Stupidity as research ethos and tactic

Stupidity is something to cultivate.
Not all the time, but strategically — as a kind of tool of research trick.
It gives you permission to ask basic questions — these might be obvious, equally they might not be.
Basic questions can be productive because others haven’t thought to ask them — as they are seem to straightforward.
Stupidity — in the sense of not knowing things — gives the researcher permission to ask about obvious things.
This is useful in all sorts of settings — in first observing a research site, in an interview, in learning how to do something.
It gives the researcher permission to start doing something — watching, talking, learning — without having a direct sense of where things are going.

On the other hand …

Stupidity as feeling or state of frustration
Often stupidity isn’t something chosen or cultivated.
It can be a state or feeling that the researcher is inadequate to the task they have set themselves.
A sense that the thing being researched has the researcher stumped.
Or that the researcher is inadequate to the task of getting into the research site (or project) in a way that others will find worthwhile, or important, or smart.
This feeling of inadequacy can then take the research away from the research site (and material generated from it) and towards theory.
Because theory is obviously ‘clever’, and it is where well developed ideas can be found and ‘applied’ to the research site (which also gives us a natural community of others who ‘use’ this theory).
So, we need to be careful with this feeling of stupidity — because it can lead us to doing ‘stupid’ things in order to impress (or fit in) with others.

Ying-Tzu

Stupidity is a limbo where the researcher feels everything and nothing at the same time. It’s a stage when one knows enough about the existing realm that other people have studied therefore triggers existential crisis and imposter syndrome.

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‘Stop fooling around!‘

Panic and anxiety triggered by the sense of stupidly often stop the researcher to observe and to ask basic questions. Is there anything new to add in front of a giant? It blinds the obviousness in front of the face.

Another case is to question the legitimacy of questions being asked at the first place. All important questions must have being asked and answered. This can’t be new. Nothing is new. The self-doubt can brew cynical in one.

Perhaps to remain the cultivated stupidity yet not brewing cynical out of frustration is more than a quest of finishing the PhD but to develop a healthy relationship with knowledge in general. The second time the sense of stupidity comes back it seems to be bearable.

Clemens, based on Lauren’s term:

FLUMMOXED

"And my 'pinion is, Sammy, that if your governor don't prove a alleybi, he'll be what the Italians call reg'larly flummoxed, and that's all about it."

People have looked, but found no Italian says this.

Turns out that was a joke by Dickens.

Flummoxed may be onomatopoeic, where the sound of the word is its meaning. Like BAM! Or kladderadatsch, as Marx imagined the sound of capitalist collapse.

Can this notion operate as a thing to aim for? Like Anneke mentioning “Elegance” as a criterion/alternative for ‘good’?

Can we dwell in being flummoxed, instead of merely stupid, just fallen to pieces and seeking to reassemble yourself again?

To reach the afterlife one has to die first. OK that’s a bit dramatic. But it matters how we think of finishing a work, and seeing the thing gain a life of its own, getting into some fresh entanglemess of its own making, being no longer under the makers’ control, if it ever was. Maybe finishing the thing is more like a birth, and making was gestation.

Many formats of working suggest a clear boundary between finished ‘product’ and independent life. The launch, the publication, the deadline. (is there life after deadline?)

Here the arts and sciences seem to imagine things differently: sciences seek to set in stone, to plastinate the soil profile into a fixed, legible but utterly dead composition. The publication is not supposed to be ambiguous, traces of its makers would taint the truth claims. Maybe a positionality statement is included in more progressive social sciences, but more to preempt critique than add to bringing the work to life? [this is questionable yes]

![[soil sciences.webp]]

Thinking of how the thing will perform once unleashed into the world will inform the making obviously. What others do we presume to resonate with. what frictions do we prepare for?

When the aim of the thing is 'giving to the situation the power to make us think' (Stengers Ecology of Practice p185), the thinking is not meant to be over and fixed in the product, the deliverable.

The thing in arts/sciences is both fixed, bounded, identifiable as an intervention, but also meant to rake up, to gather [https://hal.science/hal-02057240 ], to rile up, to connect, to resonate. It is meant more as an opening, a conversation piece, without being completely open and fluid, plastic and malleable, but suggesting directions, staging experience, offering space for complexity to encounter and preparing thought in particular ways. Offering the ground for [hashtag] unexpected surprises (are there suspected surprises one may ask - yes, those are less exciting presumably)

New challenges emerge for the artsscientist. Does one stick around to explain, to protect from critique, to adapt? Or do we need to gently push the work off in a wicker basket to go down with the flow and fend for itself and make its own adventures?

What is the script the thing brings? Is the nature of the outcome meant as an atlas, then the audience gets to be in the position of ‘explorer’ - https://feralatlas.org/.

Personal history + skills + crack (problem / challenge)

Questions of something happening in your life makes you think about what’s going on in your surroundings, society and the world.

I was curious how others live outside my boundary, going outward to ‘discover’ or ‘explore’ unfamiliar out there, not here, when I was younger. I like reading maps, travelogues, and watching movies, which are inspirations for exploring new, unknown world.

Since I became outsider overseas for my study, I gradually became to wonder how I became who I am and how it is related to where I am. After I became a mother, I was perplexed by realising my position as a female for the first time in my real life. When my life puzzles me, it becomes my curiosity and desire to understand it better. If this puzzle is not only my own, but if it resonates with others’ live stories, it becomes cracks and can be a starting point for doing research or doing arts. And how we look at these cracks can also affect the lens and the methods of how we do research.

Then, how do we tackle down these cracks? For doing that through research, it requires some skills. Basic knowledge of skills might be acquired through some training, like methods training. However, in practice, it is often that you might feel like being in battle barehanded when you really DO research. From the scratch, finding and pinning down a problem, connecting your research with the literature, collecting data through personal interactions with ‘real’ people, interpreting data, articulating findings from data and communicating your research with other people, your personal skills learned through your life and plus research skills trained or acquired through experiences are used together, whether consciously or unconsciously. In this process, it is not clear to clarify what skills are required and how they can be acquired. It’s very much connected to a researcher him/herself and his/her life experiences.

In Abruzzo, a region in the middle of Italy, community support and spaces like squares and streets are shared by all age groups. While spaces and practices usually change over time and people shape the use of the spaces more and less freely, usually children, young people or elderly do not participate in the decision making around those spaces. After 9 years as an architect in Italy, I moved to the Netherlands to conduct research on sense of community and belonging through participatory practices and spaces. This topic entangles my personal history and the crack I found in research and policies, especially in newly developed and redeveloped neighbourhoods, in Dutch peripheries and peri-urban. Within this topic, I was also able to adopt my skills in design, creative and art-based methods to help participants from different age groups, genders, social classes and lifestyles engage in participatory planning in their own way of communication and imagining their surroundings.

In general, I believe that warrants and personal history are entwined and shape the way we conduct research, choose our pathways and in my case also aim to contribute to society through research outputs.

My focus on intergenerational communities through creative methods and participatory practices also led me to a gendered perspective of care and carelessness. Belonging to a supportive community is associated with wellbeing and mental health with adults as well as with children and young people. From this perspective, a gendered approach through different life stages can empower groups that are more often marginalised. For women, changing moments in their life cycles, such as birth, menarche, abortion, miscarriages, pregnancy, postpartum, menopause, are often aside on the mainstream discourses of space production, social infrastructures, community support and reproductive governance. While social reproduction tended in the past to focus on fertility, birth and childcare, social movements and studies started focusing on abortion rights, sterilization abuse, pregnancy loss, infertility and abortion.

From my personal experience as well as from literature, creative methods can act as research methods as well as interventions to support groups that are more often marginalised, such as children, young people and women, especially in deprived neighbourhoods or contexts of displacement.

To conclude, my trajectory from practice to research and then in connecting research and practice follows a red thread that connect my personal history and cracks/gaps that I found in literature and societal practices. The lens through which we look at our topic might also reflect our ways to look of society and interpret research meanings.

Francesca Ranalli

::: warn This is a draft. It may always be a draft. And that is fine?

:::

When will this mess finally congeal into something solid, elegant, graspable? When will I stop feeling panicked when people ask what it is I’m working on? When will I stop feeling like an impostor, like I’m boring people and wasting their time? When will it finally be good?

We’re told that doing the work of creating something — a text, an artwork or anything else — we need to pass through a series of stages. For instance, in the academic world, we may be told that following the scientific method requires us to pass through the stages of developing a hypothesis, gathering data, testing the hypothesis, and drawing inferences. Each one of these stages builds on the previous one in a logical progression, and if we follow the process we will eventually have a robust set of findings that are publishable. Even when we don’t do null hypothesis significance testing, we need to develop a research question, review the literature and come up with a conceptual framework, establish the phenomenon and do all kinds of other things that will eventually result in a convincing or compelling analysis. With an artwork like a sculpture, we go from concept to sketch to prototype to a raw cast sculpture that we must sand and polish before it can be put on display. Each stage requires a different set of skills, tools, collaborators.

If this is our understanding of the work we do, it can be easy to be trapped in what we may call a stadial consciousness, where we are aware that we are at an early stage in a process and eagerly awaiting salvation into the higher, more developed stage. Then we will no longer have to feel the discomfort that comes with still having to figure things out, the panic that comes from not having an “elevator pitch,” not having anything to show for our efforts. Salvation implies a temporal rupture that separates experience into a before and after, and if we have stadial consciousness, that is what we are working toward or yearning for. Anything before then carries the blemish of being incomplete, disjointed, ill-informed, not yet good.

Because of this, the working life of writers, artists, researchers can be full of moments of self-loathing, insecurity, feelings of stuckness. We look for that easy fix, the one weird trick that will allow us to get unstuck, experience flow, finally have a breakthrough. Instead we labor over sentences, sketches, shitty drafts. The work proceeds like a series of ebbs and flows, never a watershed moment. Recurrence, not rupture.

Instead of hoping to haste the day when our work will finally be good, what if we stretch out the duration and find comfort in it? If most of the work happens in this time, we should make ourselves at home in it rather than have it fill us with feelings of alienation. One way to achieve such stretching is to ask a different set of questions. Instead of when is it good? we may ask:

• When does it create a space that I feel good in?
• When is it something I enjoy talking about?
• When does it make me laugh?
• When does it get me out of my own head?
• When is it something elegant?
• When is it not boring anymore?

Importantly, these are questions we don’t just ask ourselves, but that we address with others who may usually ask us (implicitly) whether our work is good yet. When we come into situations where our work may be judged according to a stadial conception, we can take the opportunity to instead have the kind of conversation that would actually help us and allows to feel at ease with where we are.

[contributed by Henriette:] Especially with highly ambitious people, there is a risk of trying to be complete. On paper, that sounds like rigor. In practice, it often flattens the work, or even kills it completely.

If we begin to edit out anything that feels too specific, too strange, too provocative, too unproven or too hard to defend, we remove exactly the parts that make the work vital. Those elements are the wild ones. Imbalance creates character, tension, and spice.

“Stretching”— as in postponing the moment of finishing a work and remaining open to other outcomes — can keep the process more vital and more pleasant. Energy becomes a useful angle here. Stretching as a form of energy management.

And energy management is important as artistic work (and perhaps also a scientific work?) will reveal the energy with which it was created. Many artists work based on how things feel rather than whether things are “right”. They operate in ambiguity. It is not about eliminating unknowns, but about gradually shaping a work step by step.

Process creates direction and energy in itself. It is about timing and kairos.

In co-creation processes — where artistic research involves people or more-than-human contributors —the work has to stay flexible in order to allow other directions to emerge during the process.

Journeys, formats of sharing those can be the project with leaving conclusions to the audience. Laurin Böhm's ‘Flößern (In-Fluent)’ An artistic river research and cross-border exchange stretched / floating along the Rhine. https://lina.community/projects/4632b31a-5089-46d4-9621-48d9e714a581/

I don’t think artists enjoy uncertainty per se. It is more that artistic methods are built to function inside it. The real stress is whether I can allow enough stretching to happen, and whether there is enough time/money/space for that big stretching within the work.

Ying-Tzu Lin

What is ‘ the room for reflection‘ in research?

Where to find the room for reflection?

How does this room look like?

As much as flow charts on research methodology, design thinking and survival guides for research writing demonstrate various way of DOING research, the blank space for digest, to reflect in between every stage has rarely being mentioned. At least, no one ever mention it exists to me in my whole academic training.

I come into the realization that reflection takes space in a hard way.

I strolled in street markets for months, documented everything and nothing, feeling lost. Nothing seemed to make sense for ‘the research question‘ I was supposed to answer. I can blame no one because I wrote down that question myself. I collected pieces of everything as told in methodology textbook: still and moving images of public spaces, conversations, gossips and still wondering if I miss something because I don’t understand Dutch well enough. I stared at these pieces of puzzles I gathered, wondering if I still misses the most important things, or they simply don’t come together and I am just fooling around. It’s like when you stared a puzzle for too long, you lost perspectives.

Memories of ‘I thought I was supposed to write but nothing came out of my brain and my finger’ cluttered like a cloud. Then there were countless moments of anxiety. And somehow silver linings always appeared in unexpected moments: during a walk, morning shower, reading something unrelated to my research, while talking to someone and late in the night waiting for sleeps to come. As if only when you take distance from the quest, movement of pieces would activate.

The ‘DOING‘ of research sort of implies actions needs to happen. It’s a product line that one thing goes after the other. The room for reflection signifies the waiting is also parts of ‘DOING‘. Like fermentation process. It takes time for microbes to activate and doing their work. And you need to air the jar from time to time to prevent explosion. The action of airing is creating room for reflection in research. The waiting and airing are seemingly passive yet necessary to have the process complete. One may argue that fermentation in contemporary food industry can be speed up with assist of certain chemistry trick. By now, we should all know that the health risk that came along. So does doing research.

#Vibes, or why an artist in the position of a jester could be a form of #diplomatic_intervention.

In the margins of what must be done and what the author is supposed to do within a tightly prescribed relationship between the market and the author, there exists always a possibility of very interesting, but barely perceptible #self-disclosures. The playtime begins when the #author who is certain she can’t #afford_herself, is #charmed into entering the room by a #joke, even if she does not yet speak (as there nowhere to speak into…). The #artist can expand a #space_of_vitality for this author through the same process by which the artist creates reality: be it on a canvas, or in a film, from the first to the last stroke. This is the #paradox of #agency in practice, for the possibility to emerge, it must be thoroughly integrated into the inner landscape as a possibility. By thoroughly, I mean in all its #utopian_complexity, with its incomprehensible objects, and painful beauty, and boredom, grammar mistakes, and other #deletables that are forbidden by the market. #The_intervention happen when, in order to get into this world, the #artist_breaks_the_rules, and the #author_breaks_the_rules_through_their_own_rules. -Mari 🙃

Ying-Tzu note:

On creating the vibe:

Vibe as a form of mutual care?