Methadology contra methodology

This paper considers the possibilities of what might be expressed in the relationship between practice and research. In particular, that if we are to situate ourselves as practitioners in historical relationship to the styles of other practitioners, or ourselves as researchers in historical relationship to our own practice, then we must contend with the differential semiotic relationship between these styles. Questions of aesthetic relationships, that is where we are distanced from an already constructed past, are flawed in their proposition in that they ignore where the signification of these practices is only meaningful once undone or even contradicted by future practice. Thus, the central question of a methodology of practice-based research becomes not how our research and writing might accurately reflect or affirm our practice but: how might our research deny such revelation, reiterating our practice only within a structure of denying final signification? In this way, any research methodology of practice is always in truth meta-methodology of practice as the production of non-meaning and research as performative practice.

This theoretical critique is presented alongside an auto-ethnography of my recent PhD experience; that the explicit and tacit expectations of practice-based research in the academy (indeed, any institution) hobble one’s being-in-the-world; that a desire for a reproduction of the neo-liberal politics of today’s university is incompatible with the differential structures in which practice-based research truly dwells. Ultimately, this paper is founded in and gestures towards an anti-disciplinary, anti-humanist mode of practice-based research; that “reflective” or “representational” methods are ethically insufficient in the twenty-first century. Certainly, while a rigorous analysis of one’s practice is desirable, such rigour cannot be conflated with a desire for clarity. Rather, it must dwell in the queer mists of non-clarity and the very silence we inhabit which is deformed into music.

http://www.c21mp.org/events/practice-research-in-21st-century-music/methodology-and-practice/