[A few words from me to get going, and then Chandler’s reflections follow; Jeremy’s thoughts are posted just below that… -DGB]
We moved tables and chairs and even umbrellas around today—and I, before class, somewhat sheepishly (maybe, even apologetically) talked through with several persons, who were sitting quietly on the patio, that it was my intention to commandeer some chairs in order to conduct class outside, in the sun-dappled patch southeast of Joseph Henry House.
I shuffled my feet.
I explained that no one needed to move.
It was only that, well, we would be talking out loud here—and I was concerned that we might disturb their quiet. One woman, who had just sat down to a clamshell lunch, very graciously waived off my mumbling and said she was entirely happy to move to a bench on the walkway. One busy looking scholar-person consulted a timer perched on the table beside his papers—he was meeting with students, but surmised that his final meeting may have been canceled anyway. He had no problem with my rounding up the adjacent seating into a seminar circle.
A third person, who also seemed to be starting lunch, seemed both flustered and irritated—but also quite intent on getting away, both from me and from the question. I tried various friendly overtures (“so hard to do seminar early in the semester with masks…”), and even hazarded a sort of Elysian comment about the beauty of teaching and learning in such a beautiful place. All this elicited a genuinely disagreeable comment from this person to the effect that this person had just completed teaching, and needed silence, and that, further, this person might “murder someone” if that silence was not afforded immediately. This did not come off as a threat. But it did come off as exceedingly grumpy. For whatever reason, me being me, this made me feel a quiet little spurt of actual love for this person, who seemed not entirely happy in some fundamental ways.
There can be absolutely no doubt that this person had no interest in my feelings at that moment, whatever they might be—and, moreover, that my peculiarly sudden surfeit of tenderness would surely be received as an unbearable condescension were I to let it show. I pocketed it.
All this was prequel. Seminar itself I will not try to summarize, since our discussants (Jeremy and Chandler) will take the lead on that below.
For my part, here, I will perhaps only point up the way the first part of our conversation circled the very deep problem of the relationship between knowledge (the subject of our “reader” last week) and experience (on which we read for today).
This is a problem of bottomless complexity, or anyway it would be very difficult to exhaust the commentaries that have addressed the issue. We again spent some time querying our topic by means of a set of antitheses. Which is to say, just as last week we reached for the category of knowledge by asking “what is not knowledge?” we similarly this week felt our way toward a sense of experience by canvasing alternatives. I believe this was how we got to the thorny problem of the “text.” This was then the topic that detained us for much of our initial hour—the text, approaches to the text, etc. But whatever the text is or might be, we circled an intuition that it was not an “experience.” Yes, you could have an experience of a text. And, sure, you could even turn your experience into a text. But text qua text and experience qua experience felt as if they hailed from different zones (what’s that goofy acronym coined by Stephen Jay Gould? NOMA? “Non-Overlapping Magisteria…”)
In the readings, we noticed Joan Scott’s careful critique of the category of experience, particularly when it is deployed as a locus of authority. One senses she is concerned that the language of experience is all too often (always?) invoked when someone wishes to escape the scrutiny of critical contextualization. For her, the category of experience consistently represents the fantasy of immediacy, of primordial authenticity, of that which (notionally) subtends history, politics, contingency. She mistrusts it as a trojan horse.
So different, Walter Benjamin’s cri de coeur on the same topic! His image of the generation that survived World War I is harrowing. He depicts them as having seen the very possibility of “experience” literally shredded in the dehumanizing vortex of shrapnel and fire—mechanized death and industrial destruction had obliterated the way human beings met the world in time; that meeting, which was experience, was no more.
Sketched this way, I am more with Benjamin than with Scott. Though, in truth, my heart and mind align most closely with the analysis offered in the headnote from Gadamer that I gave with the assignment: I think it is very productive to recognize a specific transformation in the concept of experience across the long seventeenth century; I believe it is correct to say that the delusional ideal of the Enlightenment was indeed the “perfection” of experience into knowledge. We need to be careful here, since there is much to be said for knowledge, and the refining of “mere” experiential into a genuine “experimental philosophy” represents, in my view, an astounding human achievement. Nevertheless, Gadamer is not wrong, I think, when he observes that such a program significantly devalues (fails even, perhaps, to recognize) forms of experience will not give themselves up into knowledge without remainder.
That’s my perspective, anyway. You will all need to reach your own peace (or disquiet?) where these issues are concerned.
(One last quick thought: I myself felt a little impatient with the Marcus and Holmes reading. Among other things, I found it just sort of “badly written” in ways that distract (even annoy) me. I also felt that at least one of what I took to be the central discoveries/propositions of the piece was, when one stepped back, little better than snicker-worthy: LePen as a “para-ethnographer”? How about Holmes and Marcus as para-political thinkers… That is me, when I myself start to feel a little grumpy : )
-DGB
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[And Chandler…. ]
Are kisses a better fate than wisdom? And, if so, what counts as wisdom and why do we prefer kisses?
This week we spoke about experience in its many variations and complexities. We asked how text, and to some extent the hermeneutics of language, differs from experience and briefly discussed a few movements that have challenged the authority of text as the ultimate medium of knowledge production and dissemination. Examples of experience raised in the group ranged from abstract conceptions of childhood euphoria to unadorned brutalities of self-mutilation, practices carried out by a small group of artists in the postwar period.
In order to have this conversation, it was important that we first define and explicate experience for our purposes. Experience is, in the words of our last seminar visitor Jeff Dolven, both a genealogy and a practicum. At the risk of later experiencing regret about reducing full philosophies to single sentences, here is a selection of disparate interpretations that we more or less considered: Michel de Montaigne argued that to be an expert experience is required (1588); Francis Bacon likened experience to judgment (1620); René Descartes distrusted sensorial experience (1637); David Hume prioritized experience over author and object (1757); Immanuel Kant maintained that experience is determined by judgment (1790); Kitarō Nishida described experience as holistic (1911); Walter Benjamin deplored the poverty of experience (1933); Michael Foucault explored unresolved tensions of inner experience and phenomenology (1978); John Dewey distinguished between episodes and streams of experience (1980); Joyce A. Joyce understood experience as wrought with identity politics (1987); Theodore W. Adorno warned that the very possibility of experience was in jeopardy (1991); Giorgio Agamben asserted that experience is no longer accessible (1993); Simone de Beauvoir defended experience yet recognized it as never full, always interrupted by projection (1994).
I had a speech impediment for a long time and one of the words I still to this day find difficult to say is experience. As a result, I think about the experience of enunciating the word experience more than I would like. This is not something I could replicate in text—suspended moments of concentration and usually of silence. In this sense, experience could be interpreted as a visceral transgression located in the body as much as in space and time.
Before Professor Elizabeth Davis arrived, Denise lit incense special to her and her family. As it burned, we talked about the experience of smelling a scent and traditions of breathing in scents.
With Elizabeth, we started by discussing her research interests, which combine Ottoman history and memory, anthropology and ethnography, medicine and psychology, film and visual culture, and conspiracy theories. This led us to ask how so many interests and disciplines could function together and if such cross sections are supported by any market, academic or otherwise. She spoke about professional obstacles she has faced and found solutions for. Sometimes, her solutions were sacrifices. Through a degree of sacrifice, however, she has expanded her methodologies in ways meaningful to her, such as conducting forensic investigations and producing documentary films. Her experience pursuing her research was, therefore, another type of experience we considered as a group.
– Chandler
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[And now Jeremy…]
The class started out with Denise clarifying her interest in fascicle as both a botanical bundle and a discrete section of a text. According to Denise, Emily Dickinson is well known for frequently sewing together her fascicles in different orders such that determining an original order is difficult. I would love to pin this idea—of mix & matchable, (un)orderable fascicles (in the physical, literary sense)—to our ongoing project brainstorm board.
Graham then opened our discussion by questioning our orientation to text. Lauren contributed that the humanities’ focus on text can feel arbitrary, and Minna provided an overview of the poststructuralist argument that everything is a text. Navjit then provided us with an overview of efforts to go beyond the text, Denise discussed the optical unconscious, and Ben brought in Benjamin’s “aura.” Graham also paraphrased Ricoeur’s claim that “we suffer, that is not text,” and Chandler added to this discussion artists’ use of self-harm to go beyond the text, including Viennese Actionism and Orlan.
We stopped for break but not before Denise revealed a stick of incense associated with immunity and wisdom, to which Graham suggested that perhaps this would have helped us with our previous discussion. If I may reopen that discussion, I’d add that the incense’s smell and Joan Scott’s claim that “the visible is privileged” (775) later reminded me of this passage from sensory historian Melanie Kiechle’s introduction to Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America on how smell uniquely evades textualization, or how smell must be transformed into something else before it can be made textual:
In contrast to the rich vocabulary for sights, sounds, textures, and tastes, our olfactory vocabulary is truncated, so I—and most others untrained in perfumery—can only describe an odor by what it smells like: a skunk, a rose, maple syrup. Those descriptions work if you have smelled skunks, roses, or maple syrup before; those who have not smelled these have no frame of reference and only know that I am writing about an odor. (Kiechle, 7)
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Our session with Lisa Davis began with a recap of last class provided by Denise and Emilio. Lisa explained that the normativity in “Refunctioning Ethnography” is helpful in showing what anthropologists see as their stakes, what they see as new, and what make up novel interventions. Lisa also gave us background on the moment marked by the publication of James Clifford and George Marcus’ Writing Culture (1986) when a large selection of anthropologists sought to excavate anthropology from its reputation as the “handmaiden of colonialism” by thinking through things like the power between anthropologists and interlocutors, the use of “I,” and reflexivity. Graham also added that at this same time, Richard Price’s Alabi’s World (1990) made use of typography to highlight these issues, and Clifford Geertz (then at IAS) and History’s Robert Darnton cross-pollinated to interdisciplinarily birth the field of cultural history. Lisa also noted that Writing Culture’s authors were deeply invested in the arts, the senses, and boundaries between ethnography, fiction, and journalism.
This brought us back to the discussion of an IRB that we began in our first meeting. Lisa explained that while all ethnography must get IRB approval, journalism, oral history and art are exempt because they do not make generalizable knowledge claims, and thus are not considered “research.” At the mention of the valuation of knowledge (via the EU’s creation of the MRes), Graham bemoaned the corporatization of the humanities PhD, suggested we read more on neoliberalism, and insisted that the university exist beyond such monetary chains.
When we reopened the discussion on ethnography, I asked a rather unformed question on how other fields dealing with living people might learn from the ethical standards developed for ethnography and Lisa explained such work done in oral history. Minna then asked Lisa to discuss the relationship between her documentary film work and her scholarly practice, upon which Lisa offered some great thoughts on vocality, the significance placed on editing, audience, and collaboration.
Finally, I’d like to bridge our discussion with Martha and Mitra’s visit next week. Last semester I got to visit Martha’s studio as part of HUM598 and I deeply appreciate her work for how she utilizes the past and puts historical/humanistic concerns up against the trickiness of materials like glass, silicone, and concrete. The work pulls on many of the threads we’ve been thinking of—the use of humans in “research,” “research” in a material sense, work that we might consider oriented away from text, etc:
- Thinking about pain and disciplines—As Mitra notes in “Body Matters,” much of Martha’s casting work relies on putting collaborator Silas Riener through considerable physical strain. How might an artist who develops their own ethical standards beyond IRB inform other disciplines with equally informal relationships to human subjects?
- Thinking about texts and disciplines—If we accept that a critic can read Martha’s sculpture or sculptural practice as a text but silo pantextualism with humanists for a moment to give Lauren’s comment from last class a bit more airtime, is the idea of the text—and its foundations in language—useful to the practicing artist invested in the material properties of various media?
-Jeremy