Cultural critics are accustomed to commenting on newly released movies or novels, or on the opening of new shows. But thesis defenses, despite being public events, never get a mention. That the world of arts and culture is so indifferent to this academic ritual – unless the candidate is a known Holocaust denier – speaks volumes about the disconnect between media and academic circles, and perhaps also about the crippling effect of hyperspecialization on scholarly research.

 

Research-creation: an emerging yet controversial practice

What actually goes on behind these doors that are never really closed? Two recent thesis defenses offer instructive insights into what is happening on the ground with the development of what has become known as “research-creation.” Of course, the practice of combining the arts and sciences is nothing new. Back in Leonardo da Vinci’s time, there was no clear boundary between the two, their division being a more recent development. Meanwhile, the 20th century has witnessed a series of varied and, at times, circumstantial alliances and separations, as Sandra Delacourt details in her book L’Artiste-chercheur (Editions B42, 2019, accompanied by an AOC article). In 1969, the Experimental University Center of Vincennes (now the University of Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis) began inviting artists to collaborate with researchers. Starting in the 1990s, universities in Quebec took up the mantle of institutionalizing research-creation by opening up standalone art departments to replace now-abolished independent art schools.[note]For a brief and insightful overview of this trend in Canada, see the work of Louis-Claude Paquin and Cynthia Noury (2018 and 2020). For further analysis, see Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), and Pierre-Damien Huyghe, Contre-temps. De la recherche et de ses enjeux. Arts, architecture, design (Editions B42, 2017).[/note] And for the past 15 years or so, a handful of academic programs in France have hosted and funded research-creation theses.[note]Examples include the SACRe program at Université PSL Paris, the EUR ArTeC graduate school, Sorbonne University, CY Cergy Paris University, the University of Strasbourg, Université de Lyon, Université Grenoble Alpes, Aix-Marseille Université and the University of Limoges. The author of this article served as executive director of the EUR ArTeC graduate school between 2018 and 2021. This contribution to the debate is based on his personal experience as a member of numerous defense panels for research-creation theses.[/note]

In the rules for its Postdoctoral Research Creation Fellowship, the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Societé et Culture uses the term “research-creation” to designate “any research process or approach that fosters creation and aims at producing new aesthetic, theoretical, methodological, epistemological or technical knowledge.” It also specifies that “these processes and approaches must include, to varying degrees (depending on the practices and temporalities specific to each project): 1) Creative or artistic activities (design, experimentation, technology, prototype, etc.), AND 2) The problematization of these activities (critical and theoretical analysis of the creative process, conceptualization, etc.).”[note]Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et Culture, Postdoctoral Research Creation Fellowship (B5) FRQSC 2024–2025.[/note]

In France, the emergence of research-creation has faced widespread criticism. Art schools have watched their Canadian counterparts being absorbed by universities and rightly seen this precedent as a direct threat to their independence. Other commentators have decried the fact that research-creation has been elevated to the status of a buzzword without any deeper questioning of the underlying academic rationale.[note]See, for example, Pierre Alferi, Dominique Figarella, Catherine Perret and Paul Sztulman, “Que cherchons-nous ?,” Hermès, La Revue, No. 72, 2015, pp. 41–48.[/note] Behind her proudly reactionary stances, Carole Talon-Hugon is perfectly right to point out, in L’artiste en habits de chercheur (PUF, 2021), that the cross-fertilization of academic research and artistic creation risks spawning an insipid mix of bad science and aesthetic mediocrity, with the de-artification of art and the general vagueness of creative practice corroding scientific rigor.

Rather than cry foul on the basis of supposition, it would likely be more productive to draw on the benefit of hindsight by looking at what is actually happening under the banner of “research-creation,” comparing this with what is being done (both well and less well) in “conventional” theses, and considering what this comparison can teach us about the types of research that our society needs to tackle the unprecedented challenges of our times. That is precisely what this article sets out to do, by peeking behind the door of two recent thesis defenses.

 

An artistic inquiry into e-scooters

 

The first thesis, by Matthieu Raffard, an artist known for his work at the Raffard-Roussel studio, is entitled En flottement libre. Enquête stackographique autour de la trottinette en free floating (Free floating. A stackographical analysis of free-floating e-scooters). The thesis, presented for the degree of Doctor of Arts and Science of Art, majoring in plastic arts, was supervised by Professor Marion Laval-Jeantet and defended at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University on November 10, 2023. Running to 367 pages, the thesis is divided into seven separate chapters, each exploring an operation linked to a specific public problem posed by the rollout of free-floating e-scooters (i.e. scooters that are not attached to docking stations but instead can be rented from anywhere in the city) in Paris between 2019 and 2023. A brief overview of each section is detailed below, giving an idea of what Raffard set out to study and how the research unfolded.

1° Pêcher à l’aimant (Fishing with magnets) tells the story of how, in order to hire an e-scooter, one first had to get hold of one, and how, since the companies that managed them were disinclined to give them away, the best way to do so was to buy a magnet and go fishing for one of the (apparently many) scooters that had been thrown into the Seine. 2° Lire dans les composants techniques d’une trottinette (Studying the technical components of an e-scooter) details the discoveries that were made when two electric scooters were successfully fished out of the Seine and completely dismantled, revealing the otherwise impenetrable insides of these “black boxes.” 3° Apprendre à identifier les différentes façons de garer une trottinette (Learning to identify the different ways of parking an e-scooter) examines an extensive series of photographs of piles of scooters on the streets of Paris, attempting to tease out underlying structures and determine what they teach us about the urban landscape. 4° Transcrire les étapes d’inscription à une application de trottinette électrique (Transcribing the steps involved in signing up for an e-scooter app) offers a step-by-step breakdown of the sequences of gestures involved in signing up for an app, reflecting on what this tells us about our relationships with our smart devices and the infrastructure that lies behind them. 5° Fabrication d’une cage de Faraday (Making a Faraday cage) recounts the construction of an aluminum Faraday cage to shield an e-scooter from the surveillance systems designed to monitor its whereabouts and to transmit data about its usage (and its users). 6° Tirer les cartes d'un tarot de la micro-mobilité (Conducting micromobility tarot readings) details the composition of a set of tarot cards depicting people from different socioeconomic backgrounds and in different occupations using networked e-scooters, as well as a series of readings using these cards. 7° Imaginer une archive des QR codes neutralisés (Imagining an archive of neutralized QR codes) recounts the collection of QR codes on e-scooters that had been “vandalized” by people opposed to the initiative, using a series of short, fictional stories to seek to reconstruct the beliefs and circumstances that might have led these people to void these codes by drawing on them with permanent marker.

The thesis ends with a conclusion, entitled Disparition d’un objet (Disappearance of an object). Here, Raffard reflects on the referendum held on April 2, 2023, in which 89% of Parisian voters supported a ban on free-floating e-scooters in the city after August 31, 2023.

The thesis itself, with its seven separate chapters, is just one of the products of Raffard’s research-creation work. In 2022, an extensive range of documents and artifacts found or created during the course of his research featured in a public exhibition held at the Fondation Fiminco in Romainville on the outskirts of Paris. Many of the photographs included in the thesis come from the art installations shown in the exhibition spaces. The “creation” aspect of Raffard’s approach helped make the research process particularly robust: the research was conducted in at least six phases (beyond the standard exchanges between him and his thesis supervisor): (i) formulating the project, (ii) producing the various aspects of the project, (iii) presenting the findings of the research in the form of an art exhibition, (iv) gathering initial critical feedback, questions and discussion points arising from the exhibition, (v) writing a thesis that was informed and improved by this initial feedback, and (vi) gathering additional feedback during the thesis defense.

 

 

Creating a makeshift paradigm

If we were to judge Raffard’s thesis against the standards typically applied to “scientific research,” we would find that – superficially, at least – it ticks some of the right boxes: he formulates hypotheses, carries out experiments, gathers quantifiable data, goes to great lengths to review previous research, and draws cautious conclusions intended not to pronounce an absolute truth but rather to suggest avenues for future, more detailed research. But to call his approach “interdisciplinary” is by no means enough to situate this thesis within any established scientific discipline.

Academics accustomed to the paradigms of art history, literary hermeneutics, or philosophy will likewise find this thesis hard to categorize. An e-scooter corroded by the waters of the Seine is far from a conventional subject for semantic dissection. No secondary sources provide insight into its meaning. It can be assigned neither an author nor any aesthetic value. It is at once perfectly singular (its fate and its damaged condition make it unique), and perfectly generic and commonplace (it is, after all, just one e-scooter among thousands). The same can be said of the vandalized QR codes, and of the series of gestures involved in registering for an app. Raffard’s approach is to interpret the subject of his research on the basis of hypotheses about its meaning. But here too, his research sits outside the confines of conventional academic disciplines – even those specific to the humanities.

It is perhaps best to acknowledge that this type of approach is not beholden to the standard academic research model. As Thomas Kuhn explained, disciplines that claim scientific status operate within a “paradigm” according to which researchers or doctoral students are generally expected to apply existing, formalized methods to a new subject. But this is not the case here. Research-creation, as illustrated by this thesis, is about having to invent a new paradigm uniquely tailored to the subject in question – or even, as the seven chapters demonstrate, uniquely tailored to each angle of inquiry.

This might sound delusional – and frightfully intimidating. According to Kuhn, paradigm shifts are exceptional events. Not every researcher is Einstein. Yet this is the very challenge facing research-creation practitioners. Rather than taking an established discipline as the starting point, identifying a problem and, if possible, coming up with a solution, research-creation involves taking a particular reality as a starting point, identifying a subject of inquiry and then creating a makeshift, ad hoc paradigm. Such an approach may seem excessively ambitious – radical, even. But it represents our only hope of rising to the challenges of our times. On our present course, we are headed toward inexorable social and ecological collapse. If we are to avoid that immovable iceberg, we must fundamentally rethink and rework our scientific paradigms, our systems of thought, our economic models, our ethical standards, and our political institutions. Research-creation should be seen as a catalyst for transforming our research methods and priorities.

 

From photography to “stackography”

“Stackography” is the makeshift paradigm devised for this particular piece of research-creation. In his career as an artist, Raffard has primarily worked with photography as his medium of expression. His thesis perfectly illustrates the vision of this medium championed by Vilém Flusser in Towards a Philosophy of Photography: the camera creates a new kind of “truth” through its ability to generate, from the object captured in its viewfinder (in this case, an e-scooter), images that are at once all different and all true, all objective and all subjective, depending on the angle from which the object in question is viewed – within a physical world where every perspective possesses the power to serve as a model.

 

“Stackography” applies this same dynamic to a different, collective (operative) medium of representation: the internet. Back in 2015, Benjamin Bratton published The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, introducing “The Stack” as a moniker for a global megastructure comprising six closely interconnected layers – earth, cloud, city, address, interface and user – each with its own, independent system of sovereignty. From an epistemological point of view, “stackography” can be described as the accidental lovechild of Flusser’s philosophy of photography and Bratton’s theory of The Stack.

If Flusser is to be believed, we have emerged from what he calls “history,” an era dominated by the causal and narrative linearity of printed writing: a cause produces an effect in alignment with a viewpoint strictly isolated from other possible viewpoints. We are instead entering an era of “post-history” in which “technical images” (as epitomized by photography) offer multiple perspectives on the same reality, each “true” although at times contradictory, but all not projecting us toward an equally desirable future. Each photograph of the same thing sets it up as an object depicting a slightly different “model” of the future. And it is on these projected models of the future – more or less desirable than the next – that discussions of the “truth” (or, more precisely, relevance) should now hinge, rather than on the relationship between the representation (i.e., the photograph) and the absent/past thing (the referent) that the photograph represents. The various disciplines (and indisciplines) invoked or invented in this research-creation thesis to account for the subject (the e-scooter) admirably exemplify our need to construct multiperspectivist and multiscalar approaches in order to understand (and, if possible, tame) the technical realities that have come into being in the past few centuries, and that now exceed our capabilities to the extent that they threaten the habitability of the Earth, the only place we call home.

 

Proposing a model of artistic creation

As an exercise in research-creation, however, Raffard’s thesis does not merely seek to contribute to – and catalyze – an epistemological revolution in academic research. For it has a loftier ambition: to challenge Hugon-Talon’s bleak prophecy. If it is to achieve that aim, it must also offer up an aesthetic form capable of taking its place in a history of art that is something other than a history of knowledge. In this respect, we can attempt to characterize the works produced during the inquiry into free-floating e-scooters (as exhibited at the Fiminco Foundation) by focusing on four salient features.

1° A pedagogy of humility: The purpose of these works of art is to help their audience make better sense of what surrounds us and makes us what we are. Raffard does this with commendable clarity and honesty – not by imposing moralistic knowledge from a position of superiority, but by sharing questions, doubts, and attempts at elucidation from a position of humility, not only showing the results of his work but also exposing its weaknesses. In that sense, this is an art of unfolding (origami in reverse) that uses aesthetics as a medium of instruction. It is no accident that the words “complicated,” “implicit,” and “explicate” contain the root “pli” from the Latin plicare (“fold”). 2° A dizzying sublime of diffracted agency: The artifacts produced by the Raffard-Roussel studio are much more than mere educational props. Many of these items – both the collected exhibits (the fished-out scooter, the QR codes) and the specially created objects (the Faraday cage, the tarot cards) – possess an aura that radiates out beyond their physical form, making their viewers feel the agencies contained within them. There is something implicit in what these objects radiate – and their sheer presence is such that the act of explanation, far from dampening this feeling, only causes it to become more intense. This feeling can be likened to the sublime in that we experience (un)foldings of diffracted agencies, temporalities and spaces that exceed our capacity for rational thought. 3° An emerging formalism: The art produced by the Raffard-Roussel studio also speaks to a constant search for the “right form,” as evidenced by the Faraday cage and the tarot cards. In each case, functional necessity leads to formal questioning, with a dual caveat: the form can only be emergent (tentative, fragile, provisional, becoming), and it can only emanate from an immanent relationship with the complex, multilayered world of technology (rather than being imposed through a top-down aesthetic judgment made by an artist in a position of superiority). 4° A model of pragmatic autonomy geared toward environmental sustainability: Above all, the “right form” is determined by an ecopolitical aesthetic through which formalism is constrained by a commitment to frugality in the material and economic conditions of production. The first chapter of the thesis sets up magnet fishing as an example of “depolluting art” – an activity that is enjoyable and participatory, that generates/collects objects imbued with the sublime, and that aligns with the imperative of protecting our shared environment. This is the central – even defining – concern of the art produced by the Raffard-Roussel studio, serving as the starting point for the entirety of its aesthetic approach. And it points to an ecopolitical, rather than merely environmental, sensitivity: instead of treating frugality as a constraint, this art envisions it as a springboard from which other forms can emerge (or be salvaged) – forms that are not so much “produced” (in the productivist sense) as received (with care and consideration). If this art is a “model,” it is not because it claims to have all the answers, seeking to impose its conception of beauty and moral righteousness on others. Rather, it is a model because – as Flusser desired – it chooses to adopt a particular perspective on the production of objects that themselves serve as models, according to their compatibility with a desirable future.

 

A literary investigation of financial speculation

The second thesis, by Boris Le Roy, also sheds light on the merits of research-creation, albeit from a very different angle. Entitled De la création littéraire à la spéculation financière. Écrire la finance (From creative writing to financial speculation. Writing finance), it was supervised by Olivia Rosenthal and defended at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis on October 16, 2023. The research is based on interviews with figures from the world of finance, which are restructured, using various literary devices, as a way to challenge the putative transparency of “testimonies” gathered by humanities and social science researchers. These devices include a 200-page-long sentence and extensive Diderot-style dialog, in which two voices (possibly the author’s internal voices) exchange questions and answers, contradict and mock one another, in an attempt to convey how financial derivatives work (an understanding arrived at laboriously) and to explain the underlying mechanisms to readers. Here, dialog is employed as an extremely elegant literary device by which the one-eyed man (Boris Le Roy,[note]Boris Le Roy is the author of several novels published by Actes Sud: L'éducation occidentale (2019), Du sexe (2014) and Au moindre geste(2012).[/note] a novelist trying to grasp the technical minutiae of finance) seeks to explain financial matters to the blind (us) in lay terms. But above all, it serves as a heuristic device that helps the one-eyed man himself see things more clearly, through a process of genuine reflective inquiry.

Le Roy’s creative use of modern literary techniques (such as the 200-page-long sentence) is justified by the fact that researchers find it so difficult to make sense (common sense, practical sense) of derivatives as anything other than the abstract product of mathematical equations. In one interview, a head of legal affairs at a major European bank said that “by 2008, nobody understood the risks associated with these products” (p. 182). Another interviewee – a lawyer who switched to selling financial securities – recounts how she ended up in the trading room: “I don’t understand much of what goes on in there” (p. 254). The “experts” (who are supposed to explain to the one-eyed man how to enlighten the blind) admit that they themselves are beset by blind spots and do not fully comprehend the implications of what they do. As Le Roy points out, people from the world of finance often make these admissions as a way to conceal mistakes, negligence or dubious practices beneath a veneer of incomprehensibility. But this research-creation thesis helps us to spot, pinpoint, observe, unearth, reveal and activate what we cannot understand through our knowledge (academic and otherwise) alone.

The subject of this thesis – financial speculation – sits in a gray area between reality and performative fiction: shifting sands on which Le Roy helps us take tentative steps. Yet this gray area amounts to a staggering $700 trillion – a sum that defies understanding. How can we even begin to grasp an amount of money on this scale? How can we truly “understand” what it is, and what could be done with it – if it actually existed? In reality, of course, it does not “exist” in the same way as a field of potatoes exists. Our minds simply cannot comprehend how it exists or how it functions. This is precisely where research-creation comes into play.

One of the interviewees is Elie Ayache, a financial market-maker and theorist, as well as a poet and philosopher,[note]Ayache is the co-founder of financial analytics firm ITO33. He is also a writer, philosopher and theorist of literature and finance, having authored two seminal books: The Blank Swan: The End of Probability (Wiley, 2010) and The Medium of Contingency: An Inverse View of the Market (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).[/note] who neatly sums up the merry-go-round of reversals that send our common-sense compasses haywire:

[W]hen a crisis hits the markets, it’s the futures products that drive the price of the underlying, not the underlying that drives the derivative [...] the underlying is in fact a derivative on its future price [...] the price of IBM today depends on how I think IBM will perform in a year’s time; I see it as a product that derives from its own price; it bites its own tail. (p. 237)

This mind-boggling merry-go-round between reality and performative fiction, which operates in the gray area of financial speculation, is the very thing responsible for the incomprehensible figure of $700 trillion. What this thesis demonstrates – and dismantles – in practice is the value of research-creation in bringing us as close as possible to the core of the reactor that feeds and drives this merry-go-round of reversals. Through its emphasis on meaning, creative writing provides us with a fleeting grasp of the “effective reality” (in the sense of the German Wirklichkeit) of finance – something that inductive or deductive reasoning can formalize mathematically but cannot usefully interpret in a way that makes sense.

 

A fictional derivation of reality

Staying with the literary theme, it is useful to look beyond the meaning of “derivative” in its technical, financial sense and to consider its etymological roots. The English verb “derive,” and the associated noun “derivation,” come from the Old French deriver (“flow out” or “spill over”), which can be traced back to the Latin phrase de rivo (de [“from”] and rivus [“stream”]). In other words, when a river “derives” in the original meaning of the term, it “spills over” its banks, “flowing out” from its intended confines. This process of “derivation” is a series of unpredictable reversals: the water does not always flow out where you expect it to. Le Roy’s use of artistic devices in this thesis is in itself an act of literary “derivation,” consisting of “overspills” that are at once controlled and troubling. The sentence that “flows out” over 200 pages is merely one device among many – albeit the most eye-catching example, serving as the standard-bearer for the author’s literary endeavor. But it would be nothing more than a gimmick were it not part of a multidimensional proliferation of similar “overspills.”

The thesis itself gradually “spills over” into the realm of fiction. Le Roy uses the example of the forward purchase of a pair of shoes as an analogy for the frighteningly abstract mechanisms behind financial derivatives. He plans to offer the shoes to his “drunk” friend in a parking lot, where other friends who might be interested in buying them are also gathered. He returns to this example repeatedly throughout his thesis, in order to show how a change in circumstances modifies the terms of the contract offered to his drunk friend, while also altering the bets made with the other friends on predicting (and/or ensuring) the various possible outcomes. However, a detour via Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Sandcauses this example to “spill over” into fiction, as the parking lot is first buried in sand, then struck by a tornado, then flooded, and finally becomes the scene of a drowning incident, causing the protagonists to prioritize their own survival over any considerations of financial gain (p. 240 et seq.).

The reversal is reversed: Ayache is probably right to point out that “the underlying is in fact a derivative on its future price,” but when the underlying threatens your very survival, neither the Black-Scholes model nor the price of shoes holds any worth. Research-creation allows for a brief fictional interlude (fewer than 10 pages) that sets the record straight on a reality that so many economics theses keep at an (excessively) safe distance. So much so, in fact, that there is a public-interest argument for requiring every such thesis to “spill over” momentarily into fiction with a tornado scene in order to show that the laws of finance only apply “outside tornadoes.”

In another act of literary “derivation,” Le Roy uses ChatGPT to write part of his thesis. But rather than view this approach as an act of deception, laziness or betrayal, or indeed a breach of the author’s academic research agreement, we should instead see the four pages of content produced by this Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) as an example of artificial intelligence that both surpasses our epistemological expectations and transcends our political positions. For although ChatGPT answers the interview questions in clichés, it proves to be just as skeptical about financial derivatives as the humans who oversee the transactions.

Almost all of the human interviewees report being ready to walk away from their jobs (one to retrain in forestry, another to complete a master’s degree in textiles and a third to sign up for a creative writing course!). OpenAI’s synthetic intelligence system, meanwhile, hints at a different kind of desertion: its advice is to “rethink existing economic systems and adopt a new, sustainable and responsible financial paradigm [...] based on environmentally friendly practices and circular models [as well as] local currencies” (p. 233). A new paradigm, indeed. With just a few clicks of a mouse, this experiment in automated writing shows that GPTs – themselves an act of literary “derivation” – have already come surging past critics of finance (including those who denounce it on environmental grounds), leaving them in their wake. Le Roy pushes the concept of “overspill” a little further: the subtle echoes between the text he is supposed to write himself and the content he draws from OpenAI’s neutral networks sows a seed of doubt in our minds. Because in a world dominated by financial markets and generative AI, we begin to ask ourselves a fundamental question: Who is the puppet and who is the puppeteer?

 

Research-creation as an exercise in learning to recalibrate

This second thesis, like the first discussed earlier, suggests that the main value of research-creation lies in its ability to catalyze the emergence of new, ad hoc paradigms. In Le Roy’s literary inquiry into financial derivatives, this paradigm draws on Ayache’s longstanding hunch that computational devices – no matter how powerful and engorged with data they may be – are inherently limited by their strictly statistical nature. They simply recalculate and recombine data or patterns provided for them. For all their astonishing capabilities, these machines simply cannot compete with human traders, who possess the unique ability to constantly recalibrate their decisions based on changes in their environment, dramatically adjusting the weightings that had previously guided their choices. When the parking lot is flooded by a tidal wave, the protagonists radically recalibrate their previous bets on the gains they could expect from buying a pair of shoes when their survival becomes a question of every man for himself.

Ayache’s brilliant insight, which Le Roy is quick to embrace, is that the act of writing a sentence is a process of recalibration akin to that performed by a trader. And because our bodies have made us perceptive to an almost endless number of micro-indicators that shape and influence our pleasure and pain, our hopes and fears, our certainties and doubts, we are able to recalibrate our sentences in ways that a machine – which merely recombines data and cannot feel physical pleasure or pain – can never hope to match. Ayache argues that this capacity for recalibration cannot be explained by stochastics, randomness, or Brownian motion. It is a power guided by internal intuition – one that categorically cannot be reduced to lines of code. For only a sentient body in motion in a sentient world, itself in motion, can speculate on an anticipated future by constantly recalibrating parameters and their respective weightings.

Le Roy’s thesis, which sits at the nexus between creative writing and financial speculation, sheds lights on a uniquely human trait: the ability to translate our animal sentience into fully formed and meaningful sentences. ChatGPT can, of course, combine words to form sentences through a process of statistical induction, wherein the respective weightings are constantly adjusted at the margins within the latent space provided by OpenAI. But the way Le Roy writes his sentences (just like the way the drunkard staggers home) stems from the continuous recalibration of his curiosity, immersed as he is in sentient and cognitive experiences that unfold over time. Through this exercise in research-creation, he is able to simultaneously conduct research on two mutually illuminating, challenging, and enriching fronts: the composition of Le Roy’s sentences serves as a literary testing ground for the recalibration processes discussed in the analysis of financial speculation mechanisms (as interpreted through Ayache’s insights).

What, therefore, is the value of this kind of doctoral research? From a literary studies perspective, the parallel Le Roy sets up between creative writing and financial speculation sheds fascinating new light on what happens when a writer writes a sentence. From a civic education perspective, the thesis provides valuable insights – narrative and partly rhetorical, i.e., literary – into the structure of derivatives: a $700 trillion market that plays such an important and mysterious role in the (at times perverse) workings of the global economy.

Or, to return to our original question about the risks and merits of research-creation, it helps us recalibrate the criteria by which we judge the value and profitability of a thesis. It provides us with a heuristic approach for taking account of out-of-model uncertainties. And it teaches us to plan ahead for the social and environmental tornadoes that loom far beyond the traditional horizon of our established disciplines and their predetermined paradigms.

There is no magic formula for research-creation. It can without doubt, as Talon-Hugon fears, spawn an insipid mix of bad science and aesthetic mediocrity. But if we are to believe what happens behind the (open) doors of a few thesis defenses, unfairly overlooked by our cultural critics and commentators, it also has the power to breathe new life and energy into academic research.

 

This article was first published in French in the online newspaper AOC, March 18, 2024. We thank AOC for the authorization to publish and translate it.