TD or not TD, that is the question (or not)
Posted on November 10, 2021What are we learning here? What capabilities have we acquired in the past 10 weeks? Based on my experience so far, one of the capabilities that is cultivated through this program (MFA Transdisciplinary Design (TD)) is what I have once read in a book [1] called “Negative Capability.”
According to English poet, John Keats, who coined the term in a letter in the early 1800s, “Negative Capability” is a capability, “which Shakespeare possessed so enormously,” of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” [2] While the commonly used term “capability” (or “positive capability” as it should be called in this context) refers to the ability to achieve something or solve a problem and is associated with some action, “Negative Capability” is the ability to not rush for an answer or into action. In the face of complex social problems that TD program is focused on, this kind of “patience” can play an essential role in dealing with those problems.
It was another book titled Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway that reminded me of “Negative Capability”. It seems that the term could be described as an ability to stay “with the trouble.” In the book, Haraway relates string figures to stories:
“they propose and enact patterns for participants to inhabit, somehow, on a vulnerable and wounded earth. My multispecies storytelling is about recuperation in complex histories that are as full of dying as living, as full of endings, even genocides, as beginnings. In the face of unrelenting historically specific surplus suffering in companion species knottings, I am not interested in reconciliation or restoration, but I am deeply committed to the more modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together. Call that staying with the trouble.” [3]
To use a metaphor of string figures, which I used to enjoy a lot in childhood, “Negative Capability” could be described as an ability to stay away from trying to unravel or even cut the strings of a game that has become intricately entangled at some point, but to look at it carefully from various angles and different distances and to savor it as it is.
I really like the name of the program, “Transdisciplinary Design”, because I don’t know what that means. Not that I have no idea what it means, but I don’t have a clear and concise definition of it in my mind. In this sense, at least, I believe I have a certain level of Negative Capability, and so do many in the cohort, I suppose. (I doubt any of us chose this program with a clear understanding of what it is about.) However, I must confess that I still find myself a little confused about the structure of the curriculum and the content and the way the classes are carried out as I am halfway through my first semester. And because of the situation and the name of the program, I always have a hard time explaining what I am doing in my graduate program to people outside, such as my family and friends. Yet, even those experiences might be part of the training on my Negative Capability.
In another letter, Keats writes about being a poet:
“it is not itself – it has no self – it is everything and nothing – It has no character … It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no Identity – he is continually in for and filling some other body – The Sun, – the Moon, – the Sea and men and women who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute… If then he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more? … It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature – how can it, when I have no nature?” [4]
I’m not trying to be poetic, but I would suggest the “poet” in this quote could be replaced with “transdisciplinary designer (TDer)”. In particular, “it is not itself – it has no self – it is everything and nothing – it has no character” sounds like a riddle with no answer, but it seems to accurately express the character (or ideal attitude?) of a TDer. Furthermore, one of the roles of a TDer as a design practitioner may be to cultivate what may be called “Collective Negative Capability” of the community in which they are involved. Therefore, the TD program might be a place to learn how to cultivate “Collective Negative Capability” of communities while fostering one’s own Negative Capability. Although I admit that It is strange for someone who does not know the meaning of TD to write something like this, I would like to continue writing, believing that writing itself is a way to figure out my own definition of “Transdisciplinary Design”. I have a sense that more things I would like to write about are about to emerge.
–KK
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1. Hosei Hahakigi, Negative Capability (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun Publications Inc., 2017)
2. John Keats, ”Letter to George and Thomas Keats（12/22/1817）”, in: Scudder, H. ed. The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats (The Cambridge Edition,1899), 277
3. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. (NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 10
4. Keats, “Letter to Richard Woodhouse (10/27/1818)”, 336