this project<\/a>, 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).\u00a0 One more thought:\u00a0 what if we stay after this idea of Agnotology, etc., and do a collaborative (fictional) departmental website for a “department of radical un-knowing”?\u00a0 We could make up the courses, the faculty, etc.\u00a0 Has some potential…<\/p>\nOnward!\u00a0 Hope you all are able to do some final project thinking together this week…<\/p>\n
-DGB<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
[Minna follows, and Foivos after….]<\/p>\n
As we continued to grapple with the question of \u201cknowledge\u201d\u2014its ontology and hermeneutics\u2014we 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 \u201cexperience\u201d\u2014itself a polemical contention, as Graham reminded us, for such antithesis refutes the modern enterprise of transforming experience into knowledge\u2014then, we added to this mix, \u201cignorance,\u201d \u201cnon-knowledge,\u201d and also, \u201cforgetting.\u201d Can we consider ignorance and forgetting as a kind of strategic \u201caporetics,\u201d 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\u2014including, but not limited to, Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance<\/em> (2008), Jacques Ranci\u00e8re\u2019 The Ignorant Schoolmaster<\/em> (1987), and Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes\u2019, Merchants of Doubt <\/em>(2010). Indeed, as Graham pointed out, this mode of inquiry into the negative\u2014what Ben has called the \u201cdark side\u201d of knowledge, or Lauren\u2019s \u201cgrey matter\u201d\u2014harkens back to the Hegelian injunction to \u201ctarry with the negative.\u201d<\/p>\nResponding to Graham\u2019s comment that the wager of both Ranci\u00e8re 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\u2019s point, whereas ignorance is a kind of \u201cun-knowing\u201d or \u201cnot-yet-knowing\u201d (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 \u201cnon\u201d in \u201cnon-knowledge\u201d (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\u2019s academia? Are they the critics or amateurs, or simply outlaws? What is the critical import of \u201ctransgression\u201d in the enterprise of humanistic inquiry? Does it still have the aporetic capacity for \u201crupture,\u201d for emergent knowledge, in today\u2019s academic fora?<\/p>\n
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 \u201cseamfulness\u201d seemed more than an apt analogy for his interdisciplinary method and positionality\u2014or rather multiple positionalities within and beyond academia. At the same time, we returned to the question of \u201cemployment cartels\u201d that continue to govern and police the citizenship in\/of academia, and mulled over the transgressive potential of \u201ccollaboration\u201d 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\u2019s object \u201ctorrit grey\u201d as a metaphor, is collaboration the praxis of producing non-knowledge out of both lack and excess?<\/p>\n
– Minna<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
[And Foivos…]<\/p>\n
Dark Kiss, tarrying with the Negative.<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
We start the seminar revisiting one of our earliest discussions, thinking that when asking what is the opposite of knowledge, all of us very casually overlooked what would be a rather obvious answer: to not know. And for now, we\u2019re staying with the trouble of thinking of what is non-knowledge, ignorance and\/or agnotology, and how this could be useful for us in this seminar.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u2014 Graham starts doodling diagrams on the board, catching and drawing connections between ideas flying in the room. I bring up Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger\u2019s book\u00a0
Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance<\/i>\u00a0that is discussing the different types of non-knowledge, unknowledge, ignorance, unlearning or forgetting, and their deliberate cultural production. Proctor in his introduction distinguishes three types of ignorance:\u00a0Ignorance as native state<\/i>;\u00a0Ignorance as Lost Realm<\/i>\u00a0or Selective choice (or passive construct); and\u00a0Ignorance as Strategic Ploy<\/i>\u00a0or Active Construct, that maybe it would be useful to look more closely in a follow-up seminar.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u2014 Minna brings up Jacques Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s
The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation,\u00a0<\/i>as an alternative way to think of ignorance in productive terms. Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s antiparadigmatic schoolmaster successfully teaches subjects he has no knowledge on through a method of\u00a0critical enquiry.\u00a0<\/i>Rarely thought in those terms and methodologies (through complete ignorance), that very method of critical enquiry is at the epicenter of the humanities as Butler argues in her critique of AAUP statement we read a couple of weeks ago.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In both Proctor and Ranci\u00e8re, ignorance is understood in productive terms \u2014 exploring its negative capabilities. Discussing the question of ignorance\/ non knowledge, a specter of the past -emerging from Graham\u2019s family memories- brings up Hegel\u2019s injunction in the
Phenomenology of Spirit:\u00a0<\/i>in order to study philosophy one must\u00a0tarry with the negative<\/i>.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Emilio reads a passage from Kant\u2019s first critique [of pure reason] on how\u00a0
nothing<\/i>\u00a0operates on thinking, something that has been under-addressed in the reading of Kantian philosophy and even Hegel\u2019s readings of Kant, and Graham points out that this opens up an interesting but huge potential discussion that the class couldn\u2019t possibly follow up on.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Tarrying with the negative then, for a bit. Dialectics come up. The notion of a\u00a0
negative anthropology<\/i>\u00a0is thrown onto the table,\u00a0negative dialectics<\/i>, Bruno Latour, Lewis Mumford, media studies, Kant\u2019s Anthropology \u2014 Minna offers to suggest further readings on this. Chandler, as well, on an extensive literature on utilizing ignorance as an alternative form of knowledge-production. We discuss dedicating a seminar on these questions and constructing collectively our own reading list for discussion in one of the coming sessions.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Denise brings up another approach to that constructive\/productive process of ignorance, the idea of \u2018recessive disclosure\u2019 and \u2018open secrets\u2019 and the revelatory character that such disclosure might have \u2014 Anne-Lise Fran\u00e7ois\u00a0
Open Secrets, The Literature of Uncounted Experience\u00a0<\/i>and Eve Sedwick\u2019s\u00a0Epistemology of the Closet\u00a0<\/i>open\u00a0<\/i>up a discussion on post-humanism and the work of Cary Wolfe, and on environmental humanities and Rob Nixon.<\/div>\nBen resists the idea and polemically pushes back thinking of the initial conditions and character of knowledge, punctuating the differences between non-disclosure, unknowledge, non-knowledge (
total absence of knowledge<\/i>), and ignorance, and talks about ignorance-production as an oxymoron and paradoxical and\/or nonsensical quest: what we don\u2019t know doesn\u2019t need to be produced since it is already there. Thinking of potential media for our collaborative project, he tries to imagine what would a book that claimed that it didn\u2019t produce knowledge look like? It would be a massive work of irony or an eloquent form of protest. We keep that connection between ignorance and irony, going as far back to the history of -western- philosophy and knowledge production as to Socrates dictum, \u201cThe only thing I know is that I know nothing\u201d.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Graham suggests to stay to with the paradox for a minute and think of\u00a0i. the socratic irony<\/i>\u00a0\u2014 and the activation of all different technics of getting people radically and utterly confused [Is confusion another word we might be interested in?]\u2014 and\u00a0ii.\u00a0 the Buddhist K\u014dans \u2014<\/i>a set of paradoxical impossible exercises that a Buddhist monk student has to think with\/through on his way to wisdom \u2014 the\u00a0experience<\/i>\u00a0of a ruminative inquiry, working out and around a paradox.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 that idea of revelation<\/i>\u00a0came up also in one of our first seminars by both Navjit and Emilio in rather interesting ways. Navjit continues \u2014drawing on Bronis\u0142aw Malinowski\u2019s distinction of different types of practices of knowledge production: magic, science and religion\u2014 to talk about the\u00a0occult<\/i>\u00a0or\u00a0dark<\/i>\u00a0knowledge<\/i>, as this process of knowledge production that occurs in the\u00a0shadows\u00a0<\/i>and in open secrecy. Proctor in his\u00a0Agnatology\u00a0<\/i>also makes a similar observation, talking about the transformation of alchemy into chemistry when it moves from the shadows into the light \u2014 thinking of the Age of the Enlightenment as the era of the sciences, academies, disciplines and open circulation of ideas\u2026..<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Jeremy puts his object on the table \u2014 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 \u2018bad\u2019 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\u2019s\u00a0Bad Modernism,\u00a0<\/i>asks everyone to think who are the \u2018bad\u2019 people of their discipline \u2014 what is a bad historian, for example \u2014 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?<\/p>\n
\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n
Can an object subsume all text? Ben brought a commemorative paperweight in lieu of a typical university diploma, from Skopje University from the period of Yugoslavia.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u2018If you took all the pigments in the color spectrum and mixed them together, what color would you make?\u2019\u00a0<\/i>Lauren brought us two identical tubes of Gamblin\u2019s\u00a0Torrit Grey<\/i>, produced through pigment recycling leading to each tube having a unique shade of grey. There is something almost alchemical here that could be unpacked.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
On the second part of the seminar Marshall Brown, from Princeton\u2019s School of Architecture, joined via Zoom. We engage in an interesting discussion centering around his work and his spectacular collages. We talk a lot about seams, as the three-dimensional space that brings together two different worlds, having in our minds Sylvia Lavin\u2019s
Kissing Architecture<\/em>, exhibitions, spaces and the colorful moving images of Pipilotti Rist.\u00a0Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters).<\/i>\u00a0And the cuts and splits of Gordon Matta-Clark. I ask a question on audience, and how the works become accessible to the non-architects. And then thinking of Architecture as kissing other disciplines \u2014such a polyamorous animal\u2014 I wonder if the kiss is ever reciprocal, or forced and one-sided, and what the other disciplines, ever get out of it.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
-Foivos<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[DGB with a few words up front; Minna and Foivos below\u2026] We had a slightly longer initial session together today \u2013 because our guest joined us at 3 pm.\u00a0 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 … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “Session FIVE – with Marshall Brown (Architecture)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1701,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1701"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":304,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions\/304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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