WHAT IF THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS PRACTICE-AS-RESEARCH?

This is a work-in-progress, given as a paper to Goldsmiths’ research seminar. Practice-as-research (PaR) is a fairly recent strand in theatre and performance studies - it’s looking at performance as a form of research outcome in itself. There’s lots that’s very attractive about this idea but it’s not been clearly established how exactly a performance, which might be ambiguous and elliptical, can be seen as equivalent to, say, an academic book, which is usually meant to be neither of those things. Can we learn from an artwork in the way we can learn from an academic book?

I would like to be satisfied and clear in my mind about what practice-as-research is and how it works, but I’ve got doubts. This paper is an attempt to articulate these doubts. To try to be systematic about it, I’ve gone to the debate within analytic philosophical aesthetics between the cognitivists - who believe that art has significant cognitive content - and anti-cognitivists who think it doesn’t. I give an account of Douglas Morgan’s essay ‘Must Art Tell The Truth?’ (1967) which argues forcibly that art’s supposed truths aren’t truths at all and Jerome Stolnitz’s ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art’ (1992) which argues that the truths it contains are banal. I offer two defences of the cognitive thesis but show that even if they work, they don’t help practice-as-research. Finally I argue that in  practice-as-research the cognitive value must - for the sake of our discipline - be inextricably linked to aesthetic value, but that in itself is an argument against practice having research value.

The paper is a provocation and I don’t want to believe its conclusions. Ideally I’d read some responses and be convinced of the opposite. If there were such a thing as practice as research, it would make my life a whole lot more coherent.

I'm also aware that this is not a good time to publish this paper; it's the run-up to REF (the Research Excellence Framework, a system under which all university research is assessed) and it could be harmful to me, my department and my discipline to publish something like this. I suspect that after the REF might be a good moment to have another look at this. I'm currently inclined to handle this dialectically ​by publishing a defence of PaR and a refutation of PaR as two articles side-by-side somewhere, if anywhere will let me.

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