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.
