I didn’t ask if anyone would be up for doing a brief on the seminar as we broke up today, and while I suppose I could email around for a volunteer, I think I’ll just go ahead and do this one for us. Take one for the team. After all, as we move into this final phase of our seminar everybody has assignments — including the first concrete deliverable en route to our culminating project (of which more below).
We gathered early today, in order to take advantage of the opportunity to meet with Professor Anthony Grafton from the History Department, a leading (the leading?) scholar of the renaissance in the known world. We agreed that it would be especially valuable to have an opportunity to talk with him, in view of the emerging theme of the final project, which has come to center on traditions of annotation/commentary — an area of his special expertise.
What to say about the visit? My own summary cannot but be colored by my immense respect for, and, yes, love of Anthony T. Grafton. As I expressed to you all after he left, there is really no one who takes up more space in my academic formation. His generosity and care as a teacher modeled the scholarly life for me when I was an undergraduate, and his mentorship and ongoing support literally structured my professional career.
As I also confided to you, there is a way in which that career (mine) can be understood (at least in part) as an effort to figure out what kind of scholar/thinker one could be if one could not be Anthony Grafton — since THAT was out of the question. Tony was very gracious when Chandler asked him that question about how it is that he succeeded in being such a successful contributor to such diverse domains (signally art history, intellectual history, and the history of science). His answer (that he had great teachers; that he was fortunate to have been part of the Warburg Institute at a key moment, and to have imbibed its spirit of omnivorous rigor) did not reference something basic and important: he is a person of absolutely prodigious capacities, capacities that are basically unlike those of most other human beings.
Wishing to make that clear, I sorta glossed his answer in my own way after he left, observing that I have simply never met anyone with comparable powers to take in, analyze, and retain vast quantities of information. Not only that, Tony also possesses a writerly fluency (and a simple stamina for generating compelling prose) that are comparably stupefying. Add all that up, and you are talking about a rare bird! Couple all THAT with so much TLC as a teacher, and what you get is simply unique.
But me getting sort of slobbery about how much I love and admire Professor Grafton was not at the heart of our session.
Rather, what we got was Tony talking with us about his own trajectory into the history of scholarly practices. In response to Ben’s question about the inherent “contingency” of footnotes, Tony expanded out into what was, I thought, a very interesting acknowledgement/endorsement of the pervasively contingent character of scholarly discourse. That was what I heard. Did I hear it right? The most extreme version of the claim might even walk the language of contingency all the way over into adjacent terrain — that slightly scary region known as “the arbitrary.” I don’t think he would go quite that far, in earnest, if pressed. But his invocation of the satirically “absent-minded” professor in Lucky Jim did suggest a high degree of comfort with a relatively radical critique of the conceptual and discursive coherence/necessity of scholarly programs of inquiry. Tony is a real historian, of course, so it is reasonable for us to expect that he would recognize a radical, indeed absolute, “historicity” — even where historical inquiry itself is concerned.
This generates a paradox that I basically love. I won’t elaborate on it here. But perhaps only poke the question of how this problematic relates to traditions of textual annotation (our theme at this point): in The Footnote, Grafton argues that the documentary footnote is closely tied to the rise of a “scientistic” conception of historical inquiry; the footnote is the way that historians show their “evidence.” And yet Ben’s sense of the footnote as a locus of contingency is interestingly at odds with this construal. But perhaps both things are true?
Anyway, we talked about other things as well, including the remarkable (to me) fact that page layouts like those familiar to us from the Talmud (which seem so specific and unusual) were actually not uncommon in the sixteenth century and were associated with traditions of textual commentary on classical (and biblical) sources. It turns out that the Talmud codified this textual form and preserved it — while other modes of scholarly publishing and analytic practice moved on. Why did they move on? Tony suggested, as I understood him, that no comparable structure of social/institutional authority succeeded in installing any other sixteenth-century commentary-tradition in any comparable way. Remarkable.
There was more, of course, but I am going to leave my summary of the front end of the seminar there for now.
* * *
We turned, after Tony left, to the final project. And we made some decisions. We are going to start by using the texts we have been reading in this seminar. Indeed, we might suggest that our aim is to redeploy them in an “experiential” way — having to this point, understandably, privileged them as forms of knowledge (and conducing to further knowledge). But that last part is my gloss.
Nuts and bolts: I learned yesterday that Alison Carruth cannot join us on the 30th. So while that is a bummer in one way, it may also be a boon, since we noticed that we really need the time we have remaining to make this project happen.
And so, I propose that we not have guests at our remaining two sessions, but focus on using them for our collaboration.
And to that end, we agreed on our first assignment:
By Tuesday morning of next week, everyone in the class is responsible for gathering SIX short excerpts from the reading we have done for this class this semester.
These excerpts may be as short as a single sentence (or even phrase). They should not be longer than a paragraph.
Each excerpt is to be labeled with a conceptual “keyword” — and we are asking that at least three of them be labeled either “KNOWLEDGE” or “EXPERIENCE.” (You can put whatever you like for the others).
These excerpts will be dropped into a google doc that I will circulate via email.
In light of the conversation with Professor Grafton, we are especially interested in a diverse range of formats for these excerpts. You may retype them, of course, but you may also take a screenshot of the passage (perhaps including your own annotations on the pdf), or even take a photograph of a physical page (or the screen). We feel it would be interesting for the excerpts, when gathered, to display some of the diversity of our encounters with text. Our aim, as we iterate to the final project, will be to assemble and link these fragments (and comment upon them), creating a kind of documentary “collage” of our engagement with the material and its ramifications.
Ok, onward! Looking forward to next steps…
-DGB
