Month: November 2021

From Monica

For me, one theme that connected last week’s seminar with Professor Glaude with this week’s seminar with Professor Levine, was the idea of the self in disciplinary spaces. In the first hour of class, Hazal brought up the fact that Baldwin’s writings often use distance from a space as a way of reflecting upon that space. This, among other things, led us to ask: How does one inhabit the space of a discipline? Does working within disciplines put us at a slight remove from the object of our study? Are academics mediators or translators? These questions touched upon the fact that Glaude saw it as imperative to “translate” his bibliography, or scholarly knowledge, into a conversation he can have in the broadcasting space. In fact, his definition of a bibliography was “a conversation had across time.” If we are to understand a potentially primary role of the academic as a translator, seen through Glaude’s example or otherwise, then we must also think about whether translating is the end goal, or whether the academic should attempt to entice audiences to look back upon those original bibliographies.

This dilemma also brought about an interesting debate between Hazal and Utku regarding the personal sacrifice that can come about by inhabiting the position of academic/translator, especially considering one’s position/translation can be overly determined by race, gender, etc. How is the self allowed to, expected to, or required to appear in various acts of translating? And do some disciplines rely on the presence of the self more than others? How does our presence inform the scholarship we produce and for which audiences we produce them? It was in response to these types of questions that Dolven introduced another graph, wherein private vs public was on the y-axis, and personal vs impersonal was on the x-axis.

With David Levine’s guidance, we discussed that Adrian Piper’s work, for example, would fall far out into the personal and public category. Levine identified with Piper’s anti-disciplinarity and the way disciplinarity makes one ventriloquize. I wonder also, how being forced to ventriloquize or to speak through the frameworks of a discipline might affect the ability to translate. Levine remarked that his “force as an artist comes from being between disciplines.” In a truly interdisciplinary space, he thought there would not be room for his work to exist. This is due to the fact that he often works with one discipline to push the boundaries (perhaps the boundaries of “bad taste”) of another discipline. For example, Levine wanted to create performances in gallery or museum spaces that confronted the art world with theater’s realist performances, using clear communication and displays of emotion, which were to be unexpected. In some ways, Levine wanted to do this to understand the limits of the space of the performance, saying “these spaces will have their say, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.” Similar to theater and art, Levine highlighted that disciplines assert themselves spatially, as well as through discourse and audience.

In the same way he saw the theater and art worlds as separate technologies designed to create a certain type of person with a certain kind of attention, might we consider disciplines to be similar technologies? By experimenting in the space between disciplines, Levine seems to challenge us to think about the drawbacks of various disciplinary methods and how to work around those to have conversations with the public(s) outside of academia in ways that seem meaningful. He also leaves us with a question that I thought was quite fitting for our seminar: Is interdisciplinarity most effective when unmastered?

From Hazal

We started this week’s discussion building on our earlier conversations regarding possible research strategies, conceptual frameworks, and literary forms that can initiate a dialogue among disciplines which otherwise seem to operate in their isolated silos. Our earlier class discussions drew theoretical frameworks and/or political concepts shared across disciplines forward as common vocabularies on the grounds of which dialogue across disciplines can flourish. On the other hand, this, we argued, comes at the expense of accessibility of social scientific and humanistic research for wider public audiences who would find the conceptual focus alienating. Our discussions throughout the semester added “essayism” that prioritizes ordinary language and experimental writing over conceptual rigidity as an alternative that can make knowledge production more accessible while at the same time bridging the disciplines. This time, however, we were confronted with concerns regarding increasing dissolution of boundaries between academic writing and more journalistic forms of non-academic public writing. Acknowledging public writing’s relevance for social and political praxis, we problematized potential uses and abuses of essayism, questioning the ways in which essayification of knowledge production relates to growing anti-intellectualism especially in authoritarian settings and its relationship to neo-liberal reconfiguration of systems of knowledge production.

Our discussions during this week’s seminar added new layers to all these unresolved tensions. To begin with, in the first half of the class, we reflected on Andrew Cole’s invitation to “simplification” in contrast to the rhetoric of problematization that dominates much of the contemporary humanistic research. Professor Cole’s invitation to “simplification,” we discussed, can help sidestep abstract (and also sometimes moralistic) language dominating humanistic research that hinders accessibility of the knowledge produced. Yet, at stake in Cole’s provocation is more than making social science research more accessible as his call to simplification itself represents a specific theoretical inclination in terms of understanding and experiencing the world. Central to this theoretical inclination is the ontological primacy that he attributes to space in understanding and addressing human condition. Hence, simplification in this framework involves writing from within the space, recognizing where you are, recovering space from writing, attending to material meanings of being in a particular built environment, and responding to those in research and writing.  In this light, in the first half of our discussion, we questioned what other potential non-spatial departure points (such as language and time) for understanding human condition we can think of; what are the merits or limitations of attributing primacy to either of these? To what extent attributing ontological primacy to space may pave the way for rather universalistic and/or essentialist accounts?  We also questioned how Cole’s emphasis on dialectics of space relates to, challenges, and/or goes beyond Marxian historical materialism that he is in dialogue with?

In the second half of the class, we focused on Baldwin’s Take me to the Water and Begin Again by Professor Glaude, where we encountered novel ways of “writing from space.” Both texts involved self-reflexive accounts of what happens to the selves of their authors in historical moments marked by the loss of faith or disillusionment in politics. Building on Baldwin’s emphasis on the interrelationship between the messiness of the world and one’s inner world, Glaude stressed autobiographical framing as a methodological commitment that would allow both for an analysis of overdetermination of social relations by race and also for “imagining a radically different way of being in the world.” This emphasis on inner world in both Baldwin’s and Glaude’s texts goes hand in hand with an interest in the body as a site of configurations of power and resistance that carries the marks of traumatic history while at the same time carrying a chance to begin new struggles again. Hence, I am curious how we can bring this emphasis on body, that registers temporal as well as spatial configurations of power, into a dialogue with Cole’s dialectics of space? What would implications of such a dialogue be for essentialism and universalism that might arise from exclusive focus on space?

During this second half, we also discussed the relationship between academic writing and public speech as a form of public scholarship. For this, Glaude described his engagement with public scholarship as an effort to try to bring the rich bibliography that informs his research into the confines of a sound-bite in order to change the direction of public conversation. Combining his intellectual background with a concern on “how to write of himself,” Glaude suggested, allows him to penetrate various publics at the same time. In Glaude’s and Baldwin’s writing, the potentials of essayistic writing and speech for penetrating into various publics find expression. On the other hand, the parallels and differences between essayism, affective storytelling, and sentimentalism were among the issues we discussed.  While Glaude suggested that presence of emotion on text is different than sentimentalism, he added that separating the two from each other can prove harder in their reception which is beyond the authors’ control. Expanding on perspectives that approach sentimentalism as a way of developing new humanitarian agendas and/or achieving a sense of agency in the face of disempowering conditions by transforming private meaning into a public one (such as Gilroy) and its critiques (such as Arendt who dismisses familiarity with the suffering of others as “politics of pity”), I am curious to think further about essayistic writing’s relationship to sentimentalism and the potentials and limitations this relationship might entail.

From Angelika

Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. is a talented speaker who artfully wove together the history of James Baldwin, the history of his own life, the history of America, and the history of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton. After reflecting on the class, I realized that most of our discussion centered around the various spheres of relationality. First and foremost, Professor Glaude clearly has a strong relationship with James Baldwin, which Professor Glaude works to maintain as a form of dialogue, not reverence. In addition, writing for a non-academic press, and speaking on CNN to a non-academic audience, Professor Glaude works to relate his academic work to the public. He does this largely by maintaining the bibliography, or the “conversation had over time,” and nodding, or alluding to the canonical texts and conversations without engaging in the typical academic practice of signaling knowledge through extensive citation practices, or the simple listing of names in conversation.

Finally, Professor Glaude shared his experience creating the Department of African American Studies at Princeton. I found this story to be perhaps one of the most valuable histories I have learned in a seminar this semester. I was surprised to learn that the Department of African American Studies was founded around the same time as the Department of Neuroscience at Princeton. Professor Glaude argued that their departmental structure and merit were comparable because each department brought together professors with different methodologies to focus on a singular problem. As Professor Dolven noted in class, the case Professor Glaude made for a problem-based department stood in strong contrast to Professor Marshall Brown’s critique of the problem-based approach to urbanism. Personally, I found Professor Glaude’s explanation compelling. Professors with different methodologies collaborating to examine a singular (but of course very broad) problem seems to offer more opportunities for the rapid co-construction of knowledge than the more conventional model, where humanities departments are constructed of individuals who use the same methodology to each examine a very different location, subject, and/or historical period.

I am still mulling over Professor Glaude’s discussion of graduate students in the Department of African American Studies. Professor Glaude said that the department is not taking graduate students because it is unethical, given the current job market. Even though we have discussed the job market extensively in this class, Professor Glaude’s statement clearly shocked many of us. Given the fact that the Department of African American Studies is made up of individuals who are trained in specific methodologies and disciplines other than African American Studies, I wonder how the requirements for maintaining the department might differ from other disciplines. Might the Department of African American Studies feel it possible to be a top-tier department without training graduate students because future colleagues can train in other methodology-based disciplines before joining the department as a professor? In fact, might this multi-methodology construction of the department be advantageous, and something the department does not want to alter?

From Joyce

In the first hour of our discussion, we continued the conversation from the last class (re: Christy Wampole’s “Essayfication of Everything” and video essays). First, Paul talked about whether the emerging formats of virtual/hybrid conferences can create double friction: the seemingly open accessibility can also perpetuate another form of inequity (e.g., the lack of technology).  Along this line of thought, Hazal asked if the rising popularity of content production among video essays/public writing may imply an emerging anti-intellectualism in the society. Furthermore, is public writing now becoming a form of survival (for job applications) for graduate students. Are publications in non-academic formats also becoming a prerequisite for obtaining a tenured- track job? We also spent some time discussing whether public, non-academic writing (e.g., blogs, journalism) should be encouraged, especially for emerging scholars like us. There seems to be ambivalence among the seminar participants, because of potential exposure—no one wants to have a (bad?) reputation before having the protection from an institution. Nick pointed out that part of the beauty of being a graduate student is to be able to say whatever in a seminar room without feeling judged. I pointed out that there are different modes of engagements/production for public writing vs. academic writing formats. For instance, a piece by the New York Times or Wall Street Journal can be widely accessible and easily ‘shared’ on social media. By default, this kind of writing is crafted for instant (and perhaps black or white) reaction, rather a than a nuanced reflection. Jeff beautifully re-phrased my question/observation as the question of Time. Academic writing requires longer time for marination, preparation, and more substantial research; and it also takes much longer for something to be in print. At the end of the conversation, Paul asked whether it is becoming a trend in our own disciplines to have the kind of professionalism where an academic is trained to operate at multiple registers—being able to produce highly academic writing but also accessible public pieces. Is this achievable and desirable?

I raised the question of how to ‘simplify’ the inquiry when my own discipline—music—can be a problematic concept. Cole suggested that I should approach from the materiality of sound, such as acoustics and physics—but I feel that this is branching out of the core IHUM values. I wonder if Cole thinks about IHUM the same way as someone like Graham Brunett, who considers the modes of knowledge production in humanities vs. STEM should be drastically different.

From Paul

In the first hour of our discussion, we revisited our conversation with Christy Wampole to tackle the question of public scholarship. We mapped some of the impulses, disciplinary and otherwise, which make public writing both attractive and risky. Hazal emphasized how much the question of public writing changes depending on one’s object of study: for anthropologists, she noted, public writing about one’s work often has living stakes for one’s research subjects, as well as material consequences for the researcher. Nick flagged the risks that accompany the exposure of public writing, stressing the importance of the “right to be wrong” as a graduate student: academic public writing often involves a performance of expertise which disincentivizes risk-taking, and which makes mistakes all the more consequential. Angela raised the question of what constitutes “proof” in the context of public writing. On the one hand, one needs to back up one’s claims. On the other hand, extensive citations tend to be discouraged outside the academy; moreover, writing on topics of general interest often requires one to attend to the forms of knowledge which non-academics bring to bear on the subject, and sticking to familiar bibliographies risks failing to attend to the complex ways in which non-academics grapple with important questions.

Andrew Cole continued this conversation, offering the provocative claim that “the problem with education today, on all levels, is that people don’t know shit.” Engaging the recurrent question of metalanguage, he argued that the purpose of critical theory should be framed as “a question of ‘what,’ not a question of ‘how’” –– that is, a matter of determining the shared basis of knowledge necessary to a given line of inquiry (“you need things inside your head”). The texts themselves, he said, provide a “how”: that is, every text prompts us to ask why it was written in the way that it is, and how it could have been written otherwise; in that sense, he suggested, theory can, and sometimes should, be read as literature (this framing recalled Erin Huang’s advice that one’s approach to a given text should always begin with method).

This discussion neatly set up his work on the dialectic of space. He argued that space is meaningfully prior to other common starting-points for encountering the world (time, language, etc.): space sets up the “ontological priors” from which these later categories can proceed. The dialectic of space, like his approach to critical theory, therefore begins with a question of “stable givens” (again, “you need things inside your head”). He drew on Fanon’s work to frame space as a basis for critique: the struggle for “bread and land” runs deeper than all metaphor and abstraction, laying the ground for both a workable ontology and a responsible politics. In response to Joyce’s prompting, he argued for the applicability of spatial critique even to apparently non-spatial forms of discourse, like music (“we can think music in terms of resonating chambers and vibrating strings”). His theorization of space as an ontological universal led to a discussion of essentialism and its hazards: he argued that the violent essentialisms which play an outsized role in the history of race and gender have discouraged the humanities from attending to the emancipatory potential of common facts: all humans do, in fact, have brains, and this seems to demand theorization. In discussing all the above points, he framed his approach in terms of “adisciplinarity”: falling away from the “how” to get back to the “what,” recovering the stable givens which set up a critique which cuts across disciplinary and discursive borders.

Let me just add to the discussion here a structural question that came up in class last week as we thought about the role of critical theory as a lingua franca among the humanistic disciplines. We noted that a discipline may have a canon of objects and a canon of methods. Literature has long had both, the canon of texts for interpretation, and the canon of theory. History has a canon of methods, but not of objects; likewise anthropology. Are methods what the humanistic disciplines most share?

A few possibilities for interdisciplinary communication:

• As a series of a ad hoc arrangements, individual embassies among the disciplines that do not necessarily offer shared terms for other connections (or even other occasions).
• As a shared commitment to ordinary language (to essayism?)—disciplines may write articles to themselves, essays to other disciplines and to the world at large.
• The existing canon of critical theory as a common language for interpreting the work and the value of different disciplines. (Primarily a European canon—but potentially expandable.)
• An alternative common language, of theory or method or technique or value etc. What could that be?