The world is populated with complex systems: from neural networks through social systems to financial markets. Uncertainty is a hallmark of such systems as they can change, adapt, and remember in ways that are hard to predict. In the words of Helga Nowotny, we try to stem this tide of uncertainty in a complex world by developing “ways of coping”: research disciplines, professional silos, and cultural institutions. Complexity will, however, always resist these strategies. How is it that old can strategies adapt and new ways of coping emerge?

This research project focuses on how human doings act to both stabilise and destabilise professional cultures, and so open a window for new ways of coping to emerge. Discussions around the “performative” nature of human actions interrogate the way in which actions simultaneously generate, sustain, but also subvert the very rules that confer on them meaning in the first place. Although now found across the arts, humanities, and sciences, this line of questioning has developed along largely independent lines – a function, in part, of when crises in professional culture have emerged. J. L. Austin (language philosopher) asked how words create the world to which they refer; Judith Butler (gender theorist) asks how our gendered actions bring about the multi-levelled self that such acts are so often taken merely only to express; Andrew Picking (historian of science) asks how the process of knowledge extension emerges through the act of its own construction rather than towards a pre-determined goal. I am exploring how the work of these authors and others (including Hans Diebner and Karan Barad) together reveal a powerful understanding of how disciplinary strategies emerge and change – one based on how ‘acts of doing’ drive the construction of knowledge, identity and practice together.

Outputs

Senior T. J. (2012). TRANSITION: Knowledge through performance in art and science. Conference and exhibition (25.10.12-19.11.12) held at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Germany. Exhibition documentation.

Senior T. J. (2014). Coping with Complexity: A Performative Framework. Performing Science: Dialogues Across Cultures – The Science and Performance Conference (upcoming) – The Lincoln School of Performing Arts (University of Lincoln).