In this article I address some questions concerning the emerging conjunction of musical research on improvisation and work in the ‘posthumanities’, in particular the theoretical results of the ‘ontological turn’ in the humanities. Engaging with the work of the composer John Cage, and George E. Lewis’s framing of Cage’s performative indeterminacy as a ‘Eurological’ practice that excludes ‘Afrological’ jazz improvisation, I examine how critical discourse on Cage and his conception of sound is relevant to the improvisation-posthumanities conjunction. After discussing some (...) criticisms of ontological and materialist approaches to sound, I consider the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, posed as offering an alternative to these approaches. Following an examination of some limitations to ANT based around the themes of critique and abstraction, I draw from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Georgina Born to suggest that work on improvisation and the posthumanities may be fruitful, but must be part of a pluralistic mode of inquiry that does not reject critique and abstraction, as some work in the posthumanities has done. (shrink)

This article argues that criminal justice and health institutions under settler colonialism collude to create and sustain “truths” about First Nations lives that often render them as “bare life,” to use the term of Giorgio Agamben. First Nations peoples’ existence is stripped to its sheer biological fact of life and their humanity denied rights and dignity. First Nations people remain in a “state of exception” to the legal order and its standards of care. Zones of exception place First Nations people (...) in a separate and diminished legal order. Medical and health agencies have been instrumental in shaping colonial “biopower,” both in and beyond carceral settings to ensure that First Nations lives are managed in accordance with the colonial settler state project. This project is able both to threaten First Nations rights to live and to maintain settler self-perceptions of decency and care. We illustrate this discussion with reference to the tragic and unnecessary deaths in custody of twenty-two-year-old Yamatji woman Ms Dhu in 2014 in South Hedland Police Station, Western Australia, and twenty-six-year-old Dunghutti man David Dungay Jnr in Long Bay jail in Sydney, NSW, in 2015. Health professionals and police demonstrated callous disregard to Ms Dhu and Mr Dungay—treating them as “bare life.”. (shrink)

Besieged by ongoing economic crises, global health emergencies, geopolitical instabilities, ecological devastation, and growing political resentments, the intractable nature of the problems that configure the present has never loomed larger or more darkly. But what, indeed, is a problem? Problematising the modern image that treats problems as obstacles to be overcome by the progress of technoscientific knowledge and policy, this introductory article lays the groundwork for a generative conceptualisation of problems. Reweaving intercontinental connections between traditions of French philosophy and American (...) pragmatism, it proffers a conception of the problematic as a mode of existence that is irreducible to the subjective, the methodological, or the epistemological. Problems go all the way down and up, requiring nothing less than an art of metamorphosis capable of engendering processes of creation, invention, and transformation in whose hold bodies and practices, knowledges and lives, thoughts and worlds, are done and undone, made and remade. (shrink)

According to some philosophers and social scientists, mainstream economic theories currently play an unprecedented role in shaping human societies. This phenomenon can be linked to the dissemination of methodological individualism, where common goods are interpreted as reducible to aggregates of individuals' well-being. Nonetheless, some emergent difficulties of economics in coping with global institutional issues have encouraged some authors to revise that paradigm. In the last three decades, there has been a parallel growing philosophical interest in investigating social sciences' epistemological and (...) ontological foundations. Unfortunately, these two research trends have often not communicated systematically enough to understand the specific ontology of collective aims. It is still unclear whether some irreducible social goods exist and how the answer to this question can set up a consistent understanding of cooperative actions. This dissertation addresses this issue, drawing on philosophical investigations about collective intentionality. It claims that a coherent ontological taxonomy of irreducible and reducible social goods is theoretically viable and can reframe prevailing approaches to collective action dilemmas influenced by the traditional economic categorisation of goods. The research begins by analysing how the influential theory of public goods has paved the way for some social and moral impasses. Furthermore, some theoretical proposals suggesting the existence of relational goods and common-pool resources are scrutinised. Hence, a refutation of the ontological reduction of all social goods to individual ones is developed, arguing that a specific form of cooperation, grounded in we-intentions and we-reasoning, shows the plausibility of the existence of some kinds of irreducible collective goods. Expanding on that view, a refinement of this categorisation of social goods is put forward by underlying the function of some relational entities, such as trust and shared sensemaking processes, in making cooperation robust in uncertain environments. Finally, by applying the taxonomy to collective action gridlocks regarding climate change, digital information, and public education, the consistency of this hypothesis is tested, showing that a pluralistic ontological account of social goods might improve the moral understanding of current social dilemmas. (shrink)

The concept of ‘problem’ has been recently promoted by the official academic institutions and put at the centre of a new field of research, self-styled ‘transdisciplinary studies’, in order to provide a foundation to a resolutely transdisciplinary approach to research and thought in general. The paper notes that the same move (i.e. connecting a problem-centred approach to thought with transdisciplinary method) can be found in Deleuze’s philosophy, which provides us with what the technocratic image of thought advocated by transdisciplinary studies (...) ultimately cannot provide: a positive concept of problems where those are not negative moments but originary and active matrices of thought. It then argues that Deleuze owes this concept to the French epistemological tradition, and more specifically to Bachelard, where it is nothing other than the concept of structure. It ends by explicating what particular version of structuralism Deleuze was thus led to construct in order to account for the role of problems in a radically transdisciplinary account of thought: it is the fact that all structures are multi-structured that grounds the essentially transdisciplinary nature of thought. The fact that we could think differently is precisely what makes us think. (shrink)

Psychosocial studies is a putatively ‘new’ or emerging field concerned with the irreducible relation between psychic and social life. Genealogically, it attempts to re-suture a tentative relation between mind and social world, individual and mass, internality and externality, norm and subject, and the human and non-human, through gathering up and re-animating largely forgotten debates that have played out across a range of other disciplinary spaces. If, as I argue, the central tenets, concepts and questions for psychosocial studies emerge out of (...) a re-appropriation of what have become anachronistic or ‘useless’ concepts in other fields – ‘the unconscious’, for instance, in the discipline of psychology – then we need to think about transdisciplinarity not just in spatial terms (that is, in terms of the movement across disciplinary borders) but also in temporal terms. This may involve engaging with theoretical ‘embarrassments’, one of which – the notion of ‘psychic reality’ – I explore here. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary research has been a topic of interest for many decades – perhaps longer. And yet, even now, there is still much we do not understand about how to stimulate collaboration across research disciplines. This article reports the results of a systematic review of the academic literature on strategies for promoting new interdisciplinary research collaborations, which returned only a very small number of empirical studies. A broader review of the scholarship in this area reveals a literature that is highly theorized, (...) but not adequately operationalized for empirical investigation of how to enable new collaborations. A shift toward a better formulation of research questions, with a view toward generating more empirical data on practical strategies for connecting researchers and encouraging them to work together across disciplinary boundaries, will be required to further the research agenda on interdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

Existing accounts of Foucault’s archaeological methodology have not (a) contextualized the concept properly within the intellectual field of its emergence and (b) explained why it is called ‘archaeology’ and not simply ‘history’. Foucault contributed to the field of ‘history of systems of thought’ in France around 1960 by broadening its scope from the study of scientific and philosophical systems into systems of ‘knowledge’ in a wider sense. For Foucault, the term ‘archaeology’ provided a response to new methodological questions arising from (...) this initiative. Archaeological methodology had already been developed into a distinct comparative approach for the study of linguistic and cultural systems, notably by Dumézil. Foucault redevised archaeological methodology for the post-Hegelian tradition of studying ‘problems’ prevalent in the history of systems of thought. The article thus furnishes the groundwork for a ‘sociological archaeology’ or ‘problem analysis’ that is not particularly dependent on Foucault as a social theorist of power. (shrink)

A recently blossoming historiographical literature recognizes that physical anthropologists allied with scholars of diverse aspects of society and history to racially classify European peoples over a period of about a hundred years. They created three successive race classification coalitions – ethnology, from around 1840; anthropology, from the 1850s; and interwar raciology – each of which successively disintegrated. The present genealogical study argues that representing these coalitions as ‘transdisciplinary’ can enrich our understanding of challenges to disciplinary specialization. This is especially the (...) case for the less well-studied nineteenth century, when disciplines and challenges to disciplinary specialization were both gradually emerging. Like Marxism or structuralism, race classification was a holistic interpretive framework, which, at its most ambitious, aimed to structure the human sciences as a whole. It resisted the organization of academia and knowledge into disciplines with separate organizational institutions and research practices. However, the ‘transdisciplinarity’ of this nationalistic project also bridged emerging borderlines between science and politics. I ascribe race classification's simultaneous longevity and instability to its complex and intricately entwined processes of political and interdisciplinary coalition building. Race classification's politically useful conclusions helped secure public support for institutionalizing the coalition's component disciplines. Institutionalization in turn stimulated disciplines to professionalize. They emphasized disciplinary boundaries and insisted on apolitical science, thus ultimately undermining the ‘transdisciplinary’ project. (shrink)

This thesis provides new perspectives on the epistemic conditions of pre- and post-revolutionary Soviet thought and constructs a transdisciplinary entry point into a materialist ontology of ‘poor life’. The concept of poor life engages contemporary debates on class composition and individuation from the materialist viewpoint of self-organising labour causality and social mediation. The thesis opens with a critical examination of the ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ divide in Marxist philosophy and shifts discussion from the official doctrine of Bolshevism to the under-represented epistemologies (...) of Empirio-Marxism and Spinozist- Hegelianism in the philosophy and political theory of Alexander Bogdanov, the writings and art criticism of Andrei Platonov and the experimental philosophy and psychology of Lev Vygotsky. A transdisciplinary, post-revolutionary logic assumes that theory should start where Marx ended and that it should act in a Marxist fashion across all conceptual and practical realms. The reconstruction of these epistemological conditions leads to an alternative philosophical genealogy of Soviet avant-garde art and the writings of Andrei Platonov. The thesis explores the connections between the Empirio-Marxism of Bogdanov and the problematic of construction, ‘life-building’ and production in the theories of the Soviet avant-garde. Bogdanov proposes an organisational ontology of the active and productive capacity of labour to compose and construct historically determined ‘life-complexes’ and orders of material relations. In turn, the organisation of sensibility, things and relations, or communist ‘life-building’, becomes the primary theoretical and practical agenda of Proletkult, Constructivism, Productivism and the Literature of Fact. The thesis demonstrates the unique place of Andrei Platonov within these conceptual settings. The core of the thesis is a reconstruction of Platonov’s method and form of writing, the aim of which is to demonstrate the conceptual reciprocity of the problems of ‘lifebuilding’ and ‘poor life’. Platonov stresses the negativity of partition and compartmentalisation within the compositional logic of ‘life-building’. In the experience of social poverty, the selforganising force of labour produces a disjunctive unity of thinking and speech, reaction and act, time and space. Vygotsky’s Spinozist-Hegelianism exposes the structural logic of this negativity. The reconstruction of his system shows how mediation produces a dialectical dramaturgy of individuation out of the compositional materiality of poverty and the given ensemble of social relations. The thesis concludes by outlining a differential unity between the three authors. The Soviet problematisation of poor life links social and ontological degrees of organisation, offering epistemological models of compositional productivity and of the individuating negativity of ‘life-building’. The epistemic conditions that we reconstruct in the thesis may have vanished along with their revolutionary context, but they are likely to resurface in the course of any new experiment in radical social transformation. (shrink)

This guest column asks how Bruno Latour has contributed to any present and future refiguring of relations between the sciences and the humanities. To answer the question, it traces three select and shifting figures of knowledge by means of which Latour himself has been charting his progress—from the anthropologist, charged with unraveling techno-scientific networks, to the moralist, participating in the parliament of nature, to the diplomat, negotiating the moderns’ many modes of existence. Rather than a neat blueprint for carving up (...) the knowledge space, this essay argues, Latour leaves us with “an ethos of knowledges that verges on a chaos of in-disciplines.” The essay concludes, however, that Latour’s “in-disciplinary” thinking is and will likely continue to be an important resource for explorations into the uncertain, “nonmodern” erritories that Latour has so valuably observed. (shrink)

: As a form of in vivo knowledge, the transdisciplinary methodology suggests going beyond disciplines. According to Nicolescu, this methodology occurs at different levels of reality, different levels of perception, and within the logic of the included middle axioms that exist simultaneously. In addressing these levels, the researcher is the interlocutor between the external world of the Object and the internal world of the Subject. In architecture, this knowledge emerges through a variety of disciplines that need to be fused with (...) an approach that is rhizomatic and nomadic, leading to thought without an image as characterized by Deleuze and Guattari. By following their “Pink Panther” metaphor for an imageless thought and approach in TR, this article aims to understand the relationship between the TR methodology and the theory of thought without an image - an approach which can enable the comprehension of ambiguous architecture and urban design problems. Resumo: Como um conhecimento in vivo, a metodologia transdisciplinar sugere ir além das disciplinas. Segundo Nicolescu, essa metodologia ocorre em distintos níveis de realidade, em diferentes níveis de percepção e na lógica do terceiro incluído, que existem simultaneamente. Ao abordar esses níveis, o pesquisador é a correspondência entre o mundo externo do Objeto e o mundo interno do Sujeito. Na arquitetura, esse conhecimento surge por meio de uma variedade de disciplinas que precisam ser combinadas e fundidas com uma abordagem rizomática e nômade, levando ao pensamento sem imagem, como tratado por Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. Seguindo a metáfora da “pantera rosa” para um pensamento sem imagem e abordagem em TR, que não imita ou reproduz outra coisa, o objetivo deste artigo é compreender a relação entre a metodologia TR, a teoria do pensamento sem imagem - uma abordagem que pode permitir a compreensão de arquitetura ambígua e problemas de projeto urbano. (shrink)