This course is inclined toward qualitative research methods. Write about your thoughts on positivist and non-positivist approaches. How do you reconcile yourself to a non-positivist position? What experiences in your past inform how you feel about these two positions? Include your thoughts on embodiment and Cartesian dualist’s mind / body divide. Relate this to your own practice and your professional experiences.
These big words scare me.
Positivist approach; scientific and fact based.
Art experience/training is necessarily subjective.
I keep questioning what I do, its legitimacy, its impact, its necessity even. So my understanding of it is constantly changing. And so is my practice. My approach to movement today is far from what it was 8 years ago. It is deeper and just-er. Like; I have dug and entered the world that I wanted to explore a little more.
I am uncovering it as I am digging.
I am creating it as I am digging.
There is still so much more to unpack and to discover.
I accepted this was going to be the journey of my life.
Years ago, when I was researching around cancer and genetics, I asked a scientist about the link between a specific cancer and genes. They said very surely that no, there was no link. When I pointed out that 3 members of my family had had this extremely rare cancer the scientist looked aside, took a deep breath and said ‘Well, you see. There are still so many things we don’t know. So. This… we don’t know’. What I found interesting is that the person was first, categoric. But when a group of people’s experience brought a slight doubt to them; they landed back to reality: we only know what we know.
How do we know that what we don’t know, is not.
What would be a synonym for non-positivism? Negationism? Nihilism? Negativitism?
I wonder.
« Doubtism» ?
I love doubts and I love not knowing.
« Let questions emerge » is a sentence from last session I wrote, underlined and circled.
« Questions lead to more interesting questions »
I believe in the power of digging and the endless discoveries and pathways research offers.
But I also feel safe and released with a pragmatic fact / knowledge / discovery.
I do smile thinking about the happy mariage of the two; I have been collaborating with scientists and philosophers to inform and feed my work for the past 6 years. A journalist lately asked me « how do you link all this together, so many different practices, directions? »
The practice. My artistic practice is the result of that marriage. And I have a feeling that my inquiry will be so too! I am digging thinking brain, animal brain, artistic practice, maybe even midwifery…
How can positivism and non-positivism co-exist and co-feed a research?
How can body and mind co-exist and co-feed a life?
This leads me to question the duality between the mind and the body.
My body often knows better than my mind.
I did believe they were dislocated, one had betrayed the other, one had been estranged from the other. My words did not heal me, but my body did (cranio-sacral therapy saved my life - and I weight my words writing this).
I remmener often feeling nauseous when I reconnected to the material reality. I would look at the tree in front of me and thinks: I am here, I am. The matter around me would root me into life, time, into my flesh even. But I could see the tree with my eyes and there is a clear physical phenomenon happening here. This phenomenon got me to sense and from my own flesh / matter, I travelled into the realm of the spiritual.
Yet that spiritual realm is very real too. It is my brain.
Hang on. Does my spiritual life sits in my brain? But which brain?
This is something I develop within my practice and my classes: disconnection from the thinking brain.
I want to quote one of my collaborators' essay The Human and the Octopus by Philosopher Thomas Stern (UCL).
This sentence resonates so much with my practice and my beliefs (and I encourage you all to read this essay, it's passionating)
There is the ancient, religious idea that man is the unhappy combination of beast and god: if only we were divine, we would be liberated, immortal spirit; if only we were beast, we could be content in our instinctive ignorance.
Do animal think? Probably not. They feel. Yet, they are.
Uncertainty echoes with movement. Uncertainty IS movement.
The only thing I know is that I know nothing (Socrate).
Dance is not fixed, a performance, a gesture will never be done the same once.
Where do I stand?
I oscillate. In my body.
T. Stern, The Human and the Octopus (2011), https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/the-human-and-the-octopus/
So beautiful to read as always. I love love love the 'But which brain?' question and everything around who knows what within our complicated human/animalness. I'm reading around gathering sensory data, and especially discussions around data collection and research ethics with people with profound and multiple learning disabilities (which I won't do for this research project). I just thought about it with your theme of disconnecting from the thinking brain. I'm maybe hoping to do something similar in disconnecting from the linguistic and connecting to (or at least making space for) the sensory (very much from Joanna Grace's research around Sensory Beings) - maybe it will be interesting to compare notes at some point!
RépondreSupprimerIt would be lovely to compare notes and chat about this!! Absolutely! I like that you mentionned the sensory. I feel like I'm looking for the flesh, the meat, the inside. But the inside is touch, right. Mmh. Let's chat!
SupprimerI just watched the Ethic Session - thanks for checking it was recorded!! :)
Hi Lea, This has really sparked a lot of thought in me thank you. I was thinking about how I usually say that I agree with the positivist approach when in medical settings. However you reminded me of an experience related to covid where a professional also just said to me we are dealing with an unpredictable, unknown disease so we don't know. I think about how frightening it was to hear that when I reflect on this now. Positivism gives us a feeling assurance where as non-positivism requires a certain level of trust to sit in that uncomfortable place of unknowing. What does the discomfort that is so often felt I think when there are no instant answers, or maybe no answers at all say about humans and society in general? It feels that the development of google and our ability to reach for answers at the click of a button must be having an impact on humans wanting this sense of control over every aspect of their lives?
RépondreSupprimerYou are right. When so many information (and knowledge?) is at hand, what are we able to let go of? And accepting that there is no knowledge on something, is already something and is in itself an answer, right? Like, it's not nothing, it is something filled with not much. mmh...
SupprimerLove this perspective! I can absolutely see how your inquiry, after chatting about it, is completely related to this. So great to see that all come together. I feel that notion of the not knowing very much. It's the more you know the more you don't know saying come to true form as I do this MA!
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