5. C.

Some Disciplinary Perspectives 203

5. C. 5. ‘Discipline Problems and the Ethos of Research’ (Mick Wilson)

5. C. 5. ‘Discipline Problems and the Ethos of Research’

(Mick Wilson)
For only two centuries, knowledge has assumed a disciplinary form; for less
than one, it has been produced in academic institutions by professionally
trained knowers. Yet we have come to see these circumstances as so natural
that we tend to forget their historical novelty and fail to imagine how else we
might produce and organize knowledge.192

Now, no discourse can claim to be free of presuppositions for the

simple reason that the conceptual operation by which a region of
thought is thematized brings operative concepts into play, which
cannot be thematized at the same time. No discourse can be radically
stripped of presuppositions; nevertheless, no thinker is dispensed
from clarifying his presuppositions as far as he is able.193

This text began life as a keynote presentation made at ‘More Than an

Island’, a research conference held on a small island in Helsinki’s harbour
in spring 2009. The conference was co-organised by the Finnish Academy
of Fine Arts, Gothenburg University and the University of Leeds. This text
concerns itself with some of the problems raised by individual artistic
research projects engaging across multiple disciplines. It proposes that
the movement across disciplines requires a critical re-thinking of the
privileged perspective often accorded to art as a form of enquiry within
debates on artistic research. The text retains something of the character
of a spoken presentation, but it has been modified for presentation
in print.194 An earlier print version appeared in the Writings from the
Finnish Academy of Fine Arts journal series.

Introduction: The Apparatus of the Four Questions

In GradCAM, the experimental graduate school that we have established in
Dublin, my colleagues and I very often challenge our doctoral students with
four questions. These questions cause lots of difficulty and debate among us
as a community of researchers. They are:
(I) what are you trying to find out?
(II) why is it worth knowing?
(III) how do you go about finding it out?
(IV) how will you know when you are finished finding out this ‘something’?

192. E. Messer-Davidow, D. R. Shumway and D. J. Sylvan (eds.), Knowledges: Historical and Critical
Studies in Disciplinarity. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993). p. vii.
193. P. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor. (London: Routledge, 2003). p. 303.
194. This text may be read in relation to an earlier essay, in which a slightly different tack through
similar waters is taken. See M. Wilson, ‘Four Theses Attempting to Revise the Terms of a Debate’ in
James Elkins (ed.), Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art. (New Academia Publishing,
LLC, 2009).
 204 Contested Values and Critical Debates
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These questions have a kind of blunt, almost mechanical, force

about them. They are not very easy questions to ask or to answer.
They force a particular agenda about ‘finding something out’. We find
these questions useful – instrumental, even – for developing a
research culture, rather than just creating a situation of ongoing
professional practice and art-making. Our musicians and artists
often say things like – ‘I am a musician. I don’t find things out. I just
do things that interest me!’ There is sometimes a certain frustration
that accompanies this declaration, as if the artists and musicians
are protesting – ‘Stop asking us these difficult questions. Stop trying
to make us into something we’re not’.

This is, of course, the right response in one sense. We are trying to
‘make people into something they’re not’; we are trying to ‘make’
them into researchers. We propose that the identity ‘researcher’
cannot simply be collapsed into the identity ‘artist’. We propose that
the idea of research education is precisely about creating a context in
which there is a wilful orientation towards becoming something other
than that which one already is, a willed change in the positionality
of the subject who wishes to know something not yet known. This is
a tremendous challenge for any professional practitioner – regardless
of whether they are working in the discipline of medicine, engineering,
computer science, music performance, visual arts or design etc.,
and regardless of any professed curiosity, experimental attitude or
other propensity for enquiry. Typically, most people, most practitioners,
are not already researchers in the strong and systematic sense of the
word. Of course, the apparatus for ‘making’ researchers is not a mere
mechanical apparatus; it is a dispositif, a systematic articulation of
behaviours, ways of speaking, ways of doing and ways of coordinating
people, resources, space and time. It is, in some sense, a disciplinary
apparatus195 and one which creates subject positions. The subject
position that the apparatus we construct in the graduate school attempts
to create is, in part, that of a researcher and, more importantly, that
of a peer within a community of researchers. (‘Disciplinary’ is not used
here in the specific sense of an academic discipline but in the general
sense of a formation of subjectivities and collectivities.)

195. It is, of course, unusual for the Foucauldian themes of dispositif and subject formation to be
used in this affirmative sense, precisely because disciplinary apparatuses are seen to be technologies
of power. However, we posit an aspiration and a goal for this apparatus to be reconstructed even as it
reconstructs us as subjects. It is this peer-community dialogue and system of interactions that
intervenes in the apparatus so as to stop it becoming totally dominant and univocal. This is a fragile
ecology of association and one that is always threatened by the overbearing impulse of an individual
or an institution or any other controlling principle that attempts to assert itself. This fragile ecology of
association perhaps inevitably collapses or reaches a kind of limit-crisis at times.
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5. C. 5. ‘Discipline Problems and the Ethos of Research’ (Mick Wilson)

Traditionally, educators, especially those of a Foucauldian bent, are

loathe to speak of themselves as consciously enfolded by, constructive
of and operative within an apparatus – preferring to speak of ‘openness’
while disavowing any deep investment of desires and subjective
anchorages within the apparatuses they inhabit. We believe that such
a disavowal is a very thin shield against our inscriptions within
apparatuses, and we place our hope in the vulnerability of arguments
premised on the insufficiency of all operations and rationales. We note
that this is sometimes dismissed as naïveté, but we will risk naïveté
in preference to risking ‘old-man Europe’s’ self-confirming pessimism
of après moi, le deluge.

But what if artists and musicians really don’t want to become researchers?
What if they just wish to be artists and musicians, just doing their
own thing and getting on with stuff? Well then, it seems probable
that doing a doctorate and studying to become a researcher is not
the thing for them. We try to establish this right from the outset, when
people first make contact with the graduate school, by emphasising
the research orientation of our activities. Most artists, musicians,
designers, architects, poets and so on just want to do what they do.
They don’t want or need to become researchers in a formal sense – with
formal education and accreditation and qualifications and so forth
(which is not to say that they might not be active as agents of research,
in an informal sense, within their own existing professional practice).
This is perhaps exactly the way it should be. But some artists and
musicians do want to formally become researchers, and they want
this for all kinds of reasons: for employment opportunities; for personal
growth; for renewal or extension of their existing practice; for building
a community of shared interest; for pursuing something they love;
for simply knowing something that seems important to them; for the
greater good that they believe in working to create; for constructing
a counter-institutional practice that operates on a different register
from the market or the various art scenes; and so on. Motivations for
becoming a researcher are very diverse and seldom fully clear to people
when they begin a course of study to become a researcher.

The approach that we have adopted in GradCAM is that ‘research’

– while being a broad portfolio category – is not a completely elastic
term. For us, research refers to an intention to know something that
is not yet known, an intention to find out about something, or some
aspect of the world, of experience in the world and even of world-
making processes. When we repeatedly ask the questions cited above,
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we are trying to cultivate a strong intention to know something that

is not yet known and to seek this in a deliberate and considered way.
Of course, epistemological doctrines and practices that might come
into play when claiming to ‘know’ something (or claiming to prioritise
knowing as situated action rather than knowledge as reified property
or thing-to-be-owned etc.) is subject to critical contestation within
the research context.

Assumptions Challenged
When outlining this position in debates with colleagues from across
Europe at various conferences, workshops and seminars on art and
research (including several within the SHARE network), the challenge
has arisen that certain flawed assumptions are being made here:
(I) That research is about the production of well-defined questions rather
than being open to the radically unspecified process of opportunistic
discovery, intuition, hunch, contingency and serendipity.
(II) That all doctoral education is for the PhD, when, in fact, some doctoral
programmes are for the DFA or DMus (i.e. not research doctorates but
professional doctorates).
(III) That artistic research is about ‘knowing’, or ‘knowledge production’,
rather than being the production of ‘meaning’ or a special mode of
aesthetic, experiential or embodied knowing, seemingly more relevant
to traditions of artistic production.
(IV) That textual production is being prioritised as the master discourse,
rather than recognising the discursive specificity of artworks and media
or even the primarily ‘non-discursive’ nature of many arts practices.

We are not necessarily operating with these assumptions; however,

the saliency of these points is clear. Again, there is a wider set of
debates that needs to be engaged with, which cannot be brought to a
conclusion in this single paper, which is but one more contribution
to these ongoing exchanges. (See the other sections of this book for
an outline of these different positions.) However, the fundamental
operational assumption that we do employ at the graduate school
is that the process of asking, and the struggle to answer, these four
questions, precisely in the instrumental form in which we produce
them, is but one moment in the pedagogical process – importantly,
a recurring moment – but these questions can be contested within
the process of responding and re-negotiating the terms of engagement.

We are very conscious of working with one set of choices while

colleagues in other situations and institutional settings operate
differently. It is essential for us that different strategies are being used
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in different institutions. The process of networking, exchanging,

comparison and critical dialogue with other approaches to artistic
research is a central activity of our school (just as it is for all the
institutions represented in Helsinki). However, each of our institutions
requires a modus operandi to set the energies, enquiries and conversations
in play within an initial ordering of intention. For us in GradCAM,
that initial ordering is provided by the apparatus of the four questions
and the teaching team’s collaborative technique in developing a pilot
programme of teaching and learning for early-stage researchers.
Inevitably, what emerges in response to this question-apparatus is
widely divergent in format, modality, goal, frame of reference and
agenda. However, the researchers we work with are expected to be
able to articulate and defend an epistemic practice and orientation
within a discursive exchange with a group of assessors.196 This is not
without the potential for contradiction, disagreement and anomaly.
However, we seek to keep these dynamics in play rather than allowing
them to congeal into a fixed knot of inaction and impasse. We seek
to do this by not pretending that all operational assumptions can be
critically thematised in the same moment.197 (Of course GradCAM is
much younger than the Helsinki, Leeds and Gothenburg programmes,
so we have a long way to go and lots to learn from the experience of
these very well-established and internationally recognised programmes.)

This description of the orientation of the Dublin School is necessary

by way of contextualising the particular approach to the challenge of
working across disciplines that this paper introduces. The approach
outlined here is significantly informed by negotiating the challenges
presented by individual projects developed by doctoral researchers
at the school. The majority of researchers are pursuing projects at the
intersection between several disciplines and dependent upon familiarity
with material derived from a wide range of discourses and practices.
Even though there is a great enthusiasm, within contemporary
institutional rhetorics, for something vaguely construed as ‘inter-
disciplinarity’, there is nonetheless a series of challenges represented
by this move across disciplines, including questions around the
meaning and value of the qualification within the existing system
of disciplines and functional units of higher education.

196. This applies even if their preferred practice and orientation is a version of methodological
anarchism as espoused by Feyerband or some other self-consciously anti-systematic or anti-methodic
perspective.
197. This approach is based in part in the work of Ricoeur who, in a terse and eloquent expression of
the idea, is employed as an opening quotation to this paper.
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The Doctorate and Questions of Discipline

In the historical development of European institutions of knowledge
since the early 19th century, there has been a strong integration of
the PhD (as certification of training in research) into the construction
of the disciplinary architecture of the modern university. The doctorate
is part of the apparatus of production and reproduction central to the
system of academic disciplines. It is clear that a key problem, contested
in debates on artistic research and the PhD, is the relationship between
the distributed field of contemporary art – which occupies multiple
social loci beyond the academy – and the institutionally delimited
disciplinary formations that primarily inhabit the space of the academy
or university. The problem arts-based doctoral researchers face, then,
is the question of whether their field of practice can, or should, be
constituted as an academic ‘discipline’ without doing a disservice to
the nature and dispersal of the field. Does being an artist constitute
a disciplinary identity or simply a professional or social identity?
Expressed in more prosaic terms, should we expect an artist working
at doctoral level to have a broad knowledge of their field, as it is practised
within and beyond the academy, or are they merely required to attend
to the immediate concerns of their own practice and its idiosyncratic
content? (It is worth noting that, very often, doctoral researchers in
contemporary art have limited knowledge of the broad field within
which they operate and very rarely attempt to provide mappings of the
‘state of the art’ as part of contextualising their doctoral contribution
to the field. This is something we are currently exploring in the school.198)

Notwithstanding the limitations outlined above, the real challenge

we face is that of getting a clearer sense of what constitutes a discipline
in general. Is there a general construction of academic discipline
that can be applied across a broad spectrum of practices and fields
(e.g. political economy, comparative literature, civil engineering,
ecology, law, philosophy, classics and computer science)? Arguably
(and this is an argument that cannot be properly rehearsed here, given
the limits of the essay format), the ways in which we choose to answer
the question ‘What is a discipline?’ are significantly determined
by our location with respect to the disciplinary schemata of the
university and the academy. Thus, an anthropologist may elect to
understand the question of disciplinarity in terms of ‘tribes and
territories’ (i.e. people sharing a local identity, form of social organisation
or field of expertise); a cultural studies scholar may elect to see

198. Rather than seek to answer this question of whether there is a clear discipline formation or not
head on, in Dublin we employ the second question – ‘why is this worth knowing?’ – as a means of
asking researchers to locate a context of relevance and an existing state of knowledge against which to
position their new initiative.
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disciplinarity through a Foucauldian analytic (i.e. disciplines as systems

of power-knowledge producing docile bodies and the undisclosed
limiting discursive horizons that enable and disable in the same
moment); a physicist may elect to see disciplines as convenient
functional units and mechanisms for a division of labour more or
less adequate to the way the objects of the world and experience carve
up at the joints; and an art historian may elect to see disciplines as
simply the canonical backbone of historically achieved bodies of
scholarship, which, while driven by the contingencies of historical
happenstance, now provide the given horizon from which contemporary
research begins (e.g. the differentiated ways in which, for example,
the history of sporting activities and the history of art-making
activities are pursued and accommodated within higher education).

This proposition – that one’s disciplinary identity and perspective

on the nature of discipline formations is strongly correlated –
should not be overstated. However, it does serve to introduce some-
thing of the ways in which different disciplinary formations might
operate different epistemic cultures, paradigms and value systems.
In turn, this may enable at least a partial response to the question
‘What is a discipline?’ that might, to some degree, be generalisable
across disciplines. Disciplines are systems of knowledge-work
organisation that entail enculturation (induction, immersion, training,
education, certified progression, and so forth) that coordinate and
regulate a division of labour, competence and authority while also
establishing broader subjective orientations or intellectual and
attitudinal dispositions.

The usefulness of this particular formulation is that it immediately

throws into relief the potential sources of tension that manifest
themselves when individual researchers begin to mobilise across
different disciplinary formations. Clearly, a discipline is more than
a set of abstract knowledge contents (a mere catalogue of facts,
opinions, sources, debates, methods and author names); it is a
broad technology and apparatus of professional subject formation.
A discipline produces attitudinal and intellectual dispositions and
un-thematised habits of thought, behaviour, valuation and commitment
that are not typically shared with professionals formed in other
disciplinary formations. When we begin to traverse the disciplinary
archipelago, we begin to encounter a kind of professional cultural
difference that cannot be simply reduced to superficially assimilating
local customs. (‘That’s the way they say ‘hello’ and that’s the way
they ‘do things’ here on the island of art history or here on the island
 210 Contested Values and Critical Debates
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of microbiology’). There is a further twist here, inasmuch as some

professional cultural differences are precisely attuned so as to exclude
the uninitiated. Exclusionary and specialist terms, practices and
devices are used to ensure that opportunity within a given arena
of knowledge work is contained within the guild or corporation of
those who are proper bearers of the discipline – properly trained
and educated, and properly equipped with the right reputation and
attitude. These differences across professional and disciplinary
formations are often calculated so as to shore up the ‘professionals’
in possession of their field of intellectual labour.

These circumstances have engendered an expectation that, when

one engages across disciplines, one tries to engage ‘responsibly’ and
‘in-depth’, precisely because there are traps calculated to make the
uninitiated stumble – there are what lawyers call ‘terms of art’,
words that seem like ordinary familiar words in everyday usage but
which have specific technical, and sometimes even counter-intuitive,
applications within the ‘trade’. Any contemporary artist who has
ever had a long dinner conversation with a sociologist or an economist
or, indeed, a lawyer who hazards a speculation on the nature of art
or alludes to their own hobbyist interest in painting, for example,
will recognise the potential for disconnection in the interaction
between a specialist and non-specialist – the ways in which the
unspoken rules of conversing about contemporary art are ‘instinctively’
known to the insider and unknown to outsiders, even though they are
otherwise exceptionally competent conversationalists. The situation
is often aggravated when these professionals move from a convivial
arena of conversation into professional pronouncements on art and
culture from within their disciplinary frame. Thus, sociologists
and economists who produce studies of contemporary art are
often taken to task for their lack of understanding of the domain
of contemporary art.

Indeed, one important aspect of the controversy over what is now called
the creative and cultural industries is the way in which professional
pronouncements by economists, policy analysts and social scientists
are produced and accorded great political weight even though a
profound gap appears to exist between the instrumental reasoning
of these professionals and the established logics of esteem, reputation
and evaluation held by arts and cultural professionals. Thus, the
distinction between an artists’ studio group, operating in the marginal
real-estate of a provincial urban centre, the members of which have
typically exhibited in local restaurants, and the artists’ residency
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programme of a major international art institution is all-important

for insiders but perhaps less so for outsiders. Indeed, the difference
may be seen as one of an essential kind for the insider and merely
one of relative market value for the outsider. In this example, the local
studio group might not be properly seen as ‘contemporary artists’
by an insider while they might be seen as less commercially viable
contemporary artists by the outsider and, therefore, in need of the
outsider’s help to develop a marketing strategy or an area-based cultural
policy to boost their visibility. This example is schematic and, in a
certain measure, fictional; however, it illustrates the tendency for
insider/outsider divisions and role differences to produce fundamental
misapprehensions even as we appear to be talking about the same
thing. While those of us operating within the arts might readily
recognise this disconnection when non-specialists talk about the
arts, it is perhaps less easy for us to identify the same process when
artists move into other disciplinary discourses – say, for example,
producing political economic analyses of the art market or of the
logics of precarity, post-Fordism and immaterial labour. We may be
less ready to recognise the potential for reductive misreadings of
other disciplines and professions by artists and assume special
exemption from these risks.

Introducing the potential problems of interaction across disciplines

in this way is not meant as an argument for policing disciplinary
borders (to use a well-worn spatial metaphor). On the other hand, this is
not a simple call for the disciplinary walls to be taken by storm, to
establish a great level playing field of knowledge lacking in divisions and
hierarchies. The purpose of this somewhat caricatured scenario of cross-
disciplinary conversations occurring at cross-purposes is to begin to
interrupt the assumption that the artist is necessarily the great generalist,
capable of standing outside disciplinary limitations because the artist
is the one without discipline and without disciplinary restriction.

There is a risk in working with schematic scenarios, as I have done

here: the risk of substituting the simple outlines of a caricature for
the dense complexity of our lived encounters with each other and
with the world. For example, there is a tendency, in the celebratory
rhetoric of interdisciplinarity, to construct a reductive account of
disciplinarity that operates along the following lines:
• Knowledge requires organisation, and hence the disciplines have
been developed.
• Research needs competence within disciplines, and hence induction
into, and training in, the discipline.
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• Disciplines are clearly established and already well-bounded and divided

• Disciplines may even, to varying degrees, be ‘obvious’, ‘natural’
and ‘given’, determined by how the world logically carves up, and, for
this reason, it has already been possible to have them successfully
formulated and delimited.
• Disciplines force disconnection with other disciplines and impose
mental habits and limitations while also fostering heightened
competence within narrow fields of operation.
• In order to progress, therefore, we need education through the
disciplines to be supplemented, or even overcome, by asserting
interdisciplinarity as intrinsically virtuous.

The shortcomings in this analysis are many, emphasised by the

reductive nature of the schematic outline provided. One key gap in
this model is critical consideration of the initial drivers to form
disciplines.199 Mirroring this deficit is the failure to interrogate
the impetus to interdisciplinarity which has characterised so
much policy and development rhetoric since at least the 1970s.
Other shortcomings of this approach include the assumption that
disciplines are, by and large, already accomplished formations
rather than highly unstable, contested and mutable heteroclite
constellations in need of constant maintenance and subject to
ongoing intrinsic and extrinsic processes of change and conflict.

Rather than unpacking this rhetoric further, the goal here is to

develop an approach which retains the right of critique – i.e. the
right to question these various formulations of disciplinary and
interdisciplinary mechanisms – while also seeking to pragmatically
negotiate the fact of working within a disciplinary institutional
framework that interacts with a broader policy framework which
lauds an ill-defined interdisciplinarity. Most importantly, the
need to negotiate a working path between the competing claims of
disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity must be rooted in the actual
content of the research enquiries which aspiring researchers bring
to the institution. In the majority of cases, these enquiries – whether
produced by artists, curators, musicians or critics – harbour an
impulse to work across disciplines, simply by virtue of the questions
produced within the enquiry, which – while rooted in the practices

199. It is argued that ‘There is no more stunning fact about the academic profession anywhere in the
world than the simple one that academics are possessed by disciplines, fields of study, even as they
are located in institutions. With the growth of specialization in the last century, the discipline has
become everywhere an imposing, if not dominating, force in the working lives of the vast majority of
academics’. Burton R. Clark, The Academic Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds. (Princeton: Carnegie
Foundation for the Advanc
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5. C. 5. ‘Discipline Problems and the Ethos of Research’ (Mick Wilson)

of art-making, curating, performance, composition and criticism

– bring us to other domains such as political economy, philosophy,
history, cultural studies, psychology, anthropology, technology
studies, and so on. So, given that we operate within an emerging
artistic research framework – with competing claims and unfinished
arguments about our own identity, role and remit as researchers,
practitioners and professionals, – how might we broadly negotiate
the movement across disciplines?

In responding, it is important to recognise the tendency, already

evident across debates about artistic research, to assume that the
artist’s discipline is to be the interdisciplinarian par excellence.
This special pleading for the universal access of the artist is, in part,
an aspect of the radical change in art practices that has taken place
since the 1960s, which sees the rampant impulse of contemporary
art to thematise anything and everything. We encounter some
familiar claims in the debates around artistic research: art is not a
self-contained discipline but a primary feature of human existence;
the artist provides a ‘unique’ perspective on all disciplines by valuing
another order of cognition or an aesthetic view of the world; art is
an essentially ‘undisciplined’ and/or ‘anti-disciplined’ space of
rule-breaking and transgression; art is much more than a discipline
– it is a form of ‘world-making’ and, indeed, constitutes multiple
worlds unto itself; and so forth. However, it is notable that many
disciplines make a similar bid for universal right of access to the
entirety of human experience, including the right to thematise the
broad conditions of other disciplines and practices and their place
in the world. In philosophy, in sociology, in economics and in literary
criticism, for example, one finds many instances of an overarching
claim that positions the discipline in question as having (at least
potentially) a uniquely comprehensive multiplicity or encompassing
arc of perspectives on experience, knowledge and the world. Indeed,
it may well be that, in the jostling for disciplinary status within an
institutional game of special pleading, such overarching claims
function precisely (and ironically) to secure disciplinary specificity,
distinctiveness and legitimacy. Rather than agreeing or disagreeing
with the special pleading of art as anti-discipline, un-discipline or
supra-discipline, at GradCAM we seek to remain agnostic and accept
the disciplinary status of art as an open question, foregrounding
instead considerations of the role of the ‘researcher’ and identifying
the work we can still do, the possibilities still in play for us to discover
something meaningful in our worlds through artistic work developed
within a framework of active and systematically-considered enquiry.
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Ethos
In order to keep the question of disciplinary status open while
generating agency for the researcher, we appeal to a notion of ‘ethos’,
derived from traditions of rhetoric. We deploy the construct ethos
in two key ways: (I) the ethos of research and (II) the ethos of host
and guest in the movement across disciplines. Ethos is a Greek word
originally meaning ‘accustomed place’, pertaining to ‘custom’ and
‘habit’. It has a rich and resonant semantic field and can be translated
in different ways. Some possible glosses on the term are: ‘starting
point’, ‘appearance’, ‘disposition’ and another meaning derived from
this: ‘character’. Ethos is also the name for a rhetorical technique
that makes use of direct appeal to an authority (typically to the good
character of the speaker) in order to strengthen the persuasive claims
of an argument presented by the speaker.

In GradCAM, we are experimenting with an approach to research

that not only employs the four questions outlined above, but which
also posits research as a particular kind of ethos. Rather than using
the tired model of research ethics, as an exercise in form-filling and
box-ticking (what is usually pejoratively called ‘arse-covering’), we
decided to see what might happen if we approached research as
an ethical relationship with the world – more properly, as an ethos
in itself. We proposed that the ethos of research is that of seeking
an alteration in existing shared knowledges, understandings and
values. It entails a ‘readiness’ to undergo a change in thinking,
knowing, understanding, believing, positioning or value, based on
considered reflection on experience in the world. This is not just
about being ‘open’, or even ‘actively open’, but systematically active
in seeking to open out an alteration in shared understandings.
Importantly, this formulation speaks of shared understandings and
underlines the need for inter-subjective dialogue and exchange in
the research process. This cannot be reduced to an ethos of self-
improvement and self-reflection. It is, fundamentally, a relational
ethos, positing dynamic interaction with the world and others.
Admittedly, this is a very abstract formulation and hard to readily
concretise without refining the use of key terms (system, active,
open); however, it does provide a basic set of principles with which
to begin building a pragmatic framework of action and enquiry.
There is a fundamental shift in this formulation – away from the
primary desire to be correct or to be the first one with the right
answer or to be able to hold onto and defend one’s views at all costs
against the challenges of others. Instead, the key quality that this
ethos espouses is that of a willingness to change one’s mind about
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things – not in a careless and irresponsible way, simply reacting to any

change of context or new information, but through due consideration
of experience and activity in the world. This emphasis on an ability
to change one’s mind, as against an emphasis on being the one
with the conclusive answer, is an important shift. While this new
formulation allows for the limitedness of any single perspective
produced at any given moment of the process of enquiry, it does not
simply institute a regime of all opinions being equally valuable and
all perspectives being equally legitimate all of the time. Positing
the ethos of research as a matter of self-fashioning and subject-
formation must carefully negotiate the risk of inadvertently fostering
a culture of narcissistic self-reflection and uncritical valorisation
of artistic selfhood. Indeed, the value of interdisciplinary encounters
may lie in the ways in which these exchanges can counter the self-
regarding tendency of special pleading found in many art rhetorics.

Ethos is a useful term here. It also pertains to relations between ‘host’

and ‘guest’ and the value of observing the rules of hospitality which
mean that we make certain changes to our habits and behaviours
when we are ‘guests’ or ‘hosts’ – in either role, some modifications
are made to accommodate the other and to meet as insiders and
outsiders beside each other. Interdisciplinary engagement by the
artist-researcher can be thought of as (in part) the experience of
being a ‘guest’ in another’s ‘place’ (in their topos or their ‘disciplinary
turf’) where we recognise that our host has a way of doing things.
However, as guest, we are not giving up the right of critique, merely
suspending the moment of critique until we have engaged in learning
the local ways. Guests in another place or another culture, we are
not required to become anthropologists, colonisers, slaves, tourists,
sight-seers or assimilated as ‘locals’, but there is a general mode of
being a guest which produces mutual obligation and constrains us
‘to be on our best behaviour’. There is a requirement to be attentive
to the way things are done and find some provisional accord with a new
or unfamiliar perspective. We don’t have to enter into a comparative
valuation; we can enter into a role of guest in which we adopt a strange
combination of relaxed engagement, allowing the host to put us at
our ease, combined with heightened attentiveness of the local rules
and rituals of conduct.

The Guest Shows Gratitude

This allegory of interdisciplinarity, as the encounter and exchange
between guests and hosts, clearly allows that we don’t seek to become
masters in another’s house, but we seek to learn something of the
 216 Contested Values and Critical Debates
Interventions: Position Papers and Dialogues

house rules. The allegory is not to be applied exhaustively. However,

it does provide a basic framework for considering how we approach
interdisciplinary dialogue with an attentiveness that is not the
same as a desire to assimilate, control or own another way of doing
things, seeing things, saying things, valuing things, recognising things,
and so forth. It is an enabling fiction, but it also has an important
critical moment. This moment is when we begin to interactively and
dialogically rethink both ‘home’ and ‘away’, through reflection upon
the experience of both guests and hosts in multiple interactions and
exchanges. Uncritical reflection upon the encounter can lead to a
shoring up of differences, a freezing of identities into clichés and an
aggressive policing of boundaries and territories. This often happens.
However, another kind of encounter is possible, with guests and
hosts becoming ‘critical friends’, enabled by the strange and unstable
reciprocation of the rules of hospitality and ethos. Sometimes, as
guests, we are even invited to come to our host’s island and there speak
of our local customs, sharing them as objects for further interrogation
and debate. This is perhaps one of the greatest hospitalities that a
guest can enjoy. Thank you for extending this hospitality to me on
this occasion.

Conclusion
By this point, it will be clear that this volume represents not a single view but a
diversity of perspectives on artistic research education. However, it is also clear
that, within this diversity, there is more than a simple principle of laissez-faire
at work. We see different commentators arguing for different positions with
greater or lesser degrees of normalising intent, with many contributors
attempting to establish the primacy of a particular way of framing artistic
research education. In itself, this might be seen as an important resource for
the practice of artistic research education.

It would seem that doctoral-level studies necessarily encounter

questions of a broadly foundational nature, which compel the
researcher to specify their epistemic beliefs and broad theoretical
and practical commitments, in a way that opens these to critique.
The lively contestation of research in and through artistic practices
means that current doctoral researchers have an opportunity to
consider competing perspectives and construct an orientation based
on both the espoused positions and actual research practices of
colleagues.
5. C. Some Disciplinary Perspectives 217
5. C. 5. ‘Discipline Problems and the Ethos of Research’ (Mick Wilson)

The challenge for the research educator is, perhaps, to create a climate
of expectation in which it is to be expected that an artistic researcher
would have a broad familiarity with the contested field and would
be able to critically situate their own strategies in relation to this
contested space. It is clearly not currently the case that the majority
of doctoral-level artist-researchers are able to meet this expectation.
Rather, perhaps too often we see a tendency to posit an undifferentiated
‘science’ against which the radical alterity of artistic processes are
routinely and uncritically declared, without doctoral researchers being
able to specify the research task that they have taken on, beyond a
commitment to make more of their own work. There is great potential
for a strange disconnect between highly articulated philosophies and
debates on artistic research and the maintenance of the ‘business-as-
usual’ of artistic production under the relatively unpopulated heading
of ‘artistic research’. This is not to be fixed by simply asking doctoral-
level students to disclose what they believe is ‘art’ and what they
believe is ‘research’. There is an immense capacity for stultification
in the trading of definitions of art and research that can best be offset
by seeking a disclosure of the specific enquiry being proposed, in a
way that is not simply a rehearsal of theoretical, critical or artistic
principles or credos or a simple commitment to production. But, of
course, this is just one more perspective. Each researcher or research
group will have to negotiate their own settlement of these questions
according to their own analysis.