Author: Jeff Dolven

We heard, from a historian of science, a strong argument for the difference between the humanities and the sciences, based in a distinction between knowledge and understanding, and I would just flag a couple of questions—already raised in those great reports—that we might want to keep after.

1) To our dyad of knowledge and experience, Graham added the term “understanding,” and he gave a great definition: being surprised together. We’ll want to think about the disciplinary (or is it antidisciplinary?) situation of this account of what it is to understand, and we may have ask too about surprise and its intellectual value.

2) The project of phenomenology came up as well, and the so-called phenomenological epoche or bracketing: inquiry into the present situation by way of the senses, of what is available to experience, temporarily suspending the conceptual frameworks within which we tend to think (and perhaps more importantly, within and through which we tend to look, also hear, smell, taste, touch). This appeal to experience, to what it is like to be in a situation (including the situation of a discipline), is a way of renewing our acquaintance with what we thought we already knew. Perhaps it is a strategy of surprise. I’d love to think about when and how we might have recourse to such strategic naivete.

I’d also like to come back to Graham’s great account of star observation and the personal equation, and the physical difficulty of making those measurements. What about the aspect of a discipline that reforms or controls the body and desires, that trains you to forgo things that you want to do and to do things that you do not? (Perhaps changing the structure of your desires in the process.)

Big questions! which we can try to bring down to earth on Tuesday.

JOYCE:

In our first session, we touched upon major points of contention including fields/areas/boundaries/borders; differences between interpretation and techné/art; close readings of spatial/architectural representations of our individual fields in terms of accessibility, transparency, and the overall culture; and whether interdisciplinarity is a requirement for decolonization.

In the first half of our second session (Tuesday, September 14, 2021), we spent some time reading an AAUP excerpt from Spring 2020. The class reflected on how uncomfortable the text made us (emerging scholars) and whether we resonated with its message. I raised the question why the piece was published in the first place, because it seemed antithetical (and especially harsh) to the reforms follwoing the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Summer 2020. Jeff pointed out the piece was published as a reaction to the anti-intellect climate of the ‘high/late Trump era.’ In addition to issues surrounding inclusion and diversity, the AAUP piece also projects a sense of denying the sensory faculties (e.g., “we cannot know the effects of candies by eating it”) and I would suggest that this ambivalence at least dates back from Descartes… (I’m taking a philosophy/history of science seminar on Descartes. In Principles of Philosophy, Descartes questions the certainty/existence of God, because “they attributed too much to sensory perceptions, and God cannot be seen or touched.”) It seems to me that the interdisciplinary effort would and should bring back cross-modal phenomenological approach to knowledge. But then, the question becomes who gets to and how to monitor the production of knowledge. Since it introduces a more subjective approach rather than ‘objective’ (and how do we even define these two, and are they mutually/conceptually exclusive?), will it offer more diversity/inclusion or otherwise be detrimental to the current efforts of decolonization/accessibility/inclusion? Anyways, this is where I would park the ‘candy’ question for now. Hopefully we can keep coming back to it over the next few weeks.

In the second part of the seminar, D. Graham Burnett joined us as the first guest speaker. Graham ran this very seminar for the past few years and always required the final project to be collaborative—which is the core of interdisciplinarity and involves working with colleagues from other disciplines. Using Thomas Kuhn’s notions of normal vs. revolutionary science from The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962), Graham emphasized the core dissonances (and distinction) between humanities and STEM, and how the current STEM model (scientific) model of knowledge production is harmful for humanistic work. For example, the process of peer-reviewed publications came from a scientific practice….

Paul brought up the notion of selfhood in relation to attention (p. 423 James reading), which is striking to me because of my dual identity as a scholar and also performing artist. Is the performer at his/her/their self when engaging with the craft/performance? Is there an artistic/musical? How is the attention from the spectator related to the attention/concentration of the performing artist? I can’t help but wonder how this inquiry relates to the distinction (between perceived & felt emotion) observed by music (cognition) theorist Alf Gabrielsson: the perceived emotion refers to the intended emotion by the composer/performer while the felt emotion comes from the spectator’s subjective reaction. This distinction is especially intriguing for the performative agent—is he/she/they reacting to the craft? How is attention effective in terms of (re)writing/guiding our aesthetics?

I would encourage everyone to listen to (or watch) this presentation: “Utopic Attention: The Currency in a Kingdom of Ends.” (https://vimeo.com/573159212) Graham offers the following statement in the beginning: “we need sustained, collaborative, critical, diverse, and well-informed efforts to theorize, cultivate, practice, and share forms/modes of attention that are resistant to monetization/financialization.” He advocates for attention for (not to) something as an intentional practice. It was a powerful way to dive deeper into some of the experience concepts explored in class.

Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to the next seminar with you all!

UTKU:

This week’s discussion was exciting and inspiring for me. I will try to write about some of the points we have talked about in the class, which I take to be important and significant. One central issue we have dealt with was the distinction between “science” and “humanistic knowledge” (if I may call the latter in this way). James’ text seems to be sitting at an interesting intersection of science and humanities. On the one hand the text is about experiments, data, and observation. But on the other hand it is an introspection into the workings of attention and understanding. And it looks like James’ philosophical investigation does not try to “imitate” science, but use it in order to attain a new humanistic understanding on attention.

Following that, Graham elaborated on the distinction between knowledge and understanding, associating the latter with humanities. Knowledge aims to fill in the gaps within a given scientific paradigm. It does not ask new questions, but only provides new answers that satisfy an already existing question. Knowledge is also depersonalized. By equating objectivity with an inhuman perspective, knowledge tries to “cleanse” its research of any human perspective or interpretation. That is why, in a certain obvious sense, critical theory is a scientific project that has a claim to “knowledge.” Commenting on Butler’s text, Graham said that Butler claims to have the “knowledge of knowledge,” which ostensibly makes critical theory the ultimate judge on science. But we have said that this would already mean “gamer over” for critical theory, since it tries to “challenge” this whole scientific discipline by playing the game by the latter’s rules. This claim to “the knowledge of the knowledge of the knowledge of…” is a never ending task that is doomed to be unsuccessful.

The alternative then, would be “understanding” the subject matter at hand. We have noted that understanding is about persons and it inevitable needs to deal with persons, their situated knowledge, their perspectives, their differing capacities for attention, etc. By taking into account all those variables about human beings, humanistic discipline tries to arrive at a “surprise of mutual understanding.” Such an epistemology does not really separate, analyze, or depersonalize, but looks for “commonality.” Mutual surprise builds on commonality, and does not conceptualize human beings as “knowledge production machines.” Perhaps, as opposed to knowledge, this view prioritizes experience, attention, and our capacity to wonder.

Finally, I would like to mention Graham and Jeff’s comments on what they call “centripetal theory of attention” as opposed to a “centrifugal” one. While centrifugal seems to be about “knowledge” that aims to depersonalize, quantify, and analyze (in the Greek sense of the word of “separating”), “centripetal” seems to be about an ever renewed attention that tries to “experience” its object. It is almost an intellectual “rumination.” I find that idea quite inspiring because it also seems to entail the idea of having the courage to be “amateurish” about one’s subject, and not being afraid of not knowing something.

Since last weeks discussion I learned about an AAUP position paper, “In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education,” and a response to it by Judith Butler, both very much to our questions. I will being a couple of excerpts to class to get us started, but I wanted to get the links up here too for future reference.

The ritual of introductions with which we began was already so fruitful; let me just identify a few questions that we might keep after. Hazal got us thinking about childhood, and Grace did too. How do disciplines account for children; how might they; is there anything to be learned from how we teach the disciplines to children (dividing them into school “subjects” etc.)? The language of boundaries and limits recurred, especially with Grace and Paul. (For Paul, in regards to tragedy and death: what is the relation between genre and discipline, by the way; is generic hybridity any model of interdisciplinarity?) How far will the metaphor of a bounded space take us, thinking about disciplines? (See “field” below.) Monica and Hazal’s interdisciplinary work, and others’, has to do with decolonialization—how are disciplines sites of colonialism? (What work does that metaphor do?) What does inter- or antidisciplinarity have to do with unmaking colonial formations? Joyce’s evocation of synesthesia is something we might carry with us too: an intimately experienced juxtaposition, or synthesis, of sensory modalities. Could we imagine an interdisciplinarity at the level of perception? (Cue the discussion of experience next week.)

Next, equipped with our set of readings on knowledge, we considered three possible objects of interdisciplinary attention: the opening paragraph of the Graduate School’s description of the “Dissertation and FPO,” a Pendaflex file folder, and an image of a space where our disciplines to their thing. I’ll pull out some questions that arose at each stage.

First that GS text: “The dissertation must show that the candidate has technical mastery of the field and is capable of doing independent and original research. It must enlarge or modify current knowledge in a field or present a significant new interpretation of known materials.” As a general project, we shared an interest in surfacing its contradictions—a paradigmatically critical procedure (per Adorno, e.g.), with its equivalents in other disciplines (structuralist anthropology, e.g.). What else might we have done—looked for patterns, considered cases; why was contradiction such an important, revealing phenomenon for us? And how should we regard those contradictions: is their suppression a power effect? Inevitably? (Might it be done as care, as protection; how would we talk about that?) But to those questions:

• How is the individual defined by a given discipline? As a unit of production (and of what: knowledge?), as a candidate for a credential, as the master of a preexisting body of knowledge, as an enlarger/contributor, as a modifier/disruptor/reformer etc.? We noticed that the first sentence emphasizes what the dissertation “shows” about the candidate, the second the dissertation’s meaning within a field. How are the work and the person connected? How do disciplines manage the requirement of “independent and original research” in relation to practical collaboration etc.? Cf. Moten’s thinking about communities of “study.”
• Does the dissertation aim at producing a capacity (at shaping a subject), or at affecting a field? There seemed to be a tension between the idea that the dissertation was a completed piece of scholarship, and that it exists primarily to prepare the student for future work. (Here Wittgenstein and Ryle are apropos.)
• What is technical mastery; what is its relation to the requirements of the second sentence, especially a “significant new interpretation of known materials”? We sensed some chafing between techne and interpretation. Is techne a form of knowledge? Is interpretation? (“An” interpretation?) Another word that detained us: method. Must a discipline have a method? Methods?
• Why the word “field,” rather than “discipline”? We considered its ambiguity: between a bounded, cultivated, owned space, already marked out, and an openness or a clearing awaiting survey. And where (per Haraway) does the student stand, or the teacher—at the edge, above, somewhere in the middle? How much of it can we see at one time? Territory is a basic metaphor for discipline and we’ll want to track it. (Does each discipline have its own? Or do disciplines compete for territory, coexist in it, etc.? Jerry Jacobs has a good account of these concepts in his In In Defense of Disciplines, which we might take up in a future week.)
• Who gets to decide what meets these requirements? Moten’s query of the supervisory character of university life, and its relation to work under capitalism generally, surfaced here.
• What is the power and use of genealogical inquiry—that is, inquiry into the origins of words, concepts, practices? We did some work with the history of “techne,” the contradictions at its origins; we also asked some larger questions about the place of philology among the humanistic disciplines. Can we do that work as part of a larger project of decolonialization? How? We might think about the prominence of language generally—which disciplines have been most defined by a “linguistic turn”? (Julie Thompson Klein and Robert Friedman discuss this in “Interdisciplining Humanities: A Historical Overview.”)

Next, that Pendaflex:

• There was the choice of intensive or extensive reading, into the object itself (close reading) or outward into its uses, origins, affinities, place in a structure or network etc.
• Does the object have a history? (In the sense of a technical history, an account of how filing and filing systems have developed, the place of the Pendaflex in American offices and offices elsewhere, etc. etc.) Does it have a story? (Does this particular artifact bear marks of its use, its travels?) Who asks these questions and how do they differ?
• The file as an instance of or figure for (there’s an interesting distinction, too) prosthetic memory. How do different disciplines remember? Do some value memory more than others? How do they conceive it—perhaps in relation to Ryle’s that/how distinction?
• Can we touch it? An interesting moment—we decided not, in our ongoing pandemic prudence/bewilderment. But what kind of knowledge would that afford? And a step further, could one try to use it, for what it is intended for, or for something else? Which would move us perhaps in the direction of a kind of maker’s knowledge, at which Vico gives us a glimpse.

Finally, the place-images, a little more telegraphically, since this is going on…

• The transparency and clean, corporate lines of the School of Architecture: how do disciplines project the accessibility or inaccessibility of their knowledge, their expertise? Compare the neo-gothic McCosh Hall. How do both hold knowledge?
• Again the SOA: how do its corporate affinities project its relations to professions outside the university? Which disciplines prepare candidates for careers outside the academy, which do not, how does that affect their structures?
• How do spaces reflect and reinforce the conditions of student work, especially solitude and collaboration? Who works in private, who works in public or under surveillance? (We thought esp about architects.)
• How do spaces reflect the relative wealth and prestige of departments as disciplinary units within the university? How do they reflect the degree of autonomy the department has to shape its spaces (are they disciplinarily idiosyncratic and legible, or versions of a corporate office design)?
• Can we read, in spaces, a discipline’s internal account of the conditions of success—for example, native brilliance vs. hard work?
• Which disciplines are attached to history in their spaces, which not? And what kinds of history? How do they preserve or efface architectures and practices that evoke or perpetuate the colonial history of the university?

Phew! My plan was to stop at 500 words—and I’m sure there are vital questions that I have missed here. The use of going on, I hope, will be laying out a range of the preliminary curiosities that we bring to our visitors and the texts they share. Some of the questions we will follow up, some may fall away; the first hour of our seminars will be an opportunity to identify particular interests, set ourselves some useful reading, and talk things through.