The future of the humanities

Practice-led research is changing how we approach humanities research. Now we need to consider what this might mean for ways in which the humanities evolve in universities, says Graeme Harper.

Universities in Australia and Britain discuss it regularly, though the term is less well known in the US, and only partly known in continental Europe, Asia and Africa. Practice-led research, research through practice, practice-based research – perhaps not one term but a range of terms describing research involving creative practice in the arts. This practice-led research is not merely of importance to arts practitioners, however, because it is now pointing to a major problem in the humanities: a long-held obsession with the analysis of objects not actions.

It’s not a new idea: creative practice involves knowledge and knowledge can be investigated, developed and enhanced. Creative practitioners, perhaps when working towards graduate qualifications, or in their roles as faculty, explore form as well as content, and create works that declare new ideas or ideals. Along the way they add to their own creative understanding, as well as to their critical knowledge, often leaving a range of evidence of their creative and critical actions. What has emerged in the relatively recent expansion of practice-led research in such fields as creative writing, music, art and design, filmmaking, fine art, architecture, dance and drama is that the journeys of these practitioners reveal inadequacies in any understanding that focuses primarily on the results of action, rather than on the actions themselves.

Certainly it is possible, starting with completed artefacts as a number of humanities subjects do, to come to conclusions about the nature and context of creative works. Knowledge that is produced or explored in this way is, of course, entirely valid knowledge. But, as with all reasoning, analysis reflects the place at which it began. What practice-led research is revealing is that while what can be called “post-event” analysis (that is, analysis after the “event” of creating) can produce knowledge about the artefacts produced, it does not easily produce knowledge about the practices themselves. So, for example, literary study can substantially enhance our knowledge of literature, but it does relatively little to enhance our knowledge and understanding of the practice and process of creative writing.

In this sense, practice-led research is research that is declaring the need for a focus on the acts and actions of creation. The considerable importance of such event-based research has revealed itself now because of the impact of new technologies that have changed the way in which we all act and interact. If the humanities is concerned with the human condition, as is generally believed, then this change is fundamental to our research progress. The notion that we can continue to separate objects of creation from their creators, and from their acts and actions of creating, simply fails to learn from what is happening all around us.

It is barely a dozen years ago that the internet began to change the ways in which we communicate and exchange human knowledge. The considerably growth of the web – the years 1996 and 1997 being key years of early expansion – at first mostly added new dimensions to such human exchange, supplementing the existing paper-based communications and shifting the process slightly away from the cultural and economic centralities we’d been used to in the earlier 20th century. So, for example, email began to replace snail mail and, in doing so, it both literally and symbolically moved the control of mail-based communication into the individual space and accelerated the speed of mail communications beyond anything previously imagined.

The word control here is carefully chosen, because email took out of this style of human interaction several levels of market and exchange control. That is: the printing of letters, the purchase of envelopes, the buying of stamps, the dependence on external delivery, and a chronology staged and extended by the number of hands needed to bring object to consumer (in this case, a letter to a reader), placed many filters between the creation of mail and the consumption of it. Email, very rapidly, changed all this.

But the problem that practice-led research is identifying in the humanities is not all about email, or necessarily even generated by the emergence of email. It is not all about communication. It is, indeed, about understanding, about knowledge. What practice-led research is revealing is that the 20th century, particularly the latter half, became so enamoured of creative objects that academics in the humanities failed to adequately engage with the human undertakings that created them. And it is the new technologies of the internet, the cell phone, wireless communication, that are unearthing this key fact.

To sustain the creative writing and literature example: it is now possible for those creating new pieces of creative writing to create their works in full and complete connection with the world, at all times; to draw on information and experiences that appear in front of them, not just in their local sightlines but from around the world, and to do so in real time, frequently in their own domestic spaces. They can do so, empowered by technologies that allow them to complement their creating with communication and, during the acts and actions of creation, they can distribute works when they see fit to whomever they like. Most importantly, when their works are as complete as they wish them to be, they can release these works (which we might, for the sake of simplicity, call books) to the world without the control or filtration of a 20th century bookselling system that focused on objects and their commodity value.

What does this all mean for literary scholarship, therefore? Is it really still possible to begin any reasoning in the field of literature by analysing completed works of creative writing produced only via a centralised printing and distribution system and sold as commodities in bookstores (whether physical or virtual)? Is it still possible to consider music, or film, or design in this centralised commodity-focused way?

A shift away from systems in which the object is the primary point of exchange, brought about by the new digital technologies, has immeasurably changed the ways in which we understand the world, yet still much humanities scholarship deals primarily with objects, as if they exist relatively detached from the actions that created them. Or, alternatively, it begins an analysis with the object and works backwards, as if it can reveal action without ever dealing directly with action.

It is possible to see clearly what all this might mean. First, that the 20th century commodification of creativity, particularly occurring in the consumerist ideals highlighted in the latter half of the century, no longer can be seen as valid for the consideration of objects, texts, creative artefacts. Process – the acts and actions of creation – needs to be given higher status in our humanities research and to inform the place at which such research begins, as well as how it progresses.

Artefacts remain significant, but the range and location of these artefacts needs revisiting and the importance of actions relating to those artefacts, both completed works and works preceding and complementing those works, needs to be given greater evidential status, reflecting its true importance. Second, humanities scholarship that separates creative practitioner from critical analyst needs to be revisited so that we can create new ways of exchanging ideas and understanding, much like the new ways of exchange that the internet and cell phone technologies have introduced to us generally. A move towards more event-based humanities research needs to be brought about, so that where post-event analysis continues, it is recognised as a component of understanding, not as containing higher general knowledge status, where this may too often have been the case.

Similarly, the shift away from seeing the final commodities of creation as being the primary identities of those human creations – whether those are the final commodities of creative writing, film, architecture, drama, dance, computer games, music, or otherwise – reminds us that human action forms artefacts, that not all these artefacts have mainstream commodity value, or indeed are final, and that the importance of adjusting our modes of research to explore human action reflects not merely a technology-generated revelation but something we have known all along: that human action is complex and requires our due attention if we are to better understand it.

Practice-led research, giving voice to the events of human creativity, is leading the way in changing how we approach humanities research. It is now up to us to consider what this might mean for ways in which the humanities evolve in universities and colleges and, without doubt, how they contribute to the stock of human knowledge beyond academia. If new technologies have alerted us to something inherent in our lives, it can but be hoped we take heed of this alert to develop the depth and scope of our research.

Graeme Harper is director of the National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries and a professor of creative writing at Bangor University, UK.