Caroline Gatt, together with Sarah Winkler-Reid, is on the scientific committee for the Royal Anthropological Institute’s biennial major conference on “Anthropology and Education”. As part of this work Gatt and Winkler-Reid are convenining one of the conference’s Keynotes, called “From Education to Anthropology and Back Again”. The key note will consist in a roundtable discussion between Gatt (University of Graz), Winkler-Reid (Newcastle University) and Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen), Elsayed Elsehamy Abdelhamid (The University of Manchester), Soumhya Venkatesan (University of Manchester), Simone Dennis (The University of Adelaide), Mariya Ivancheva (University of Strathclyde), Cris Shore (Goldsmiths) and Andrew Dawson (University of Melbourne)

As part of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s major conference on education, Caroline Gatt is convening a workshop together with Idjahure Kadiwel (Universidade de São Paulo), Francy Baniwa (Universidade Federal Rio de Janeiro), Ty Tengan (University of Hawaii at Mānoa), Zoy Anastassakis (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) and Mr Luiz Fontes (Brazil).

The workshop offers concrete examples of pedagogies for pluriversal anthropologies. Participants will engage with three ways of teaching anthropology: Two developed by Indigenous anthropologists to appropriately share their respective knowledges; one offering a transnational improvisational pedagogy.

If you’re in London in June do come along!

The Splitter Orchester meets the (M)IE team again in Berlin, this time for a “private” Lab with no pre-planned public events. Stay tuned for possible spontaneous showings at our workspace at studioboerne45.

Bergamin and Williams return to Trondheim on 1 October for (Musical) Ethics Lab 4, a second encounter with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. Two public events are on offer, both presented by the Fri Resonans Festival.

On Sat. 7 October from 14:00-15:15 a “research concert” will be hosted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s music department, moderated by Prof. Michael Francis Duch. The MIE team will discuss the Lab and its methods with guest academics from NTNU and musicians from TJO. TJO will whet our appetites for the next day’s concert with a couple short musical interludes.

The main concert event takes place on Sun. 8 October at 20:00, featuring a program developed collectively over the course of the previous week in the Lab. Work will build in part on experiments from Lab 1 in June 2023; for a taste of that, check out the two trailers made by our video collaborator Thomas Martius:

Reviewer meets Reviewed

• A SEMINAR SERIES OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE -

An Ethnography of Global Environmentalism:
Becoming Friends of the Earth

The Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between author Dr Caroline Gatt (University of Graz) and reviewer Professor Stewart Barr (University of Exeter).

Based on nine years of research, this is the first book to offer an in-depth ethnographic study of a transnational environmentalist federation and of activists themselves. The book presents an account of the daily life and the ethical strivings of environmental activist members of Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), exploring how a transnational federation is constituted and maintained, and how different people strive to work together in their hope of contributing to the creation of “a better future for the globe.” In the context of FoEI, a great diversity of environmentalisms from around the world are negotiated, discussed and evolve in relation to the experiences of the different cultures, ecosystems and human situations that the activists bring with them to the federation. Key to the global scope of this project is the analysis of FoEI experiments in models for intercultural and inclusive decision-making. The provisional results of FoEI’s ongoing experiments in this area offer a glimpse of how different notions of the environment, and being an environmentalist, can come to work together without subsuming alterity.

The book is published by Routledge. More info here:
https://www.routledge.com/An-Ethnography-of-Global-Environmentalism-Becoming-Friends-of-the-Earth/Gatt/p/book/9780367594206?utm_source=cjaffiliates&utm_medium=affiliates&utm_campaign=nmpi&utm_term=generic&utm_content=generic&gclsrc=aw.ds&cjevent=16dc48307d3211ed809879eb0a18ba74

The Habits of Freedom: Improvisation, Rationality, and the Paradox of Spontaneity

The practice of musical improvisation – of spontaneous co-creation in a unique situation – offers a rich and colourful example of the questions at the heart of the McDowell-Drefyus debate (Dreyfus 2005, 2007, 2013; McDowell 2007, 2013). The debate itself centres on the phenomenological contrast between reflective or deliberative thought, and reflexive or habitual skilled practice. At issue is the role that concepts play in these (apparently) contrasting modes of cognition, and particularly their employment (or otherwise) during the ‘flow’ of skilled practice.

In improvisation, we find a (seemingly) paradoxical situation where deeply-practiced habits are employed spontaneously toward an open-ended goal, in acts of sense-making that involve a constant negotiation between players, materials, and their wider social context. While many practicing improvisors insist that one should not ‘think’ (deliberatively) about one’s actions, there remains nevertheless a strong normative conception of what sounds or musical phrases ‘make sense’ in any given context. Which is to say – with Dreyfus – that there is no explicit reasoning going on in the act of improvised creation, yet nevertheless – with McDowell – that there are always reasons for why certain musical decisions ‘make sense’ and others do not.

In this paper, I discuss the moment of practical decision-making in improvisation, in the context of an ongoing phenomenological study that I am currently undertaking in collaboration with practicing improvising ensembles. I explore the way that habits both enable and constrain musicians’ creative decisions, and how their spontaneous (and apparently non-conceptual) musical actions are grounded in a ‘vocabulary’ that develops over time via a social practice of collective sense-making.

By pushing deeper into the frequently-reported analogy of improvisation with a ‘conversation,’ I argue that our fluent use of language is likewise a practical skill that blurs the distinction between ‘conceptual’ thought and ‘non-conceptual’ praxis. I expand on this by taking up Charles Taylor’s suggestion that skilled human action is not simply non-conceptual, but rather post-conceptual – that the process of habituation attunes us to directly experience concepts in a reflexive, perceptual way.

I conclude with some ethical considerations about what these normative and habitual constraints mean for human freedom – most importantly, what being constituted by language and cultural norms implies about the limits of our individuality, and whether and how aesthetic practices (like improvised art) can make these norms and limits more visible.

This iteration of the (M)IE Seminar Series will come to a close with a very exciting talk by Bern Brabec (Universität Innsbruck).

The seminar will be held at the Forum Stadtpark, Graz (with coffee and brötchen) and online.

Title:
HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN AGENCY IN SOUND AND MUSIC

Abstract:
Music was brought to humans by gods, ritual chants were received from animal spirits, or voices of the deceased are channeled through the voice of a gifted singer. Artificial intelligence is at the point of composing or even performing (at least, producing) music in formats that sound – for some genres – perfectly similar to humanly composed pieces.
Musings about non-human agency in music are probably as old as human discourse on music. Pondering the possibility of non-human music (made by birds, or by algorithms) is however tied to the question how ‘music’ is defined in human terms. In this talk I will present some examples of sonic creations by computers, animals, plants, outer space bodies, and spirits or gods in order to discuss whether music is something essentially human or not. Maybe, obtaining different perspectives on the phenomena yields different, even contradictory results.

Free (?) Agency : Towards a Phenomenology of Musical Improvisation

Musical improvisors have a long history of exploring conscious states. From pre-modern ritual performance, to Indian classical music, to the Grateful Dead, musical improvisors across time and cultures have developed sounds and techniques to alter both their own consciousness and that of their audiences, in ways that are imbued with meaning.

While such creative exploration is rarely considered ‘research’ in a scientific sense, recent empirical work (Dolan et al 2018) has approached the topic, positing an ‘improvising mindset’ that parallels ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi 2009) and ‘primary’ (Carhart-Harris et al 2014) states of consciousness. Notably – and intriguingly – elements of this state appear to be shared between improvising performers and their engaged audiences.

Musical improvisation therefore offers a rich and accessible case study into different aspects of consciousness, attention, and awareness, and an opportunity to explore how such aspects arise and interact as players navigate a complex sensory and social environment. The spontaneous, reflex-like creative decisions of the improvisor raise important questions about the interplay of habits, choice, and discursive thought, while offering rich, immersive examples of joint-attention and participatory sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo 2007; Schiavo & De Jaegher 2017).

Yet while such phenomena have been fruitfully studied from third-person (psychological, neuroscientific, musicological) perspectives, less attention has been paid to a central element of the practice: the experience of the improvisor herself. In this paper, therefore, I develop a phenomenology of musical improvisation based on ongoing fieldwork, involving in-depth interviews, observation, and participation with professional improvisors through a series of artist-led ‘musical labs.’ These ongoing interdisciplinary workshops have been co-designed to collaboratively explore and bring out the habits and musical/social phenomena at the heart of improvisation.

Bringing fieldwork results into dialogue with classical phenomenologists (Heidegger 1927; Merleau-Ponty 1945) and their more contemporary followers (Gallagher & Zahavi 2008; Sutton et al 2011; Høffding 2018), I describe and examine key phenomenological structures, centred around – but challenging – the oft-observed dichotomy between ‘reflexive’ action and ‘reflective’ discursive or deliberative thought (Dreyfus 2005). I argue that elements of these cognitive modes co-occur during improvising states, resulting in what I call ‘split-attention’ between different intentional objects and modes of awareness. Such split-attention appears closely related to the frequently-reported phenomenon of ‘watching oneself’ perform during flow-states.

The interaction of co-existing modes of consciousness raises important questions for concepts of habit, choice, freedom and agency, encapsulated in the (seemingly-)paradoxical notion that spontaneous, freely improvised actions need a lot practice to be enacted well. I unpack this through a phenomenological analysis of how decisions are made in moments of improvisation, giving particular emphasis to the role of external affordances – instruments, spaces, relationships, and above all, the music itself – that constrain but thereby enable particular choices to ‘make sense.’

I suggest that musical improvisation offers an encapsulated example of phenomena that occur throughout our broader human lives, and modes of consciousness and attention that challenge traditional conceptions of agency. I therefore conclude with questions for consciousness researchers, and suggestions for future empirical work.

We are thrilled that Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen) will be coming to Graz to give the next talk in the (M)IE seminar series.

The seminar will be held at the Forum Stadtpark, Graz (with coffee and brötchen) and online.

Title:
HOW THE WORLD MAKES ITSELF HEARD

Abstract:
Does a falling tree make a sound if no-one is around to hear? It depends on what you mean by sound. If it is a physical impulse, transmitted through the aerial medium, then ‘yes’; if it is something we register in our minds, then ‘no’. But must we choose between these alternatives? In this talk, I ask you to picture yourself walking in the forest, during a storm. The sounds of trees falling, wind gusting and thunder rumbling are not objects of perception but rather the reverberations of a consciousness that has opened to the sky, to merge with the cosmos. In this sense, sounds are neither mental nor physical but atmospheric. This leads us to think differently about ears, not as anatomical organs primed to respond to acoustic signals, but as the attentiveness of a body placed on aural alert. This aural attention, this hearing, gives voice to the tree, the wind and the thunder. Hearing, thus, doesn’t provide a portal for the human mind to take possession of a world. Rather, it is in taking possession of its human inhabitants that the world makes itself heard. Is this also what happens in music-making?

Chair: Joshua Bergamin (Universität Wien)

Christopher Williams will be presenting the methods and approaches of the (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics project at this year’s Society for Artistic Research conference, Trondheim 19 - 21 April.

By happy coincidence Christopher will be presenting the (M)IE team’s ‘Anatomy of a (Musical) Ethics Lab’ at Dokkhuset, which was also where the project’s first lab was held with Trondheim Jazz Orchestra in June 2022.

The second talk in the (M)IE Seminar Series will be given by Ben Spatz, who will be discussing crucial questions in relation to ethics, politics and artistic research.

This seminar will be held online only. Please scan the QR or follow the link below to participate.

Title:

WHITE ETHICS: RACE, METHODS AND ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Abstract:

This seminar will consider how the project of artistic research could be reframed by a decolonial understanding of history and the present.
A methodology of productive deflation will be used to exam- ine the structural, institutional, and atmospheric whiteness of european artistic research, simultaneously rejecting its implicit claims to universality and reactivating its potential politics as a mode of critical whiteness practice.
We will ask:
• What happens when racialization and coloniality are taken as fundamental aspects of the given conditions or experi- mental apparatus that underpins artistic research?
• What happens when we assume not only that our identities are constructed by our practical techniques (as social the- ory and performance studies have long argued), but also that our epistemic techniques arise out of our embodied and emplaced identities?
• How can the naming of whiteness — as in critical black studies, critical indigenous studies, and critical whiteness studies — help us to link the dynamic introspective and micropolitical ethics of artistic research with broader social and political movements?
The seminar will be organized around material from Spatz’s artistic research and from their forthcoming monograph Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research (Northwestern University Press).

urbanresearchtheater.com

Caroline Gatt will be presenting a talk at the Finnish Anthropological Society Conference 2023 in March. The panel, convened by Anna Krzywoszynska, University of Oulu, and Agnese Bankovska, University of Helsinki, is called “Making ‘Good’ Relations in more-than-human worlds”.

Gatt’s paper is entitle “Ethical striving with other-than-humans in two multicultural examples” and the abstract is below:

From dominant western perspectives, debates around ethics are conducted along anthropocentric modalities of relationship: only persons with the capacity for self-awareness, autonomy and rational judgment are considered able to engage in ethical behaviour. Even though there are increasing instances of legal processes attempting to expand definitions of personhood to non-humans, these retain an anthropocentric understanding of personhood, as Elizabeth Oriel shows. In animal rights movements and animal studies, it is human behaviour towards animals that is discussed in terms of ethics. And despite attempts of Object Oriented Ontology and New Materialism to decenter anthropocentrism, a central critique of these approaches is that intimate relations between humans and other-than-humans become even more unlikely.

In this paper I present two examples from multicultural contexts in which the humans involved are open to different subjectivities and knowingly engage together in forms of ethical striving; human and non-humans enter into relation for ‘doing good’. The first example comes from my doctoral research with Friends of the Earth (FoE) activists and the second is from my current research with improvising musicians. Both examples are characterized by a striving to relate with non-humans. In these examples the different subjectivities that emerge are not known in advance. What the efforts of both activists and musicians show are different strategies for how ‘good’ relations beyond anthropocentric positions are sought. I ethnographically explore how the humans involved, both individually and collectively, perceive and evaluate this ethical striving. I also suggest how we might describe more-than-human collective ethical striving in such contexts.

For the first talk in the (M)IE Seminar Series, Joshua Bergamin, Caroline Gatt and Christopher Williams will be presenting their methods, approaches and reflections on the first year of the (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics project.

The seminar will be held at the Forum Stadtpark, Graz (with coffee and brötchen) and online.

Title:
ANATOMY OF A (MUSICAL) ETHICS LAB

Abstract:
In this seminar we ask: In interdisciplinary projects that integrate artistic research, how do teams
• calibrate zoomed in (e.g. ‚practitioner‘) and zoomed out (e.g. ‚audience‘) perspectives?
• balance the generative and comparative aspects of practice-informed research over time?
• negotiate formats and priorities in individual and group outputs?
We - as an artistic researcher in music, an anthropologist, and a phenomenologist – address these questions and unpack the methods of ‚(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics‘, a four-year interdisciplinary project funded by the Austrian Science Fund.
The aim of the project is to investigate the improvisatory foundations of ethical behaviour and processes across a range of human activity. A series of seven ‚(Musical) Ethics Labs‘ with live experimental improvising music ensembles offers case studies for examining and experimenting with key ethical phenomena such as listening, habituation, and value-formation.
The goals of our artistic-scholarly assemblage are to bring to the fore the ethical phenomena of interest for the ben- efit of the musical process itself and for collective reflec- tion. This reflection informs the design of subsequent labs and will cumulatively ground a generalisable conceptual framework for understanding the ethical significance of improvisation beyond music and art.

The (M)IE seminar series will explore issues related to ethics, improvisation, music, and research methods.

Seminars will be held both at the Forum Stadtpark, Graz (with coffee and brötchen) and online. The link to participate is posted below.

We invite you to join in the discussions and debates!

Each talk will be recorded and made available online.
It is funded by the University of Graz Postdoctoral office, the FWF and the Forum Stadtpark.

https://unimeet.uni-graz.at/b/car-jks-uxl-sqf

We will present an in-depth report on our methods and discoveries in the first three Labs of 2022 at exploratorium Berlin’s yearly ‘Symposium / Open Space’, this year focusing on improvisation and ethics.

The schedule will be improvised on the spot!

A broadcast around Lab 3, featuring music from concerts with the klingt collective at Wien Modern in November 2022, and interviews (auf Deutsch) with Christopher A. Williams and musician Angelica Castelló.

A condensed version of our Lab opened exploratorium Berlin’s 2023 Symposium on the theme of ‘Improvisation und Ethik’, followed by conversation with participants and the audience (auf Deutsch).

Musicians:
Christopher A. Williams (US/AT): concept, direction, double bass
Carl Ludwig Hübsch (DE): tuba
Christoph Irmer (DE): violin
Nina Polaschegg (AT): double bass
Wolfgang Schliemann (DE): percussion
Sabine Vogel (DE): flute
Moderation: Mathias Maschat

Bergamin and Williams present a talk about (non-)groove in their experience at Lab 2 with the Splitter Orchester at the Groove Workshop 2023. Abstract below:

It is well-established that rhythm generates embodied senses of belonging in musical and non-musical contexts (Born 2011, Mater. Cult.; Gatt 2018, Routledge; Iyer 2018, OUP; Hamilton 2019, Midwest Stud. Philos.). Recent studies on entrainment (Cross 2009, Empir. Musicol. Rev.; Clayton 2012, Mus. Sc.), in musical performance particularly, support the view that rhythm forms a powerful medium of social connection. Rhythm also offers examples of ‘participatory sense making’ (Schiavo and De Jaegher 2021, Routledge) where – as an emergent phenomenon that recursively structures and influences performers’ decisions – it contributes to collective performance while retaining a sense of autonomy beyond the actions of any individual producers. These phenomena converge in the culturally-specific yet widely recognizable virtue of groove (Keil and Feld 2005, Fenestra; Doffman 2009, Open Uni.).

However, in experimental improvised music, where performative social connection is not only highly valued but often topicalised, groove is often optional, and is at times even actively circumvented. The practices of experimental musicians therefore raise questions about the specific function of groove in relation to other intersubjective musical structures, and the varieties of musicians’ experiences of music as an autonomous object.

In this paper, we discuss these questions via a case study of a large contemporary improvising ensemble. Drawing on in-depth interviews and musical analysis of live performances, we explore what constrains and structures musical choices in the absence of groove. We contrast the practice of ‘deep listening’ against the ‘flow’ of groove-based improvisation, and suggest that the bandwidth of individual choice is perhaps wider in experimental music. Nevertheless, other emergent rhythms and structures do arise spontaneously in ways that aren’t attributable to any one performer, and help reframe how we might understand the intersubjectivity and joint attention of musical performance.

We close by examining the correlation of these emergent structures with reported feelings of connection and togetherness, and discuss the implications for our understanding of autonomy, choice, and personhood during acts of musical co-creation.

The venerable Wien Modern festival hosts Encounter 3, our final event of 2022, with the Vienna-based klingt collective at Odeon theatre.

Monday’s performance will begin at 19:30 and be followed by a Q&A with musicians and researchers.

Tuesday’s event will commence with a roundtable discussion at 18:00, followed by the concert at 19:30. Our roundtable guests include philosopher Michael Wheeler, artistic researcher Deniz Peters, and members of the klingt collective.

As with all encounters, the concerts may vary radically, so attendance on both nights is strongly recommended!

https://vimeo.com/805579102/043ca683ad

Christopher A. Williams presents an introduction to the project to students at the Hochschule Osnabrück, Institut für Musik. Abstract below:

What do music and ethics have to do with each other? How does the phenomenon of improvisation tie them together? What can we learn about human life by studying experimental music? These are some of the many questions I, anthropologist Caroline Gatt, and philosopher Joshua Bergamin are currently thinking about in the context of a four-year interdisciplinary project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF, grant number ZK93) called “(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics” https://improv-ethics.net/. In this presentation, I will share some of our assumptions about this broad topic, outline our methods, and offer documentation from our first three (Musical) Ethics Labs with large improvising ensembles, which form the heart of the (creative) research.

Gatt was invited to speak on the ‘whoidentity’ panel, which is a collaboration between ORF musikprotokoll and ARTikulationen. Other panellists are double bass player John Eckhardt, composer and sound artist Miya Masaoka, and composer and artistic researcher Pia Palme. Hanns Holger Rutz, co-organiser of ARTikulationen, moderated the panel.

The panel explored questions of the self and other in artistic collaborations.

How is identity defined and questioned in collaborative artistic and artistic research contexts? Between composers and performers, between performers or improvisers in an ensemble, and between artists in transdisciplinary work, creative proximities, distances and frictions arise out of underlying social identities. In this panel, musicians, artistic researchers, and scholars discuss creative conflicts in artistic work and research with a particular focus on collaboration, and how (and whose) identities might be questioned, changed, abandoned, or found in engaging with others.

ARTikulationen interweaves in-depth artistic research presentations, a festival character (intermezzi-performances), and a mini-symposium – this year on matters of intersubjectivity in artistic research. It is directed by Deniz Peters, co-directed and produced by Hanns Holger Rutz, and organised by the Doctoral School for Artistic Research (KWDS).

Photos by John Eckhardt

Anthropologist Caroline Gatt has been invited as a keynote to present at the Interface workshop to share her experience of developing engaged approaches, including performative anthropological methods of scholarship. Interface is the Engaged Anthropology Commission of the Swiss Anthropological Association. Description below:

Over the last 4 decades ample arguments have been made in anthropology and beyond not only for the discipline to be more engaged in broader social matters, but also that any apparent disengagement is merely the product of discourse or ideology. Any knowledge is situated and always already embedded in a person’s experience and values (Haraway), even though the basis for much academic work is what Savranski has called ‘an ethics of estrangement’. The struggle between what are effectively two distinguishable epistemologies can be seen in the ongoing division in anthropology between ‘fieldwork’ and the complex of other aspects of academic anthropological work (including reading\writing, publishing\sharing one’s research, teaching, administrative work etc…). Sanjek refers to the latter as anthropology’s ‘career complex’. While epistemology, and more recently even ontology, are now routinely examined as part of fieldwork, the same cannot be said for the rest of this career complex. This leads to an epistemological split: In fieldwork anthropologists explicitly join in with the life and happenings all around them as the basis for learning and knowing; in ‘university work’ that ethics of estrangement, underpinned in anthropology by logocentrism, remains the dominant way of knowing.
There are at least two reasons why this split needs revision. First, logocentrism is an ideology of language tied to a hierachization of ways of knowing that privileges Western academic epistemologies. As part of imperial projects across the world it has been called upon to justify the subjugation of all sorts of knowledge, from Indigenous and Black ways of knowing, to female, Queer and even practical (as opposed to intellectual) ones. Therefore, if anthropologists want to work towards decolonizing their discipline they will need to revise the onto\epistemologies at work in their daily practices. Enabling different ways of knowing to inform not only the concepts anthropologists develop but also the way the discipline is practiced promises both a wealth of new insight but also a radical revision of the politics of knowledge the discipline is embedded in.
Second, while description and critique are essential ingredients in an engaged anthropology, to make these the aim is somewhat contradictory. What many studies show, consider studies with hunters and with performers, is that the epistemology at work in anthropological fieldwork is prospective and speculative, rather than retrospective. Reflection and critique are not separate aspects of a person’s ongoing responsiveness to their experiences. Although it is impossible to control how anthropological work is received by multiple and varied audiences, it is possible to embrace the speculative potential of anthropological work. Therefore, an alternative aim for anthropological work, one which does not split off the way of knowing of fieldwork from everything else, is to make proposals for life that learn from and draw on the myriad, grounded and rich experiences that are the bread and butter of anthropological research.
In this workshop\session I make the above arguments by tracing the relationship between a skilled practice and different ways of knowing by inviting you to try a couple of tasks to think through. I draw on my collaborative work with environmental activists, laboratory theatre practitioners and regenerative farmers\artists that have led me to working towards setting up a college of ‘regenerative scholarship’. The college is a dream which is a long way off, in large part because of challenges from within academia. As well as outlining the principles for this college, I describe some of these challenges, which are an illustration of the politics of knowledge I described above.

Philosopher Josh Bergamin will be presenting a paper at this year’s annual conference for the British Society for Phenomenology, which is being held in hybrid-format in Exeter and online. Abstract below:

When is ‘my truth’ true? Interpreting lived experience in phenomenological interviews

Many topics and methodologies for investigating subjectivity that have become widespread in the social sciences – for example, an emphasis on ‘lived experience’ – have been significantly developed by applied phenomenologists. Yet phenomenology’s own commitments often bring it into tension with giving full voice to its subjects.

For example, the ‘bracketing’ of prejudices may not take into account how those prejudices are constitutive of the subject herself. Furthermore, researchers are rarely trained to self-reflect on how their own history – cultural, sexual, professional – might colour their interpretation of a subject’s ‘bracketed’ responses.

A risk therefore is that a subject’s experience be distorted by the researcher’s own interests. But at the same time, the latter’s immersion in a broader investigative discourse offers insights to which their subject may have little access.

My paper examines this tension as it manifests in an ongoing interdisciplinary research project, working with improvising musical ensembles. Centred on the co-creation of a ‘hermeneutic circle’ between artwork, artist, and analysts, the project aims not only to render the research process itself transparent, but to consciously blur the distinction between researchers and research subjects, treating subjects as partners in a creative process in which all participants have a voice and an opportunity to learn/grow.

After briefly outlining our methodologies, I dig deeper into the problems of truth and interpretation that this process exposes, namely:

– At what points do ‘lived experience’ accounts reach limits that might be better informed by critical distance or historical consciousness?

– Is it essential to reconcile contradictions between levels of analysis? If so, how do we give weight to values like truth while doing justice to different lived realities? If not, can we avoid reperpetuating power imbalances between researcher and subject?

I examine these questions with reference to particular case studies, while suggesting potential generalisable conclusions.

Encounter 2, with Berlin’s Splitter Orchester, takes place at the Academy of the Arts Berlin, one of Europe’s oldest cultural institutions.

Friday’s performance will begin at 20:00 and be followed by a Q&A with musicians and researchers.

Saturday’s event will commence with a roundtable discussion at 18:30, followed by the concert at 20:00. Our roundtable guests include anthropologist Jonas Tinius, theatre and performance scholar Irene Lehmann, and Splitter musicians Steve Heather, Sabine Vogel, and Magda Mayas.

As with all encounters, the concerts may vary radically, so attendance on both nights is strongly recommended!

On Friday 12th August, our philosopher Josh Bergamin will be presenting a paper to the Conference on the Present and Future of Hermeneutics and Phenomenology at Southern Denmark University in Odense. Abstract below:

The Participant is the Play: Ethical applications of a phenomenological case study in musical co-creation

Phenomenology and hermeneutics’ most influential shared legacy is undoubtedly their challenge to the Modernist conception of the human being. In particular, they have worked – via individual and social levels of analysis – to deconstruct the dominating picture of the human as a ‘rational individual ego’ in favour of a broader understanding of ourselves as embodied, historically-situated, socio-cultural beings.

At the same time, these complementary disciplines have given us the tools and frameworks to understand how our particular self-understandings have developed over time, offering a method to understanding our subjectivity on its own terms, yet without sacrificing scientific rigour.

A growing engagement with phenomenological and hermeneutic discourses – not only within the humanities, but increasingly in dialogue with ‘harder’ sciences of the mind and brain – therefore offers an opportunity to develop and apply their methodologies across disciplines and to particular problems that have not traditionally been seen within their remit.

In this paper, I discuss these themes in the context of an ongoing interdisciplinary research project into the ethical aspects of improvised music. Using Gadamer’s discussion of art as a jumping-off point, I argue that the relevance of his insights extends beyond aesthetics, and offers a richer way of conceptualising embodied practical consciousness, especially the collective forms that emerge during acts of dialogue and co-creation.

Specifically, I apply Gadamer’s discussion of rhythm to interpreting a series of phenomenological interviews with an ensemble of professional improvising musicians, aimed towards understanding the forms of attention and mindedness that guide their playing. Viewed through a hermeneutic framework, I suggest that their collective performance can be understood not simply as a collaboration of individuals, but as a living event which both shapes and is shaped by the human and non-human participants in the work.

Such a conclusion has important ethical implications, as it brings into question the limits of individuality, freedom and autonomy in collaborative settings. This, in turn, suggests a practical methodology for exploring ontological questions about intersubjectivity and mindedness. I therefore close by considering the implications of this case study for the role that applied phenomenology can make to the ethical and political debates that arise from ongoing questioning of our concept of the human.

In this practical workshop at the Society for Artistic Research 2022 Conference at the Bauhaus University Weimar, we invited participants from any field to experience interventions currently being developed for use with musical ensembles.

Participants worked with us through a collage of performative exercises and simple scores inspired by artists and scholars such as Augusto Boal, Lawrence and Anna Halprin, Ben Spatz, and Pauline Oliveros. These are meant to bring specific ethical issues to the surface through practice. We then looked back over the performance work and discussed how it responds to questions such as:

• (How) do interventions that increase the visibility of practical ethics affect participants’ aesthetic values, and vice versa?

• (How) is the experience of being a self amongst others altered in the act of collaborative improvisation?

• What aspects of listening – to both the human and other-than-human – in improvisational practice are conducive to (individual and collective) ethical goals?

The workshop was a useful way both to show our work process as well as learn from participants from different fields, as we weave together our working-processes-in-progress into a method that can be applied beyond music.

Encounter 1 kicked off in June, with TJO in their HQ on the harbor in Trondheim.

Friday’s performance consisted of two sets, exploring the band’s relation to the audience, the space, and each other, and was followed by a lively Q&A session with the public.

Saturday’s concert presented a very different work, and followed a roundtable discussion where our researchers discussed the project themes with TJO saxophonist Amalie Dahl, trombonist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø, and local philosopher and jazz expert Mattias Solli from the NTNU.

Photos by Thomas Martius

Christopher A. Williams plays Ben Patterson’s Fluxus classic Variations for Double-Bass on 19 March, followed by a talk on 20 March entitled ‘What’s Left of the Blurring of Music and Life? Some Pattersonian Speculations’, at a special program around Patterson organized by the MaerzMusik festival and SAVVY Contemporary gallery.

Talk abstract

Ben Patterson’s early work, as exemplified by his legendary 1961 piece Variations for Double-Bass, both embodies and challenges the notion of ‘lifelike art’ theorized by Happening inventor Allan Kaprow. Although the legacy of that notion has had a rough time recently, Patterson’s work remains fresh. Through my performative experience with Variations, I will explore why that is so, and argue that an understanding of the blurring of life and art — updated with Patterson’s help — might be more relevant to current problems in contemporary music than is obvious.

Click for more information on Variations

Caroline Gatt and Tim Ingold are convening the first studio of this year’s conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists. The Studio, called ‘Anthropology as Education’ runs from March 14th until 11th April and will explore what an understanding of Anthropology as an educational process might imply for both anthropology and education.

Education is literally a way of leading out into the world, where we are exposed to beings and ways of life different from those to which we are accustomed. If we take education in this sense, then Anthropology is educational through-and-through. But it is a sense that challenges the orthodox idea of education as the intergenerational transmission of authorised knowledge. Philosophers of education, from John Dewey a century ago to Gert Biesta today, have struggled to articulate a vision of education that would escape the stultification of the transmission model. A critical anthropology needs to catch up with this literature.

The introduction to this first studio is on March 14th 19:00 - 21:00 GMT and the closing session is on April 11th 08:00 - 09:00 GMT. In between the introduction and closing sessions participants can join in online talks, workshops, demonstrations, discussions, while also contributing to growing texts by commenting on the conference platform.

This year’s ASA conference is experimenting with an entirely novel format. Following an introduction, the conference will comprise five consecutive studios, each extending over a month, with opportunities for ongoing conversation on the virtual conference platform. Our intention is not so much to provide a forum for the presentation of finished work as to open up a space for conversation, with a view to advancing the topic under discussion. By the conclusion of the conference, then, we expect to be in a very different place from where we began. This, in turn, will be reflected in the eventual conference volume, which we conceive less as a collection of papers than as a multi-stranded compilation of voices and perspectives.

Deadlines for proposals

Studio number:
1: Friday 4th March
2: Friday March 18th
3: Friday April 15th
4: Friday August 19th
5: Friday September 16th