular truth, let alone the notion that an objective research paradigm consists only of a rationality. In harnessing intuitive responses in the research encounter, the interdisciplinary dynamic of the methods explored by our authors implies something deliberative, in allowing the unexpected to emerge from the activity of the collaborators – again privileging the notion of process over end-product. Indeed, as Luciana Parisi has suggested there is a ‘topological notion of physical uncertainties defined by the directly lived, the gestured, the felt, the danced, or generally by experienced contingencies’ (Dawes 2013). We would like to call this the movement of doubt, a valuation of doing that installs an aspect of modesty and humility into research, because the process is emphatically and necessarily framed around what each researcher does not know, rather than a ritualistic posturing and repeating the motions of what we can already assert.
While the fields of practice in which many of us research might increasingly overlap, in relation to new problematics and expanded social networks, our theorists – and we ourselves, in this essay – seek to offer possible approaches for rejecting the reductionist demands of scientific methods that can be imposed on humanities and social sciences research by research funding bodies, citation factors and other structures that dominate academic institutions today. We are perhaps united in a rethinking of disciplinary research as an interdiscipline that involves an assembling and making which remains dynamic, linked to a shifting of perspectives, and a picking up of tools and a downing of preconceptions as they relate to new and unanticipated situations. We see the challenge of an interdisciplinarity of methods to be its mobility, or its emphasis on movement between one state and another. Although the research subjects in these contributions might, at first, look disconnected, what unifies them is the idea of movement. Making and assembling as an interdisciplinary methodology is an act of hovering, of moving towards, shifting away, being drawn to and pulled back. This almost magnetic sense of attraction and repulsion sparks the creation of research: the making of ideas, and the assembling of knowledge.
1 See, for instance: Ingold (2011).
2 For further consideration of archival theory, see Fensham (2013).
3 This was typified in a famous Roger Ebert review of the notorious rape-revenge film I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) from 16 July 1980, which can be found online at www.rogerebert.com/reviews/i-spit-on-your-grave-1980 (accessed 21 August 2016).
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