Notes on the theory-practice problem of practice-led PhDs

This is a relatively short mental note to myself, an attempt to address a basic methodological issue which I have been thinking about while reading economic and political theory over the past few days. I don't mean to address all the issues relating to practice-led PhDs. This is also not specifically about my own work, although I am affected by it. The problem which poses myself in renewed urgency is as follows.

As I have been reading quite a bit of theory over the past 5 months, a lot of it only half digested, I guess, it has come back to my mind what my former second supervisor Michael Keith has said about the PhD as a format. Usually, in a standard theoretical PhD the procedure is as follows: the student/researcher itentifies a subject area, a research project. Then the first year is spent doing a literature review. The researcher identifies all relevant literature in the subject area. Through this research, the researcher is able to identify a gap in knowledge. Through that, the researcher becomes able of clarifying the research question. S/he then writes up the literature review in the form of an introduction to the subject, which contains the literature review, the description of the research to be undertaken in the future and, if possible, a methodology which s/he will follow. Once this is approved, the researcher carries out the work in the remaining two years.

For a practice based PhD the process is much less clear. There is no definite guideline, at least not in the student handbook provided by the University of London (Goldsmiths' guidelines are identical to those of the University of London which it is part of). The only difference is that you should write fewer words, 60.000 is the norm (and Goldsmiths is quite keen that you should write just about that amount and not significantly more) and that the practice should somehow be made to count. There is no prescription in which way this should happen. Evidence should be provided, maybe a little project or exhibition at the end of the period of study, usually then transferred onto a documentation as a cd/dvd, which is what assessors will get to see, if they cant be motivated to be dragged along to the project itself.

However, as the words practice based or practice-led suggest, the practice should be more than just an appendix to the written work, it should be an integral part. One way of achieving that is known as action research. It proceeds in a cycle of action - reflection - action, which is repeated as often as is needed. But nobody says that the phases of reflection consist of writing about the work in a theoretic manner. Reflection can take many forms: it can consist of writing up notes, of taking steps of documenting, of developing ways of describing - formal systems such as taconomies, the dfrawing of diagrams, etc. While the wide range of methods that count as action research are surely a positive step to take by practitioners and will be of benefit for the development of future work, as all those steps carried out help to externalise some of the thought processes that go on in practitioners minds, this does not in itself guarantee that theoretical content can be derived from that overal process of cyclical action - reflection.

Now looking at theoretic thought production, my recent readings have provided me with a sort of provisional insight. What interesting theorists usually do is to identify an objective problem, a problem that theory (in the umanities and social sciences) has not yet been able to solve. They then try to work out the exact character of that problem as clearly as possible, by a) going sideways, that means identifying contemprary work that is relevant for the same problem, and b) backwards, by identifying what previously has been written. It then, surprise surprise, often shows, that the roots of the problem can often be shown to have been present at least since the beginning of modern times. Thus, for instance, already Immanuel Kant has been trying to understand the limits of pure reason and practical reason. He has been able to show that reason is very efficient in formulating terms and categories of thought which are rational and which allow to formulate a system of such categories and concepts, which is in itself logical and whose parts are reasonably connecting. then he made the discovery that while pursuing the path of reason he has lost contact with the world. He calls it the thing-in-itself (referring to the object of a particular concept). While the formalisation of thought in a rational manner gives a satisfying result, yet only if he stays within the realm of rational thought, it gives him no access whatsoever to the thing-in-itself. The thing in its thingness is obstinate, it can be 'understood' but it cant be known. Thus, Kant has identified a real problem, something that he is unable to solve not because he is stupid or lazy but because at the time he had exhausted all possibilities available to him and had not found a solution. What he is capable of however, is to present the contradiction in the most elaborate way. Therefore he is justifiedly considered to be a great European philosopher. The problem which he encountered is also not just his problem, it goes probably back to Plato in the Western philosopjic tradition, while Indian and Chinese philosophers have dealt with similar problems yet in a different way.

Now if you ever have tried to read Kant you know what my problem is. He is very hard to read, in German probably more difficult than in English as the translation softens some of those harder edges of Kant (the word 'Kante' in German means 'edge'). Now since then roughly 250 years have passed and some of the smartest people in the world have assigned their brains to the problem. Rather than solving the problem, they have added more layers of complexity to it. There is currently, I have picked up somehwere, a bit of a Neo-Kantian revival in the computer sciences going on. Kantian categories and their relationship to 'real objects' (or things-in-themselves) have become a problem relevant for computer sciences. My description of the problem is a quite vulgarised version of it, written from memory from recent reading of how Georg Lukacs deals with it. There are Marxist Kantians such as Lukacs, conservative or even reactionary Kantians, Kantian-Hegelians, digital Kantians, maybe even anarcho-Kants and certainly many anti-Kants.

Now, poor me. I know nothing. I am a practitioner, I have spent the better part of my life doing stuff in the real world - even so doing was often connected with writing, but an entirely different way of writing. What I am actually trying to say is: the path of theory, ever since Kant, has been seeking ever more refined ways of rationalisation. The process of theory production is in itself a way of presenting a problem in a very condensed and abstract way - sometimes even formalised mathematically or logically. Theory is in essence a cristallisation of a problem in the most minimalistic way possible on the most abstract layer possible.

This is not commensurable with the way practice works. Practice is messy, it deals with real objects, relationships between people and objects, between people and people, with all the things that, as Kant himself has pointed out so eloquently, are 'unknowables' for a rational process of knowing, strictly speaking. As you probably have suspected by now, I have chosen Kant as an example for a reason. The problem that Kant has identified, the chasm between the rational way of knowing about things - whereby rational also means constructing, creating ever more abstract concepts in the ever thinner air of 'pure thought' - and the obstinate thingness of things, is very similar to the problem of theory and practice in a practice-led PhD. The more successful I become in creating a real 'theory' the further I move away from the concrete basis of my work.

I think this is not just my personal problem, but an objective problem haunting practice-led PhDs. In the natural sciences it may be less difficult, es the epistemology is quite clear and the 'experiment' is designed to verify or falsify the theory. As science studies scholars have shown, the experiment constructs the knowledge object in the controlled environment of the laboratory (or whatever is needed). Yet in the arts and humanities it can never be as clearcut as this. This is something I think the people who have introduced this system in the UK and elsewhere have not sufficiently thought about, - this profound chasm between theory and practice.

In effect this means that we are left with an objective problem for which we have to find individual solutions. The practice-led PhD is a bastard, an impossible crossing between a tradition of book centred, scholarly work with a strong grounding in academic science and rationality, and a wholly different tradition of artistic practices, which is not "irrationalist" per se, but derives its legitimacy from another social context and other ways of working which are more concerned with materiality than with theory formation. This does not mean that the problem is impossible to solve but that the methodological question at the heart of it is, if taken seriously, so difficult in itself that it can become such an obstacle that the content fo the work, that what we really set out to do, can become marginalised, or at least pushed to the background.

That said, I am already thinking about a solution, which I hope to find in dialectic materialism. In the coming weeks I hope I will be able to work on that more, starting with History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs, London, Merlin Press 1971-1990