Author: Ayluonne Tereszkiewicz

(Sincerest apologies for the delay! — I had a particularly rough go with my Booster shot.)

Our final meeting began with recapping David Levine’s visit and analysis of the Adrienne Piper piece. Piper, by defining each discipline as a “hat” of equal but non-transferable or integrative value, argues neither for interdisciplinarity nor antidisciplinarity as we have understood them.  Instead, she values the borders of things, both of the disciplines and of her selves. I wonder, should each of us be more discrete, and less discreet about our discreteness? What are our stand-alone hats? Fedor offered a new term to explore this new vantage point on disciplinarity with: pluridisciplinarity. Professor Dolven offered us a metaphor to think with: the university as a city versus the university as a corporation. How do the disciplines in their current configuration aid in producing either of these atmospheres? The concept of disciplines being either forms (more capacious) or genres (more suffocating and prescriptive) also came up as a circle back to the beginning conversations of the term.

We also discussed Levine’s idea of “taste” and the argument that the disciplines are shame-controls or shame salves. This was particularly striking to me. I have never considered whether my disciplinary choice reflected not only the questions I wanted to ask–the central and epistemological hows and whys, as Hazal described it–but also the parts of my researching Self I wished to reduce or avoid. As an anthropologist engaging in homework (as in, fieldwork in my own community; I dislike the term native anthropologist), I do feel a heightened sense of insecurity about my identity and choice to testify as belonging to a particular people and place. Are my disciplined forms of questions asking and data-analyzing a boon to these discomforts of the inquiring Self?

Once Brooke Holmes and Martha Friedman joined us, we explored many themes, but perhaps most pointedly: What does it mean to have a body in our contemporary moment? What does it mean to produce a body of work? A phrase that particularly struck me is when Brooke described our bodies, according to Classical medical science and philosophy, as: “just moments of coalescence in a world in flux.” (Wow!) I found the organic conversation between Holmes and Friedman refreshing. There were many great threads that pertained explicitly to our task at hand: the disciplines. 

First, I think it was critical that Holmes responded to one of the class questions by qualifying Lucretius’ mode of address as ‘the second personal.’ As opposed to the first personal–understood as the feeling point of view (body)–and the third personal–understood as the knowing point of view (mind)–Lucretius is always addressing and engaging with a “you” in a collaborative process of situated, mobile, and strategic knowledge-making, in the Haraway sense of two bodies and minds entangling. It collapses our understanding of first and third personals as binaries of subjectivity and objectivity. And, by engaging in different and relentlessly specific ways of knowing, Lucretius is creating a community of knowers: relativism builds community. I also found that Holmes’ description of the fluid body as “in perpetual flux: amorphous, labile, elusive” (Holmes, In Flux) echoed our discussion of Levine and Piper at the start of our class session. The “small wonder” that Classical Greek medicine required the discipline of philosophy and techne to manage the messy, flawed, and potentially dangerous free-willed body reminds me of the “small wonder” of the disciplinary boundaries and chiefdoms to manage the fluidity of our inquiring selves–as embodying “life unbound” (Holmes, In Flux). 

Second, I think Friedman’s reflections on her body of work were illuminating. In an interview on her exhibition Castoffs, Friedman describes the grid of the gallery as a bounded body “that you as a viewer sort of puncture” and get disoriented within (Freidman, interview with Henry Gallery). This piece, along with the humours exhibition, explores the tensions between the disciplined and undisciplined gaze onto the body and challenges the disciplining of our gaze from the ground up, i.e., through the presentation of the object. I wondered if this disorientation is part of what “form fears in matter,” as Brooke alludes to in her review of Castoffs, as well as “what defenses … these fears produce” (Holmes, “Time-Lapse”). As one example, Friedman uses spikes to plug holes in the fragmented body parts, holes which Holmes defines as the greatest threat to the classical body. How could we understand our own disciplinarity as the plugging of holes with spikes, large and small? Visible and imperceptible? Is there anything genuinely wrong with this inclination?

Lastly, I enjoyed hearing Friedman’s four-piece treatise on Lucretius and want to sit with her offerings: first, she had tensions with Lucretius’ bidirectionality of ontology and was disinterested in raising the inanimate to the animate; second, she viewed Lucretius’ articulation of bodies and matter as a direct threat to neoliberalism and heteropatriarchies; third, she was interested in the very moment of annihilation and death, when the body and soul cease to share the same frame; and fourth, she wondered whether art’s ability to suspend or extinguish the signified in favor of playing with flexibility of signifiers mirrored how Lucretius understood the Gods–as perpetually unreachable and unknowable, and therefore as not really the point from which to justify “our self-reflexive play.”

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?