From Transdisciplinary to Transpractice

A large literature sorts multidisciplinary from interdisciplinary from transdisciplinary, but the discipline is an artifact of the university.

Enrico Isidori has pushed this ladder further than most. Past transdisciplinary he adds crossdisciplinary, then antidisciplinary, alterdisciplinary, post-disciplinary, undisciplinary and an “off-disciplinary” region for knowledge meant to leave the disciplines behind.⁴ Though, every rung, including the ones built to escape, still ends in -disciplinary. I think it's difficult to prefix your way out of disciplinarity.

Andrew Barry and Georgina Born make the ceiling explicit. Among their three modes of interdisciplinarity, the sharpest is the agonistic-antagonistic: interdisciplinarity “driven by an agonistic or antagonistic relation to existing or prior forms of disciplinary knowledge.”⁵ Even here — the mode that contests the disciplines hardest — the work is defined by what it opposes. The discipline still sets the coordinates. Negation is not an exit.

The exit is not another prefix. It is a different root. Keep trans-; drop -discipline; attach it to practice. Transpractice.

“Practice” is an anthropological unit, not an academic one.⁶ It treats a discipline as one kind of cultural practice among others — particle physics, backstrap weaving, a funeral rite, a mortar and pestle — rather than as the ruler the others are measured against. To name the disciplines as practices is to provincialize them:⁷ to withdraw their claim to be the neutral center from which every other knowledge is ranked. The move has a flattening effect on the culture and the power the older word carries quietly.

The stakes show up at the moment of naming. Ramon Santos calls the very notion of “music” “an inheritance from western European culture,” one that leaves “all other musical traditions… qualitatively and aesthetically disadvantaged.”⁸ Take him at his word and a further question opens under it: a knock on a door, a mortar and pestle, the sounds made after a death — are these even “music,” or a sonic practice the word only strains to hold? Name them “music” and you carry the expectations of Western art music into a room they never lived in. The same happens when a craft with ritual or ludic use enters the white cube as “art” — a modern European boundary⁹ that lifts the object out of the belief systems and rituals that gave it meaning¹⁰ — or when oral folklore is admitted as “literature.” The object gains a room and loses its reasons. Whether the definition of music should expand to hold these sounds, or whether it breaks, or whether the practice should simply be left as itself, I don't know. That the renaming does something — saddles a practice with a burden it never asked for — is the point.

Universities already lean this way. Transdisciplinarity's turn to stakeholders — research subjects reframed as participants — is a half-step toward flattening the hierarchy between expert and non-expert knowledge. Transpractice takes the step the rest of the way, and turns it back on the university: it provincializes the disciplines themselves, into practices. It is a semantic move, and semantics is where this particular fight is decided. Once practice holds the center, the other trans- words have somewhere to stand — translocal, transvernacular, transsubcultural — none of which can mean much while discipline holds it instead.