On the Threshold of Knowing

...with Lucia Rainer

1. Why a book on this subject?

My research started from the observation that defined boundaries between social fields are increasingly becoming non-representative. And indeed, in the course of my empirical study, my hypothesis was acknowledged that interaction between oppositional fields results in reciprocal processes of redefinition. On account of this, my book raises the question of ownership, addressing where, how, and by whom social boundaries are being drawn.

2. What relevance does this subject have in the current research debates?

Regarding current artistic research debates, my book is – different to other studies – centered on the question of how knowledge practices reveal themselves between frame-dependency and frame-coalition. My empirical study highlights that artistic and academic praxis is in fact subject to processes of transformation, calling that, which counts as artistic, or rather academic, to succumb to variation.

3. What new perspectives does your book open up?

My empirical findings facilitate the emergence of a knowledge concept that – alluding to Ryle – is not only a social phenomenon that produces and reproduces itself, but – in addition – builds upon continual (re)negotiations that inevitably display themselves as »partial«. Building on this, knowledge emerges as a space of actual experience, which confronts apparent and gridlocked presumptions of what knowing is, or rather, what knowing might be.

4. Who would you preferably like to discuss your book with?

My study does not exemplify the application of theoretical considerations, but goes further in the sense that it provides a conceptual and methodological tool to gain insight into contingent knowledge practices that are difficult to grasp. Relying on Goffman's frame analytical approach, it would be extremely interesting to discuss my praxeological viewpoint with the author. Needless to say, this is no longer possible.

5. Your book in only one sentence:

My book bridges the gap between acts of lecturing and acts of performing, accommodating knowledge formation as subject to contestation irrespective of academic or artistic research positions.