Being in-between: Performance studies and processes for sustaining interdisciplinarity

• Main Author: Lynette Hunter
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2015-12-01
• Series: Cogent Arts & Humanities
• Subjects: interdisciplinary humanities; performance studies; performativity; interdisciplinarity; process-thinking; rhetorics of engagement
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2015.1124481

Interdisciplinarity happens when we commit to staying in the in-between, to staying in process. It is about not-knowing as a precondition for encountering matter/material, about not aiming at knowledge but at ways of knowing as practices of becoming. Interdisciplinary work is necessarily concerned with what is not present or represented in existing disciplines, but felt. It attends to what discourse leaves out, the elements not only outside the rules, bending and breaking them, but those radically outwith the rules, no doubt inflected by them but not working primarily in response to them. This essay explores ways of distinguishing between rhetorics of responsiveness and rhetorics of engagement as ways to practice interdisciplinarity. The growth of critical disciplines in the humanities can be traced to a western twentieth-century concern with reflective thinking that questions the assumptive logics of liberal nation states. Critique, as imagined here, happens in process, in the in-between, and its ways of knowing can release emergent becoming. The essay takes Performance Studies as currently an interdisciplinary site. It addresses several of these issues not only as methodology but also as material as it moves from performance to performativity in a manner analogous to the move from the responsive to the engaged, and encourages it to think through strategies that sustain working with the not-known. It is from performativity that helpful contributions toward interdisciplinarity can be made in terms of process, relationality and pedagogy.