Author: Jeff Dolven

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?

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 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.

objectivity—subjectivity
information—interpretation/critical thinking
collaboration—autonomy
reproducibility—singularity
for profit, for social good—for itself, for social good
fact—value
instrumental/unreflective—ethical/reflective

From Nick:

In the first hour of seminar, we continued to think through Graham’s provocation last week regarding the chasm between scientific and humanistic epistemologies, practices, and doxa. We collectively brainstormed different key phrases associated with each half of this dyad: proof/verification, collaboration, reproducibility for the sciences; subjectivity, interpretation, “critical thinking” for the humanities. Paul drew our attention to the political-economic dimensions of the science/humanities split––external grants, more intense engagement with and regulation from state bureaucracies, and closer ties with the private sector (“industry,” as our STEM colleagues call it). How do the material conditions of the academy determine and delimit how disciplines form, cohere, and persist over time? What does it mean to talk about disciplines in the register of “rise and fall” or “birth and death”? Grace raised the important point that other cultures place a higher value on the sciences. How, as humanists, can we attend to and incorporate divergent understandings of knowledge production in different national contexts in our pedagogy? Fedor and Utku both shared their unease with Butler’s “additive” approach to epistemological self-reflexivity––there is no potential for transformation in this framework, just endless contingency. Jeff ended our conversation with a nod towards Agamben’s exploration of the pre-linguistic character of experience: “In terms of human infancy, experience is the simple difference between the human and the linguistic. The individual as not already speaking, as having been and still being an infant––this is experience.” (50) What would it mean for the humanities to eschew its privileging of the linguistic in favor of the phenomenal, to conceive of our truth-procedures in terms of experience? Is this one way for us to bridge the divide we articulated in the beginning of class, without falling into the trap of treating human beings as “problems of knowledge” to borrow Graham’s phrase or indulging in “prestige envy” of our colleagues in the sciences?

Paize Keulemans began the second half of our seminar by bringing in a material object of his own––a Japanese action figure which takes its inspiration from a historical actor in early modern Chinese cultural and political history. Professor Keulemans called our attention to the multiple levels of mediation through which this action figure traveled––from an empirically existent historical person to his representation in the novel-form to the build-your-own Japanese toy sitting before us. That the toy did not come already assembled raised a generative question for us: how does one make an object their own? We then turned our focus to the Galloway chapter and Prof. Keulemans asked us about his distinction between “operator” and “machine.” Utku tethered the relative agency Galloway imbues the machine with his almost lyrical description of ambience–where is agential potential to be found when, as Jeff said, we abandon the game to “its own homeostatic self-sufficiency?” Ayluonne asked whether game studies can be said to sit within the intellectual tradition of new materialism, best epitomized by Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. We ended our conversation with an extended meditation on the institutionalization of game studies, its own internal battles over the discipline’s organizing principles and procedures (ludology or narratology?), and whether Galloway’s theories can be transposed onto other cultural forms. Keulemans ended our discussion on a distinctly Jamesonian note: can the conceptual tools which Galloway utilizes help us unearth previously illegible features of a text (its gamic/diegetic dimensions) and prevent us from “rarifying” our objects of study?

From Paul:

Paize Keulemans opened our discussion in the second half of class with a provocation: he showed us a contemporary Japanese action figure, which appeared to be part-human, part-robot, whose packaging labeled it as a character from sixteenth-century Chinese literature. When he opened the box, we saw that it contained a set of disassembled plastic pieces from the factory rather than a readymade object. This observation launched a wide-ranging conversation which I will try to condense into two broad categories. First, the semiotic: in what sense does the cyborg in the box map onto the literary figure named on the packaging? Second, the libidinal: what sort of drive makes consumers want to buy the set of plastic pieces which supposedly comprise this character, assemble it, and make it their own? Both of these directions proved fruitful. Semiotic problems, such as our Galloway’s distinction between a “player” and an “operator” in the context of gamic action, led us to reconsider our own position in relation to our objects of study, whether textual or otherwise: what would it mean to break down the familiar binaries which often delimit academic subjecthood (expert vs. amateur, critic vs. text, outside vs. inside) and re-encounter our work as a mode of fluid interrelation with various forms of difference? On the other hand, might the resources of traditional critique provide us with a means to enter into strange worlds, like that of a video game, without being subsumed by them –– can our disciplinary training help us attend to the nondiegetic machine acts which structure the ways we think and write, to immerse ourselves in something strange without losing ourselves within it? This question immediately turns libidinal –– how does the pleasure associated with gaming (allegedly: raw, vulgar, uncritical) relate to the affective domain of traditional academic media, and what configuration of social forces constructs these hierarchies? Our pursuit of these questions returned us neatly to the core concerns of this seminar: as a group, we reflected on why it seems so difficult to think “video game studies” within the vocabulary of academic disciplinarity, and we read that difficulty as a symptom of the recalcitrance of elite disciplinarity in the face of evolving habits of media consumption. I’m left asking myself: what would it mean to attend to the “nondiegetic machine moments” which construct our own academic formations –– the quiet glitches which both make them what they are and challenge their coherence? What drives make us want to continually play with the pieces that comprise our own disciplinary assemblages, like the action figure in the box? How can this sort of play –– in some sense, a prerequisite to participation in the academy –– be made to reflect the critical potential Galloway highlights in the word?