Contextsreadership (Wood 2000). it also has the capacity to ‘draw us beyond ourselves and
throw us back upon our own subjectivity and agency’, which remains a central theme
in our research (melville and Readings 1995). This is a theme pursued by hannula et al.
(2005) and is bedrock to a proper understanding of what the cultures of research in the
arts stand to lose if they curtail the ambition of these individual studies in the name of
increased homogeneity, parity and bureaucratic ordering. While we do not anticipate
that art research will necessarily offer conventional reasoning or even ideas that appear
useful, our evidence is of its distinctive and critical independence, most particularly
from institutional norms of accountability, such as predictive forms of writing for the
comprehensive literature review and subsequent argumentation.
our second phd example concerns the locus of decision which the author proposes
at ‘the limits of subjectivity’ (Bowden 2006), that is at the limits of what an individual
can do. This study demonstrates a sophistication concerning issues of authorship and
the subject of enquiry in its relation to the author of it. We will not explore this here,
but in describing the study, we hope that it will add to the insightful understanding of
susan Kozel in this book (Chapter 12), concerning consciously embodied research. it
provides a set of chapters setting out Kierkegaard’s ideas concerning the particularities
of a singular decision in its urgent relation to the development of what we could
call individual conscience and humanness. in the two central parts of the written
component, Kierkegaard’s theory is clearly presented. however, the particular nature
of the phd is exposed by the accompanying dVds, the first after Chapter 2, and
the second after Chapter 4, of part one. Both dVds explore ideas concerning the
subjectivity of the author and its centrality to any theoretical exegesis. in the first dVd
she presents a fictional encounter between two philosophers each of whom is in fact
an actor and both read scripts of her own devising concerning philosophical exchange
about the nature of the decision. in the second, we see her describing the process of
reading michel henry whose work is central to her analysis of radical subjectivity, still
drawing on Kierkegaard as her main theoretical source. in this dVd, she talks of her
life’s interruptions to this singularly intellectual endeavour and playfully inscribes her
own daily experience against the seamlessness of the written research. in this way,
the researcher both provides substantive literary and theoretical contextualisation
and playfully inventive discursions: the latter create a tension with the intellectual
construction and provoke the reader/viewer to understand the anxiety and crisis
involved in any profound decision-making process. it also inscribes the ‘radical’
subjectivity proposed by the researcher. it leads her to propound that ‘subjectivity is not
something that can be designated as a fixed category as such. it is rather like the point at
which all external (and often contradictory) categories of life coincide: the biological,
social, political, legal and so on’ (Bowden 2006: 31). she also offers the compelling idea
from derrida that ‘we know less than ever where to cut’; that is, we know less than ever
about the relationship between experiencing and what is experienced, what we do and
what we make of it; what it is to take any decision at all given that we know so little
about how to make sense.
This phd actively and inventively deploys philosophical writings in the enactment
and presentation of the decision as a locus of subjectivity and vice versa. it clearly
indicates crucial differences between philosophic discourse and art’s work, that is
how art functions in the world. The actual form of the thesis plays out the character