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?
