Passion and judgment in practice-based research or how

Passion and judgment in practice-based research, or how not to lose your practice to research Clive Cazeaux Cardiff School of Art and Design, UWIC 21 January 2008 ccazeaux@uwic. ac. uk

Passion and judgment in practice-based research 1. The passionate question: the relation between passion and the research question 2. A phenomenology of passion 3. The location or coordination of passion through judgment (the application of categories) 4. Insight through metaphor 5. ‘You’: challenge, transformation, revelation, obligation.

‘I can’t wait to finish my Ph. D to get back to my own practice!’

Testing a hypothesis, assessing or supporting a claim, but the right hypothesis, the right claim?

The passionate question Passion for something

Phenomenology: the interwoven subject-object Our awareness and the world of which we are aware mutually defined, they mutually unfold from an underlying (ontological) structure. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787): the conditions of possibility of subjectivity are at one and the same time the conditions of possibility of objectivity. Experience has a questioning-character: just as a question draws out and determines a range of possible replies, so the manner in which our faculties approach the world shapes how it appears to us.

For something… Projection In what way does the aspect of [a particular] house reveal the how of the appearance of a house in general? The house itself, indeed, presents a definite aspect. But we do not have to lose ourselves in this particular house in order to know exactly how it appears. On the contrary, this particular house is revealed as such that, in order to be a house, it need not necessarily appear as, in fact, it does appear. It reveals to us ‘only’ the ‘how’ of the possible appearance of a house. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1962) p. 99.

Research question Locating or coordinating passion through judgment The application of categories X Y Two points defining a line What is the relation between X and Y?

Kelly Campbell How can the ceramic artwork display the condition of being ‘inbetween’?

What are the meanings of X and Y? ceramic work in-between . contradiction revealing/concealing juxtaposition enabling/constraining 1. Christo, Untitled (2000). 2. Babette Martini, Untitled (2006). 3. Rachel Whiteread, House (1993).

Mark Elmer How can a critical or creative space be established within the programmaticity of photographic technology?

What are the meanings of X and Y? creative/critical space programmaticity . . philosophy of technology: . Heidegger v. Flusser enframing or governing. v. making possible how a technology reveals itself how a technology works against itself Theodore Brauner, Sidereals 102 (1950). Marco Breuer, C-592 (2006). `

The application of categories? Isn’t this talk of X and Y reductive? Books do not take the place of experience because concepts always remain universal, and do not reach down to the particular; yet it is precisely the particular that as to be dealt with in life. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, New York, Dover, 1969, vol. 2, p. 74.

1. XY as metaphor Metaphor ‘is living’, Ricoeur proclaims, ‘by virtue of the fact that it [metaphorically] introduces the spark of imagination into a “thinking more” at the conceptual [speculative] level’ (1977: 303). ‘My inclination’, he writes, is to see the universe of discourse as a universe kept in motion by an interplay of attractions and repulsions that ceaselessly promote the interaction and intersection of domains whose organizing nuclei are off-centred in relation to one another. Paul Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor (1977: 302). The interaction, as a process, brings into being what Black terms an ‘implicationcomplex’ (1979: 29), a system of associated implications shared by the linguistic community as well as (or so Hausman thinks) an impulse of free meaning. Clive Cazeaux, Metaphor and Continental Philosophy (2007: 15). A metaphorical expression functions so that it creates its significance, thus providing new insight, through designating a unique, extralinguistic and extraconceptual referent that had no place in the intelligible world before the metaphor was articulated. Carl Hausman, Metaphor and Art (1989: 94).

XY as metaphor Metaphors, for Black, are like ‘cognitive instruments’: they create new perspectives on objects, allowing us to see things in a new way, as in the case of the first cinematograph ‘creat[ing] the aspect’ of a horse appearing to gallop in slow-motion. Max Black, ‘More about metaphor’ (1979: 39).

2. XY (the research question) as a slice across phenomena An act of violence against experience by the concept? This sense arises solely because we have the misplaced ideal of a concept that should be identical to its object, that should fit or contain it perfectly. It is precisely the sculpting of experience by the concept whereby we construct a project for ourselves…

‘I can’t wait to finish my Ph. D to get back to my own practice!’ On the metaphysics given here, the ‘we’ or the ‘I’, what belongs to ‘ourselves’ or to ‘myself’, is not an essence or region whose identity is fixed… challenge transformation revelation obligation

interests of my practice v. interests of my research

Conclusions 1. The passionate question: the relation between passion and the research question 2. A phenomenology of passion 3. The location or coordination of passion through judgment (the application of categories) 4. Insight through metaphor 5. ‘You’: challenge, transformation, revelation, obligation.

Theories of metaphor as knowledge 1. Black, M. (1979) ‘More about metaphor’, in A. Ortony (ed. ), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 19 -43. 2. Cazeaux, C. (2007) Metaphor and Continental Philosophy, New York: Routledge. 3. Dillon, P. (2007) ‘A pedagogy of connection and boundary crossings’, www. creativityconference. org/presented_papers/Dillon_Apedagogy. doc 4. Hausman, C. R. (1989) Metaphor and Art: Interactionism and Reference in the Verbal and Nonverbal Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge U. P. 5. Ricoeur, P. (1977) The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. R. Czerny, K. Mc. Laughlin and J. Costello, London: Routledge. 6. Ricoeur, P. (1978) ‘The metaphorical process as cognition, imagination, and feeling’, in S. Sacks (ed. ), On Metaphor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 141 -57.

Other examples of research questions? Passion and judgment in practice-based research, or how not to lose your practice to research Clive Cazeaux Cardiff School of Art and Design, UWIC 21 January 2008 ccazeaux@uwic. ac. uk

Questions 1. What are the meanings of X and Y? critical or creative space programmaticity ceramic work in-between Metaphor contradiction revealing/concealing juxtaposition enabling/constraining 2. The application of categories? 3. Isn’t this talk of X and Y reductive?