Discussion

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 30^th. 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

[A few notes by DGB, followed by write ups by Julia and Jeremy — for which, thank you!]

The opening discussion in our session today ended up circling a topic that remains on the minds of most: the job market in the humanities; the future of humanistic inquiry/teaching at the post-secondary level.  In certain ways, it cannot but be a “tired” topic.  But in another way, we have to keep it fresh — since it does not look like a problem that is likely to solve itself.  Although it is hard to figure out how it is to be solved.

Should graduate programs take fewer students (if there are fewer jobs)? Should universities figure out how to hire more PhDs (if they are training them)?

We talked about this stuff, and I tried to bring some of the perspectives that circulate in gatherings of faculty — and these perspectives are diverse.  Some feel we are, effectively, “professional school” for the professoriate.  If that is the case, we need to be responsive to the market: fewer professional positions, fewer new trainees.  Others incline to conceiving graduate training in the humanities as part of a wider project of cultivation of “intellectual life” or (along the lines of the Wendy Brown piece) the maintenance of civic/existential/social values/practices other than “market” values (or the associated reductionisms/heuristics, like “optimization” discourse or the game-theory schemes of adversarial maximization).  For those that way inclined, a bad job market in the humanities is actually a symptom of a wider calamity of conscience and collective being — and the way forward is a doubling down on the project, in the hopes that new waves of “believers” can help save the day.

There may be other positions.  But those are the ones I see.  My own sensibility inclines, as I indicated, to the latter view.  And I am less interested in sorting out how to help PhDs in the humanities find alt-ac career paths that articulate with the machinations of neoliberalism, and more interested in trying to change the world into which new humanities PhDs go — to make new spaces for the kind of work we care about and that I believe is essential to human wellbeing.

But this is a very difficult — indeed, possibly utopian — program.

I did mention a bright light: Matthew Spellberg (IHUM alumnus!) whose work with Outer Coast strikes me as part of a very exciting movement to create a new kind of network of two year colleges — rooted in local knowledge and indigenous traditions.

* * *

I won’t try to summarize Professor Hare’s visit, leaving that to Julia and Jeremy below.  But I would be remiss if I did not mention Navjit’s immensely powerful intervention, in which, linking back to the question of the university humanities, she articulated a slashing critique of the provincialism of American university whinging about humanistic collapse: the idea of the liberal university, in her account, was born of an “original sin” by which the (sacred) “spaces of thought” were to be won by means of a severing of thinking from doing, a split between “head labor” and “hand labor.”  This is and was a false move, and one rooted in class (and empire).  The resulting universities “worked” as bastions for a special kind of humanistic “reflection” for exactly as long as the brutal “outsourcing” of physical labor could be maintained (exported, in effect, to the global south and subaltern peoples).  It is THAT architecture that is collapsing.  And as the brutalizations “come home to roost” (in the “heartland”) the little arcadia of the American college can no longer hold space.

An analysis not to be forgotten.

-DGB

* * *

[Julia follows…]

During the first half of last week’s discussion, our conversation shifted somewhat rapidly from the final project to, more broadly, the crisis of the humanities and the position graduate students and their departments hold within it. It stemmed from a comment made by Graham, who let us know that, in the History Department, faculty had met [back in pandemic times -DGB] to decide whether to accept the same number of Ph.D. students or grant for extra year for pre-existing Ph.D. candidates instead. This seemingly small dilemma opened the gates within our class for a number of questions regarding the usage of funding in the university and the possible politics that different department can take within the shrinking job market, giving way to our (perhaps first?) intense debate on a subject that, on one way or the other, preoccupies most of us.

Graham started the conversation by stating his position, advocating for the acceptance of the same number of graduate students as a way to create as many open-minded, intellectually curious academic individuals that could advance the conversations of our society forward, whether they were granted a job afterwards or not. This position advocated, in a way, for the conceptual health of the society and academia as a whole (and was maybe tied into our conversation a week ago where students where not only discussed within the space of the university, but within civic society more broadly.)

Chandler then proposed that students, within departments, should be encouraged to follow more alternative paths more often – from curatorial gigs to working at museums, applying for writing fellowships, and so on. This seemed to be of interest in the class, where the consensus was that “Altac” paths were discouraged more often than not. Minna responded here, and pointed out that many of these “Altac” jobs fall into a similar austerity that the academic market currently has, and signaled that getting a curatorial job at a museum was as hard to do as getting a teaching position. The conversation between Chandler and Minna, in this sense, turned into whether an alternative path was feasible at all, or whether it was as hard and somewhat pointless as trying to be a university professor. Finally, Navjit spoke very passionately about the role that faculty can have within the improvement and advocated for the unionization of professors as well as students, which would allow for some leverage to negotiate with the institution. I asked shyly about the possibility of faculty allowing for the creation of more jobs – as a direct way of counterbalancing the shrinking market – and Graham responded by underscoring the hardships of some of the negotiations that take place within party politics.

After that first half, prof. Thomas Hare came into our seminar to give a delightful talk about the tea ceremony, In Praise of Shadows, his own writing on nō theatre, and medieval Japan. The meeting started with a short presentation on the intense changes that the tea ceremony underwent during the 14^th century in Japan, and how it came into being as it is today. Prof. Hare showed compelling images of tea houses and bowls and explained to us the fascinating relationships between aesthetics, class and art that are at the heart the tea ceremony. He also offered the idea that the tea ceremony was both deeply disciplinary as well as anti-disciplinary (in the sense that, at the time, it was intensely anti-traditional and even somewhat subversive).

During the Q&A section of our discussion, some of the questions that arose had to do with the process of doing within scholarship, and how the performance of nō affected, to some extent, prof. Hare’s own writing. He remarked, here, on the fact that some of the aspects of the theatre tradition are better understood when one’s performing as well as writing. Subsequently, some of the questions turned into the discipline of comparative literature as a whole, where prof. Hare said that, within the past few decades, the orientation of comparative literature (and perhaps following broader, political movements) has influence literary studies that consider themselves within the tradition of certain national languages – i.e., that a comparative literature framework is used broadly today in departments like French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, East Asian Studies, and so on.

A remarkable moment of the conversation with Prof. Hare took place when he offered two, possible genealogies for the emergence of comparative literature as a field. One, he said out, could be thought of with the study of The Epic of Gilgamesh, which forced many academics from varying languages that are related to ancient Mesopotamia to come together and study comparatively. Another, possible origin took place, according to Prof. Hare, when, during the Holocaust, of Jewish scholars migrated from Eastern Europe into the United States and brought, with themselves, vast knowledge on traditions and languages. Erich Auerbach’s anecdote on the writing of Mimesis was brought as a key example, where memory served Auerbach as a form of writing his seminal work from exile in Istanbul (the word exilic figuring prominently in the board of a classroom, as part of the conception of comparative studies). Finally, some of the remarks turned into the idea of amateurism and the retro-feeding of dilettantism into interdisciplinary studies. Another last point that was left hanging in the air (and perhaps also one that might be worth picking up next week) was the so-called anti-intellectualism of American culture, and the damage it might do to academia as a whole.

-JK

[And Jeremy here below…]

“And so we distort the arts themselves to curry favor for them with the machines,” writes Jun’ichirō Tanizaki in In Praise of Shadows, the primary text Thomas Hare assigned for us this week. Though our discussion never got to Tanizaki, for me this line captures a theme we wrestled with this week, and to a certain extent, one we have dealt with in many of our more quotidian discussions on doing humanistic work in present day academia.

Tanizaki is of course discussing the transmission of Japanese art forms through media made for western music, so I don’t want to conflate his move with what the (still largely western) humanities experience in the face of an academic landscape increasingly shaped by the sciences or when humanists seek out post-grad employment. But in the comparatist orientation of the week, I would put forth that much of our discussion seems to hinge on the unease of a similar distortion of spirit that occurs when humanists confront an abysmal job market and, to paraphrase Denise, the “conversations on conversations” that recur around it.

We circled around the problem a bit, questioning what “the job market” means to various disciplines, how alternatives to academic careers are seen and presented (or not) to us, and the instability inherent in many of these other careers. We delved deeper than the prior conversations I have been part of when we began to discuss how such conversations frame the problem—individual vs. collective—and who holds what responsibilities when it comes to faculty and students. There seemed a general hesitation with the concept of framing graduate students as the “vanguards” of any future revolution—that perhaps the vanguard feels too easily coopted by the entrepreneurship model already making its way into the humanities and seems separated from much of the problem’s origin in the increasing reliance on adjuncts, graduate student teaching, and larger class sizes at universities at all levels. A powerful end note to the discussion was Navjit’s call for unionization—of both graduate students and faculty—and reminder that the “my” in “my students are still getting jobs” is where solidarity ends. As it spilled into the break, our discussion concluded that the question of the job market beyond academia, even in the most well-intentioned of conversations, is still framed as 1) a second choice, 2) an “if” not “when” scenario, and 3) a “you” not “we” situation– i.e. “you could still do this if even after you’ve secured the incredible postdoc you don’t get a tenure-track job,” and not a “when our students all face this shared future.”

In our second half of class, Tom Hare of Comparative Literature presented on tea and in doing so gave us insightful threads to think about in terms of the body as vessel for cultural tradition, the demeanor of cultural production, and the issues of class and gender embedded in the organizational structures of training. Graham braided some of these threads together into an area we have yet to explore in depth, aesthetics, as well as our ongoing discussion of teaching vs. training. Julia asked if, in the IHUM spirit, training was an integral part of scholarship on writing about art forms like tea or noh, which got us back into thinking about thinking vs doing.

We entered a conversation on disciplinary formation with Minna’s questions about comp lit’s relation to area studies and Ben’s question about comp lit’s ascendance in the United States vs. Britain and discussed the range of origin stories told within the discipline, starting as far back and as textually as Gilgamesh and as recent and as contingently as the arrival of Eastern European Jewish refugee academics in the United States—to go back to last week’s discussion, a “seed bomb” that transformed many disciplines, my own field of architecture included. We then got into the exilic nature of interdisciplinary work and riffed a bit on this to think about excavating meaning from terms now seen as derogatory—like the amateur or the dilletante—as a way of thinking about interdisciplinarity.

This brought us back to the question we approached before break of what to do about professionalization and the de-skilling it entails. What do we do when, after narrow professionalization, no profession exists and much of the solutions that exist thrust more side-gigs and side-gigs-turned-main-gigs upon already time- and cash-strapped graduate students. Much of these ‘suggestions’ are framed as work that will make us competitive later on, but for graduate students today, just having five years of employment and health insurance and time to read and write may be already as much as we or our families may hope for. To paraphrase Navjit once more, the academy has always been built on the exclusion of different types of knowledge, and now it is dealing with it, and to paraphrase my own comment, institutions that only recently professed a desire for inclusion with no real way to attain it are especially poorly equipped to “deal.”

Also, thank you to Emilio for bringing what looked like a quite heavy typewriter all the way from home! We unfortunately never got to address it or put it to use but hopefully get to think with it as we go back to discussing our final project next week.

-JW

A good seminar today. We committed ourselves to a session in which we would focus on some of our own thematic concerns (as they have emerged across the first six weeks of our work together) and, importantly, on our final project (a concrete plan for which is starting to feel urgent). I took responsibility for the write-up of the session, so here we go…

We spent the first hour and a half or so discussing the three readings, with a focus on Yves Citton’s précis of Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster. There was a little resistance from the outset to the “Jacotot theory of learning” — and such ambivalence is by no means unreasonable. Lauren offered a personal story that involved the enormous pleasure (and relief?) of being taught. Meaning, having someone pick up the chalk, go to the blackboard, and explain the problem: where it came from, ways of solving it, and directions for further inquiry.

Chandler followed up and expressed skepticism about the ubiquity of “intellectuality.”  What might this even mean? What kinds of fantasy must one indulge even to posit such a thing?

Lauren spoke of her friend who is a social worker, whose committed lifework involves, to a significant extent, the enormously challenging business of trying to get marginalized and compromised people to engage in the most basic forms of self-care (showering, eating, sleeping). This is teaching. To suggest that, under the right conditions, such persons might somehow better be permitted to “discover” such matters on their own initiative can seem, in context, positively cruel (consider, for a moment, R. D. Laing’s experiments at Kingsley Hall in the 1960s).

And yet, we also had Julia’s striking story of teaching poetry in a penurious mental asylum in Argentina: yes, it was overwhelming to try to read and write poems with individuals of enormous poverty who had spent lives, in some cases, as outcasts of society, and who were subject to spells of genuinely frightening mental instability; at the same time, how overwhelming, in a very different way, to discover the extraordinary poetic genius that emerged in such environments.

It is difficult to do justice to the richness of the conversation about pedagogy that ensued. But there are some shining moments. I think all of us were probably affected by Navjit’s contribution. She offered us two very different (but equally beautiful) images from her own public education in India: on the one hand, the open lecture halls of the public universities permitted a coming and going of those who were interested (exams could structure individual trajectories, but there was little formalized “course of study”  that brought students under the surveillant scrutiny of professorial expectation or curricular programming); on the other hand, her training at the hands of a recognized master of (as I understood it) Hindustani vocal performance (where for five years she rarely, if ever, was permitted to sing more than a single note for her guru/teacher—who sequenced her through a lengthy and tributary novitiate). Others, too, had teaching stories, and learning stories.

Before we moved on, I did try to underscore how powerfully I had been affected by Rancière’s argument on this read. Yes, I have made my way through his texts before. Yes, if pressed (like, in a generals-exam setting), I could have “given” his argument. I knew the story. But, as I admitted to you all, only on this reacquaintance did I genuinely feel how completely I had missed the dialectical power of the core claims of Rancière’s work.

He is really flipping the script on us professor-types. Did you all fully inhabit this?

I think it is not easy for people like us to do so. We wouldn’t be in a graduate seminar if we didn’t, in some basic ways, “believe” in the form of education (its methods, its implicit theory of knowledge, its sociology) characteristic of the modern research university — where we seem to be intent on nesting ourselves in perpetuity, if at all possible. In that context, we are probably a little “hard of hearing” when what is being said is “the educational project you are part of is in fact an elaborate machine for producing ignorance/stultification — things which are in no way natural, and come into being through the dynamic of ‘teaching.’”

I asked us to attempt, heuristically, fully to inhabit such a perspective. Did we succeed?

Hard to say. I’m not sure I myself can fully get there.

But perhaps doing so involves really zeroing in on the political stakes. Since the question is NOT “Don’t some people know how to do math problems better than other people?” (The answer to that is, presumably, “sure.”) The question Rancière is asking us to ask ourselves, the question Rancière is saying Jacotot was asking, is “What is the right kind of education in a democracy?” And more specifically, “What is the form of education suitable to a truly egalitarian ethos?”

The key moment appears on page 33 of the Citton, where Rancière is quoted as follows: “Equality is not a given, nor is it claimed; it is practiced, it is verified.”

This is, I think it must be acknowledged, a proposition of challenging profundity. If it is true (and is it not?) then a form of education that genuinely works to practice and verify equality may indeed be something more than just “nice” in a democratic polity. It may be absolutely obligatory, and possibly even constitutive of a meaningful democratic politics.

But if this is the case, is it not also the case that the deepest presuppositions of the educational system of which we are (I believe, all of us) the products, and which we propose to extend and perpetuate are hopelessly wrong-headed — indeed, diametrically at odds with what is wanted?

Strong medicine. We walked this inquiry into a conversation about academic training (grad school) as opposed to undergraduate teaching, etc. But, interesting as that was, I don’t want to lose the force of the original challenge. Our system of teaching and learning stratifies, sorts, and very definitely produces an attunement to (nominally justifiable) dominance. As in “this person is better than that person.”  Our education system is ALL ABOUT THAT.

Is this what we want? Is it just happenstance that we have ended up with such a system (in a democracy that feels less and less “democratic”)? Is it happenstance that the system we DO have accords so smoothly with the needs of transnational meritocratic capitalism?

And even if you find that question sort of tediously knee-jerk leftist, do you not smell something weird in the way the “democratic education” we are endlessly subserving can never show us equality now, but only offer a (notional) equality of endowment (anyway dubious) or an aspirational equality of outcome (which is continuously and assiduously deferred/falsified by the very educational apparatus itself)?

Smells fishy to me…

* * *

We pivoted away from all this at the end of the first half of class, and talked about the footnote piece from Critical Inquiry, and we also stirred in a bit of quick appreciation for Proctor’s agnotology essay, by this point we were basically all ready for a short break.

WHEN WE CAME BACK, we dug in on the final project proposals.

I am not going to try to résumé this conversation qua conversation.  I am instead going to go ahead and try to do the work of formulating a WORKING PROPOSAL out of what got said (while also taking a moment to surface some of the ideas that were a bit off the emergent “path” of collective energy—some folks may want to opt for developing this or that aspect of those, and going other directions…)

In the end, I sensed that a lot of us might be able to coalesce around something like this:

• Everyone gets to choose a “text” (this could also be an image; it could be found or made; but we presume it will be of value in thinking the themes of our course, and will engage more or less directly with stuff we have discussed). We will need to zero in on a STANDARD FORMAT for these (to enhance comparability and formal coherence). Let’s say, for the sake of argument, it needs to fit legibly on a single side of a single piece of paper not to exceed six inches square.

• Then, everyone takes some time, working individually (but also in emergent groups, as needs-be), to produce a SET of “annotations” to these “primary texts.” We have not yet set the number or character of those annotations, but there is going to need to be some kind of “rubric” that (again) makes those annotations “comparable” – and that gives the final project, again, some formal coherence.  So, it would be something like, say: A) everyone does a total of 12 annotations; B) we do these in two rounds of 6 (so there can be annotations on the annotations); C) everyone does at least 3 annotations “from their disciplinary position” and at least 1 that is “explicitly about inter/trans disciplinarity”; the rest may be (intelligently) indifferent to, or resistant to, “disciplinary” orientations; D) some (say, as many as 4) will be direct citations/quotations/reproductions from existing works; E) at least two will be images; F) at least two will be handwritten or hand-drawn.

• Yes, all that sounds like a lot of bullshit and preformatting. But if we agree to roll with something like that, I think the final thing will take on a texture and balance exceeding what might otherwise be hoped for in a collaboration that will be, of necessity, limited in duration (and in the iterative labor required of intense and deepening projects of this kind).  So I would ask you not to dismiss my suggestion here – though we can surely discuss!

• If we go with something like this, we will need to come up with a “plan of work.” In the sense that we need to lay out a timeline for the elements, as well (again) as some formal conventions.  But I foresee the final project being, in effect, “assembled” (out of the drafted “parts”) in a one-time final class session – meeting in-person, in a studio space of some kind (to be determined!).

• I think it is not an “exhibition” or anything, and I think we do not plan for the thing to be “public.” Though we can take up the question of “documentation” downstream.

So something like that?

If we go this route, there is some stuff that will, to some extent, get left on the cutting room floor.  So a moment on a few of those elements that jumped out for me.  (And if I am omitting stuff you were into, just poke, and I can add…):

• I was REALLY into Ben’s idea of exploring obsolescence (as a patterned conception of knowledge within knowledge-producing domains like academic disciplines), and I thought the idea of doing so by means of a project that involved the BOOK as a form (the codex having been invented to preserve knowledge; the book currently feeling like an increasingly “obsolete” medium). Ben also suggested our writing texts that were, in a sense, “pre-programmed” for obsolescence.  (Wait, do we ever do anything else?)  But seriously, this idea too struck me as odd and promising, and like it might (as he suggested) link to the “time-capsule” idea.  Chandler put the concept of the “gimmick” in here, which felt relevant.  And we took a moment to play around with some ideas of self-destructing books, etc.  Not sure what could be exactly done with this line of inquiry, but I was intrigued.

• Also thought that Foivos introduced a very interesting/promising referent with the “seed bomb.” Not quite sure how it might best be “activated.”  But rich terrain, both in terms of material culture, and by way of metaphor.

• Finally, would not want to lose Lauren’s invocation of the potential of various chromatic investigations. (I was the one who started talking about zippers! That was NOT why she showed us that sample book!)

We will pick all of this up in the first half of our session next week, with Professor Hare…

-DGB

[A few introductory words by DGB, then Julia and Navjit’s write-ups follow]

I will leave to Navjit and Julia the heavy lifting of documenting the two parts of our seminar today — but I do want to put down a few thoughts. We had a slightly longer first half of the class this week, because Professor Glaude joined us only for the last hour of the session. That left us a nice stretch of time in which to brainstorm/discuss the final project. We got into this via our shared document, where a number of us have put down some thinking — much of which reflects the meeting that you-all did when you met up together without me in the week before break. While I took a moment to sketch some of the structural elements that need to be in place to make something like this work (symmetrical/comparable “elements” that each individual can contribute; a manageable “deliverable” by dean’s date, with the possibility of optional additional project work to follow), the bulk of the conversation circled what seems to be emerging as a thematic/formal nexus: textual annotation (academic citation/footnotes/endnotes).

I am attempting here to paraphrase a ranging conversation, but it seems that there is interest in footnoting from several directions: the role of annotation practices in all academic work; the polyphony of annotation as a convocation of diverse perspectives; the layering and historicity implicit in citation; and various other things too. We spent some time on the basic problem of what text might lie at the center of a collective annotation exercise. And this feels hard. So much would quite literally “depend” on/from such a decision, and that weights the choice in a way that does not feel exactly comfortable. Could we write, or perhaps find/collect such a text? Perhaps. And this might help resolve the issue. I myself was drawn in that direction by the prospect of collecting language on campus — from the “ether,” as it were — by analogy to the remarkable origin of “Torrit Grey.”

About this time I reminded us that for all the immense openness and in effect infinite potentiality of the project we do have a very real center/focus: whatever final project we do, in whatever form, it wants to engage the question of the humanities as a “universitarian” project, and to do so in a way that manifests a critical/reflexive awareness of the disciplinary topologies of our moment (meaning the epistemic, economic, political, and historically contingent facets of the institutional organization of scholarly inquiry and associated pedagogy).

We spent a little time on the distinction between centripetal and digressive/centrifugal patterns in textual orientation. There are different implications to committing ourselves in one or the other of these directions. Formal implications and substantive ones too. At one point Juila asked about “creativity”: just how creative is it possible to imagine this final project really being? This was another moment where I tried to specify some “framework” stuff: yes, the project can be pretty creative, I think; however, whatever it shapes up to be, I need to feel that I can “defend” it as a final project in this graduate seminar.

Defend it before/against whom?

Well, really no specific person or persons.

But heuristically, let us say, I would want to feel like I could defend it (1) as a final project (2) by a group of graduate students (3) in this graduate seminar… if asked by a group of my professional colleagues to do so.

Practically speaking, I think that gives us quite a lot of range, because if we agree we are doing good/serious work (and that does not preclude the work being “playful” or “creative” or “defiant” or a lot of other things), then we should be fine. I also noted that the project had to include enough symmetrical/comparable individual work to permit me to discharge my institutional/administrative obligations. To some extent, that latter proviso does bear on exactly how much of the project can be “purely” “creative” (in a “this-is-a-short-story-I-wrote sense”), because it is not clear that everyone is going to feel equally interested in or competent to certain forms of creative making — and we need to find a kind of collaborative work that everyone can do.

*

Enough on all that for now.  But we have our work before us for next week in this regard — since I think we need to have something like a plan by the end of our session on 2 November.

What remains is to say a few quick words about Professor Glaude’s visit.  In a somewhat indulgent way, I suppose, it was pleasing for me to reminisce with Eddie a little—since we have known each other for more than twenty years now, and our academic lives intersect going back almost an additional decade.  This starts to be “history,” in a way, and thinking the university (this one specifically; the broader institutional form of universities in general) across more than a quarter of a century “from personal experience” has its own qualities.  These are affectively notable (from the first-person perspective), but I do not mean to suggest that substitutes for critical insight!

That said, there was plenty of that on offer, I think, from Professor Glaude, who both sketched the evolution of “Black Studies” over nearly half a century at Princeton and elsewhere, and gave us a feel for his own professional/intellectual trajectory over the second half of that interval.  All of us learned some things, I am sure.  And there were some glimpses of the workings at that delicate nexus where administrative negotiations around salaries and hiring intersect with the wider conceptual/political visions of scholars.  Sometimes the result is nothing less than the formalization of new spaces of inquiry!

-DGB

* * *

[Julia here below, then Navit after]

In the seminar on Wednesday, much of our discussion focused on what we would like our seminar discussions to yield, as required in the form of a term end paper. Our discussions jostled to find a collective idiom for our creativity (something other than a conventionally accepted term paper), and this mostly manifested in a discussion around the several prefixes we could attach to the word “note”: footnote, endnote, or its allied concepts; annotate, keyword etc. Since my part of the write up focuses on the second part of the discussion, the second half of the seminar started first with the discussion of objects that Navjit had brought. There were two objects put on the table. One the Indic version of an earthen lamp, called the diya and other a form of rosary beads that her mother gave her when she first left India for the United States. The first object wanted to gesture towards other subversive histories that object used to have which getting obliviated with the globalization of the Indian festival Diwali, that is steeped in upper caste North Indian narratives erasing the other meanings that Diwali held especially for other castes and communities in India. The second object wanted to deliberate on the role religious objects and symbols continue to embody even as questions of economic and cultural aspirations ceaselessly are changing.

The object was interpreted by incorporating Vikrant dadawala’s timely essay in the point magazine on ‘Ethnic Studies’. What does this term mean anymore other than an identity politics? And given the insistence of the seminar on Anti- and Inter- disciplinarity, it seemed a timely question to what kind of knowledge is the translation of a religious object from the faraway lands of India in a seminar that is bound up with dilemma of avowing and disavowing enlightenment tradition of making, producing and discussing what knowledge is.

The entry of Professor Glaude into this discussion made an interesting continuation, not only because of his early work on religion but also his discussion on the question, fate and legacy of Black Studies, a question that further fragments the enlightenment traditions of knowledge formation by inserting experience (colonial, violent, raced) at the heart of the question of knowledge. It was a surprise to learn that African American studies department started its trajectory in a small Dickinson room in the 1960s while it would only become an official, independent department by 2015. Professor Glaude talked about the several black scholars at his time in different departments, a pedagogy that instilled several questions regarding Black Studies. Standing true to the lines, that he writes in one of the essays that eh shared, “History prepares the poor, the victims of unnecessary injustice, to spit at tradition, to blow up the laboratories, to despise all knowledge recklessly loosened from the celebration of all human life. And still, it lies there, the university campus, frequently green, and signifying power: power to the people who feed their egos on the grass, inside the gates.” In narrating the history of the African American Studies department and his own personal history of being a pedagogue, rather a black studies pedagogue, Professor Glaude brought the visceral experience of these words penned in one of the readings visibly present. In the end, Denise asked him about the question of solitude that he mentions in one of his readings and he answered by listing that as a task and a challenge. The class parted ways on some words by James Baldwin.

-JK

* * *

[And Navjit…]

A seminar discussion is a particular genre — ideas flow in a way that is not necessarily linear, disseminating from different possible points of departure that feel rhizomatic, more often than not. These notes will take the form of some of those possible lines: forgive me for the silences, the empty spaces, the things unnoted.

We started the class discussion going back to the issue of the final project, now agreed upon footnotes. Some of the questions that arose had to do with form, content, and contingency. I think these might be very useful in the weeks to come and, as our project starts taking shape, we should maybe make decisions upon these inquiries. Namely: What is the relevance of footnotes now? Do we want to footnote a book (Benjamin, Kant, Mailer), a conversation (between us, between Princeton students, of the ghostly voices that float on campus)? Do we want to footnote a color (torrid gray), an official document (Princeton’s endowment and how it is invested), an object? Do we want to make a sculpture, or a book? And, if the latter happens, do we want the book to be a traditional one, or should we play with the format of a book itself (like the Babylonian Talmud) or the materials of the book (like with transparency and vellum paper)? Do we want the book to pass the mom test, as it was suggested by a classmate, or are we veering to esotericism instead? Would the footnotes be creative, like short stories under a text, or more provocative?

Navjit brought to class two sacred objects that refer to Diwali (as somewhat of an elitist fantasy), prayer beads and her own experience in America, and brought our attention towards a fantastic essay in The Point about contemporary ethnic studies: https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/ethnic-studies/

During the last half of the last, Edward Glaude joined us to discuss his experience in the formation of African American Studies, productively putting in dialogue several temporalities at the same time (Baldwin’s mid-century writings, the emergence of the field during 1968 and 1969, his own experiences in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, the present moment). He spoke about Bringing Back the Person first, as an emergent text within what he called an epistemic insurrection, i.e. a direct challenge to epistemic (willful) ignorance which had historically defined the university (“silence carries forward histories that have to be excavated.”) He brought our attention to the relationship between knowledge and experience, arguing that the centering of experience within the practice of own’s scholarship is a way, for him, to challenge knowledge itself.

Prof. Glaude went on to create a concise history of the emergence of African American Studies, between 1969 and 2022. He raised some important questions in this regard: What happens when a discipline that is, by definition, counter-cultural and subversive, becomes institutionalized? How does it happen, and what is lost? Some of the points that were brought into this history were the creation of the first African American Studies departments around the country (which Princeton carefully avoided), Glaude’s own shift from Religion to African American Studies, and some of the main public discussions and debates that allowed for this constellation of scholars from different discipline to converge within one area. Cornel West was pointed out to be one of the main figures within this process, particularly in his debates with Lawrence Summers, Leon Wieseltier, and his collaboration with other scholars like Kwame Anthony Appiah. Another remarkable point was the discussion in tandem with how Neuroscience was developing as a department, and the dual function of having both an institute and a department.

Finally, some of the closing remarks following a few questions had to do with the importance of solitude vis-à-vis individuality. Professor Glaude remarked here on the important idea of elsewhere, that is, places that are far from our central communities (Heidelberg, Paris, etc.) and that allow us to replenish, giving space to quiet our minds and care for communities at the distance. He also briefly talked about his role as a public intellectual, reminding us both that a fundamental change always happens at the level of the writing (not through accessibility, he said, but through clarity) and that some of the main challenges that we encounter at the university are the same ones that our society faces today.

-NK

[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

* * *

[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

* * *

[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?

———

Our opening conversation today ended up taking a relatively extensive turn through the consideration of a question I might sum up as follows: “what, exactly, are we doing in this class?”

I am being sort of funny here—but there is also a barb in the humor. Which is to say, I think in a very genuine way there was a desire to feel around a little bit for the “thread” or “through-line” or even “objective” of the course. I want you all to keep pushing on this, and I do not in any way mean to evade such questioning—not even when my efforts to reply include anecdotes about art projects like Fia Backström’s Studies in Leadership.

One part of the ensuing conversation did take up the (pretty concrete) question of what it would mean for history as a “discipline” to be more “humanistic” and less “social-scientific”—and that pivoted us into the exchange between Judith Butler’s dissent from the AAUP statement on the function of the university and the purpose of education. Chandler expressed a strong feeling of distaste for the way the AAUP statement privileged the discourse of “expertise,” and the way it also seemed to double down on the idea that education amounted to the transmission (inculcation?) of knowledge—knowledge certified by people who claim to “know better.” In this sense, Chandler (and others, too, I think) felt greater sympathy for Butler’s critique: it is critical inquiry, not merely “knowledge production/transmission” that lies at the center of the humanities (at least) and quite possibly university enterprise as a whole.

This felt right, and I believe there was pretty broad consensus in the group (am I right about this?) that we were more on Butler’s side than on that of the formal statement. (Lauren, to be fair, seemed to feel that it ought to be possible to reconcile these positions, and that the energy of dissent and polemic were perhaps overblown.)

We didn’t really have much time to play this conversation all the way out (our guests arrived), but we did take a moment to think through just what “critical inquiry” was supposed to achieve. The answer, basically, was something like “emancipation from our prejudices,” or perhaps “heightened awareness of the way our prejudices are canalizing or delimiting our range and access.” All of this is obviously incredibly important (Who wants to be prejudiced? Who doesn’t want a wider view?). Nevertheless, I did try, by way of closing provocation, to ask what I think of as a difficult question that does not seem to me to be answered in the program of critical inquiry as Butler outlines it (or, to be clear, as the program of critique is generally defended—since I wish to stipulate here that I enormously admire the Butler piece).

And perhaps the best way to articulate that concern would simply be to ask whether our “prejudices” are only ever an “impediment” to our thinking? Are they not also a condition of possibility of our thought? ESPECIALLY where humanistic work is concerned? Or, to put a finer point on it, what would it be like to “think” once we had eliminated all the things we thought we knew in advance (all our “pre-judgements,” all our “baggage”)? It would be, in a way, to think quite outside of time and place, body and tradition, language and history. Wouldn’t it? Is that what we WANT? Or, wait… DON’T WE ALREADY HAVE THAT KIND OF THINKING PRETTY WELL WORKED OUT? Isn’t it called…SCIENCE? Needless to say, it is hardly as if science has entirely escaped from its prejudices but it presents a pretty rigorous program for “thinking without ourselves” in all those messy ways.

Or no?

At any rate, we were left with that question—and with the braid of mane of now lost horse, which sat in its beautiful little box.  A memeno mori? Perhaps.  And also a reminder of life and bodies and memory and… traditions?

-DGB

———–

[And now Ben… -DGB]

[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

——-

[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

————————————————-

[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)

 * * *

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

[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…”]

[DGB, writing the first discussion post…]

Just a few notes to get our thread launched.  We gathered for the first time on Wednesday the 7^th, and though there was a sense that the class was organizational (mostly), and that we might not use the whole period, the truth was we sort of ran out of time!  (In that, I realized after we dispersed, that I had failed to talk about the tradition of the “weekly object” — which, to get us launched, I will bring to our next session…more on that TK).

But I take that as a very good sign for our semester together, that we immediately got rolling, and found ourselves, without even having done any shared reading, already thickening a conversation about the humanities, the arts, the sciences, “professional trajectories,” and many of the other themes to which we will return over the next twelve weeks.  We also, of course, did quite a bit of “nuts and bolts” on the way 583 works, the ways that it is a little different from a lot of other seminars, and I dished a little on the “lore” of past cycles, genealogies, hoary wisdoms, blah blah blah.

In all seriousness, though, one of the moments I hope we can hold on to as we launch was that little excursus into the pandemic, and its immense costs to so many over these last years — and the shared recognition (I felt) that we all wanted to try to be a little extra “careful” with each other, trying to keep in mind that a lot of folks (everyone?) is maybe just a little closer to their edges after the strain and isolation and disruptions since March of 2020.  So I am committed on this, and I hope you all are too.

That said, there was also a valuable turn through the respective virtues of “affirmation and positivity” (the saying of yes) as against “critical resistance” (refusal, negation…the saying of no).  To this I am sure we will return, since it informs so much.  I suggested it is key to be wary of the saying of “no” merely out of fear/anxiety/unfamiliarity.  And I further tried to slip in there a little plea for the special power of refusing to use what one thinks one knows to fuel disdain or an inadequately examined sense of mastery/ownership.  Here we tip open the value of a very particular kind of “negativity”: negative capability, in the Keats sense.  Key, that.

But we have time for all these questions.  And time, too, to think about our forms and modes of potential collaboration.  A good deal of our conversation circled that imminence, and it felt right to come right out of the blocks with various suggestions and examples on all that.  Very much looking forward to our term together!

-DGB