Transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary exchanges between embodied cognition and performance practice: working across disciplines in a climate of divisive knowledge cultures

ABSTRACT

Although Embodied Cognition and Performance Practice could be said to have in common that they live in the fields of hermeneutics and epistemology concurrently, and with this are interested in perception, knowledge, experience and agency without privileging any of them or presuming a linear or status relationship among them -- there still remains a divisive disciplinary gulf. This paper provides a critical history of the science/humanities divide, exposing prejudices and practices that often impede productive interdisciplinary relationships between Cognitive Science and Performance, and offers suggestions forward towards a more productive middle field allowing for the possibility of new knowledge(s).

KEYWORDS:

• Embodied cognition
• performance studies
• performance practice
• interdisciplinarity
• transdisciplinarity

something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map. (C.P. Snow)

Forging the “Gulf”

The “something” in the above quote is the notion of the “Two Cultures” referred to in that (in)famous lecture which took place on 7 May 1959 in Cambridge titled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”. It set off “the mother of all academic shouting matches” (Gould, 2011, p. 89), concerning the tensions between what Snow called at the time “literary intellectuals” and “research scientists”. After the lecture, Snow rightly stated that “Just as the concept of ‘the two cultures’ has been accepted, so has the existence of a gulf between them” (Emphasis Added) (Snow, 1960, p. 217).

At the time, science as a discipline was still largely flying on the coattails of the great advances in seventeenth century Europe:

a brief, and sufficiently accurate description of the intellectual life of the European races during the succeeding two centuries and a quarter up to our own times is that they have been living upon the accumulated capital of ideas provided for them by the genius of the seventeenth century. (Whitehead, 1967, p. 39)

Today, although the scholarly, political, disciplinary and funding landscapes have slightly altered and, with this, the naming of the “two” territories, there still remains a perceived “gulf” between the Sciences and other enterprises of knowledge production, despite a flurry of interdisciplinary activity in recent years. The Embodied Cognition and Performance Practice Symposium, for which this Special Edition of Connection Science is an outcome, is one example. It became evident during the Symposium that both Embodied Cognition and Performance Practice are concurrently hermeneutic and epistemological. They are both interested in the practice, reception and perception of knowledge, action, agency and experience, and in their enquiries do not necessarily privilege or presume a linear or status relationship between these. However, even with this in common there is still work to be done, assumptions to question and institutional prejudices to confront to better negotiate the historic “gulf”.

As we work towards rigorous and valuable interdisciplinary exchanges between Embodied Cognition and Performance Practice, this article will sit in the discomfort of this “gulf”, review embedded prejudices and often fatuous arguments between and within the two cultures, reveal the ways these have trickled down and influenced Performance Practice and Embodied Cognition and, hopefully, offer some clarity and ways forward, allowing for the emergence of new knowledges born of our exchanges.

Although the history of Snow’s lecture, with its subsequent criticism, could be dismissed as a thing of the past and contained as an out of touch elitist conversation held within an Oxbridge parochialist privileged landscape, it is still within us and in our institutions, influencing decisions on policy, funding, career progression, project approvals and publication. In order to understand how we got here, appreciating that Snow’s notion of “two cultures” presaged the even more contentious premises behind what would later be called the “Science Wars” is useful.

The martial metaphor here is a little annoying, as there were no battles, no winners or losers, or, most importantly, few if any “practicing” participants from either side fighting, really. However, as it is it was quite a tiff. Following Snow’s lecture, the “gulf” grew and arguments extended across the pond, drawing from European philosophical influences and creating much contention in the US. Postmodern thinking began to gain traction, and with this came a social, linguistic and cultural analysis of a “pure” science, critically reviewing its ideological underpinnings.

Within the 10 years following Snow’s lecture, the student uprisings in France disturbed modernist ideology and confronted political doctrine, historic materialism and social reality. Complex socio-cultural networks were recognised while established modernist hierarchies dissipated. This was a time ripe for the birth of interdisciplinary scholarship, but also of great resistance. The “Science Wars” and other such debates established newly minted categories on both sides of the “gulf”.

German Social theorist Wolf Lepenies’ statement exemplifies the type of stance that got things so heated:

Science must no longer give the impression it represents a faithful reflection of reality. What it is, rather, is a cultural system, and it exhibits to us an alienated interest-determined image of reality specific to a definite time and place. (Collini, 1998, p. 1)

Those perceived to agree with such sentiments were painted as living within an “academic leftist” camp comprised of humanists, social scientists and radical feminists. With the emergence of the interdiscipline cultural studies, there came a blurring of boundaries, with an augmented interest in cross-disciplinary activity among the humanities and sciences. It was in this climate that Performance Studies, along with Science and Technology Studies (STS), which will be discussed in the next section, was born. Many considered this a serious threat, articulated most succinctly by Lyotard when he introduced the notion that interdisciplinarity erodes disciplinary authority (Lyotard, 1984). As I have argued in past publications, however, “How can we erode what we do not know, what we have not practiced, and what is not embodied?” (Bryon, 2009, p. 136). Regardless, the fear was real and played out in interesting ways, laying the foundations for our current interdisciplinary climate.

Gross and Levitt, self-identified scientific realists, were aggressive defenders against any view of science that favoured social context over pure logic of argument. For them, this cross-disciplinary trend was akin to an intellectual nihilism. (I will discuss in the next section that because Performance Practice had no such defenders against this trend, there were no “performance wars”)

Many notable historians and sociologists of science have long held misgivings about intellectual nihilism that offers itself as “cultural constructivism”; but they have been reluctant to challenge it for fear of gaining a reputation as sissies, too weak-kneed to play the exhilarating game of “epistemological chicken. (Gross & Levitt, 1998, p. xiii)

This game of “epistemological chicken” was played dirty, but to great effect in the controversial stunt perpetrated by physics professor Alan Sokal. Inspired by Gross and Levitt’s take that the academic left as being “permeated by jargon, philosophical dogma, and political attitudes drawn from the world of postmodern literary criticism” (Gross & Levitt, 1998, p. 81) and their pointed statement:

The notion of “cultural critic,” in its postmodern form, embraces a certain kind of sociologist as well as a certain kind of literary scholar. They publish in the same journals and appear at the same symposia, speaking the same language and sharing the same attitudes. (Gross & Levitt, 1998, p. 81)

Sokal successfully submitted a nonsensical article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (Sokal, 1994) in which he posited that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct. It was published in the journal Social Text in its spring/summer edition in 1996. For many it proved that the leftist, postmodern, subjective and relativist humanities was an incestuous, non-rigourous melting pot of pretentious mumbo-jumbo. In reality it proved that Social Text had not yet put in place a proper peer review process, and as such no physicist had read the paper prior to its acceptance. But the damage was done.

In John Gray’s highly provocative account of human nature, Straw dogs: Thoughts on human and other animals, an account of knowledge that arguably eats its own tail, he perpetuates the above mentioned “gulf” to the point of condemning humanity as a solipsistic exercise largely perpetrated by notions of misplaced belief.

Outside of science, progress is simply a myth. In some readers of Straw Dogs this observation seems to have produced a moral panic. Surely, they ask, no one can question the central article of faith of liberal societies? Without it, will we not despair? Like trembling Victorians terrified of losing their faith, these humanists cling to the moth-eaten brocade of progressive hope. Today religious believers are more free-thinking. Driven to the margins of a culture in which science claims authority over all of human knowledge, they have had to cultivate a capacity for doubt. In contrast, secular believers – held fast by the conventional wisdom of the time – are in the grip of unexamined dogmas. (Gray, 2002, p. xi)

What we often find within discussions such as these is a perpetuation of “two cultures”, albeit in different terms. The “gulf” now is no longer articulated as in Snow’s divide between “literary intellectuals” and “research scientists”. Of course many historic readings, plotting a path from the “Science Wars” of late last century to the beginning of the new, may easily and correctly plot a different path citing different moments; however, I think we can agree that Christensen’s summarisation of Gray’s two-sided assessment articulates a fair estimation of where we are arguably stalled, especially when we fail to engage productively across disciplines.

Gray adopts a very peculiar position in an on-going and often contentious academic debate that pits scientific realists on the one hand against social constructivists on the other. At stake in this debate is the very nature of science: for scientific realists, science proceeds by discovering and verifying empirical realities; for social constructivists, science proceeds by inventing a plausible means of interpreting nature and then persuading colleagues and the general public to believe in it. (Christensen, 2005, p. 2)

With this, new lines were drawn between science and the humanities, with the scientists often regarded as positivists rather than relativists, naturalists rather than humanists, realists rather than constructivists, empirical thinkers relying on logic and evidence rather than interpreters valuing aesthetics, with proper science on the side of falsifiable truth and New Age pseudo-science on the other; and with this also a peculiar political penchant to label the Humanities category as Leftist, with science on the Right. This entire set of dualisms and generalisations, not excluding the aforementioned “weak-kneed sissies and trembling Victorians”, is, ironically, a perfect example of the type of socially constructed reality created by those that so ardently fought to eradicate it. Interestingly, even Sokal, after drawing so strongly from Gross and Levitt with the epithet “right wing”, had to clarify – however, only in a footnote.

In this footnote I have also engaged in the habit – followed ritually throughout the essay – of tagging Gross and Levitt with the epithet “right wing”. Of course, this epithet is inaccurate: Gross is a curmudeonly old-fashioned liberal and Levitt is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. But even if Gross and Levitt were hard-core right-wingers, how would that affect the validity or invalidity of their arguments? (Sokal, 2008, p. 28)

Regardless of the story told and the drama played out, the stuff of the “Science Wars” worked quite effectively towards the assumption that science lives on more properly on the side of epistemology, with the humanities on the side of hermeneutics. However, when it played out … it was not so simple.

The problem with the “Studies”

Both Performance Studies and STS emerged from ideas expounded around the late 1970s in the same climate in which the aforementioned Cultural Studies emerged, a climate where cultural Critic and Anthropologist Clifford Geertz shared approaches to social thought surrounding behaviour in his often cited article Blurred genres: The refiguration of social thought in American Scholar, Spring 1980 (Geertz, 1980). Jackson identifies Geertz’s notions of “game”, “drama” and “text” within the context of ritual and human behaviour as a grounding influence. Through Geertz, who “came to symbolize ‘anthropology’ for a generation of non-anthropologists, wax[ing] eloquent about the blurring, particularizing, and analogising of social thought, the discipline of performance studies secured an institutional hold” (Jackson, 2004, p. 147) – as did the discipline of STS.

As there are entire sets of books, departments, and critical histories that are devoted to defining and re-positioning the evolving nature of these interdisciplines, of course within this small section of this particular article there is a limit to what can be covered; however, what I aim to illustrate is the ways in which these “studies” as disciplines differ in status and function in relation to the practices from which they draw and also influence.

STS takes a variety of anti-essentialist positions, with a scepticism of the natural as an essential custodian of knowledge with inherent properties that contain truths. The field investigates how scientific knowledge and technological artefacts are constructed. Sismondo summarises:

The source of knowledge and artifacts are complex and various: there is no privileged scientific method that can translate nature into knowledge, and no technological method that can translate knowledge into artifacts. In addition, the interpretations of knowledge and artifacts are complex and various; claims, theories, facts, and objects may have very different meanings to different audiences. For STS then, science and technology are active processes, and should be studied as such. (Sismondo, 2010, p. 11)

According to prospectus of the STS Graduate Program at Vancouver British Columbia, topics for study within a STS programme will generally include such things as how laboratories work, how to understand the development of scientific practices and technological objects in social context, examination of the ethics of science and technology, analysis of expertise and the authority of science in democracies, understanding relations between science and public policy, and exploring representations of science and technology (University of British Columbia, 2016).

At the core of this social-constructivist approach to science is the notion that scientists, with their network of technologies, artefacts and ideas within an institutional culture, and operating within dynamics of social interactions, construct truth and facts rather than discover, find or uncover them.

Where STS seriously differs from the story of Performance Studies, however, is in the appropriation of its findings, vocabularies and contextualisations of its practices.

Many, or even most, people who are involved in producing scientific knowledge and new technologies do not subscribe to the story that STS tells. For them, science is a progressive neutral activity that produces true knowledge and facts about the natural world through application of a standard method. Most scientists do not think that the knowledge they produce is contingent on social factors or conditions, only that it is constrained by the limits of scientific possibility, material and technical resources, of funding. (Erickson, 2005, p. 2)

This may be because within the scholarly institutional framework the standard account of formal science still holds a privileged position. “The standard account of formal science describes a project for science (the discovery of facts about the natural world), and prescribes a method – what we can call formal scientific method – by which this should be carried out” (Erickson, 2005, p. 54). Formal science rarely competes with STS for funding or status, and for the most part relies on different vocabularies and skillsets. STS has not re-defined the research languages or institutional parameters and modes of evaluation of formal science, although it can influence framings of these. Formal science is still more recognised than STS within academia. The same cannot be said for Performance Studies and the practices which they draw on within scholarly contexts. The practice of science has not been as compromised by becoming an object of study as the practice of performance when Performance became an object of study.

Performance Studies and its accompanying theories are often erroneously thought to offer critical articulations of Performance Practice. This is not necessarily so. Performance Studies has a direct heritage from the aforementioned branch of interdisciplines that was previously, derogatorily, referred to as coming from the “academic left”. It is greatly influenced by poststructuralism and postmodernism, and has roots in literary theory and anthropology, with discursive criss-crossings in areas concerned with meaning, language, ritual, identity, society, behaviour and culture. For a more detailed comparative analysis of the development of Performance Studies and its key tenets, including performativity and liminality, see my previous publication Integrative performance: practice and theory for the interdisciplinary performer 2014, Chapter 2. In it, I concluded that the fact that Performance Studies has roots in social sciences and literary theory is significant to the way in which performance has come to be defined. It has also presented some problems with respect to how performance practitioners are characterised. “It is particularly of interest when looking at how our way of practice is often pulled away from subtle understandings of process, and instead categorised as a performative object that is embedded or positioned in the construction of a performance” (Bryon, 2014, p. 38).

Performance as a general term can be understood as a theatrical form, practice or event, such as a play, an opera, a piece of musical theatre or a dance; however, within Performance Studies everything that does, or is done onto and/or generates meaning can be seen as performance, and therefore used as a way to create hermeneutic readings and representations while examining theories of reception and repetition across many events, texts and/or identities. As one of the founding scholars of the discipline defined performance, or arguably un-defined it:

One cannot determine what “is” a performance without referring to specific cultural circumstances. There is nothing inherent in an action in itself that makes it a performance or disqualifies it from being a performance … every action is a performance … What “is” or “is not” performance does not depend on an event in itself but on how that event is received and placed. (Schechner, 2002, pp. 30–31)

So when one practices performance with this definition, what is the practice exactly? With STS, the practice of science, even if put under a microscope, still maintains some sense of stability. However, as mentioned above, many practitioners of science do not need to adopt nor articulate their actions through the critical lenses of the theories expounded by STS to be deemed rigorous in scholarly contexts. This is not so for the performance practitioner when engaging in Practice as Research (for instance) at the postgraduate level. This is attributable partly to the unfortunate received divide that will be addressed further on, between those that do and those that think, the conservatoire artist and the university scholar, the artist and the analyser. Another, more recent definition, a little less strictly attached to the original anthropology and literary theory roots of Performance Studies:

Performance is both a practice and a mode of analysis. It is a communicative behaviour for which there is no other name (that’s to say, if you can call it acting you treat it as acting). It is a mode of analysis that works by framing, thinking of, its material as if it were performed, which is to say as if it were a deliberate communicative practice. (Shepherd, 2016, pp. 222–223)

This of course is true; however, this definition does not speak to that type of practice that is purposefully not communicating that practice at the core of Performance Practice that must precede communication: the scales, the barre work, the way of being in the doing of the doing so that one is in the flow of process, the act of the act – although, if looked at from the outside as an object of study, it like anything else could be seen to “communicate” – but being in the practice of the act is the practice of many performance practitioners, not the looking at it as an object.

I will argue later that the practice of a doing and the doing of a practice become a potential shared space where Embodied Cognition and Performance Practice engage in a mode of enquiry. I will also propose that this offers unprecedented possibilities for emergent knowledges about the human condition, especially if we do not fall into the modes of observation that derive from critical lenses that trap process as object before we can engage in the uncomfortable places of process and practice. Practice as/based/and Research can offer some models, but until both sides get inside of the thing, more rigorous interdisciplinary exchanges could be difficult. For Performance Studies some recognise this problem, as Conquergood attests to, but there has yet to be a satisfactory arrangement.

A performance studies agenda should collapse this divide and revitalize the connections between artistic accomplishment, analysis, and articulations with communities; between practical knowledge (knowing how), propositional knowledge (knowing that), and political savvy (knowing who, when, and where). This epistemological connection between creativity, critique, and civic engagement is mutually replenishing, and pedagogically powerful. … The ongoing challenge of performance studies is to refuse and supercede this deeply entrenched division of labor, apartheid of knowledges, that plays out inside the academy as the difference between thinking and doing, interpreting and making, conceptualizing and creating. (Conquergood, 2002, p. 153)

Unlike STS, what Performance Studies takes from Performance Practice is profound and what it gives back is difficult and negligible. In the linking all performative meaning to linguistic metaphors it often dilutes or bypasses the very things that make the way practice, rather than the what or situ of a practice of value. Importantly, STS remains a distinct exercise from that of empirical science practices. These are not funded from the same pots, neither are they evaluated as scholarship in the same manner. Performance Practice, having never experienced “performance wars” akin to the science wars, has not been given the same treatment. Within many Liberal Arts departments in the US and university/conservatoire hybrid institutional models in the UK, practice has been largely subsumed by the rhetoric of Performance Studies, bending to its critical discourse, evaluations of rigor and funding models, especially where interdisciplinary exchanges are concerned and where practice is explored as scholarship.

Science and performance – equal validity?

Paul Boghossian, author of Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructionism, argues against what he terms Equal Validity, which he defines as a radically counterintuitive doctrine, a doctrine that posits that “There are many radically different, yet ‘equally valid’ ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them” (Boghossian, 2006, p. 2). To illustrate his concerns he discusses American prehistory and cites a 1996 New York Times Article titled Indian tribes’ creationists Thwart archeologists. He discusses a dissonance between the scientific consensus, proven through archaeological findings, that humans first entered the Americas from Asia, crossing the Bering Strait around 10,000 years ago, and a Native American creation myth which tells the story of a people who emerged from within the earth as descendants of the buffalo people after supernatural spirits prepared the world for human kind. This concerns him because:

 … we have a variety of techniques and methods – observation, logic, inference to the best explanation and so forth, but not tea leaf-reading or crystal ball-gazing – that we take to be only legitimate ways of forming rational beliefs on the subject. These methods – the methods characteristic of what we call science but which also characterize ordinary modes of knowledge-seeking – have led us to the view that the first Americans came from Asia across the Bering Strait … For this sort of deference to science to be right, however scientific knowledge had better be privileged – it had better not be the case that there are many other, radically different yet equal ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them. (Boghossian, 2006, pp. 4–5)

This idea seems to really disturb him and he further speaks to the notions of credibility and the problem with seeing Zuni creationism in line with archaeology and evolution in line with Christian creationism.

Equal validity, then is a doctrine of considerable significance, and not just within the confines of the ivory tower. If the vast numbers of scholars in the humanities and social sciences who subscribe to it are right, we are not merely making a philosophical mistake of interest to a small number of specialists in the theory of knowledge; we have fundamentally misconceived the principles by which society ought to be organized. (Boghossian, 2006, pp. 4–5)

Despite the fact that one could spend an entire article unpacking the many difficulties here, including the equating of crystal ball reading with the people of the Lakota tribe, unfortunately this will have to wait for another time. Staying on point, the comparing an active disorganisation of society with “the ivory tower”, evoking the leftist intellectual camp discussed earlier, has a certain hypocrisy, as the creationism story generally touted by the right (which he touches on only briefly, fluffing over this) could be seen as the same play with different props.

However, the most important point to be made here is the idea that Equal Validity is even a thing. Perhaps this is the wrong conversation, especially when it comes to fostering productive and rigorous scholarly environments able to allow for the emergence of new knowledges. Is “equal” so important? Equal to what exactly? Why not just different? And is something not made valid only by its own terms and culture, and with this, its discrete modes of evaluation?

Nelson, pioneer of Practice as Research and as such committed to “creative cross overs in an interconnected academy” which includes arts research that “demonstrates a rigour equivalent to that of the sciences”, argues for a “both-and” type of epistemological space which includes “a more fluid ‘knowing’ … ” which might be located on the spectrum between types of knowledge rather than on the reverse side of an impervious ‘knowledge/not knowledge’ binary” (Nelson, 2013, pp. 23 & 39).

In order for us to foster a healthy and productive interdisciplinary environment between Cognitive Science and Performance, an approach like Nelson’s may be more advantageous. However, it is not so simple, as there are legacies of prejudices that linger, even with the best of interdisciplinary intentions.

In order to think critically about science, one must understand it at a reasonably deep level. This task, if honestly approached, requires much time and labor. In fact it is best started when one is young. It is scarcely compatible with the style of education and training that nurtures the average humanist, irrespective of his or her political inclinations. (Gross & Levitt, 1998, p. 5)

As discussed in the previous section, the practices within Performance Studies do not equate to the practice(s) that performance practitioners undergo and continue throughout their entire careers, day in and day out. Interestingly, the very type of exactitude, early training, rigour and commitment intimated by Gross and Levitt’s somewhat insulting comment above is absolutely required of the ballet dancer, the opera singer and the actor, for instance.

The notion that performance practitioners are not able to engage or interested in engaging in theory and scholarly enquiry can also be misguiding. Pavis states: “Theory must be guided with real epistemological and methodological care. The crisis of academic research, particularly historical and dramaturgical research, probably stems from the sad conclusion that it doesn’t seem to interest theatre people” (Pavis, 2001, p. 156). Here he expressed an ongoing perceived divide between what Jackson so eloquently describes as “She-Who-Is-Preoccupied-With-Making-Meaning” and “He-Who-is-Preoccupied-with-Meaning” (Jackson, 2004, p. 111). However, with the advent of Practice as Research PhDs and the increasing interdisciplinary projects being undertaken in the last decade, this perceived dualism is slowing being challenged. Further, William Newell, Executive Director of the Association for Integrative Studies at the Miami University of Ohio writes:

While the notion that interdisciplinarians study complex systems tends to resonate well with natural and social scientists, it tends to sound strange (even alien) to humanists, not to mention those in the fine and performing arts for whom anything systematic is anathema … . The humanities and arts are more concerned with behavior that is idiosyncratic, unique, and personal – not regular, predictable, and lawful. If the natural and social sciences focus on the rules that govern behavior, the arts and humanities focus on the exceptions to those rules. Systems thinking seems more relevant to the practical, real-world problem solving of the sciences than to the probing and expression of meaning by humanists. (Newell, 2001, pp. 3–4)

Perhaps the physical theatre circus performer, the dancer who is practicing catches, the actor who needs to repeat systematic feats of emotional availability night after night and the opera singer reaching consistent high Cs might know a little about the necessity of regular, predictable and lawful, systematic analysis and practices born of the complex system of the emotive breath/body. In fact very often it is a serious matter of health and safety. Here we enter into misunderstandings about the values and operations to do with embodied knowledge, especially as activated within Performance Practice(s).

When Bruce McConachie, an influential advocate for interdisciplinary exchanges between theatre and cognitive science, examines the reasons why our discipline (for which one can only assume he means generally theatre) came late to cognitive science, he situates the argument within the aforementioned dualistic categories of theatre scholars as being humanists and relativists and scientists as naturalists and empiricists, one I have argued above lies more within the scope of Performance Studies rather than Performance Practice. He maintains that “scholars in our discipline remain committed to one or another area of poststructuralist theory, an orientation to knowledge that does not recognize the value of empirical science for humanistic investigation” (McConachie, 2013, p. 5).

While I appreciate the point, one does not necessarily preclude the other as a way of investigating the practice of doing theatre. As a PhD supervisor for some years now, I have seen various critical lenses being applied to the understanding of Performance Practice concurrently. I offer but one such example when I draw equally from the poststructuralist notion of performativity, next to phenomenology and cognitive science, to explore the notion of self in action as a performance practitioner (Bryon, 2014, pp. 9–20).

It is interesting when McConachie rests on the notion of falsifiability:

By falsifying provisional theories, constructing alternatives, and searching for evidence to support them, scientists gradually forge new possibilities that offer more robust explanations … Scientists do not arrive at objective truth, but, through experimentation and argumentation, good science narrows the range of possible explanations and interpretations. (McConachie, 2008, p. 9)

This statement has much merit, especially if we are discussing Performance Studies; however, one could certainly argue that performance practitioners experiment and establish clear processes and feedback as to what works, what is repeatable and what is physically emotionally feasible, narrowing the range of what is possible. Further, within the pedagogies and practices that are born as part of their experimentation, knowledge emerges that has as part of the discipline a necessity for clear interpretations and articulations of the ways one enacts practice as a doing. This is not so much a hermeneutic exercise as an epistemological one.

Regardless, in taking a more critical look at the all-encompassing notion of falsifiability as the validator of science over humanities, upon inspection things are not as cut and dried as one might have assumed.

The standard account of Science rests on the premise that “science is a form of knowledge that produces facts and fact-like statements” and with this tenet it “conflates science and knowledge, seeing them as indivisible” (Erickson, 2005, p. 55). The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle in the 1920s started with the notion of verification, which posits that

 … a theory is proposed and the theory makes predictions that can be tested through observation. Scientists will skeptically adopt a theory, and will then test the theory by making observations. As the observations that confirm the theory accumulate, the theory achieves a scientific status. (Erickson, 2005, p. 56)

Karl Popper took things a step further with falsification, a theory of logic that despite seeming critical of the work of the Vienna Circle worked to fortify their logical positivist account of the world. He posited that experiments and observations are not there to verify but rather to falsify theories, and that if and until they are proved false, they are considered true. But what happens when we fail as an institution and society to test past theories and/or even try to repeat experiments that have entered the lexicon as scientific fact?

Recently, Brian Nosek’s Reproducibility Project included 270 scientists repeating 100 published psychological experiments. The reproducible results were surprisingly low, with only about a third of the experiments able to be repeated effectively. This problem, however, is not just within psychology:

There exists very little evidence to provide reproducibility estimates for scientific fields, though some empirically informed estimates are disquieting (Ioannidis, 2005). When independent researchers tried to replicate dozens of important independent studies on cancer, women’s health, and cardiovascular disease, only 25% of their replication studies confirmed the original result (Prinz, Schlange, & Asadullah, 2011). In a similar investigation, Begley and Ellis (2012) reported a meager 11% replication rate. (Nosek, 2012, p. 657)

There are many thoughts about this, which go from the unlikely case of outright fraud to the more likely ideas such as “publication bias”, the thought that journals prefer to report positive results, and of course the fact that funding is not given generally to prove something wrong, especially when the positive result serves pharmaceutical companies and institutional profiles.

Considering its central importance, one might expect replication to be a prominent part of scientific practice. It is not (Collins, 1985; Reid, Soley, & Wimmer, 1981; Schmidt, 2009). An important reason for this is that scientists have strong incentives to introduce new ideas but weak incentives to confirm the validity of old ideas (Nosek, Spies, & Motyl, 2012). Innovative findings produce rewards of publication, employment, and tenure; replicated findings produce a shrug. (Nosek, 2012, p. 657)

Reproducibility could be seen to live in the field of process and practice, a way of doing, rather than what or how was done. Performance practitioners operate and are valued in this active field constantly. Sadly, they often actually lose value when they fail to reproduce that high note, that extension of the leg or that ability to embody a character six nights a week with matinees on Saturday. Further, one can be both a scholar and a practitioner; one can move between making meaning and an interest in meaning and discovering knowledge. In fact, one of the things that Embodied Cognition and Performance Practice have in common is that they are both hermeneutic and epistemological concurrently, and with this interested in perception and knowledge without privileging either or presuming a linear or status relationship between the multifaceted aspects.

Problematics of interdisciplinary scholarship between the sciences and performance practice

Barthes was not wrong when he stated that interdisciplinarity is “not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to a mere expression of a pious wish) when solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down”. And with this he refers to an “epistemological slide”, opposing this to an all important “break”:

He did not want to suggest some conscious decision to re-ground theory on a new foundation. Instead he sought to challenge the very notion of foundation through the event of structure. Once one takes the idea of structure seriously, one has to recognise that knowledge and learning are the effects of movements that are not within the realms of decision and knowledge. (Bryon, 2009, pp. 139–140)

The institutional realms of this decision and knowledge that I refer to in the above quoted previous article are determined in the ways we measure, support and evaluate knowledge and knowledge production. The British Academy’s 2016 Report Crossing paths: Interdisciplinary institutions, careers, education and applications recognises this problematic, but also encourages researchers to engage across disciplines only after establishing themselves in an “academic home”:

We recommend that researchers should aim to develop an academic home, a secure base from which to carry out IDR. An academic home consists in those critical elements that allow researchers to build a career, including expertise in core methods; a set of publications within a disciplinary area; ability to teach core courses in a discipline; and professional networks forged by attendance at conferences. (British Academy, 2016, p. 3)

This gets complex when the models of evidencing knowledge and the processes of knowledge production live within completely different aesthetics, vocabularies and ways of documenting/capturing evaluable outcomes across disciplines. In my forthcoming book Performing interdisciplinarity: Working across disciplines through an active aesthetic (Bryon, in press), I will argue that disciplines are not the custodians of knowledge, but that knowledge is an active process often born of the crossing and colliding of disciplinary concerns. Further, the need for a solid establishment within an “academic home”, which customarily is situated within a home discipline which may not recognise modes of knowledge production from other disciplines, becomes particularly difficult for reasons discussed throughout this entire article, especially when crossing the humanities/sciences divide. The report recognises this to some extent.

Evaluation is key to many of the barriers to pursuing IDR. Many of the reasons for avoiding interdisciplinary projects relate to the fact that it is harder to publish outputs; such work is perceived to have less value to hiring and promotion panels; and one is less likely to be selected for submission to REF. However, none of these barriers is an essential aspect of IDR and they can be addressed by better and more appropriate evaluation. (British Academy, 2016, p. 4)

What constitutes better and more appropriate evaluation across the sciences and humanities has yet to be determined, and despite recognition that interdisciplinary exchanges offer productive spaces for innovation and impact, HE institutions and government, at the most basic of levels, perhaps unknowingly, impede this type of work systematically. The Stern Report (an independent review of the last cycle of UK-based research evaluation exercises) reveals a sense that interdisciplinary work has been disadvantaged through disciplinary “silos”, which we can safely assume are directly correlative with disciplinary constructs.

 … interdisciplinary work was often regarded less favourably than mono-disciplinary research. Such perceptions may have contributed to the relative underrepresentation of interdisciplinary outputs in RAE / REF compared with the known proportion of such work revealed by other bibliometric surveys of UK interdisciplinary research. In contrast the interdisciplinary contributions to impact case studies featured strongly. (Stern, 2016, p. 15)

The Stern report states that despite the British Academy’s aforementioned report, which identified the essential role of interdisciplinary research in addressing complex problems and research questions posed by global social, economic, ecological and political challenges, “ … There is a concern that institutions were risk averse in submitting interdisciplinary work. We think that it is vital that interdisciplinary work is submitted, assessed and rewarded through the REF … ” (Stern, 2016, p. 28)

When it comes to interdisciplinary exchanges between the sciences and performance, it is worth remembering that “The concept of humanities research as discovering new perspectives, or new information, is actually a very recent formulation”, an aspect of the issue that Frayling so clearly pointed out. In addition, “prior to the turn of the century the word [Research] predated the division of knowledge into arts and sciences” (Frayling, 1993, p. 4).

Even the best intended efforts to highlight the value of non-scientific research can arguably create a bigger “gulf”. Not wishing to pick on any one advocate, but rather to offer a publicly accepted example of a common approach: when Senator Kim Carr, Northern Australia’s Minister at the time for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, said of the creative arts: “We should support these disciplines because they give us pleasure, knowledge, meaning, and inspiration. No other pay-off is required” (Carr, 2008), he represented a position that has long existed and does not necessarily help the situation. To say that the arts, especially when engaged in as part of scholarship and research, should merely be permitted to exist because they give a different sort of “pleasure, knowledge, meaning, and inspiration” is undermining. This gives the impression that it is difficult to measure rigour in the arts, and although this may be the case within select conditions earlier expressed in the section of this article on Performance and Science and Technological Studies, it is not the case when it comes to Performance Practice. Such reasoning also perpetuates the previously mentioned misperception of the arts living solely on the side of subjective meaning making and hermeneutics, with the sciences on the side of objective knowledge production and epistemology.

When the 1998 Australian Strand Report tried to address “a way forward as agreed by the academic creative arts community, by which government and institutions could address inequities and marginalisation within their respective spheres of operation”, similar problems occurred. As Wilson points out, in the “years since its release only limited progress has been made and many of the same concerns remain”. This may be because it is not really understood what the nature of this inequity is. She proposes that:

The creative arts should be recognized not because of their similarity or equivalence with the prevailing disciplinary powerbase, but for their contribution to the furtherance of knowledge in their own fields and their value to Australian society as a whole (Wilson, 2011, p. 75).

This would certainly go some way towards solving the problem; however, it still remains that even though we are getting better at evaluating within our own fields, when we cross fields challenges are still present.

Although things are slowly changing, when we do see science and performance exchanges, it is usual to see the performance being used to illustrate as a way to make the sciences more understandable to the general public – and it is not unusual to see the sciences used in general terms to validate a discrete aspect of a performance-based enquiry. As further interdisciplinary research between Embodied Cognition and Performance Practice is engaged with, hopefully in part inspired by the Symposium of Embodied Cognition and Performance Practice that has taken place over the last three years as part of the Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behavior conferences in the UK, we see moves towards braver and riskier approaches that exceed the mere illustration/validation relationship. However, taking into account the current cultures of evaluation so tied into career progression, one can understand the caution.

Pitfalls and possibilities within inter/transdisciplinary exchanges between embodied cognition and performance practice

Dreaming forward to a day when interdisciplinary exchanges meet modes of evaluation that can properly assess and support truly innovative cross-disciplinary breakthroughs between the sciences and performance, it is a good time to take stock and consider the possible natures of exchanges between Embodied Cognition and Performance Practice. In order to stay ahead of the game, we not only need to have a better understanding of the provocative histories between the sciences and humanities, along with the difficulties surrounding institutional support and scholarly evaluations of interdisciplinary exchanges; we need also to look to possible ambiguities within our own camps.

Cognitive science (which Graff refers to as cognitive studies, interchangeably) is of course an interdiscipline in its own right and in being so presents an interesting conundrum.

More than most interdisciplines, cognitive studies is distinguished by its many academic homes and attachments: a sign of both its potential and its limits. Its quest to become an interdisciplinary discipline across disciplinary clusters conflicts with opportunities to develop and become established as an interdiscipline. (Graff, 2015, pp. 17–18)

Embodied Cognition, aptly referred to as “research program – rather than a well defined theory”, or separate discipline (Shapiro, 2011, p. 2) is an ongoing enquiry within cognitive science that is unified by a hunch that “cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the world” (Wilson, 2002, p. 625). As part of the Embodied Cognition Symposium of recent years, of which this special edition of Connection Science is a result, we invited Performance Practitioners and Embodied Cognition researchers to engage across the 4 E’s: embodied, embedded, enactive and ecological movements of research that are grounded in the dynamic interactions of brain, body and world. I will not review the 4 E’s here, as this would take a book, and there are many great sources out there that refer to these, although sometimes within slightly different categories to highlight different arguments to do with efficacy (Shapiro, 2011; Wheeler, 2014; Wilson, 2002); however, for the purposes of this article the implications of this grouping is interesting.

Embodied Cognition, like Performance Practice, shares a problem of seriousness. Where Performance Practice, as discussed in the previous section, has the problem of being either misunderstood and/or misappropriated, and certainly mis-evaluated as scholarship when judged simply within the hermeneutic-based theoretical constructs of Performance Studies, Embodied Cognition comes under a certain level of suspicion when its enquiries are placed against the more traditional computational and representational models of Cognitive Science, with their embedded ontological commitments drawing from the aforementioned “standard account of Science”.

Whilst for strong proponents, such as Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), Thompson (2004) and Hutto and Myin (2013), the embodied approach is seen as a radical departure from standard Cognitive Science; which, as Adams wryly observes “.. is sweeping the planet” (2010, p. 619), for others perhaps hedging their bets, the jury is still out.

Empirical findings support substantive versions of both the embedded and embodied theses. Yet, although these empirical findings reflect important trends in experimental design and in the modeling of cognitive processes, the theoretical import of such findings has been substantially oversold. (Rupert, 2009, p.242)

Rupert states that the embedded and embodied approaches offer little reason for the revision of computation and representation, and further that they do not represent the revolution against computationalist cognitive science but rather offer “friendly supplements to the orthodox view, not departures from it” and, importantly, that

We have no reason to think cognition extends into the environment, and insofar as embedded and embodied go, it appears that we face more of a nudging than a coup. (Rupert, 2009, p. 242)

Wheeler stresses a certain conservatism, nodding to Shapiro’s stance that “the methods and ontological commitments of standard cognitive science win out because of their proven track record” (Shapiro, 2014, p. 6) with a fairly strong criticism of the Phenomenological approach so often drawn on to varying degrees by performance practitioner/researchers when speaking from the notion of a sense-making body:

In sum, the account of relevance-sensitivity on offer from the perspective of Merleau-Pontian, sense- making embodiment may well be revolutionary (non-representational, non- computational) in its implications, but it is dangerously incomplete, because it fails to deliver a compelling causal explanation of the phenomenon at issue. Indeed, the shortfall here is serious enough that one might wonder whether it constitutes a genuine advance over the representationalist alternative. (Wheeler, 2014, p. 381)

So here we have a good example of the type of interdisciplinary conundrum that occurs across disciplines, one that brings up the difficulties of working across different modes of enquiry and methods of knowledge production that are built on different methodological, hermeneutic, epistemological positions and grounded in different ontological commitments.

Phenomenology, of course, is not about causation; in phenomenology, “subjects and objects are essentially interrelated, a fact which any adequate account of subjects and objects must preserve” (Howarth, 2005, p. 791). Further, “Phenomenological accounts of subjects emphasize action and the body; accounts of objects emphasize the significance they have for us” (Howarth, 2005, p. 791). One of the reasons performance practitioner researchers are so attracted to it is because although proponents of phenomenology such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty et al. interpret the field differently, they share a thought enquiry that reveals “a method of philosophical investigation which results in a radical ontological revision of Cartesian Dualism” (Howarth, 2005, p. 791). Simply using a phenomenological account to explain things is not likely to match well within the empirical methods of measurement, explanation or evaluation born from the standard account of Science. However, drawing from such non-linear perspectives could offer alternative entries into the scientific enquiries, especially as we explore inter/transdisciplinary exchanges across Embodied cognition and Performance Practice.

When we work on putting various disciplines, practices and/or critical frameworks together, assessing them by any of the “one cultures” discrete model may not work. When discussing the problematics of interdisciplinarity, Moran, in reviewing Bennington’s (Bennington, 1999, p. 104) astute critique of the prefix “inter” as ambiguous (as it can both be seen as a joining such as in “international” and as a separating such as in “interval”), observes:

This ambiguity is partly reflected in the forging connections across the different disciplines; but it can also mean establishing a kind of undisciplined space in the interstices between disciplines, or even attempting to transcend disciplinary boundaries altogether. (emphasis added) (Moran, 2010, p. 14)

An undisciplined space may not need to be non-rigourous, especially as new knowledge emerges that exceeds the model and methods of the old evaluative measures. The notion of transdisciplinarity sits at the heart of this. When Nicolesu designated categories of disciplinarity he defined disciplinarity as one practice concerned with itself, as opposed to multidisciplinarity, a relationship which transgresses disciplinary boundaries while its goal remains limited to within the framework of disciplinary research. For him, “interdisciplinarity transgresses the boundaries of disciplines while its goal still remains within the framework of disciplinary research. Interdisciplinarity even has the capacity to generate new disciplines, like quantum cosmology and chaos theory” – not to mention research programmes such as Embodied Cognition. As a somewhat utopian vision, transdisciplinarity “concerns itself with what is between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all disciplines. Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge” (Nicolescu, 2005, pp. 143–144). McGregor, speaking of transdisciplinarity, offers that a “ … complicated problem is hard to solve because it is intricate and detailed. A complex problem has the additional feature of emergence, the process of deriving some new coherent structures, patterns and properties” (McGregor, 2004). When we try to evaluate and/or fit the languages, skill sets, processes and practices of different disciplines from and into one another before giving time to work within the undisciplined space for a while, this is not complex or rigorous, but complicated and un-rigourous.

It may be useful to recognise the heritages that both Performance Practice and Embodied Cognition carry with them as different strands of “two cultures”, the humanities and the sciences, and also to recognise the ways in which they depart from the “studies”, whether they be that of performance or science, within which they are often critically situated.

As explained earlier, performance practice is not born of Performance Studies, and as such does not live exclusively or even mostly in the realm of representation and hermeneutic enquiry. It is in the practice of the practice where various techniques happen, as process in a mutually interdependent dynamic between brain, body and world; further, this is where the practitioner as self and the act as performance are made simultaneously as an emergent property of an act of doing. The practitioner therefore works/practices from inside/between as process. In my previous book I refer to this as the field of performing (Bryon, 2014).

Performance may be a work of choreography, a play or a score. It can also be an exercise, executed in the classroom or practice studio, such as barre work, scales or sensory work. A performance can even be a doing or a verb, when that doing becomes the object. (We have all made the act of singing, dancing and acting a thing to tackle. This often happens in practice or in a lesson.) Performance is an outcome of you, the artist, doing something in a certain way. We will learn that when you try to do an outcome directly you leave the way of Performing and change that desired outcome. In short, we work under the understanding that we are performer (self), performing (way of doing) performance (what’s done). (Bryon, 2014, p. 11)

I posit that performer does not do a performance, rather a performer does something, a practice of a practice, within a field called-performing. It is within this middle field, performing, that the practice of the practice, the doing of the doing occurs, and through that act of doing, both the Performer and the Performance emerge. The field of performing collapses the subject/object paradigm required from representational and hermeneutic-based theoretical underpinnings of Performance Studies. It is not linear. It is not representative. It is not causal. The dynamics that occur within the field of performing are part of an active aesthetic, a term that designates a processual space that precedes representation and is also self-reflective. It is a theory born from an interdisciplinary enquiry around performance practice, not Performance Studies.

Knowing that there is a serious difference between the “performance” of performance studies and the performance of the practitioner might be really useful going forward. Both Embodied Cognition and Performance Practice live in seriously dynamic places, but are also in danger of being pinned down by each other in ways that derive from the prejudices they have both encountered. Ironically, Performance Practice could be seen to be the more empirically solid of the two, with repeatable, testable and rigourous outcomes and Embodied Cognition could be seen to be a little subjective and interpretive. To achieve the type of innovation and the possibility of new emergent knowledge that I suspect those of us interested in this exchange feel is impending, we need to exceed the two-culture habit mentioned earlier of validation/illustration and enter a different understanding, perhaps not unlike Moran’s notion of the “uncontainable real”:

In its constant search for the uncontainable “real”, interdisciplinarity can disrupt the deceptive smoothness and fluency of the disciplines, questioning their status as conveyors of disinterested knowledge by pointing to the problematic nature of all the claims to scientific objectivity and neutrality. (Moran, 2010, p. 180)

Moving forward, perhaps performance practitioner/researchers may need to draw on Embodied Cognition for more than proof against a perceived Cartesian dualism as a simple justification of our experience, that the mind and body and world are connected in measurable ways within the practices of our practice. Embodied Cognition may need to distinguish between Performance and its Practice(s) to go deeper, exploiting the ways in which practitioners work from inside the act of doing, with no dissonance between the dynamics of witnessing the act of doing, serving/acting as representational elements, and being in a flow of doing.

Engagements between Embodied Cognition and Performance Practice have the potential to achieve emergent knowledge that could be deemed truly transdisciplinary. What might happen if we were to recognise our historic baggage and allow a rigourous undisciplined space to explore an uncontainable “real” that exceeds the mere aforementioned illustration/justification relationship between science and the arts, which unfortunately keeps us within the same old “two cultures” distinctions? If we are brave and rigorous, and work across disciplinary boundaries by engaging the practices of the disciplines rather than an object of discipline as a mere custodian of knowledge, we may allow for the emergence of new knowledges that resolve that thorny issue of two cultures: “something a little more than a dashing metaphor and a good deal less than a cultural map” (Snow, 1998, p. 217)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.