[DGB, writing a little intro on our second session; with Emilio and Denise to follow…]
We launched our session today with an hour to ourselves (before our guest, Jeff Dolven, arrived), and we used that time to run back through the general structure of our seminar, and also to dive in on the initial short reading packet — our gathering of provocations concerning “knowledge” (what it is, how we get it, the paradoxes of its transmission).
Much of our discussion centered on the question of the alternatives, or even the antitheses, of “knowledge” — at least as the term circulates in ordinary usage. (Concerning that “at least”: we reminded ourselves that we had not done the kind of technical work of definition that would satisfy a philosopher, and thus our “feeling around” in the semantic field had less to do with logical relations and more to do with moods and associations.) We tested a number of possibilities: “practice” (which may involve knowledge, and could surely be reconstructed by one or another knowledge preoccupied enterprise, but which can certainly, in some sense, be thought of as the “other” of mere knowledge, whatever that is); (which like every other word we use has a history, and has not always meant the same thing, but which certainly has come to mean something other than knowledge in a dominant way that idea gets thrown around — which, we noticed, is heavily influenced by the kind of thing that the sciences achieve); and I put “understanding” into the mix, somewhat polemically (invoking Gadamer, and his luminous assertion that “understanding is an event,” which I believe does indeed contrast with any conventional construal of knowledge).
The drift of all this, of course, was in the direction of our seminar thematics — namely, interdisciplinarity and the general problem of disciplines. I think it is fair to say that there was consensus by the end of this conversation that what disciplines do is “manage” the production of knowledge. The term “revelation” (which Emilio put in the mix) is instructive here: there may or may not be a thing called revealed knowledge, but either way, it isn’t relevant to the disciplines (except as an object of study in the ordinary knowledge producing sense — probably managed by a discipline called “Religion” or maybe “History”). We will test a variety of answers to a variety of questions this semester, but if the question is “what is a discipline?”, a pretty good first cut at an answer might be: “a discipline is a social technology for the production of knowledge.” You can invoke as many heavy-hitting names in the history of continental philosophy (Kant, Hegel, etc.) as you like, but practically speaking, if you are trying to get a PhD, there is going to come a moment when a committee of human beings who belong to a discipline will be convened to read your work. They will do so in an effort to determine: 1. Whether you have created new knowledge in the discipline in question; 2. Whether you have demonstrated a capacity to situate your new knowledge with respect to the things already known in the discipline (thereby explaining / justifying the newness of your new knowledge, while also carefully articulating your indebtedness / entailment to those who have come before you in the knowledge producing business as defined by the aforementioned discipline).
Which is to say, the subject tipped open at this point in our conversation is of the greatest and most immediate relevance to each and every one of you. We didn’t really get into this, but it is also worth mentioning here that the “social” part of the “social technology” definition is directly relevant to all of your lives in another way too: the odds that you will someday secure an academic post in any discipline other than the discipline of the people on that committee is vanishingly small. Which is to say, professional trajectories are determined by disciplinary structures. Are disciplines “epistemic”? Meaning, do they have distinctive ways of defining knowledge and accounting for how it may be achieved? Sure. To some extent. (Though, actually, I would argue that they are all epistemically pretty similar at this point.) But their epistemic-ness is sort of dwarfed, I would argue, by their social-ness. This gets kind of knotty, in that there would be one version of that assertion which would purport to be a “critique” of their claims to knowledge. I’m interested in that version of the claim, but I am not really putting forward so strong a program here. I am merely stating the obvious: there’s a lot of knowledge; you can divide it up lots of ways; “disciplines” within the modern research university are historically contingent aggregations of people who self organize around (by means of) highly particular partitions of the total conceivable field of the knowable.
Toward the end of all this we made a quick loop around the question of the alternatives / antitheses of the disciplines themselves. Here I made a case (debatable, I concede) that the disciplines are best juxtaposed with the “professions.” This can get a little tricky, because, after all, I used the phrase “professional trajectories” above. So sure, being an academic is a “profession” — sort of. But in a deep sense “the professions” are determinate and canonical: medicine and law being paradigmatic (and architecture, pharmacy, accounting, and a smattering of other things holding on to the edges). We didn’t have much time to get into this, but I suggested that the distinction between the disciplines and the professions thusly defined has everything to do with the historical evolution of these different domains: certain enterprises of inquiry, erudition, and craft cast their lot across the early modern period with the emergent structure of the university; others threw in with the “Prince” instead; the latter became professions (in which, ultimately, guild membership was state-regulated), the former became the academic disciplines as we know them. Lots more to say about this, but we have a whole semester.
I’m not going to say much about the Jeff Dolven part of our session. I thought it was great, but I am going to leave the work of summarizing the discussion to Emilio and Denise. I will say, though, that the moment where we circled the problem of “speaking in public” stimulated my aspiration for our final project — not in any specific way, but it just felt like there might be something there for us to pick up and carry forward.
Oh, and I cannot resist just a quick reprise of Navjit’s forceful expression of the ineluctable dynamic that she perceives to operate across universitarian endeavors: the separation between subjects and objects; subjects who know, objects that are known. She may wish to revise or nuance my reconstruction of the claim, but I wish to make clear that I immensely admired the clarity and commitment of the analysis. (I also basically think it is correct, for better or worse.) In this construal of the enterprises, the categorical distinction between subjects and objects is a condition of possibility for the production of knowledge in any relevant sense. Again, I think this is basically right, descriptively (I also think it is wrong, substantively, and I long for university enterprises that decline to submit to this template — but it is tough sledding).
Things began to get juicy in our discussion when we got going on language as both an object of knowledge production (“the text” in, say, an English department) and the medium / form for the production of knowledge. Things get complicated here in a hurry: we don’t make language, it makes us (or anyway, we come into it though it is not, in a basic sense, our own — at least, not at first, and maybe not ever [at least for some]). It is possible that what makes the sciences the sciences is that they have figured out how to take most of the language (in any genuine sense of “language”) out of the knowledge producing business. This makes the knowledge, somehow, especially knowledge-y, and leaves the stuff that the rest of us make looking weirdly contaminated. If there is a way to turn this to our advantage as practitioners of the humanities, it is not clear to me the trick has been well-learned or widely taught.
-DGB
[And Denise, here below]
The first third of our seminar was devoted to a discussion of some readings that Graham casually called “fascicles concerning knowledge.” We did not pause to discuss this term, but “fascicle” was, in retrospect, a rather curious term to use, especially insofar as it introduced a discussion about the bundles of structures that produce, measure, constrain, taxonomize, or hegemonize knowledge. Some images conjured by this term: fascicles as bundles of disciplines, fields, professions; fascicles as bundles of botanical nerves, muscle fibers, conducting vessels.
We began by considering some concrete examples of things that may or may not constitute knowledge. At some point, Graham proposed (via Gadamer) that knowledge is distinct from understanding because understanding is an event. Ben asked: what exactly constitutes an event? And in the midst of all this, Navjit interjected: why yield to the exhortation to produce knowledge? Why do we feel compelled to do so at all?
I suggested that we consider an “event” and Navjit’s question alongside Enfield’s work on the varying temporal scales of language. Enfield’s concept of enchrony is specifically concerned with the causal processes that operate at the “temporal grain” of “conversational time” and social behavior (29). Enchrony is organized, sanctioned, and regimented by normative notions of “effectiveness” and “appropriateness,” and therefore always entails accountability (32). In other words, we may want to invoke enchronic perspectives and temporal scales (rather than Saussure’s synchronic and diachronic perspectives on the study of language) when we consider communications that contain an exhortation, a motive, or a morally charged “ought.”
Paraphrasing Minna in her pivot towards the Peters reading: if an “event” and a state of understanding necessitates the temporal grain of conversation and of a subject, then what is the relation between knowledge and subjectivity (or knowledge and an audience)?
. . . . .
Jeff enters the scene by invoking William West’s Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion. In early modern playhouses, the foot of the stage was the cheapest spot from which to view a play. The playgoers who occupied this spot under the stage (rather than in the galleries and rooms above the stage) were called understanders or understanding men, which suggested the joke that “what characterizes understanders most is their lack of understanding, taken as disembodied comprehension. Described primarily as bodies rather than minds, understanders (as the word literally implies) are physically subjected to the stage, thrown under it rather than independent of it, unable to distance themselves from it or make judgments upon it” (West 83). Jeff relates this idea—of understanders who under-stand but do not comprehend—to the way that, in the discipline of English, the tools of language that we use are also the objects that we study.
As a group, we consider whether science tries to escape from language, whether (even) history tries to escape from language in its archival intensity, and whether English succumbs to language and revels in it. Graham mentions that the emergence of philology and geological strata (the historicity of language and of the earth) may complicate the relationship between “science” and language. We did not talk about this, but this made me think about Bacon’s distinction between fixed conceptual ordering (temporally invariant) and systematic observing (temporally variant) in his Novum Organum. Bacon calls his method of observation “literate experience.”
I know that Emilio plans to spend more time filling us in on our discussion of Peters’ distinction between dialogue and dissemination. Peters’ comments on the “transgressive circulation” of knowledge may cast some light on the processes of defamiliarization that can help us reexamine the very tools that we use to produce knowledge (39). As we discussed the symmetrical and asymmetrical forms of communicating/loving that are raised in the Phaedrus, Ben invoked Simone Weil in his suggestion that love is self-effacing and self-unraveling. What if “asymmetrical” forms of communication produce productive moments of defamiliarization and unraveling?
. . . . .
Punctuating all this was the occasional crackling of walkie talkie static.
-Denise
[And Emilio has, in lieu of a more traditional response/write-up, sent us the poem below, which, he offers to “those feeling the disciplinary structures of knowledge-production…”]
