{"id":811,"date":"2011-09-29T02:12:26","date_gmt":"2011-09-29T09:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/?page_id=811"},"modified":"2015-12-07T01:46:43","modified_gmt":"2015-12-07T08:46:43","slug":"darren-tofts-being-indisciplined","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/the-leonardo-education-and-art-forum-workshops-2011\/leafrewire\/darren-tofts-being-indisciplined\/","title":{"rendered":"Darren Tofts: Being Indisciplined"},"content":{"rendered":"

Being Indisciplined<\/strong><\/p>\n


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Last week at ISEA I presented a section of Edward Colless\u2019 provocation \u201cTransdisciplinary Aesthetics: An Occultation and Occultism\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 The section in question was entitled \u201cOn the trans\u2026\u201d and it offered a critique of what Ted saw as the glib ease with which discussions of trans- and interdisciplinarity presume a knowledge of which they can have none.\u00a0 As Ted asserts, \u201cconnotations of diversity and amalgamation arising from transdisciplinarity have nothing to do with multiplicity, diversity, relativism or autonomy.\u00a0 Nothing to do with collegiality as an intelligible, institutional paradigm\u2026 This insistence on \u201cnothing\u201d isn\u2019t just rhetorical or polemical: we have to accept the transdisciplinary as entailing a certain mode of exclusion and divesting of properties\u2026\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the first part of Ted\u2019s paper, \u201cOn the inter\u2026\u201d he foregrounds this throwing down of a diacritical gauntlet by insisting that aestheticians \u201cwho try their hand at art are often treated as amateurs, since they lack what is called \u2018a practice\u2019, or professional history of working in art.\u00a0 Correlatively\u2026 when artists or writers who are untrained or qualified in philosophy talk about aesthetics they\u2019re doing so with the untutored partiality of an amateur or hobbyist\u201d.<\/p>\n

Ted\u2019s example of the coming-together of the aesthetician\/critic\/academic and the arts practitioner is a useful synecdoche, a figure for thinking about the precariousness and potential ill-fitting collision of the \u201cinter\u201d and the \u201ctrans\u201d.\u00a0 In picking up on this thread I suggest that rather than seeing this as a lugubrious impasse we treat it as an opportunity, a heuretic, as Greg Ulmer would have it, that enables us to make something with what we have at hand.\u00a0 And in this bricolage we need to be bold and divest ourselves of the usual trap in such discussions of defaulting to familiar, jaded and, as Ted reminds us, deleterious binary oppositions.\u00a0 So rather than trying to resolve these contradictions I suggest that we embrace irresolution.\u00a0 Instead of being trans or inter, we need to be undisciplined.\u00a0 Or more accurately, \u201cindisciplined\u201d.<\/p>\n

Here is an example of how it can be done:<\/p>\n

The 70s prog rock band King Crimson reformed in the early 1980s and produced a CD called Discipline<\/em>.\u00a0 One of the tracks was called \u201cIndiscipline\u201d.\u00a0 This is a semi-instrumental piece that segues between a number of different and complex time signatures.\u00a0 The piece is largely a dialogue between bassist Tony Levin and drummer Bill Bruford.\u00a0 Levin begins with a steady 5\/8 beat; Bruford keeps time with him, establishing what seems like a dialogue, a call and response vibe.\u00a0 He then syncopates on the downbeat, creating disruptive, arythmic counterpoints to Levin\u2019s vamping and consistent beat.\u00a0 The effect is of a dialogue between two different attitudes, two different forms of discipline.\u00a0 What emerges is something that works as a collaboration from different perspectives; it segues between being disciplined and undisciplined; it is indiscipline.<\/p>\n

It is \u201ctrans\u201d in the coming together of two different voices riffing off each other; a crossing of thresholds not setting out to achieve some kind of harmony, but to heighten their difference.\u00a0 It is \u201cinter\u201d in that when they attune themselves to the rhythm, vocabulary and tonality of the other, or at least become conversant in them, they can have a dialogue of sorts; one grounded in hybridity, the formation of something new from ill-fitting components.<\/p>\n

So \u201ctrans\u201d as enabling a temporary, heterotopic common ground found in difference; \u201cinter\u201d in enabling difference to emerge from a common ground.\u00a0 This is what Ted describes as an \u201coccultation\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIndiscipline\u201d is for me, after T.S.Eliot, an objective correlative of Ted\u2019s merger between inter and trans, a merger of fusion of horizons in which irresolution, risk and heuretic pathfinding is ok.\u00a0 It is a journey into indiscipline, in which we won\u2019t know what is possible until it has already happened.<\/p>\n

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Being Indisciplined   Last week at ISEA I presented a section of Edward Colless\u2019 provocation \u201cTransdisciplinary Aesthetics: An Occultation and Occultism\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 The section in question was entitled \u201cOn the trans\u2026\u201d and it offered a critique of what Ted saw as the glib ease…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"parent":706,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-811","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2799,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/811\/revisions\/2799"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}