Interdisciplinary anxiety

I am waiting in Euston Station to catch a train to Manchester to go to the SEP-FEP conference: the joint conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy where John Mullarkey and I are going to give a joint presentation on Laruelle and Kaprow, non-philosophy meets nonart and the nonhuman.

 

And I am having, again, a bout of interdisciplinary anxiety.

 

In part, this follows some very interesting discussions on an earlier train with two colleagues Tony Fisher and Amanda Stuart-Fisher about the inevitable issues and questions surrounding any interdisciplinary project, such as Performance Philosophy.

 

How do those who have not been trained in Philosophy engage with it?

How do we avoid accusations or (sometimes self-imposed) impressions of dilettantism?

What counts as ‘expertise’ in the interdisciplinary realm of Performance Philosophy?

Do philosophers feel any interdisciplinary anxiety when they engage in discussions about performance or art? (and my suspicion is that they may do, but less so than scholars from other disciplines worry about their ‘right’ to engage with philosophy).

 

We had been discussing moments of confrontation we had experienced at philosophy conferences. The moments when we have witnessed a more junior or less experienced speaker being derailed by an ‘expert’ – with notions of expertise based on, say, those who have specialized in the thought of a single philosopher throughout their career, who have read that philosopher in their original language, who have read everything available written by that philosopher and extensive amounts of secondary literature.

 

We all agree that there is much to be valued in these experts. But we were also questioning whether this was the only type of expertise. And about the limits of philosophy conceived only as the practice of the history of philosophy.

 

And we talked about dogmatism and the question of how to converse in the context of profound disagreement.  I reiterate my idea that Performance Philosophy as an association should not exclude any mode of philosophy except those that seek to exclude others – that is, those who refuse to acknowledge the validity of any other approach to the topic than their own. The confrontation, anatagonism or what one could even call aggression of some philosophical debates – whether they take place online, in print or at conferences – is arguably relatively unfamiliar in the context of theatre and performance. Perhaps to the good, perhaps problematically – but it does make me wonder what new ways of dealing with disagreement might emerge in the interdisciplinary context of a Performance Philosophy event.