Situated Knowledge, Transmissions of Practice and Parasitic Endeavors

Abstract

This paper presents an exchange between four practitioners from distinct disciplines of site dance, philosophy, experimental writing and pedagogy. It presents responses to provocations that position these practices as containers of Situated Knowledge, it interrogates the transmission and reception of practical knowledge, and employs the notion of ‘parasitic endeavor’ as a lens through which to facilitate discussion of of how disciplinary specific practices and emerging knowledges might traverse from one discipline to another and how this knowledge might be articulated and communicated to wider audiences. Informed by Bennett’s notions of ‘vibrant matter’ (2010), Barad’s conception of agency and intra-action (2003), transversality (Guattari, 1964 and Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012) and J.J. Gibson’s theory of affordances (1986) the paper explores how embodied knowledges become activated and mobilised through human-material-world intra-actions and how interdisciplinary engagements facilitate the articulation of such knowledges. The notion of parasitic endeavor employed here alludes to a temporal process in which theoretical paradigms from one discipline are employed within or applied in another for a required period of time to facilitate the articulation of complex intra-active and diffractive human-nonhuman entanglements. This paper seeks to show how distinct practices transmit knowledges beyond disciplinary boundaries. Each respondent will offer a ‘score’ to provoke and support intra-active practice. The score frames a set of instructions, rules or constraints for fellow authors to explore and reflect on their experiences in relation to their own, customary modes of ‘doing’ practice and research. For publication, each contributor will present a response to one or more of these scores, drawing on their own disciplinary methods and working practices to consider how the specificities of their discipline engage creatively with these alternate actions and actors. In this scenario the notion of ‘parasitic endeavor’ is positioned as prodigious and facilitatory; we move through and beyond disciplinary silos, borrow and compare, creating new theoretical and disciplinary entanglements, through which new/augmented modes of thinking/doing might emerge.