[DGB with a few words up front; Minna and Foivos below…]
We had a slightly longer initial session together today – because our guest joined us at 3 pm. And I thought we really used the time. Both Minna and Foivos have offered quite detailed synopses below, so I will not recapitulate their work here by way of introduction. I’ll just put up this image (above) of our front chalkboard, and the one below (the board on the side). Foivos says calls these key archival texts “doodling” – but I ask you, is that fair?
🙂
A few thoughts on the readings from this week (our conversation got going and we never really circled back on our texts in any detail): I felt pretty impatient with Klein & Frodeman. “Interdisciplining Humanities: A Historical Overview” feels like such an example of the thing it sort-of documents. It is a peer-reviewed piece of workmanlike scholarship. It contains some absolute HOWLERS which really sort of make me feel a bit testy about the very idea of peer-review. For instance, how did the claim that “the first use of the term ‘natural science’ did not occur until 1834” make it through peer review?? Try Google Books advanced search, and you will instantly discover that this is TOTALLY FALSE. (The authors have garbled something true, namely that the term “scientist” is coined in 1834.). And the courtly concept of the humanistic honnête homme is rendered as bonnete homme, which is not merely missing the diacritical mark, it also seems to suggest people wearing funny hats. Moments like this make me feel despair. You get to this point, and this is what you get? Is anybody paying any attention?
Grumpy. Makes me feel grumpy.
But the stuff in chapter three of the Jacobs concerning the extraordinary recentness of multi-person “departments” in American universities made an impression on me. The statistics were compelling, and I would have guessed wrong on that stuff. He really demonstrates the explosive growth of the modern university in the postwar period. And demonstrates how recent the world we are in really is (from a higher-education perspective).
I wanted to put in a few words too about concrete plans: I am going to hold the 2nd of November as a “guestless” session, one in which I think we will assemble some readings around “ignorance” and “non-knowledge” (per our discussion). And reminding us all of some ideas for final project stuff that got tossed around: perhaps “outlaw” posters (for disciplinary transgressors? this reminded me of this project, which I was involved in for the Sharjah Biennial some years back); what about some sort of “compact” or “contract” that we might all draft and sign, committing us (or the signers, anyway) to some sort of specific performative cast or intervention (perhaps that we would all agree to make, one time each semester, a gesture of “radical un-knowing” in a seminar setting? word of it being something to which we were all committed would potentially contribute to the sense of its being a certain kind of collective/critical act). One more thought: what if we stay after this idea of Agnotology, etc., and do a collaborative (fictional) departmental website for a “department of radical un-knowing”? We could make up the courses, the faculty, etc. Has some potential…
Onward! Hope you all are able to do some final project thinking together this week…
-DGB
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[Minna follows, and Foivos after….]
As we continued to grapple with the question of “knowledge”—its ontology and hermeneutics—we began our seminar by pushing this inquiry further by expanding the category of its antinomies. If thus far we have paired knowledge as the antinomy of “experience”—itself a polemical contention, as Graham reminded us, for such antithesis refutes the modern enterprise of transforming experience into knowledge—then, we added to this mix, “ignorance,” “non-knowledge,” and also, “forgetting.” Can we consider ignorance and forgetting as a kind of strategic “aporetics,” which is to say, does it have the capacity to maintain a certain kind of aporia towards some political purpose? The impromptu bibliography that emerged out of this question of tactical forms of non-knowing was both extensive and interdisciplinary—including, but not limited to, Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (2008), Jacques Rancière’ The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), and Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes’, Merchants of Doubt (2010). Indeed, as Graham pointed out, this mode of inquiry into the negative—what Ben has called the “dark side” of knowledge, or Lauren’s “grey matter”—harkens back to the Hegelian injunction to “tarry with the negative.”
Responding to Graham’s comment that the wager of both Rancière and Proctor and Schiebinger is to dialectically pivot the claim that knowledge has to be constructed, Ben pushed the discussion further by alerting us to the onto-epistemological difference between ignorance and non-knowledge. To crudely sum up Ben’s point, whereas ignorance is a kind of “un-knowing” or “not-yet-knowing” (absent presence), non-knowing cannot be produced because it exists in total absence. (Sorry, Ben, if I have totally misrepresented your point). This comment was truly generative and allowed us to dwell with not only the epistemological question of the “non” in “non-knowledge” (from the lack in Lacanian psychoanalysis to the hermeneutics of the Buddhist Koan to the occult in Islam and Hinduism), but also the question of form, the physicality of non-knowledge and ignorance. The latter was also a helpful transition for us to meditate on our collaborative final project: Who are the ignorant schoolmasters in today’s academia? Are they the critics or amateurs, or simply outlaws? What is the critical import of “transgression” in the enterprise of humanistic inquiry? Does it still have the aporetic capacity for “rupture,” for emergent knowledge, in today’s academic fora?
In many ways these questions continued into our conversation with Prof. Marshall Brown, who described the ways in which his artistic and professional practices are held in productive tension with his scholarship. Indeed, his theorization of “seamfulness” seemed more than an apt analogy for his interdisciplinary method and positionality—or rather multiple positionalities within and beyond academia. At the same time, we returned to the question of “employment cartels” that continue to govern and police the citizenship in/of academia, and mulled over the transgressive potential of “collaboration” therein. This conversation left me wanting to dwell with the notion of collaboration. Does collaboration happen in the invariable gap between the seams, the interstices between disciplines? Is this the outside of the law of cartels, an out-law territory? Moreover, to borrow Lauren’s object “torrit grey” as a metaphor, is collaboration the praxis of producing non-knowledge out of both lack and excess?
– Minna
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[And Foivos…]
Graham suggests to stay to with the paradox for a minute and think of i. the socratic irony — and the activation of all different technics of getting people radically and utterly confused [Is confusion another word we might be interested in?]— and ii. the Buddhist Kōans —a set of paradoxical impossible exercises that a Buddhist monk student has to think with/through on his way to wisdom — the experience of a ruminative inquiry, working out and around a paradox.
Navjit draws on Islamic and Hindu traditions to talk about the always already segmented and incomplete character of knowledge and the ethical questions of agency that emerge when thinking of knowledge as something that is produced rather than something that is revealed — that idea of revelation came up also in one of our first seminars by both Navjit and Emilio in rather interesting ways. Navjit continues —drawing on Bronisław Malinowski’s distinction of different types of practices of knowledge production: magic, science and religion— to talk about the occult or dark knowledge, as this process of knowledge production that occurs in the shadows and in open secrecy. Proctor in his Agnatology also makes a similar observation, talking about the transformation of alchemy into chemistry when it moves from the shadows into the light — thinking of the Age of the Enlightenment as the era of the sciences, academies, disciplines and open circulation of ideas…..
Meanwhile Jeremy puts his object on the table — a non-representational self-portrait -including script- in the form of a book that he created in his first years of architecture book and that has accompanied him throughout the years. He shyly refers to it as ‘bad’ art, which raises reactions and opens up a discussion on amateurism as an important category of relations to knowledge production, and amateurism as something that transgresses the traditional boundaries of the disciplines. Denise, pulling from Rebecca Walkowitz’s Bad Modernism, asks everyone to think who are the ‘bad’ people of their discipline — what is a bad historian, for example — and what types of transgressions, disruptions of knowledge (or emergent knowledge, niches of interdisciplinary, eccentricities of the scholar, amateur-bad thinkers) can we think with?
———
