Month: October 2021

From Nick

Our conversation with Christy Wampole and her “Essayism” seminar probed the various genric options available for essay writing, particularly those which emphasize visual and other extratextual elements. Before diving into the Kevin B. Lee pieces, Christy opened with a set of questions regarding the relative dispositional conservatism, or traditionalism, of the different disciplines in which we were trained. What writing practices, research procedures, and argumentative styles become naturalized––and which are demoted––as disciplines crystallize in the pages of scholarly journals, the training of graduate students, and so on? We all shared our respective anxieties about potential professional or reputational consequences if we were to regularly engage in more meditative forms of scholarly intervention. Grace and Christy both mentioned the importance of acquiring a certain rhetorical and linguistic mastery, in the normative valence of that word, before more experimental approaches can be pursued. Fedor rightly noted that, as teaching assistants, we are told to evaluate students on the basis of a front-loaded, “strong” thesis statement that conceals the rhizomatic pathways of thought from which the argument emerged. As Christy suggested, this may be a contemporary byproduct of the humanistic fear of “compromised rigor,” an echo of our conversation with Graham on status envy at the beginning of the semester. Our conversation then briefly pivoted to the alternative modes of academic engagement (Twitter, public history) that have proliferated in the last decade and how this causally relates to Christy’s “essayification” paradigm. Christy and others mentioned the glacial temporality of academic article and book publications, the imperative to “respond” to ever-mutating political or social developments, and, most crucially, the vanishing of stable academic career prospects as possible explanations. We then turned our attention to the video essay materials Christy assigned. Christy and Paul highlighted the degree of technical finesse required both to produce and to interpret these essays. Paul’s comment and Christy’s response echoed Miklós Kiss’s own admonition that “one cannot posit an equivalent relation – and, thereby, a fully reciprocal adaptability – between textual and AV communication of the same information, as their distinctive media work very differently through their performative dissimilarities and idiosyncratic affordances” (108). One takeaway from our discussion of the video essay-form is the importance of pluralizing our reading practices as interdisciplinary scholars. Being able to dexterously move between visual, textual, auditory, and filmic mediums, and questioning their formal boundaries, could raise profound, and vexing, questions about the inversion of the theory-method/object of study divide we discussed in our session with Erin. Two of Christy’s students followed this thread, considering the degree to which the Kevin Lee essay simultaneously conceals and exhibits its technological apparatus, its formal structuring, the practical and discursive “work” that goes into the multimodal construction of an “argument.” Utku ended our class with a provocative and productive question about the dangers of essayistic subjectivism, the tyranny of the “I,” that lurk beneath the surface of non-normative writing styles. Christy concurred––the most effective and affecting essays do not strive to obliterate the subject, but also do not reify it as the sole locus and receptacle of ideational content. The ability to mediate multiple registers of phenomenal, social, and aesthetic experience through the process, rather than the product, of writing could help us refuse choosing between empiricist or speculative-introspective rhetorical strategies.

From Utku

This week, we have focused on the concept of “essay,” both as a specific literary genre, but also as a method of producing and sharing knowledge. Since Montaigne and Bacon, essay has been associated with a literary genre, a specific artistic product that had its proper conventions and limits—though, the idea of essay itself suggests that essay always redefines its own conventions and limits.

Today, interestingly, essay seems to go beyond the limits of textuality and becomes a defining feature of modern individuality. As Professor Wampole mentions in her essay “The Essayification of Everything,” we are increasingly more skeptical of certainties, absolute truths, long commitments, as we become less and less capable of paying sustained “attention” (Week 1 and our discussion with Graham) to pretty much everything around us.

We want to collect experiences, memories, little snippets of knowledge, with the hope that perhaps one day all these might come together and make a meaningful whole. Or maybe, similar to our skepticism of absolute truths, we are also skeptical of any “meaningful whole” (we are all “ironists” in Richard Rorty’s (1989) language. It is hard to arrive at a final judgment on the question whether we are “delaying” our commitments and judgements on truths in life until our “essays” will bring together a grand narrative, or whether we are genuine “essayist,” i.e. enjoying the suspension of any final truths, serious commitments, and paying sustained attention to anything.

I believe that essay perfectly embodies that tension in itself. On the one hand, it tends to fractionalize, make mundane, make conversational, and introduce a certain “lightness” to its topic. On the other hand, it is not meaningless ramble, but it has a tendency to “concentrate on and intensify” the meaning of the topic at hand, as Kevin B. Lee indicates in “The Video Essay: Lost Potentials and Cinematic Futures” (is essay film meaningless vlogging, or can it pass as serious cinema?). Thus, essay is a great way of investigating the boundaries between serious scientific inquiry loaded with jargon and “less serious” ways of meditating on a subject. Personally, I think that “essayifying” my research in this sense (exploring the boundaries between “serious” and “less or non-serious”) should be one of the essential features of my dissertation project. That is why I found our discussion very productive.

Another issue we have mentioned during the class discussion was the “loneliness” of the scholar. Professor Wampole reminded us of the fact that how solitary we are when trying to produce an academic research that is supposed to have a certain language, style, rules of citation, etc. In contrast, essay opens up the the writing to a wider audience (at least potentially, and stylistically). A lighter and more colloquial writing seems to invite the uninitiated to the conversation. Thus, I thought that one can say that essay seeks “friends” while “article” (as an antithesis of essay) seeks “students.” Academic jargon creates hierarchies, while essay seeks a more egalitarian dialogical space. Remember that we described understanding as a capacity to “wonder collectively,” to paraphrase Graham. Perhaps essay contains the possibilities that enable us to wonder collectively. Thus going forward, essay as a way of producing knowledge will be an important method that I will think more about.

Some synoptic thoughts here; see also Ayluonne’s reflections below on our discussions in week 6.

We have had a few basic metaphors in play over the six weeks so far. One is field, where the discipline is imagined as a territory. It may overlap or underlap with others—that is, disciplines may share or dispute the same terrain, or they may concentrate their attention on particular problems tractable to their practices and leave (socially, politically) important gaps in-between. Those diagrams from Jacobs are useful:

a) is the “siloed” academic landscape; b) is Campbell’s 
idealized fish-scale pattern of disciplinary coverage; 
you can imagine c) a diagram in which the scales overlap 
wantonly, as a figure of Taylor’s critique of disciplinary 
redundancy. See Jabobs 14ff.

If a discipline is a territory, how does it mark and control its boundaries? How far do the languages of nationalism and colonization help us understand those relations? Another important metaphor, or perhaps metonymy, for discipline is method. Disciplines are not defined by the map of their objects, but rather by the way they do things. This was a particularly important framework for Huang. We thought just a bit about a discipline as a game, an account that allows for the boundedness of its practices and its quasi-autonomous values. Are there others that would be useful? For example, from Bourdieu (a student of the academic landscape), habitus.

We have also seen a few different basic approaches to managing the relation among disciplines. One is methodological transfer, applying a method from one discipline to the material of another (as with game theory and early modern Chinese literature). Another is translation, rearticulating a problem native to one discipline in the language of another. The distinction between the two perhaps wants more thought?—as does their distinction from something like interdisciplinary leverage; perhaps we want a better word for that, but the basic idea is adopting the perspective of one discipline to renew and/or critique the approach of another. The relation between the two can be more or less dialectical: that is, one can hold one term steady (e.g. applying the lessons of COM to EAS), or allow them to reshape each other (resulting in an account of COM as European area studies). All of these approaches depend upon the differences of the existing disciplines and the gaps between them, understanding those gaps to be spaces of work and thought (whether opportunities, or urgencies). We also have thought about something like the Mark Taylor critique, that the disciplines need to be dismantled in order to reorganize research around problems, and to respond, in hiring and in the allocation of resources, to how those problems change over time. And we have from Marshall Brown our strongest resistance to the problem-based strategy, an alternative that is difficult to name, but that might be considered antidisciplinarity, preferring occasions and opportunities to programmatic or systematic reform, and seeking alternate genres (e.g. fiction) for expressing ideas and persuading readers. As we observed, Brown also seemed to be the most comfortable within his discipline, Architecture, because its historical and contingent character provided better cover for his work than a rationalized, team-based, neoliberal workplace might.

Speaking of neoliberalism—a critical relation toward neoliberalism has been a recurring theme, a promising orientation for the humanities broadly construed, or even a definition: the humanities allow for the study and cultivation of alternative values (cultural, aesthetic, etc.). We all have sympathy with this view (Wendy Brown being the strongest voice we have heard), but also some concern that the opposition, drawn too sharply, allows the academy to mis-recognize the ways in which its practices are implicated. That concern aligns with reservations about the promotion of critique as the humanities’ basic project, a powerful version of which we heard from Judith Butler early on. Should the humanistic project be defined by its restlessness with premises? Whether or not that is essential—how often do we live up to that account? At the same time, the clean (and of course polemical, and strategic) separation the AAUP proposed between politics and the disciplines seemed like an obvious and potentially dangerous error. We have more thinking to do about this debate and the productivity of its terms in 2021.

A handful of other terms have been prominent. One is knowledge, and how to define it in a humanistic context; what the place of positivist knowledge is in relation to projects of critique and interpretation. Are the humanities too deferential to a scientistic account of what knowledge is and how it is represented? Graham Burnett preferred “understanding,” and that ideal of “being surprised together.” Another term is experience, and the question of whether the humanities renew themselves by insistent contact with the somatic, affective encounters that ground disciplinary concepts. Devin Fore’s showed us, for example, how Kluge gives “phenomenological depth” to questions of political economy. (A phrase that just now strikes me as paradoxical!—but maybe usefully so.) Finally, recurring but still wanting development, is the idea of access. Who gets to participate in disciplinary inquiry, and in what ways; how do the disciplines access one another? What is the relationship among their constitutive barriers: barriers to entry, barriers to (criteria for) credentials and awards, barriers among and against one another? How would thinking about access as a sociopolitical question affect the exchange of people, ideas, knowledge within and across and beyond disciplinary formations?

And just a few more terms that have cropped up and might bear further, future thought. Aesthetics: for which disciplines does the category matter; how much disciplinary judgment can be explained in terms of an aesthetics of production? (What looks good to disciplinary citizens, how it can be made to look good?) Memory: is memory a basic humanistic task (and under what aspect: archive, testimony, etc.); what are the different ways different disciplines keep it, and lose it? Childhood: we haven’t figured out a way to activate this concern yet, but it is shared by many of us: how might disciplines converge on childhood; what sort of model might childhood offer us for thinking interdisciplinarily (pre-disciplinarily?).

From Ayluonne:

Professor Dolven began last class by running through the dramatis personae of the four visitors we have so far encountered and their practices for living among “the disciplines.” These strategies included generatively redefining/partially protecting the disciplinary boundaries between humanistic and scientific knowledge, tracing where disciplines saturate one another in the case studies of particular intellectual objects, and seeking a form of anti-disciplinarity which is safely (if counterintuitively) nested within a singular discipline. 

In our discussion of Professor Erin Huang’s personae, we once again explored the importance of ‘the gap’ and the power of staying in the negative. We largely argued that Huang presented the fruitful merits of allowing disciplines to clash and how one could explore issues which span epistemological boundaries from a point of disjunction rather than conjunction—from where epistemologies misfit. Later on, we placed Huang’s work in conversation with Wendy Brown’s “Neoliberalized Knowledge” and probed the connections and disconnections. Wendy Brown’s “Neoliberalized Knowledge”  illuminated the potential neoliberal logics within Huang’s own bibliographic kinship technique. Fedor further drew our attention to the potential faults in Brown’s own recuperative critique of the humanities, which suggests a purity to the humanities and their past. Fedor highlighted that this recuperation is impossible to reconcile with today’s treatment of the Western Cannon as a colonial and imperial artifact. We landed on this: Brown is still a thinking partner of ours. Where in our own critical interventions would she critically intervene?

Following the break, Professor Devin Fore joined us, and we launched several inquiries into the general framework of Kluge’s History and Obstinacy and Fore’s process of translating the work. Fore explained his particular orientation towards Kluge as one of genuine curiosity and marvel at having found a largely unknown intellectual endeavor. (“It was as if Kluge was whispering in my ear.”) After establishing Kluge as interested in the specificities of the German public sphere of production, Fedor prompted an exploration of the quote on Pg. 121 in which Kluge quotes Marx’s definition of critique: a mode of articulating a field of engagement rather than critique against a particular ideology; critique is furthermore a parsing, while production is part of the continuous realm of transformation. “What is counterproduction, and how do you do it?” also emerged as questions worth wrestling with together, perhaps in our respective lives and works as well. 

Along this line, we engaged Anthropology as one of the disciplines that Kluge may have indirectly engaged since his empirical engagement with the political ecology of labor was phenomenological and his analysis nested the activity of labor within a field of capitalist ethos, telos, and materiality. In other words, Kluge showcased how abstract notions of labor and capital have real force in generating realities which exceed the sites of labor and produce an “abundance of experience” (Kluge 126). Paul also raised the question of how the broader field that was the 1980’s refracted within Kluge’s work, and whether the socio-political ambience of the 21st-century reader would refract differently?

As a way of condensing the remainder of the class period, which was rich in discussion, I will center on the figure of the female pipe welder as a subject-object to explore the additional themes. Focusing on the pipe welder’s act of stretching as a site of obstinacy, rather than counterproduction, Professor Dolven drew our attention to how said the strategic act was always rooted in the somatic. Between several of us, we raised the question of whether obstinacy (here, stretching) is self-will working against the horizon of historical materialism or whether it is depersonalized? How does this distinguish from subjectivity; is it incompatible with that framework, in the Anthropological sense? Is there a disciplinary gap in our understanding of subjectivity?

Lastly, at the start of the session with Fore and at its end, we discussed Kluge’s intellectual universe and genealogies. Fore traced Kluge’s analytical and disciplinary lineage as moving alongside and against Adorno and Lukács, and as looping in Deleuze’s conceptions of the virtual and actual while not stating these influences explicitly. One interesting point that we wondered aloud was whether “there was [and always is] something in the air”—the humbling notion that there is no originality in thought. Could ideas, in this case, ever be owned?

From Monica

In this week’s seminar, methodology was central to defining disciplines and interdisciplinarity, and addressing the “gaps” between disciplines. Erin Huang, working at the intersection or “gap” between East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, talked about the experience of navigating different disciplinary expectations in her respective fields. Huang saw Comparative Literature as a type of European area studies that emerged as a utopian cosmopolitan project in Europe, whereas area studies, including East Asian Studies, emerged after WWII and is tied to U.S. military global surveillance projects. From these extremely different disciplinary histories, Huang situated herself as a crossroads in order to study the political theory of horror and its socio-political sentiments. What positioned her in the gap between these two disciplines was her need to redefine or expand definitions for existing concepts. The way she writes about “horror,” for example, falls outside of the traditional Euro-American genre that is recognized by Comparative Literature. Similarly, the way she talks about China, especially its connection to neoliberalism, falls outside of traditional modes of understanding China in East Asian Studies. She relied on a discipline outside of East Asian Studies to expand the definition of China and a discipline outside of Comparative Literature to expand the understanding of horror. In this sense, interdisciplinarity allows one to study what one wants without being confined to the boundaries of a discipline.

For Huang, this interdisciplinarity allowed her to create an entire genealogy that did not previously exist, such as that of neoliberalism in China. Neoliberalism, as she notes, commonly refers to American neoliberalism, which is an issue that perhaps has less to do with disciplinary boundaries and more to do with the imperialism of Euro-American academia more generally. Huang encourages us to really unpack terms like neoliberalism, which lack specificity and are used differently by different fields. We talked about the need to really articulate the gap between theory, text, and experience in negotiating the definitions for such terms and in negotiating the forms of power that control hegemonic definitions in the first place. Other examples Huang gave for these loosely defined terms in need of attention were: “cold war vs. post-cold war” (in order to question continuities and discontinuities in the language we use) and “colonialism vs. semi-colonialism” (to articulate the power of language in defining words like “colonialism” through colonial language).

Moreover, the question of language and expanding definitions for concepts like “neoliberalism” was brought up in relation to Classics as a discipline, and pre-modern, pre-capitalist studies more generally. Do these types of terms have a place in Classics? How do we use these terms without collapsing the gaps between fields? Huang noted this was a great example in terms of trying to articulate the gap, wherein pre-modern, pre-capitalist examples could bring new, exciting perspectives to existing languages and concepts. Furthermore, the tension between defining these concepts locally vs. globally is also important to keeping the concepts alive and meaningful in their usages. Considering the political pressures to stay inside the boundaries of a field, questioning disciplines based on their language and concepts seems like a daunting yet important “methodology” for interdisciplinary work and to expand the way we imagine modes of knowledge. At the end, Dolven left us with a related question: Can we consider method as fore-knowledge?

From Fedor

We began this week’s discussion by following up on Marshall Brown’s idea that urbanism can be called a “set of strongly held beliefs.” Ayluonne highlighted the tensions that exist between Brown’s formulation of urbanism and urbanism as a socio-historical paradigm, while Angelika pointed us to the tensions that lay distinctly around the borders between disciplines and the built/non-built environment. The class then moved to a broader discussion of Brown’s action-bias critique, and Brown’s distinct preference for framing projects as narratives rather than problems that require solutions.

Following the break, we were joined by professor Erin Y. Huang. Huang immediately pointed us towards her interest in methodology, especially as it intersects with her own disciplinary position in the university. Split between an East Asian Studies (75%) and a Comp Lit (25%) appointment, Huang narrated the ways in which these disciplines affect the methodological perspectives of her work. She addressed briefly the historical afterlives that disciplines hold — in relation to both Area Studies and Literary Studies — and how working between two disciplines with very different senses of historical perspective can open up certain theoretical “gaps” that she finds generative for her own scholarship.

Our discussion of productive disciplinary gaps continued to widen as we began a conversation about cross-cultural analysis. In discussing “neoliberalism” as a productive “Western” concept that, in Huang’s book, can be applied also to China, she fruitfully pointed us to the implicit tensions that arise between theory and geography. With a particularly productive question (“is Marx German?”) she was able to point us to the theoretical gaps that arise when theory is read from a global perspective or from a local one. She stressed the importance of not having to solve for either the local or the global: the tension between the theory and the source material can and should be productively explored in the interdisciplinary space, and it is the work of a responsible scholar to undertake that task.

We finished the class with a discussion of the image, which Huang noted to be a particularly fraught topic in film studies. She concluded with a particular striking account of how her work always begins with the “technical materiality” of the image: a process that involves an unpacking of how the image was taken, how it circulated, what community it was from and who it was for — it is from this solid ground, Huang noted, that the the more theoretical work can begin.

From Hazal:

In the first part of our discussion last week, we approached some of the main questions, that we inherited from our earlier conversations throughout the semester, in the light of Jacobs’ rather conservative defense of disciplines and disciplinary boundaries. Prominent among these questions were the problem of “knowledge production” as a paradigm of humanistic research, and the dualisms ranging from objectivity vs. subjectivity to collaboration vs. autonomy that have long been central for making and remaking of the boundaries between “sciences” and humanities.

While Joyce set up our discussion by inviting us to think the extent to which we achieve to go beyond our disciplinary silos even in interdisciplinary settings such as our seminar, Fedor drew our attention to the circularity of Jacobs’ argument for defending disciplinary boundaries with reference to already existing institutional logics that assert disciplinary boundaries as efficient mechanisms to “manage” the “knowledge unmanageable.” Our focus on “manageability of knowledge” and/or lack of universal language across disciplines that are becoming increasingly self-referential brought questions pertaining to profit vs. social good and instrumental vs. ethical research that we identified earlier to the center of our discussion. We discussed objectivity claims’ relationship to logic of profit; the political economy of disciplinary boundaries and in what ways they correspond to capital’s interest; universities’ tendency to prioritize institutional interests over public good; and implications of all these for interdisciplinary research. Likewise, we discussed in what ways institutional factors that separate disciplines from each other are also complicit in demarcation of boundaries between academia as the site of “knowledge production” and wider society, and how interdisciplinary research can complicate this multiplicity of boundaries while also rendering knowledge more accessible. The conversation we started with a focus on knowledge “production” and different forms it takes in the opposite ends of the listed dualisms opened up new questions pertaining to reproduction, circulation, and accessibility of the knowledge produced, such as: What does interdisciplinarity mean for pushing the boundaries of academia itself, particularly as they pertain to who is included/excluded from configurations of knowledge production to whose benefit? Is interdisciplinary research simply about a dialogue across disciplines (as Jacobs seems to suggest) or an urgent need that derives from a research agenda that prioritizes accessibility of knowledge? Or else, is it the nature of the subject that one studies that turns interdisciplinary lenses into a need?

The second half of our discussion, where we discussed Lefebvre’s chapter on “Industrialization and Urbanization” with Marshall Brown was also a reminder that how the topic in hand can demand an interdisciplinary approach: such as complexities of contemporary metropolitan conditions. Expanding on Lefebvre’s discussion on industrialization, we addressed how complex social problems associated with urbanism and attempts to contain and control urban space paved the way for “invention” of various disciplines such as urban planning and transportation engineering. These emergent disciplines, Brown suggested, involve what he called “industrial savior complex” and/or “an action bias” to “efficiently” respond to various urban problems. Contrasting the diversity and ever-changing character of cities to various disciplines’ rather generalizing formulations of urban landscape, he drew our attention to how disciplinary boundaries that “discipline” our gaze limits our understanding of various configurations and the vitality of “the city.” Similarly, Brown problematized architecture’s claim to produce social realities and underlined that it is rather social, economic, political phenomena that encourage and/or discourage certain physical and intellectual products (not the other way around). Hence, he suggested moving away from the ideals of control, problem solving, and efficiency that mark the disciplines that address urban problems in favor of negotiation between realities and imagination. This latter point, I believe, also relates to disciplines’ investment in and relationship to aesthetics that we discussed at length. Reminiscent of Lefebvre’s emphasis on the ways in which the paintings of artists such as Kandinsky land themselves as instruments of cognition of social space, Brown in his short piece that he shared with us underlines the power of drawings for shaping the urban imagination. In the light of all these, I wonder how the claims to “produce realities” present themselves in other disciplines. What kind of implications does negotiation of social realities and ideals have for interdisciplinarity? Similarly, I am curious to think further about the “aesthetic value” of various forms of knowledge production and how it relates to the diverse ways in which realities and imagination are/can be negotiated.

Drawing on Lefebvre’s formulations, we also discussed use and exchange value of the city and urbanization’s relationship to commodification of space over its use value in diverse settings ranging from western post-industrial towns to neo-liberal authoritarian settings. Beyond our rich discussions on urbanism(s), I wonder how we can address making and dissolution of disciplines and/or the form of knowledge produced by academic research through the analytics of use vs. exchange value. Is academic knowledge production related to use value? Does it produce oeuvres in the way Lefebvre defines them? Or does the neoliberal logic turn campuses into sites of consumption and equip the knowledge produced with exchange value? If so, what kind of implications does this have for our problematization of accessibility of knowledge?

From Angelika

In this week’s seminar with Professor Marshall Brown (Architecture), we revisited several of our recurring themes in this course such as the question of problems and disciplines. To start off the seminar, Professor Brown invited us to consider what field is best equipped to deal with contemporary urbanism. He then explained that many different disciplines, including landscape architecture, architecture, sociology, and engineering, would argue that they were, in fact, the discipline where urbanism belongs. Professor Brown concluded that if all these disciplines were making a case for their ownership, or perhaps expertise in urbanism, then urbanism must belong to nobody.

Professor Brown defined urbanism as something that was not a discipline, but a set of loosely defined, strongly held beliefs. In general, these beliefs were that the contemporary city was a good thing that was also a sort of problem that could be solved, through a process that was definitely not science. When first offered this definition of urbanism, I wondered if there were any other programs or introductory courses at Princeton University that could be described as “a set of loosely defined, strongly held beliefs.” Could “Introduction to American History,” “Introduction to English Literature” or the “Program in Latin American Studies” be, or be guided by, “a set of loosely defined, strongly held beliefs”?

Professor Brown’s conceptualization of urbanism also brought us back to our recurring interests in the interdisciplinary or antidisciplinary of problems. In our discussion on Tuesday, we had already been considering in what way interdisciplinary work such as Professor Keulemans’ might use interdisciplinary methods to solve a motivating problem, without so much working to answer the problems of other disciplines. Professor Brown introduced us to “action bias” which describes the fact that when we perceive a problem, we feel compelled to do something about it, even when we cannot really do anything about it. Action bias could explain urbanists’ perpetual desire to do something about problems such as traffic or crime, despite the fact that urbanists have worked to address the problems for years without actually managing to fix them.

At the end of the class, Professor Brown pulled out his own interdisciplinary objects – little disks with a different problem of urbanism printed on each side such as “crime” and “congestion”. The disks functioned like tarot cards to guide thinking and conversations about contemporary urbanism. The final versions of these disks were in an archive at another university, but Professor Brown had managed to keep these protypes. Of course, making and archiving these disks did not solve the problems they listed. But the little tokens allowed each of us to fulfill our own “action bias”; sliding them across the seminar table and flipping them in our hands we too got to participate in the “set of loosely defined, strongly held beliefs” of which urbanism is made.