SEMINAR 1: We Begin

[This was a test of the new “blackboard” in our room — which is appurtenant to the super high-tech AV module, which was showing drone flyovers of the business districts of global capitals when I came into the room.  Just saying… – DGB]

Our launch session for the semester. There was no pre-circulated reading, so this was mostly an opportunity to make some introductions, and also, yes, to sketch the structure of our class — its rhythms, and (expected) trajectory.

And I will take a moment to review some of that here. We aim in this class to achieve a collaborative final project. And we do not stipulate the nature or form of that final project in advance. Rather, it is our hope that, across the semester, a workable collaborative endeavor will emerge — out of our readings and our conversations. I will try to do my part in trying to help shape this process, but it is indeed a process, and we all have to be willing to throw in together and trust the emergent dynamics. It may be hard! But the possibilities are endless, and that itself is something real and beautiful and important. I gave some examples of what has come out of previous versions of the class, and also told some stories about the challenges that can arise in the attempt. More on all that if and as it becomes relevant…

I also sketched the way our seminar meetings will generally work. Namely, that we will gather for the first half of our class each week and discuss pre-circulated readings (which I will provide, at least initially — but that I invite you to play a role in suggesting / recommending / sharing), and then, for the second half of the period, we will usually be joined by a guest (often, though not exclusively, a member of the IHUM executive committee). In that second half of our meeting, conversation will turn around a reading provided in advance by our visitor, who will also send along a sample/taste of their own work (by way of introduction). Each of you, as we discussed, will be responsible for two “write-ups” (a little bit like what I am doing here) over the course of the semester. These will be determined at the end of any given session, basically on a volunteer basis, generally two people per session. Posted to our discussion thread here on the website, these write-ups will both create and reflect the arc of our seminar. Oh, and the two people who did the write-up the previous week will be responsible for a brief oral welcome / introduction / resume / synopsis with which we will welcome and orient our guest the following week. 

While we did not really have a full-on seminar this week, we did do some seminar-style conversation. Here’s a picture of the board on which I scrawled some notes as we talked. 

It is a little difficult to reconstruct how that conversation went, but I remember very well SGM’s wonderful question / observation about that moment over to the right — where I wrote “auto-antonymic,” and offered a reading of the English expression “make believe” as one of those strange linguistic situations that can be understood in two perfectly opposed ways. We can work to “make” person X “believe,” and that means securing their confidence and commitment; at the same time, “make believe” in idiomatic English means “to pretend, to feign.” This is odd. And SGM raised her hand and sort of noted something along the lines of this being the kind of thing we humanities people find interesting, and then she also reached toward a question that was a little hard to put into words. So it is possible I will fail to get it exactly right here. But it was perhaps akin to “I’ve never heard that before — that ‘auto-antonymic’ idea — when will the time come I’ll know all that kind of stuff?”

That isn’t really what she said, exactly. But that is how I understood the question. And phrased that way, I must say, I loved the mood and tenor of the whole thing, in that it seems to me to speak in a very deep way to the project of educating ourselves in the ongoing way that constitutes a committed life in learning. Because the answer, of course, as SGM herself surely knows, is that, well, one never really gets to the point that one knows all the stuff one would like to know — or perhaps even that one “should” know.

That “should,” which is imposed by disciplinary expectations and the dynamics of professionalization, weighs heavily as a kind of miasma of anxiety over much of academic life. But part of what made the question so wonderful is that it is a question about what it’s like to be a scholar, or to aspire to the being of a scholar — and I think that is how the word “being” ended up on the board.

Why is it crossed out? Well, it is crossed out because the conversation took a turn into historical epistemology, and we did a loop through the university as a site for “knowledge” production — recognizing, along the way, that knowledge, as it has come to be defined in our tradition, mostly stands apart from the matter of being. By the working definitions salient in the modern university project, knowledge is strives for an impersonal (indeed, “objective”) character, and this means that knowledge is, strangely, always a little bit without us.

Which makes it awkward for us. Since we are never without ourselves — or anyway, we encounter that form of dissociation (alienation?) relatively infrequently (I hope). 

We will surely return to this theme, which is taken up a bit here, in the little book that came out of an earlier version of this seminar (and that we discussed….). Onward!

SEMINAR 2: w/ guest Gavin Steingo

 

Our first “proper” session — in that we met together as a class for the first hour today, and then we were joined by our guest, Professor Steingo (from the Music Department), from 2:30 to 4:20. Although this session was a little unusual, as we noted, because Gavin came with his entire graduate seminar. And the reason for this? I explained: Gavin, as it happens, had assigned several chunks of my 2012 book The Sounding of the Whale in his musicology seminar, which is themed around “animals and music.” He had invited me to join the seminar to talk about chapter 6 from my book, which deals in detail with the emergence of ideas about cetacean “intelligence” and “musicality” — specifically the “discovery” (or was it an invention?) of “whale song.” But I told him I couldn’t visit his class because I was teaching this class at the same time, although our class runs, I explained, on the jet fuel of interdisciplinary visitors, and would he like to be one?

Thus was birthed the idea of our, in effect, mutually inviting each other as guests, with the effect of combining our classes for the second half of the session today. 

I have to say, writing this in the hours immediately following our session, that I thought this “experiment” was genuinely a success. Speaking for myself, I really enjoyed the second part of our gathering, and felt like I learned a lot (and also got to talk a fair bit — maybe more than would be ideal, I recognize!). 

But before I get to that, maybe a few words about the way our first hour went.

This felt (was this just me?) frankly a little rushed somehow. We may need to build into the syllabus a session or two just us together, with no guest (I have done this before), just so we are sure to get enough time to ourselves, in order to dig in on our readings and our questions. But we certainly got to some big questions very quickly. There was SM’s opening gambit, which I will translate / relate as follows: “reading this stuff about knowledge and power, and the specific cultural conditions of this or that ‘regime of truth’ just makes me want to ask directly — how far are we willing to push this stuff? I mean, what about gravity, and stuff like that? Is “gravity” some kind of cultural construction? The product of some specific regime of power / knowledge?” 

Let me be clear: SM did not use exactly those words. But that was the question as I heard / felt it. 

And a crucial question it is. Indeed, one might argue that it is the question of questions. A question that (and we got to this at the end of the seminar,  didn’t we?) poses / states a central challenge to the very idea of the humanities as a program. Or anyway, I think the question can be construed to have that force. And that’s because the question can be understood to ask about the limits (if any) of science’s claims concerning “what obtains” (and the “workings” of same). Or, to put it differently, the question can be understood to request clarification as to whether there are any limits to the project of understanding human understanding in human terms — in the terms, that is, of history, society, and language.

I am not going to try to answer / resolve this challenge as posed. We have the rest of the semester to resolve this one, and I am sure we will return to it. Suffice it to say, for now, that this formulation of the question reflects the central preoccupations of my own field (the history and philosophy of science) over much of the last fifty years — though it cannot be said that my “disciplinary” obsession with historical epistemology entitles me (and / or my colleagues) to a privileged claim on the problem. 

Other stuff that happened in our first hour? I talked a bit about the dream of an “IHUM fellowship in institutional jesterism.” We talked about “dithering” (both in a technical and in a non-technical sense). We spent some time on my little grapheme of the two “modalities” of interdisciplinarity, as depicted here: 

I thought the idea here was relatively clear: one kind of “interdisciplinary encounter” can be thought of as the result of new knowledge being produced out of the intersection of highly specialized experts working in adjacent domains on a common problem / object / situation. We might call this the interdisciplinarity of experts in their expertise. It is depicted above by the circle encompassing the overlapping branch tips of the two trees (labeled “learnéd / erudite”). I suggested there might be another mode of interdisciplinarity as well, one perhaps less easily positioned within university structures. This was the interdisciplinarity that might result not from going out to the ends of the branches of adjacent expertise, but rather that which might be achieved by movement in the opposite direction, down the trunk and into the roots and “Earth.” This, I suggest, we might call the “interdisciplinarity of foundations” or maybe something like “primordial interdisciplinarity.”

At this point we took an all-too-brief turn into what became a little discussion about intellectual resistance and metaphor and, perhaps, whether any of this amounted to anything at all. I am referring to the turn we took when HG, seemingly a bit puzzled (or anyway, not perfectly satisfied), expressed some misgivings as to exactly what kinds of claims were here being advanced. Metaphors? What was the status of these propositions? Lots of figural language, perhaps. But the referent? Were we sure what it was?

This was a pleasing suspension of the flow, and it occasioned a moment of meditation (by me — but was it an evasion?) on different intellectual “styles” or sensibilities. I admitted that I have, at different times, thought of myself as a “serial understander” — by which I mean that I have a somewhat itchy trigger finger on my “I understand this!” sidearm. Do I actually “understand” what I continuously persuade myself I have already understood? Maybe not. But I am so addicted to the pleasurable feeling of “understanding” (or “the pleasurable feeling of believing myself to be understanding”) that some labile quality of my inner life continuously persuades myself that I have “understood.”

By contrast, I have several friends (dear friends, brilliant friends!) who seem positively never to permit themselves this satisfaction. I happily concede that several of them are very definitely much, much “smarter” than I am, much “quicker” in their technical command of difficult topics — but for all that, they always seem thoroughly dissatisfied with whatever it is that is trying to work its way into their heads: they resist, they push, they probe, continuously finding ways to be not yet “with” the claims as they stand.

This, too, can be a form of love — love of the ideas, love of the thinking. I am not very good at it. 

And our guests arrived.

I won’t try to summarize this part of what happened.  Lots of interesting things, I thought.  We talked a bit about musicology as a discipline.  About the notable fact that it is possible to be tenured in Music (on the “composition” side) without a monographic book.  About the absence of tenured faculty on the pure performance side.  About what it means to figure music composition as a “research” domain, in which something like “advances” are made in a “knowledge producing” project.

And we rounded (across a fair bit of actual discussion of animal communication, cetacean “phonation,” and the idea of music as the “other” of reason) to a challenge with which we will surely spend more time: Is it possible, now, within the university “humanities” and/or “qualitative social sciences” to be anything OTHER than a “scientist”?

CB’s writeup on the session follows; “Huut” is below that.

-DGB

 *  *  *

[CB starts here:]

Our class on 9/13 was the first to have a guest, an ethnomusicologist, for the second portion. Students in his Animal Music and Communication class also joined. Before they joined, our class discussed the readings on knowledge and (inter)disciplinarity.

We started off with a big question: when (if ever) can we take knowledge for granted? The question was on the table, and although we didn’t answer it then, it would continue as a theme throughout the class. One particular moment between the profs stood out as exemplary. I will outline a simplified version of the conversation with the hope that I understood it correctly. One argued that whale song, although only discovered by humans in the 1960s, existed before then, and was not contingent upon human discovery. The other argued that song is a cultural imaginary–it exists only because humans place value on the idea of music in culture–and therefore it was not a phenomenon that was discovered in whales, but one that was constructed based on human aesthetic values. Here, knowledge is in question: do we know whales have song, or is whale song a cultural construction?

The conflict between taking knowledge for granted or questioning it brings me to another recurring theme form class, that of “going back to basics.” We discussed the idea of a class “jester,” who would enter an advanced class and ask basic questions. There are disadvantages to this idea; of course, the point of an advanced class is to move beyond the basics, and this character could easily waste time. But we focused on the possible advantages, two of which stick out to me. One advantage is that the “jester” might help clarify concepts for those in the class who do not have the same foundational knowledge, and who might be unwilling or unable to articulate that in class. Another advantage is that it can bring the knowledge that advanced students/professors take for granted into question. It creates an avenue (for those willing) to reevaluate what they hold as truth, and it can produce interesting conversations and moments of disagreement, like the conversation between the professors on whale song.

Several other interesting themes came up, including the idea that fear drives much knowledge production and is a contributing factor in the upholding of disciplines. We see it in many aspects of life including academics and even conversations on gender: when categories begin to break down, many respond with negativity and fear. On the flip side of that, we discussed what can happen when one easily moves about, exploring a wide range of ideas. The concept of “dithering” provided a useful metaphor, and suggested that when we remove the fear of categorization breakdown, we may gain new insights.

I have not exhausted all the themes from the conversation, but I will end with an idea our prof brought and guest professor expanded on. They discussed the importance of the moment that reason and rationality break down, and how this moment is a fruitful space for their research. The guest stated that he is in the discipline of (ethno)musicology broadly because of his observation that when reason is exhausted, many turn to aesthetics–in particular music. He noted Kant’s three critiques as a perfect example of this move (the first two as critiques of reason, and the third as a turn to aesthetics). I am similarly drawn to studying music because of its unique position between the rational and someplace beyond.

And I found a parallel between the guest prof’s comments and our prof’s study of what would become the save the whales campaign to be especially interesting. We learned that the public became interested in saving the whales only after it was discovered (or scientists perceived to discover) that whales sing. The earlier scientific arguments in anti-whaling movement (arguments about whales’ reproductive patterns, which at the very least shed light on the fact that whales are living, growing creatures, and in that way are like humans) did not reach the public. In other words, arguments about reason–that whales live, and if humans kill fewer, they will still have enough of their resources–were not enough to convince the public. Only after the aesthetic turn–that whales have a culture of singing–were the public convinced. The aesthetic turn had a profound practical effect on public attitudes and policy. This moment highlighted the close proximity of two or three disciplines–history, science, music–and revealed the almost inevitable nature of interdisciplinarity.

-CB

 *  *  *

[“Huut” (a pseudonym) starts here:]

Bonjour !

At first I thought that would be Princeton. We would all be someone else’s Belle. From one familiar face to the next with a couple books in our hands. Bonjour ! Bonjour ! Bonjour ! Bonjour !

My apologies, I will start again.

Hello.

I ended up being quite uncomfortable.

Say Hello!

That’s not it. Nobody cares. Let’s start again.

How can someone make “Hello” sing?

I was told that everybody is smart but few people are kind.

I sing my hello like a whale. You spend your life looking for a comfortable position for your tongue in your mouth, but can you imagine it, when your tongue is as big as an elephant?

Sorry, I’ll start again. (Hello!)

Do you know this whale I’m talking about?

But you do know it.

First there are all the other whales. For thousands of years they were the loudest animals on the planet, before the men and women who can’t hear them. Whales with accents, personalities, cultures. Whales supporting each other and taking turns to assume roles, like nursing, while the others hunt in deep waters their offspring can’t reach. They can’t reach them. They just can’t reach them, at least for now.

But there is this whale that sings 27 Hertz higher than all the others. The Americans found it by accident and they called it 52 Hertz. “They do not know and cannot guess its species”, writes Hal Whitehead. “It could be a hybrid. It seems to be an individual who has not picked up either a culture of song or a culture of migration, and its track was unrelated to the movements or presence of any of the other whales. It had its own songs, its own movement patterns, but they are not culture, and without culture it was alone.”

In an increasingly noisy ocean, there is a whale that sings in its own way, in its own tracks, and for which we, who do not know how to listen to whales, have nevertheless paid attention only for an instant.

Hello — This whale is me.

-Huut

 

 

SEMINAR 3: w/ guest Jeff Dolven

We jumped right in today (with a well-worn [and SILENT]  horseshoe on the table), thinking about the category of “experience” and its status in relation to “knowledge” and “knowledge production.”  After a turn through the Benjamin, and that powerful idea that experience itself (or, anyway, “communicable experience”) was literally blown apart in the trenches of the First World War, we moved to reflection on Agamben’s citation of the same passage (for Agamben it is the pre-linguistic, “infancy,” that sets the aspirational horizon of something like pure experience). Before long we were reviewing Dewey’s careful distinction between experience-as-such (the pervasive condition of the live animal) and the distinctly human notion of “an experience.”  We worked this passage for some time:

And particularly on that telling sentence in the heart of things: “No thinker can ply his [sic] occupation save as he is lured and rewarded by total integral experiences that are intrinsically worth while.” 

Is this correct?  Or is this a mystification?  Who is a “thinker” anyway?

We sat for a while with Dewey’s intuition that “an experience” amounts to a certain integrity of cognition and affect (“intellectual” and “emotional”), and that “an experience” possesses a coherence (a wholeness, achieved through narrative? through all-at-once-ness?) that stands in some significant relation to conscious being itself.  Dewey is said to have read Heidegger and more or less to have remarked “yeah, that’s what I have been saying.”  And so we might say that Dewey sees in “an experience” an index (or is it a sacrament?) of “Being.”  This is, I think, a “humanism.”  It might be wrong.  But it is certainly a claim.

And to that claim we read Joan Scott as saying something very much like “NO”!

For in her account, invocations of “experience” are always to be held suspect — in that they all too easily function to “black box” dynamics of history (and power) that must be held up to scrutiny.  She is wary of the way the implicit irreducibility of “the experiential” thwarts (or evades) criticality, and thereby too easily functions to buttress various illegitimate privelegings of perspective — of which the normative “human” of the “humanities” must be called out early and often.

We did not resolve this faceoff.  But we brought it into the room.  And it gave rise to a quick loop (shown on the board) into the very idea of a “critical theory” — an account of what obtains that is thought to have a self-executing emancipatory effect.  See the lower lefthand corner, where the names “Marx” and “Freud” appear.  (And for a polemical treatment of this idea, consider Raymond Guess’s contentious The Idea of a Critical Theory.)

And genealogy?  Yes, we did some of that too.  In that we took some time to discuss the process (of particular interest to Gadamer) by which “experience” came to be entailed to service in the project of knowledge production — via the rise of the “experimental philosophy,” by which certain kinds of experience, under certain circumstances, could be understood to do certifiable epistemic labor.

But then the knock on the door, and Jeff Dolven was with us.

Conversation turned to SCALE, via the Horton, and our exercises, which he and I have preserved here in this set of slides.

Before long, I was good and confused about some pretty fundamental things (what, if anything, is the actual distinction between a “difference of kind” and a “difference of degree”?), and we were musing on Cantor’s diagonal argument.  Scalar alterity?  Indeed.

But Horton’s critique of trans-scalar humanism?  I dunno.  Isn’t “trans-scalar humanism” what is otherwise known as REASON? 

*

RC and HK offer their own thoughts on the session below!

-DGB

 *  *  *

[RC starts here:]

I looked forward to this week’s seminar after last week’s rather lively discussion with Gavin, and it did not disappoint. It felt helpful to spend some extra time to rooting ourselves in the readings, as they covered quite a bit of ground this week—much of it unfamiliar to me. (Thank you, HK—for graciously agreeing to take on the second half’s discussion on scalar alterity, which I’m still trying to make sense of!)

We began our discussion by reflecting on dialogic criticism—that is, criticism that is “conversant with the author.” This is the critical mode of Dolven and Kotin’s The Parkland Mysteries, and seems to be increasing in popularity. I could not help, of course, but think of Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay, “Death of the Author,” which argues that we should dispense with traditional literary criticism’s fixation on the intentions and biographical context of the author in order to understand the meaning of that author’s work. I wouldn’t say Dolven and Kotin’s style of criticism is traditional, exactly, but it does seem closer to the ways we tried to make meanings of things, of texts, in the past. With the author hovering just at one’s shoulder, figuratively and/or literally. (Specifically thinking pre-twentieth century.) At the same time, this mode of criticism also feels decidedly modern to me. I was musing about why it might be regaining its popularity and wondered if the dominance of social media had anything to do with it—how the line between public and private has been all but eroded, how artists, intellectuals, celebrities have increasingly lost their mystique. (For better and for worse.)

We spoke too about the nature and structure of universities: of the disciplines as “scalar formations”; of knowledge production as a self-defining enterprise; how even non-scientific disciplines have taken on scientific architecture; and how the idea of experience might figure into all of this. DGB mentioned that “experience carries water for knowledge production,” a metaphor I rather like and am still pondering. And we talked again about the course’s aspirations—to imagine other architectures, for example.

I found our discussion of critical theory’s endeavors especially luminous: the dream that by understanding what is, we might arrive at what ought to be. This is such a helpful framing—one I wish I’d had my first year of grad school. David Hume contends that we cannot get from is to ought (Hume’s fork), while Hayden White tries to resolve the is-ought problem with historicism. [DGB: this is the claim of the first chapter of Hayden White’s magisterial and exigent Metahistory (1973)]

By way of attempting to set up something of a transition for HK, I’ll end with a quote from Dolven and Kotin’s The Parkland Mysteries: “Pastoral is always about what you knew and when you knew it, an innocent space hung with fatal apples.” This quote took the breath from me—its image and timbre. I scrawled it at the top of Walter Benjamin’s essay on experience and poverty. Many things here: I am first struck by how we keep returning to trees. It seems hard to talk about knowledge without the trees. Perhaps we should go out to the field. I’m struck too by—even though I only jotted Dolven’s quote on Benjamin’s essay because my notebook wasn’t handy—Benjamin seems to similarly inhabit the elegiac: “Where has it all gone? Who still meets people who really know how to tell a story?” It made me curious about the possibilities of this backwards glance, of the elegiac as a launchpad for meaningful criticism (rather than reactionary nostalgia for a mostly mythic past, with which we might be more familiar. . . ). Perhaps what we once knew, and how we thought we knew it, can be just as informative as what we don’t know now, and why we know we don’t know it.

-RC

 *  *  *

[HK starts here:]

Professor Jeff Dolven joined our conversation. Before his arrival, we read various takes on “experience.” How to think experience diversifies one’s disciplinary training and intellectual aims. In the latter half of the seminar, we focused on Zachary Horton’s The Cosmic Zoom. A fun reading exercise followed. We tried to understand and experience Horton’s key concept, scalar alterity.

The Cosmic Zoom allows you to mull over multiple ways to experience interdisciplinarity. According to the University of Chicago Press’s website (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo63099371.html#anchor-reviews), The Cosmic Zoom belongs to these categories: History of Ideas, General Criticisms, Critical Theory, Media Studies, Philosophy of Society. Horton himself is a media, literary, and game studies scholar and Jeff’s expertise is early modern English literature. All these crossovers of different scholarships centered on The Comsic Zoom, offering the heuristics to think something differently. I meant “things” as thoughts, ideas, and practices derived from clashes and encounters from disciplinary practices. In other words, interdisciplinarity of scalar alterity is a promiscuous (!) dithering, concept that we talked about in our previous class.

We then discussed how to read a photo that Jeff brought, the musical scale. Musical scale exemplifies that scalar alterity is the contact of two things. Musical scale is a spatial phenomenon, notating hearing to a flat paper. At the same time, as FH pointed out, musical scale is a temporal encounter, transforming time into a graphic medium. Speed, rhythm, and our bodies react to the gradation happening on this paper. The practice gives the virtual scene from the tangible image. We zoom in to the scale and then zoom out to see the human scale.  Experience of scale is also far from neutral and objective. Some scales hold more importance than others, as CB mentioned, implying the political dimension from scalar access.

We then experimented with how we could alter reading practice. Mediation, one of the key practices, can define our exercise. Each participant brought photos they took to see four taxonomies of scalar alterity. The first category of scale is a map. CG’s photo exemplifies the category. In CG’s photo, we see someone’s vision. The eyes of the photo watched their MacBook’s screen while grasping the broader view from the backdrop of Princeton Chapel. On the laptop screen, we see the satellite image from Google Maps. A bird-eyed view of the map draws the geometric division and multiple grids representing the lands and architecture of France. An interesting contrast between geometrical graphics and a green background was found. While HK mentioned the machinic visions’ inhumanness, the pastoral green successfully melded into the Princeton lawn’s green, showing the scale altered. It was the example of scalar access, where the scalar alterity happens. Houses, green fields in satellite images, shadows on the monitor, and the indexical image of someone’s viewpoint sitting on Princeton’s lawn depicted scale as a map and the experience of mapping.

We moved on to FH’s photo. There was a small flower pot with a blurred background with multiple trees. The photo evokes the discussion: what is the difference between size and scale? Furthermore, what is the difference between alterity and difference? Size involves differences, such as different sizes of small pots and large trees. Scale involves change and shift entailed by a certain encounter and the possible way of thinking “alternative,” if this is the right description. Scale is, thus, fundamentally political. Transitions and modulations happen to adjust and change what we think and practice. We briefly talked about Hannah Arendt’s quote, which is a powerful reminder of the politics and ethics of scale; the catastrophe arrives when humans fail to realize different types of scale.

We also discussed the anti-humanistic tone alluded to in scalar alterity. DGB asked; does scalar alterity minimize humanism? The technical metaphor of zooming in and out pertained to his point. Moreover, how can we not obsess with the fantasy of holistic experience implied by scalar alterity? Horton’s scalar paradox, another key concept, responded to these points. Scalar alterity is paradoxical because the scale is both heuristic and ontological. Navigating humanistic methods and extension of perception brought questions about methods in disciplines. History’s long duree to literature’s close reading can be encountered, blended in one discipline’s interdisciplinary experiment. We access books, the material medium, with all scalar alterity, different disciplinary inquiries, objects, genealogies, and bibliographies. All to say, we are experiencing scalar alterity with multiple dithering from scholars.

One instance of scalar alterity that I could think about is a footnote. Footnote is a method and a feminist practice. Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories might be the perfect example. In the book’s footnote, black anticolonial thoughts, cultural geography, Black history, poetics, and Detroit electronic music open up all different scales of thoughts and practices. Sometimes, the footnote takes more than half of a page, making the conventional reading a bit challenging to practice. Footnote becomes an extensive map interweaving voices outside the canonical methods and disciplinary divisions. It configures ethics and politics of experience as well. In Dear Science and Other Stories, one visible paper visually maps Black intellectual genealogy. I am curious how other colleagues experienced scalar alterity.

-HK

SEMINAR 4: w/ guest Christy Wampole

Our opening conversation circled the AAUP statement defending universities, a document generated on the 2019 / 2020 watershed, a moment we can fondly remember as pre-pandemic, but that we took some time to reconstruct as a particularly fraught episode (politically speaking) for colleges and universities. We took a little time to sift out just who exactly the AAUP is, and to reflect on the specific fears engendered by several Trump-era initiatives that were interpreted within the liberal establishment as “shots across the bow” of the good ship American Higher Education. 

But the truth is, the energy in the room was decidedly unsympathetic. Which is to say, while everyone seemed to appreciate that the authors of the statement were trying to mount a forceful defense of universities, academic labor, and the values of universitarian inquiry, really no one in our seminar seemed willing to step forward and champion the line of argument manifest in the piece. On the contrary, HG went right for the strong-arming grammar and barely sublated “violence” of the opening sentences — and finally found the piece an uncomfortable litany of (effectively phony) hyperboles which felt basically indefensible, even if they were occasioned by other (effectively phony) hyperboles. The repeated invocations of “expertise” raised hackles, and seemed not to align with the sensibility of the room. Further, the emphasis on the “hard work” involved in disciplinary knowledge production struck some of us as almost a little silly as “protesting too much,” as a kind of dour intoning of the Protestant work ethic (see the board above) — as if, somehow, it was the sweat of our brow in our air-conditioned offices that entitled us to respect on the floor of the House of Representatives)

I confess to having maybe been a little surprised by how little quarter the piece was given. CG actually even got everyone out-loud giggling about the part where the authors sturdily invoke the Enlightenment dream (but was it ever only the Enlightenment dream?) of a knowledge transcending the political.

Fair enough, I guess. Although I would like to remind everyone that there is quite a lot of knowledge that is a lot less manifestly “political” than a lot of other knowledge (no? or anyway a lot harder to demonstrate to be “political,” and isn’t that the point?) — and if you genuinely have no feel for there being something special about the kinds of knowledge that get farthest from the “merely” political, you are either a very very special kind of radical thinker, or you have perhaps not thought hard enough about this stuff. 

Or anyway, so suggest I.

And then there was the Butler.  We did not spend as much time as we might have done on Butler’s response to the AAUP statement, but I tried to suggest that her mode of “criticality” looked a lot like the ambition to use “critical” humanistic / textual / interpretive modes to correct the errors made by those who pursued knowledge without adequate command of the relevant resources. But this, I suggested, looks a lot like a “science of science” — which can hardly be said to have abandoned faith in a knowledge project systematically stripped of (at least undesirable) ideological contamination. 

Did you feel the force of this argument? Or do you feel I have her position wrong?

I do not mean to suggest that Butler cannot defend herself from this line of scrutiny, but I do tend to read pieces like this through the lens of Bruno Latour’s late work (e.g., “Why has critique run out of steam?” and “Towards an anthropology of the iconoclastic gesture”), which tends to see the critical ambition of “science of science” as a project that collapses exactly with the rise of constructivist STS and strong-program anthropological SSK (sociology of scientific knowledge). More on all that anytime for anyone who is interested — although this starts to feel “disciplinary” from my sector.

We left all this with me once again (perhaps nebulously) gesturing at the category of experience, as well as that of making, projects that I again suggested seemed to operate perpendicularly with respect to the plane in which the “science of science” problem arises — the board catches some of all that (quite schematically!) here below.

And that was that. We then took half an hour to dig in a bit on the final project. In this we were assisted by a gracious visit from Lauren Dreier, a student in last year’s class. She brought along some samples of the final project that came out of that session (the cards documenting our participatory annotation / citation collage experiment, a still shot of which is actually the header on our course website this year, fwiw). Her visit provided the occasion for me to circulate some of the Keyword books (a final project from an earlier year), and also to sketch some of the contours / norms by which the more successful of these enterprises have operated. I’m going to repeat those here so that you have them for consideration. The most successful final projects tend to have something like the following characteristics:

1 – A somewhat “modular” structure, such that there is a discrete “deliverable” of some reasonable size/scope that everyone does in some broadly “individual” way (this is necessary, such that I have a way of responsibly evaluating everyone on a separate and equitable basis; a component of my administrative/institutional obligations as I understand them);

2 – A larger integrative enterprise that lets the whole of these together be, somehow, greater than the sum of the parts (as we say in idiomatic English);

I also added that, vis a vis the issue of “creativity” or “form” or “limits,” I tend to use the following pragmatic analysis: I would want to feel like I could “defend” our final project (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.

Also, I noted that we will try to keep as much of the group together in one project as possible, but that it is not impossible that two or even more group projects might ultimately emerge.  Finally, is a “total fail” possible?  Yes.  And if we get there, we will deal with that — but the “last resort” is everyone writing a 25-30 page paper (just like in a more “regular” graduate seminar).

Make sense?

Nobody needs to be exactly focused on the final project in any formal way at this point, but everyone should be keeping ideas and possibilities in mind — and you are invited to discuss them among yourselves, or to surface them in class as you like. Examples of interesting things done by groups of people (even if they are quite different in terms of subject from anything with which we are concerned) can be quite useful / inspiring (I have requested, on the assignments page, that you give that some thought for this week).

I won’t say too much about Christy Wampole’s visit, leaving that largely to JN and CG and their write-ups below. However, I do think it was a very interesting conversation. I found the film itself basically unwatchable, unfortunately. Not because I am squeamish about skin diseases (I am not), but rather because I am a highly suggestible and somewhat neurotic/compulsive-spectrum person (unsurprisingly), and I therefore find big long deep dives into the intimate conditions of anguish/paranoia/craziness more or less unbearable. I just did not have it to give on this one. That is not to say, however, that I failed to do the homework. I “watched” the film — but as Christy Wampole herself noted, there are many ways to watch a film, and I watched it in such a way as to prevent most of it from getting inside me in any meaningful way. Sigh.  Oh well.

As far as the conversation went, I very much appreciated the turn into the weird borderlands of the fictive and the documentary, and I mentioned this important article from 2009 by Carrie Lambert-Beatty (which is now on our reading list for next week — oh, and I referenced this related work of mine, which is about this).

The stigmata stuff was cool too. I am always interested in situations where cognitive or affective aspiration bends the body and/or transforms matter. It is possible to believe that all knowledge aspiration is ultimately an aspiration for consilience/unity/metempsychosis. I am not saying I quite believe that, but stuff along those lines veritably haunts epistemology.

In closing, I want to underscore that moment at the end, where Professor Wampole invoked “wider publics” in connection with her discussion of the essay as a form. I flinched, basically because I think those two things want to be kept separate. One can be for or against “public humanities,” for or against scholars attempting to reach non-scholarly audiences (I am “for,” basically  — what’s not to like? except scholars thinking in terms of “trickle-down” intellectuality, which is actually fatal, in my view, to most of what is good in the work of thought), but the essay strikes me as a form whose importance lies precisely in its distinctive orientation to the conjunction of knowledge and experience, of knowing and “being.” And it is my belief that we could do with a GREAT DEAL MORE close attention to precisely that conjunction…entirely within university precincts. So for that reason, I am especially jumpy to the essay being relegated to (even “characterized as”) an instrument by which “technical” scholarship can be made more “accessible.” It certainly can function that way, but I take that to be a relatively “low” and even not-that-interesting manifestation of “essayism.” Whereas what the essay has to teach us about what is missing from disciplinary knowledge production strikes me as IMMENSELY IMPORTANT — indeed, profound.

But more on that as we continued to make our way across the term!  With thanks to all, and especially to Professor Wampole!

-DGB

[JN below, and CG follows]

-JN

[CG follows below]

I really enjoyed reading Prof. Wampole’s article “Dalí’s Montaigne: Essay Hybrids and Surrealist Practice” and was looking forward to her intervention in our class. I found this session particularly interdisciplinary (even if I’m aware we are still questioning this concept) since it tackled the essay genre, applied to painting, as well as photography and cinema (unless it is painting, cinema, and photography that apply to the essay?)

After introducing ourselves, RC and HK presented what we are trying to do / define / question / interrogate in our class. HK referred to the “scalar alterity” concept we discussed with Prof. Dolven last week. On this point, Prof. Wampole stated that this concept could also apply to the essay, especially when it intertwines with other forms of art. She further introduced her undergrad seminar, explaining how it lies at the intersection of a theory class and a creative writing workshop (and, on a side note, I wonder to what extent this definition could also apply to our own class. After all, isn’t this discussion thread – to quote Prof. Wampole – a sort of “cahier créatif” [“creative notebook]? Will our final project also take the form of a ‘creation’? Since we discuss knowledge production, what difference do we make between ‘production’ and ‘creation’? But back to Wednesday’s session…)

Even though we mentioned Prof. Wampole’s article, we mainly spent the second half discussing Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s essai vidéographique (videographic essay) called Watching The Pain of Others. We agreed that defining Galibert-Laîné’s project was not an easy task, and I must admit I still struggle to explain it while typing this… To put it (somewhat) simply, Galibert-Laîné films herself watching and working on Penny Lane’s film The Pain of Others, which is about three middle-aged women suffering from the Morgellons disease and sharing their experience on their YouTube channels.

Many interesting points came up in our discussion with Prof. Wampole and her students, but one that particularly caught my attention was the relationship between knowledge and experience. To what extent does what we know influence our understanding of the world? I believe it was Prof. Wampole who brought up the following question: Is Morgellons a contagion of the mind?

Wednesday, after class, when I was collecting my notes and trying to organize them, I typed “Morgellons disease” on Google and found a definition that I thought echoed our conversation: “Morgellons disease is a condition characterized by a belief that parasites or fibers are emerging from the skin.” (my emphasis) And that’s a point several persons raised during the discussion: the role of belief in experience. How can we persuade ourselves of something? How can the mind contaminate the body and vice versa?

On this topic, Graham mentioned an essay by Carrie Lambert-Beatty: “Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility.” It seemed to me that it indirectly echoed Galibert-Laîné’s words in her essay when she wonders if Morgellons disease can be defined as an “excès d’empathie” (excess of empathy). What struck me here is how the form itself becomes empathetic as well. Prof. Wampole stated that the essay is, by definition, an “empathy form” since it confronts the subject to other subjectivities.

Lastly, we discussed how Morgellons echoes the stigmata image. I think it was JN who explained that, in the Christian tradition, the stigmata become a persuasion tool, with Christ showing his wounds after his crucifixion to prove his resurrection. Is The Pain of Others rooted in this tradition? Can empathy become physical?

To conclude, I would like to end with a more personal impression. I feel like our seminar intertwines more and more the question of knowledge, science and fiction (i.e., fictions we tell ourselves, fictions we create from ourselves to produce knowledge), and I’m really curious to see what form this will take in the upcoming weeks and for our final project.

-CG

 

SEMINAR 5: w/ guest Lisa Davis

We opened today with a brief review of this discussion thread itself, and with some reflections on the way that it wants to serve both as documentation of our semester, as well as contributing to a “centripetal” dynamic. Or at least that is the idea — that by taking some time to read through these weekly postings, we can (ideally!) slightly “thicken” our collective feel for the different perspectives in the room, and perhaps get a little help along the path to some constellation of our group. And we are hoping for some of that coming-together exactly because of our challenge — to try to achieve some form of collaborative final project.

And we spent some time reviewing the general contours of that undertaking. HG showed us (in connection with his expressed preference for less linear forms of notetaking) the tool he uses for composing and graphically representing the stuff he writes down both when doing readings and in class: Obsidian This led to some reflections on note taking as a possible theme for a final project (it is a practice of wide applicability across disciplines and across a variety of stages and phases of academic life). In this context, SA shared some of her own note taking works, which combined graphical and textual elements in explicitly “designed” ways. Stuff for us to think about.

We took a loop into the Carrie Lambert-Beatty article, and even reflected on some ways that the final project might include some “parafictional” elements (I showed this project done by some of my undergraduates during the pandemic), although there were also very legitimate concerns/questions about the status of these techniques, which CG noted appear to be pretty directly at odds with the larger project of truth seeking. If we did go this route, we would need to be careful to consider/control the “critical” orientation of whatever we do. As I expressed in class, I am interested in this kind of thing, but that makes me especially concerned to be careful, and to make sure whatever takes shape is something that you all actually want to do! If momentum builds in this direction, I will ride along but I do not in any way want to push us into this idiom. (I did this essay, “In Lies Begin Responsibilities,” a number of years ago this kind of work, and you are welcome to check it out if you are curious — but no obligation!)

How did we get to that idea of “negative capability” that we had up on the board?

I cannot reconstruct our path. But I do remember that we experimented with the idea that disciplines might perhaps be understood as systems for eliminating or at least managing, this special form of not-already-knowing. One might even suggest that a discipline is constituted by the systematic conversion of negative capability into the distinctively determinate form of not-yet-knowing known as a “research program.”

It was in fact this meditation on different projects of “unknowing” (I will indeed slot in the “Agnotology” reading for next week…) that gave rise to a quite concrete and, I thought, really interesting, direction for a final project: what if we collectively conjured a university “department of negative capability,” and did so by developing a body of (fictive/parafictional) materials along these lines? These might include a departmental brochure, course listings, perhaps some syllabi, maybe even a website. Could be a playful and simultaneous serious way of thinking about the limits of the disciplinary, knowledge-producing paradigm of the modern university. Let’s see if this thread gets picked up, or if the seed grows (or fill in your preferred metaphor here…).

And then we were joined by Lisa Davis. I found our discussion this week enormously rich, if also genuinely challenging. Professor Davis called Favret-Saada’s text a “polemic.” And one feels the force of her opening gesture in the chapter we read: the author explicitly denounces that kind of anthropological knowledge production which moves from the comforts of a well-guarded (an epistemically distanced) subject position. And there is a suggestion that it is not merely “witchcraft” that cannot be understood from such a position, but indeed that perhaps no aspect of human meaning-making can be truly illuminated on such terms.

What is the alternative? It is, frankly, a little scary, at least in this context: one must “wager oneself.” One must be willing to put oneself at risk (see lower left of the board picture above). Fear follows just behind.

I suggested toward the end of class that this formulation (that we are or must be “wagered” in the pursuit of knowledge) had something in common with Gadamer’s treatment of understanding in Truth and Method, where we are reminded that understanding is an “event” and that is only possible when we make ourselves available to actual transformation in the course of the encounter (with a text, a person, etc). Gadamer treats these matters in connection with the problem of interpretation, generally in reference to the reading of, say, a poem, or an archival source. Are there stakes in such encounters? To be sure! And yet, the direct peril to which Favret-Saada subjects herself in the pursuit of witchcraft knowledge takes the matter of the “risk” of understanding to a different level. She is literally inserting herself in a belief system, and a series of practices it would seem that are death-dealing. Directly death-dealing.

That is pretty intense. Maybe even scary. It may set a kind of radical limit case for whatever it is that might be other than the “safe” (if perhaps also forever slightly unsatisfying) project of “knowledge”— of the kind that works exactly because one keeps the distance between oneself and the object of knowledge (in connection with all this, some of you might find Carlo Ginsberg’s interesting book on distance of some use).

-DGB

* * *

[FP notes follow, with VB a little further down]

Before proceeding to brainstorm some ideas for what our final project might be, we kicked off this class by placing (what I think was) a wooden spinning top in the center of our table. In looking at the swinging artifact crowning the desk I couldn’t help but thinking of Nolan’s film Inception, in which a spinning top is used by one of the characters to check the difference between dream world and reality: if they spin the top and it stops and falls, they know they are awake; if the top continues to spin indefinitely, they are in a dream. The film’s ending shows a top spinning but the screen cuts to black before the audience knows whether it will collapse or not, inviting speculation as to whether the scene is real or part of the character’s dreams and, therefore, hinting at the possibility of them being trapped in an endless time loop. 

The conversation about potential paths forward for our final project felt a bit loopy (is that a word?) or paradoxical as well… We are all gathering around the idea of interdisciplinary work, yet there seemed to be some fear that the diversity of our backgrounds might pose a challenge for building the sense of community and equal belonging that is necessary in order to pull off the assignment. At any rate, some stimulating proposals were discussed, and we opined that some anxiety at the possibility of not finding common ground is actually at the core of what any interdisciplinary endeavor represents. So the overall vibe seemed optimistic, I would say—we’ll just have to ride the spin! (If the metaphor is allowed…) Professor Burnett introduced a concept that he attributed to Keats that I really loved: negative capability. As I understood it, this would be the capacity for thinkers to embrace intellectual uncertainty as opposed to rigid conceptions, and is what eventually fuels the notion of interdisciplinarity. 

All this happened before we were loudly interrupted by the government alarm test—and, speaking about interruptions, I’ll venture to ask whether interruption could be another topic to consider for our final project? As a composer of music I think a lot about interruptions: what they are, and what interrupts what, and what is the effect of said disruptions. This seminar is in a way—for me, anyway—an interruption of our daily practice, a “letting in” of the other. Is that a shared feeling? And if yes, is it powerful enough to become a theme for us? In reading Christy Wampole’s article the previous week I thought about this as well. Besides working as echos, comments, or amplifications of the text that contains them, the illustrations in books sometimes function as interruptions of some sort: a mandatory stop on the reading process that opens a window into something else. Prof. Wampole’s visit felt too short, and I couldn’t get to ask her what she thought about this…

Luckily, Elizabeth Davis’s visit this week felt less rushed. Before Prof. Davis came in we had spent some time with Carrie Lambert-Beatty article on parafictions, and both this article and the one by Jeanne Favret-Saada that Lisa offered us (Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage) helped us problematize the notion of belief within the broader discussion of what forms of knowledge (theory, expertise, experience, belief) relate to our respective disciplines. The discussed concept of “situated knowledge”, the idea of a knowing that demands an experienced/embodied vision, felt to me relatable to the artistic medium, or at least to how practice-based arts are situated within academia. Musicians, for instance, to a large extent learn by doing—which is not to say that observation, measuring and analysis don’t have a place in their instruction, but rather that the bulk of their expertise is developed by means of an embodied, pre-theoretical experience (in turn putting the arts in an oblique, conflictive relationship to the knowledge production project, as was [succinctly] discussed with Gavin Steingo on week 2). Sometimes it feels like I am getting a PhD in what may look like witchcraft for many. Oh well…

What else? Many more mentions of the word “fear”. Might we have another theme there? 

-FP

[VB follows]

As I went through my notes to work something out for the task of comprehensively describing this Wednesday class, something about the early discussion we had popped-up into my mind in the most nonlinear way. In the preamble of the class, while DGB waited for the seats to be filled, a conversation on the multiple ways of taking notes took place. Huut pointed out that the class follows a very nonlinear structure that could somewhat be transcribed via  Obsidian. When DGB asked what that would be, Huut showed us on his computer, this note taking application that turns linear notes into constellations of concepts or mental maps, something that he believes could help us grasp the content of the class in different ways. (I reckon that, as averse to technological experiments as I am, this way of taking notes would indeed work better, as linearity is not capable of reproducing the richness of ways this class takes). As the discussion on note taking went on, SM proposed as a final project the possibility of us, collectively, engaging with note taking in a somewhat anthropological way. This had been done in another class she took with great success. At that point, CB proposed as a final project taking notes on the class and mixing it, in a creative and parafictional way, with unreal notes. This idea touched DGB, who is particularly involved with projects that play around and with the idea of reality/fiction. He then proceeded to show us projects that had been done over the past few years that engaged with the question of parafictionality – following the topic of Carrie Lambert’s article assigned for this class. One of the projects, done during the first year of the pandemics, proposed a syllabus for a class to be taken in 50 years time, on the topic of food and coronavirus. For each article or book in the syllabus, the students wrote a short abstract on the topic of the book. The interesting point here is how they managed to mix in an indissociable way both fictional works – pieces that they imagined could be written about covid in the next fifty years, with real works that also engaged with the broader topic of food, history, future, etc.

The class moved on nonstop to our conversation with Lisa Davis. Professor Davis proposed as readings for this week the book Witchcraft in the Bocage that she teaches in her course of introduction to anthropology. According to her, this is a course in which she needs to weight the pros and cons of canonical texts in anthropology, since this field is particularly embedded in colonial history. In this sense, she points out that she needs to decide carefully between the good and bad legacy each anthropological work carries. In that aspect, SA raised a question about the potential racialized reading of  Evan Pritchard’s expression, quoted by Favret- Saada “thinking black and feeling black”. As the professor recognized the racialized background of this expression, she also pointed out that it has been interpreted as an anthropological approach toward its object. In other words, it has been understood in regard to the positionality subject-object, and how this relationship, as well as the relationship with the knowledge that is sought, involves risk as a key element. Be it to move towards it or away from it. At this point, even if escaping the chronological intention of this write-up, I would like to mention DGB’s intervention regarding that aspect. Towards the end of the class, DGB explained, in a much more logical way that I can reproduce here, that understanding is letting yourself be affected and transformed by the knowledge you acquire. This to me seems to be the nodal point that unites most of our discussion: there’s a relationship between knowledge and experience and affects that is and has been ignored by the knowledge making process as it happens in academia. As DGB pointed out, what the method does is, among other things, interpose itself between subject and knowledge and, by doing so, it offers a safe space for this subject to inquire about the world. There’s no risk involved in the way we produce knowledge in academia and, for that, all we can do is reproduce the same images of a disenchanted world.

– I know there’s much more to say about the class but I feel that I covered what for me were the most important and interesting moments of it.

-VB

 

SEMINAR 6: w/ guest Karen Emmerich

In a departure from our usual order of things, our guest joined us for the first half of this session. This meant we jumped right in with both feet on a set of genuinely fascinating questions brought to us by Professor Karen Emmerich from Comparative Literature. For starters, Professor Emmerich sketched the effectively “interdisciplinary” nature of her own professional identity: her department is Comparative Literature, and she is 100% a scholar in that field (indeed, she will soon be president of that field’s professional association); at the same time, she has a strong affiliation with the “regional” (and also linguistic) domain of “modern Greek studies,” which is not a department (worth thinking about why there is no department of “Greek” in the same sense that there is a department of “French and Italian” or “Spanish and Portuguese” — and, wait, did there use to be separate departments of French and Italian? There did — indeed, not long ago…), but is certainly a coherent academic project, and even has “program” status in various places. And finally, Professor Emmerich is very active in “translation studies,” which is also not a department, but is program at Princeton, and is certainly a very large and important area of literary/scholarly work where questions of theory and practice are alive and there is lots of work to be done. 

We took a loop out on what we have come to call the “low road” (shorthand for the nuts and bolts and ground-level features of disciplinarity / interdisciplinarity) in a conversation about professional associations themselves — the way they work in the academy, their status in the sociology of the profession. But Professor Emmerich was quick to take us into the core problems that constitute (and bedevil) comparative literature as a field.

Prominent here was our discussion of “comparison” itself. It was clear from the Shih reading that the field experiences a kind of traumatic discomfort with the very idea of a comparative method. Shih sets out from the assertion that all comparison is effectively invidious, in that it is always already evaluative and inevitably sets the conditions for rankings and assertions of hegemony. By these lights, comparison is the handmaiden of imperial/colonial power, and inextricable from legacies of violence, both ideological and direct/embodied/material.

I personally expressed quite a bit of resistance to this notion, which seems to me false as a matter of logic — even if true insofar as it pertains to the history of literary comparison within university settings. But I feel it is very important to make the distinction. It seems to me not at all correct hat all comparison conduces, ineluctibly, to ordinal sorting. On the contrary, comparative methodologies have a longstanding connection to the study of “form” as such, and it would not be wrong to say that the modes of abstraction that tend to emerge from the work of comparison are essentially homologous with the very idea of an “idea,” such as that term gets thrown around in the diverse intellectual traditions that take an interest in Plato, Aristotle, etc.

Let me be clear: I’ve read Orientalism (indeed, Said’s work was very important to my first book). I am not denying the imbrication of Anglo-European literary scholarship and the larger ideological program of empire. I am merely insisting that one can do comparison with an eye toward things other than deciding “who is greater” or anything along those lines. One can do comparison for the purpose of discerning structure. One can do comparison in an effort to identify kinds. And, indeed, one can do comparison in the hopes of having an idea.

To be sure, structuralism, systematics, and conceptual abstraction itself all have much to answer for, and each can be shown to have participated in political programs we would now repudiate. But it is also the case that these are fundamental practices of reason itself, however construed, and I would be very interested  if you believe that any one of these modes of thought is essentially “corrupt” or, say, “culpable” in an absolute, context-independent way.  If you do, let’s talk!  Perhaps I am wrong here…

*

Context. We spent some time on this notion. On the forms of equality or equalization that are achieved through contextualization, and those that are achieved through the erasure of contextualization. A very definite preference was expressed for the latter. Although Hayden White has some very interesting things to say about a propensity for contextualist modes of argumentation (NB: he associates them with an essentially “ironizing” intellectual orientations). There was a ringing moment, nevertheless, when Professor Emmerich expressed, as I heard her, that she committed to comparative literature as an alternative (a respite?) from the “ethnonational” study of literature.

*

The last part of our session with our guest focused on the status of the literary work (as distinguished from the literary text) as an object of study. I expressed some misgivings in relation to the Shih framing of the problem, expressed here in my marginal annotation:

 

 

Obviously this was on the polemical side, and conversation ensued about the importance of demystifying “the literary” while activating a sensitive critique of the ideological work this mystification has performed. This was good stuff to get to, not least on account of the considerable number of the folks in the class who hail from departments built around the study of language and literature. 

There was a very moving (to me) turn, in closing, to the issue of translation, and to what it would mean to have the work of translation be the work of academic scholarship itself (whereas it is mostly, these days, treated as a kind of poor relation, and younger scholars are often encouraged to focus on “original” work).  What clearer way to see the cost of the current “scientistic” model of knowledge production within the modern humanistic academy?  After all, much learned culture, in many parts of the world, across much of human history would have understood translation to be the highest form of scholarship...

-DGB

*  *  *

[SM and CB notes are below, SM first…]

 

Part I

“In a moment of frustration,” as he put it, DGB wrote the following note in the margin of Shu-mei Shih’s “Comparison as Relation”: Is power even the most interesting thing to be thinking about using literature?

When I took Wendy Belcher’s course on writing journal articles (see her cool site here), I learned that Homi Bhabha’s short introduction to Simone de Beauvoir has—according to certain metrics (and how do these things really work, anyway?)—been cited more than any other article published since 2000. As a Beauvoir person, I am not troubled by this fact (am I nonplussed by it? A bit.). But one thing that does intrigue/bother me is that ever since Foucault did his Foucault thing, the word “power” has become the most common journal article keyword in the humanities and the social sciences.

This is all to say that, to borrow DGB’s language, I was very down with his remarks. I think CB is going to write more about the first half of seminar, but here are some things I noted and enjoyed:

• DGB characterizing certain parts of our “low road” discussion as “follow the money moments”
• JN telling us about his dead disciplines reading group and saying that Classics may very well be the most chauvinistic discipline
• Reflecting on works of literature as objects that create fields of study and vice versa
• KE’s mention of the “spectre” of Emily Apter (if we had had more time, I would have like to ask about David Bellos and Apter’s ongoing debate over untranslatability and what KE makes of the whole thing. Is this a generational difference? What is actually going on here?)
• Learning about Forms
• Learning about Matthew Reynolds Jane Eyre project 
• Imagining JN teaching “Why Compare?” to undergrads (and thinking about this question from R. Radhakrishnan’s article after class: “Where and how does one draw a critical line between ways of being and ways of knowing?”
• DGB asking, “Would you like to sort of blast us with a fire house of negative capability?”
• Returning to a theme that seems to be one of DGB’s favorites. I tried to note it, and it goes something like this: “The humanists hitched their wagons to the model of the sciences. After WWII, we began to think in terms of knowledge production… [interruption] peer review… [interruption] self-obsoleting… [interruption] obsessive preoccupation with new knowledge production.”  Is it just me or do we keep coming back to this thesis? Could we do something with it? I have the impression that we haven’t talked through these “We’re all scientists now” ideas enough–nor have we dwelt on DGB’s imperative: “Find ways to not be a scientist.”

Part II

We all (I think) got excited at the idea of doing a project around interruption(s). And also corruption. But this was at the very end of class. I am going to try to reconstitute what took place first.

Key, pressing question: What happened to the geographers?? Here’s one answer, but we need to look into this more closely. Also, why does Berkeley get to have all the fun departments? Why can’t we have rhetoric?

We went far down the low road and learned:

• That the are different types of chairs (high and low, honorific, administrative…)
• That the tenure process is quite convoluted. Or so it seemed to me. There’s a lot of letter writing and then there’s this thing called “the committee of three,” but it’s actually made up of six people?
• That you go UP or OUT
• Loads of other stuff, but the board was erased and no photo taken. And that means that maybe there’s no record of our knowledge production besides what we’re writing here.
• Oh! We also learned that there was a faculty piñata party with goading of timid children involved.

Eventually DGB left us a little early (and much too late to play proper hooky). We then brainstormed. It seems like we’re still interested in the idea of negative capability. But we’re also worried that we’re thinking too much about the concrete outcomes of our project (What will it look like? Will it be on Obsidian?) and we haven’t spent enough time thinking about the idea or theme we’d like to explore.

SA sent us all a Google doc so that we can keep brainstorming. We did not come up with a plan about how to proceed exactly, but it sounds like we’re all going to jot down thoughts/link to inspiring projects.

We also discussed meeting again on Wednesday the 25th after class. And we didn’t get to talk about agnotology—hope we can next week!

-SM

[CB follows]

We all sat in chairs as we learned what it meant to be promoted to chair versus to be administrative chair of a department, and eventually, with all this talk about (and all this sitting in) chairs, “chair” started to mean nothing to me. Semantic satiation took over and I started to laugh. I wanted to say out loud why I was laughing, to explain that it was not about anything being said or at anyone, but just that the word “chair,” despite all of the new meaning it was gaining, was temporarily a just a couple of phonemes. Although we did not get to discuss the reading on agnotology (the cultural production of ignorance) I felt that this moment metaphorically captured the spirit of that idea. It is not a perfect parallel, but it felt like a “the more you know, the more you realize how little you know” moment. As we learned about chairs, I lost all sight of what “chair” meant, and in the process the idea of ignorance–and different manifestations of ignorance–was highlighted.

At the end of class we discussed our project, and I just wanted to acknowledge my classmates’ congeniality, respectfulness, and willingness to listen to each other. This kind of thing is not guaranteed in any group project, and so I appreciate the generally positive attitude. And when someone expresses (understandable) concerns, it seems that there is always someone else ready to provide encouragement.

Going back to the first part of class, our guest Prof. Emmerich, who works on modern Greek came to us from the Comparative Literature Department. A few topics of conversation included the concept of “area studies” in universities, the purpose and dangers of comparison across cultures, and translation as scholarly work that adds (perhaps more than original work?) to knowledge production/a body of knowledge.

Prof. Emmerich is a proponent of translation, and I found something she said on this topic especially inspiring (and placating): “One can start at any place.” [See this on the photo of the board, above! -DGB] That is, “each instance of the work [any translation into any language] can be taken as a starting point to interpret it.” She argued that even though nuance may be lost in translation, translation is also always more. If you can’t translate a word perfectly, or the meaning gets misconstrued, rather than thinking of that as a loss, we can think of it as a boundary where languages meet and do not cross, but the translation still provides more (more what? Knowledge? Opportunities? Something else?) than if it had never been translated.

This idea is especially interesting to me as a musician and musicologist. In what we usually call “classical” music (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, those kinds of guys) the musicians who play their music are never playing what they wrote. It is always a kind of translation/interpretation because composers do not write in sound waves. (Maybe with modern technology they can now, let me know FP!) We might have similar arguments in music about how it should be played. These are discussions of performance practice, which we base on the historical context: what kind of instruments were played in the past, how did technique develop, how were instruments tuned, which intonation system was used. Often proponents of the Historical Performance Practice movement will criticize a modern violinist who, for example, uses vibrato and a lot of bow to play a Baroque piece because these techniques were not preferred, or were impossible to do in that period. Others–and this seems to be parallel to Prof. Emmerich’s approach–will appreciate such a performance as another valid interpretation, that adds to the pool of musical possibilities.

The idea of translation as “more” also led to the discussion of a new view of the humanities at universities. Could translation be the antidote to the scientific model that the humanities have been following? Rather than producing “new,” “self-obsoleting” knowledge through the process of peer review, could translation be the new model?

I guess it depends on what we take to be the difference between translation, interpretation, and analysis. They are obviously different concepts, but I do think they are related, and if so, I think that many people in the humanities are already doing interpretive analytical work. Analysis of (for example) a piece of music constitutes the discipline of music theory, yet it is not necessarily new knowledge as much as it is a translation or interpretation of what is going on in a piece of music. I imagine similar processes are happening in literary disciplines. Is there a way to harness that kind of work and align it more with the translation model? And would that be different from what we do now? Would it be helpful?

-CB

SEMINAR 7: w/ guest Tina Campt

We spent the first part of this session reviewing the series of short final project ideas that you all contributed to this document in advance of class. I won’t try to recapitulate this conversation, though I was struck by one or two things that I felt came out of our going around the room. For instance, the idea of our focusing on the “article abstract” as a form jumped forward as a very promising avenue for further exploration. The abstract has the advantage of being a distinctive kind of text/paratext that is common across all the different academic disciplines. In this sense, it might provide a choice locus for critical/creative experimentation. In conjunction with these reflections (or had we moved on to something else?), we did a loop out into Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947). Would this offer a model for a collaborative final project? It seems there were a number of ways it might, even as it must be admitted that the highly refined mastery of prose expression on which such “exercises” depend might be challenging. We would be setting ourselves a potentially high bar for success down this path. Even so, it would be very cool if we could pull it off, and we spent some time on a scene or situation of sufficient richness that it might merit the iterative and deepening scrutiny such a project would entail.

What else? There were other things, and they are all in there in the shared document. Interruption? Sounds promising. And what about that idea of our doing a mini prosopography of various counter/anti-disciplinary Holy Fools — figures (Socrates, Diogenes, etc.) who in their maverick posturing productively or constructively disrupt settled norms/conditions. I like this idea a lot, although as I went away and tried to think of some examples I found it harder than I was expecting. And the language of “disruptors” has come to be so tightly associated with various forms of consultant-driven neoliberal cant that I began to worry we might slip into a recapitulation of that kind of “maverick discourse.” Maybe we would need to invent some of these counter-disciplinary fool-figures? That might bring the project more into line with the “parafictional” key. I don’t know. Could work, but the key would be if all of us were genuinely into the idea and wanted to give it a go.

I did note (and so did some of you) that I thought a number of the different ideas being proposed could conceivably become part of the idea that continues to float out there — namely, that we together compose a website or body of departmental documents for an academic program/discipline called “Negative Capability” (or something like that). And I think that is true. One could, for instance, imagine a whole course on “interruption studies” as something on offer in such a department. In a similar way, courses could be offered on Holy Fools, etc. But I don’t want to push this point too hard. I sorta like the idea, but it is true that it is a little close to the thing I showed you that a group of my students did during the pandemic (with that hypothetical future class on the history of food after Covid).

I feel like part of my job is to help give shape to a workable collaborative framework/proposal (or two, or three), but it is a delicate business for me to help give shape while also making sure that you all feel you are realizing a project that is yours and that you want to do. You will find me open to input on this matter, so please just recognize that I am trying to help and make whatever steps you feel are appropriate to take up and shape the leadership roles on what we are trying to do (I have always admired a funny and critical art project by a very brilliant Scandinavian contemporary artist named Fia Backström: in “Studies in Leadership” she very carefully, over a period of weeks, delicately declined to effect the installation of a gallery exhibition of what was supposed to be her own work; as a result, the exhibition took shape as the work of the installers, gallery managers, and a number of other helpful onlookers who grew increasingly concerned that the show was not actually happening. She has a high tolerance for chaos – much higher than my own. And that project cannot be said to have been entirely “responsible” in a way that would be appropriate within an academic setting. Nevertheless, it is a striking activation of the relationship between authorship and anti-authorship, between “leadership” and patience).

We will have an entire session in which to work up our ideas next week – and I invited you all to propose readings you felt might be relevant. I’ll get some stuff up in the Assignments section of the website by the end of the day on Sunday [Actually, it was Monday!  Apologies!].

*

Then our guest arrived! What an enormous privilege to have Tina Campt join us for this session. We went around the room, and set up the way our course works. And she jumped right in, taking up the invitation to think the “high road” and the “low road” of academic/disciplinary life in a perhaps more direct and generously responsive manner than we have hitherto encountered. She sketched her own professional trajectory (from German history, to migration studies, to oral history methods, to feminist theory and Black studies, to media theory, art history, and now contemporary critical practices) in ways that, I thought, toggled back and forth in a fascinating way between conceptual problems and institutional opportunities, between archives and ideas, between the ethical obligation to individual lives and the political problems of collective identity. I genuinely think we were on the edges of our seats for pretty close to forty-five minutes as Professor Campt elegantly worked her intellectual biography into the analytic framework of our graduate seminar. I thought it was very special.

What were the core questions that we reached in the course of that presentation and the conversation that followed? Well, some of that can be reconstructed from the catchphrases scribbled here and there on the blackboard reproduced above.

At the top, I noticed that we have written “to be hailed by an archive.” It is a lovely phrase, and it is the one Professor Campt used when she spoke of the process by which she found her way to the bodies of material upon which she has worked. Part of the elegance of the formulation lies in its invoking the sonic register – a key analytic, of course, in Listening to Images, and important across Campt’s body of work. A fair bit of our conversation circled this idea of listening. Is it meant as a metaphor? Obviously in some sense the answer must be yes. But it also seems to be more than merely a figure. I perhaps wish we had been able to spend a little more time on exactly how “listening” works as a methodology. The collective with which I have worked for a bunch of years, ESTAR(SER), has done a number of art projects that involve actual performances and participatory practices in which listening to images actually happens — performatively).

I am also interested in the more conventional (rich, powerful, important) historical practice of contextualization, and there are aspects of what seems to be achieved in the activity of listening to images (in Campt’s sense) that stands close to, or at least in relation with, the thickening effects of what Hayden White called “contextualist” modes of historical practice. We didn’t quite have time to dig in on that set of issues, but they were very much in my mind. As was the relationship between “knowledge production” and something like “experience” or “activation” – since Professor Campt clearly displayed a great deal of respect for disciplinary practices focused on “method” (and hence subject to evaluation in the terms of “knowledge generation”), and yet she also obviously has an active interest in creative practices and relations of care that perhaps do not reduce to knowledge production (at least not without remainder). That was really the conversation I would have loved to have reached on Wednesday afternoon, and I felt it in the air – but there was so much! And it did not feel quite right to pull too hard in any one direction – especially when we were being led with such thoughtful and generous attention.

There is another scribble on that board which perhaps merits a moment of reflection, and it may even speak to that question with which I was wrestling in my heart. I am referring to the left margin where, circled, we can read “wariness of ‘expertise’ – as a mode of fidelity to accountability”. The syntax of this annotation is a little garbled, but the sense as I remember it was that Professor Campt expressed caution concerning certain kinds of claims to “expertise,” precisely because it was necessary always to remain faithful to an earnest accountability to one’s subjects (and the arrogations of putative “expertise” too often foil precisely that accountability/fidelity).

To put that in plain terms Professor Campt, as I heard her, expressed a desire to write things about vernacular photography that could be read to the human beings depicted in this family snapshot or in that aging passport photograph and that those human beings  could hear and, yes, even understand/appreciate. Did I get that right? I am not perfectly sure. But it was certainly a thought that moved me as I reflected on the Teju Cole, and the powerful language of witnessing that he invokes, and which he juxtaposes with the idea of being “unprofessional”:

Much to think on here….

-DGB

*  *  *

[HK and SA follow, HK first]

SEMINAR 8:  Final Project Charrette (no guest)

Today was our session set aside for a clean run of sustained thinking/talking/deciding about the final project. And we basically followed the process structure template that I sketched out provisionally in my email on Saturday:

I have to say, I was really impressed by the way this conversation unfolded. It was super interesting to hear everyone’s short initial presentations, and a number of quite promising new ideas got onto our slate. I noted a few things on one of the blackboards:

For instance, VB’s idea that we might assemble some kind of text/image array, along the lines of Aby Warburg’s “Mnemosyne Atlas.” This led us to look at some of Nina Katchadourian’s “Sorted Books” installations. There were a bunch of other good things that also surfaced in this first “charrette.”

But time was ticking away, and before we took our break it was necessary to settle on a small number of relatively specific proposals that could be further developed (in a slightly truncated “part two” of our process as given above) en route to an actual vote/sorting that would commit us to what we are actually going to do — by 4:20 pm!

And in fact, everything cooked down to three relatively coherent possible undertakings:

• Some kind of exploration of the article abstract as a literary form (investigated in the spirit of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947);
• Some kind of conjuration of “Department of Negative Capability” (effected by means of a website and associated images/texts/maps/diagrams);
• Some riff on the “Cards Against Humanity” game along the lines of the proposal made by HG and VB (involving a kind of “Mad Lib” combinatorial rearrangement of some key theory statements prominent within the contemporary critical humanities).

I thought all of these were downright groovy — full of possibility. There was no way to go wrong with any of them! Or that was my view. But we agreed to go off into caucus groups and develop each of these into slightly more concrete proposals each of which needed (we decided) to have three components: (1) a concrete deliverable that was possible to achieve by 6th December; (2) a more aspirational possibility of subsequent development into something more substantial/better; (3) some kind of work plan that spelled out achievable and equitable steps from where we are to where we want to be.

Off we went…

This part was rushed, but it basically worked. The results are here below, in somewhat scribbly form:

So then it was time to vote as to who wanted to do what. And at this point what emerged, at least as I experienced it, was basically that nobody really wanted to let any of these ideas drop. And indeed, along the lines of CB’s original “integrative proposal” (the lead photo in this Discussion Thread entry!), there was a sense that all of these could be fitted together somehow in a way that would feel, at least potentially, pretty coherent.

So that is basically where we left things. Folks took down the names of who was most committed to what, but as I remember it we all agreed to gather a set of academic apothegms that would be the raw material for the card game. We said that we would each collect ten (with citations) by the 27th of November, and that as soon as possible, HG and VB would provide us with the necessary template to guide our search (maximum number of words, necessary grammatical architecture, etc.).

We also agreed that we would each do about a thousand words worth of work on the other two projects — that might be two or three abstracts, or, say, one abstract and six or seven hundred words’ worth of material for the website, etc. I do not intend to be too much of a “bean-counter” on this part of things, but from the outset we have agreed that it was important to ensure that work was distributed fairly. My recollection is that we agreed that if HG was going to do the work of assembling the cards, and VB was going to be responsible for writing the introduction and rules for the cards, then they would perhaps not need to do a thousand words on the other stuff.

Needless to say, everyone is welcome to do additional work if they get motivated — but for now I just want to make sure we have a coherent and reasonable work plan. And we can refine this a bit (it is pretty minimal at this point, I think), but we definitely have a coherent vision. I am very much looking forward on all this!

More to discuss when we are next together concerning additional guests we would like to try to secure in the weeks ahead, and additional reading we may want to do as we build out our projects. But for now, I think we can congratulate ourselves on a good day’s work…

-DGB

*  *  *

[CG’s notes on our session follow; and more to come from HG & VB?]

This Wednesday was the day we had to determine our plan for the final project. And we actually came up not with one, not with two, but three plans!

As an assignment, we all had to prepare a five-minute informal presentation in which we would detail our ideas/ show some inspirational stuff. Some of us had slides and/or material to display on the screen; the idea was to allow everyone to share their thoughts and inspirations – in a collaborative way – for the final project.

So instead of summarizing everyone’s presentations, and because I’m more and more becoming an abstract aficionado, I thought I could introduce the different ideas that came up with keywords [not that I want to promote the abstract project, but I just figured it would be more convenient – sorry in advance if I forget anything or if I oversimplify any idea].

RC – Department of Negative Capability, architecture, website, Course Description.

VDB – books, beginning of the world, collection, The Bible, The Big Bang

CG – abstracts, Queneau, Exercises in style, Sokal Affair, journals

HK – grading system, university system, university evolution

HG – cards, quotes, Cards Against Humanity, “Grads Against Humanities”

SA – Capsule, art project, residency, video

[After SA’s presentation, DGB suggested that if we decided to do several projects, we should find something in common/comparable in every group, such as a theme, a word, a medium, etc.]

JN – poems, poetry, phones, poem-generator, Queneau

FP – translation, music, “from one language to another,” “from one medium to another”

CB – Wikipedia, essay, essay-style, rewriting, Negative Capability.

*

As you can see, many different things were brought up, but it seemed that the common thread was our desire to question academia and the way knowledge is produced. With that in mind, we agreed on three different projects.

• A Department of Negative Capability project.
• A board game project.
• An Exercises in Style

1. The first group will be working on creating/imagining a Department of Negative Capability. I believe it was the first idea that came out when we started thinking about a final project a few weeks ago. If I remember correctly, this emerged from a discussion we had about the lack of representation of certain disciplines. Why, for example, does almost every university have a history department and not a geography department? What happened to the geographers? [I actually wonder if this is something specific to the Anglophone world. As far as I know, Sorbonne University, for instance, has an Institut de Géographie, but I’m digressing].

Practically, it means creating a website with:

• A Course description
• A Faculty page
• Syllabi
• Links to the other projects.

 

2. Then, we have the board game project. HG proposed the idea of creating a game inspired by the famous game “Cards Against Humanity”, which would be called “Grads Against Humanities” – the idea being to question the importance of quotes in the humanities fields and how some disciplines almost seem to have created knowledges that only rely on them. Practically, it would involve putting a famous quote on a card, leaving a blank somewhere on it, and pairing it with another famous quote whose syntax would fit the first one. The rule is pretty simple: make the most surprising/funny/puzzling pair. See below an example of what is considered a good association in the original game:

3. And finally, we have the abstracts project, which comes from a conversation we had last week about Queneau’s Exercises in Style. This project would also be a sort of stylistic exercise. It would involve writing a series of abstracts about the book Exercises in Style. It means each group member will write (about) 5 abstracts for different journals. [For example, one abstract about Queneau’s Exercices for a language journal, another for a history journal, another for a musicology journal, etc.] I should also add that this project will consist of what I would call an “academic suspension of belief”: even if the articles do not exist, people in the project will pretend they do. That means we’ll have to formulate a strong argument in each abstract, which could also be used in a longer article.

At the end of the first two hours, we devised a plan for the rest of the session:

• What will be “the imagined end thing”? Or, to put it differently, what do we think will be the form of the projects on Dec. 6, 4:20 (our last session)?
• What could the project become? What will it be if somebody wants to keep working on it?
• Steps – How will we reach our goal(s) in the next three weeks?

For the second half of the session, each group “chair” presented their plan, and new ideas/questions were brought up:

• DGB suggested that groups try to collaborate despite working on different projects. People from the Department of Negative Capability project and from the board game project volunteered to collaborate with the abstracts group (i.e., writing one abstract for a specific journal). And people from the board game group and from the abstracts group volunteered to collaborate on the department project (i.e., being a faculty member).
• For Nov. 27, everyone prepares 10 quotes that could be used as cards in the board game project.

As final words, I will go briefly over each group’s makeup and our following deadlines [arrows are for those who volunteered to collaborate (from what I remember and have noted), but this might change, I guess. I’m just underlining where we are now.]

Last but not least, here’s a reminder of the following deadlines:

Nov. 27: 10 quotes for “Grads Against Humanities”.

Dec. 6: Imagined end thing.

After the break: (maybe) bringing our projects outside the classroom (i.e., printing, sending them for publication?)

And on that note, I let Raymond end this write-up with a few pictures of him:

-CG

*

[VBDLS & Huut below]

HK brought an object that seemed strangely delicate, not exactly a book, not exactly a booklet. Maybe, technically, a plaquette ? But what struck me about this object is how its bound revealed both its solidity and its frailty, which felt in tune with how haptic the content of the book was. I didn’t take a picture, but it didn’t feel right anyway. We have a strange, taken-for-granted relation to bounds. They seem obvious in the books we study, but fascinating when they connect our own productions.

— This week’s class was entirely dedicated to the crystallization of the project(s) for the course. Three projects emerged from the presentations:

First, an exercise in style, à la Queneau, based on “abstracts of articles that do not exist (yet)”, mostly based on CG’s input from our Google Docs. CG wishes to explore the function of abstracts, and indicated that SM (not present) will follow his project. FrDP agreed to join as well. Part of the project includes a compilation of pre-existing abstracts to extract the templates that make abstracts accomplish their functions — which remain to be defined, or at least to be questioned, by the very nature of the project.

Second, the creation of a Department of Negative Capabilities Studies, which echoes a persistent subject evoked in the background of a couple classes now, appealed to the interest of SA, CB and RUC. SA shared a work of visual art, that I would call “What is the ugliest part of your body? (I think it’s your mind)”, which combined miscellaneous and stroboscopic elements, mostly text based (screenshots of chats, notes written, lyrics…), but introducing characters (at least two), with their own choreographies ; a game, a dance, and a message all at once. If, hypothetically, their choreographed gesture towards each other had a specific meaning, I missed that meaning, but they did not seem to care. Doing what they were doing seemingly made them happy, whether or not a meaning was carried towards each other or towards the viewer. I think their happiness was important.

FrDP wanted to contribute to the Department of Negative Capabilities Studies by introducing another piece of work which questions, among other things, the assumptions within translation and between parallelism in lyrics. I would call this work “Say”. The written work was composed of a series of doubled stanzas, one in English, one in Spanish, and it seemed, without explanation, that the Spanish line was submitted to be the translation of the English line. FrDP questioned our assumption, smoothly but irreversibly, by introducing a progressive emancipation of the second line from the first. It reminded me of the emotions carried by some of the Fantasia episodes, when the characters achieve an exhilarating freedom or joy, almost chaotic. It was beautiful to see this happening to a line of text.

— I think those two contributions paved the way to a desire to telescope the projects one into each other, a desire confirmed by CB’s chart which mapped our impulses and tried to find the largest common denominator among them. DGB noticed this, that even if most of the previous editions of his class had one or two projects at most, it’s the first time that the three projects presented are quite “whole” on their own, asserting both their independence and their sensibility towards the other projects’ aspirations.

— HK, JN, and we proposed a third project. VBLDS wanted to work on a taxonomy of knowledge, and when she explained her idea, I pictured a phylogenetic tree of concepts, or theories, instead of animals. From this, we had a conversation about the strength of quotations, fragments, selections and extractions of texts rather than the unit in which they are contained. Bound versus Unbound, to go back to HK’s object. But unbound texts can be extremely volatile ; they are twistable, twisted, and twisting. They can be funny, when decontextualized, but they can mutate into forms that carry a meaning that is the opposite of their original stance. Our project would like to question as openly as possible the random nature of what makes a quote memorable, and whether a pseudo-randomised process can generate new memorable quotes, or even new ideas. The game Cards Against Humanity takes mostly from OuLiPo’s cadavre exquis method, and that is, combined with Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, how we came up with Grads Against Humanities.

— To be continued. We set up a calendar for each group and kept them three open for members to join. All three projects are still unclear about their definitive deliverable, but they can be both modular and complementary to each other: the Department of Negative Capabilities can advertise or show as samples a course relying on randomized processes, including GAH, and feature a bibliography with abstracts.

-VBLDS & Huut

*

SEMINAR 9: w/ guest Jeff Whetstone

The opening conversation this week was a little truncated — our (wonderful!) guest came a little early, and a few folks were late joining, with the net effect that our pre-guest conversation was relatively brief. And there were enough people missing that we perhaps hesitated a little digging in on final project stuff, simply because it feels so important to have everyone participate in those conversations. I think we will do best to pick up the final project conversation in good earnest at the start of our session next week. So I hope everyone can make a special effort to get to class on time, and we will turn right to that: working out our different responsibilities as we head into the final weeks of the semester.

The conversation we did have, mostly informally, circled questions of the “media ecology” within our classrooms. HK was thinking about how new media tools can be incorporated into classroom activities, and can also reflect the sensibility and the “habitus” of students formed to screen-based encounters. We go to this because I asked if folks had seen Anemona Hartocollis’s piece in the New York Times this past weekend about the status of the humanities.

And I supplemented that question by telling the story about a colleague of mine who is despairing about what she is experiencing as the collapse of humanistic education as she knew it at Hunter College in New York City — on account of the institutions’ inability to get students to come back to in-person classes in history and other related disciplines. In her view, this amounts to an endgame, in that she does not believe virtual classes “work” for the kind of teaching she cares about. We entertained the possibility that this simply reflected her inability to work within a new media landscape. SM directly asked how I manage device usage in my class, since it sounds like she (and others) have been wrestling with this in teaching settings as preceptors and AIs.

I got pretty excited about this question, since it relates closely to work I care about a lot in the history of attention (as a field) and the history of the scientific study of attention (more specifically). I said that I have an interest in what I think of as both ends of a kind of “spectrum” on this question: on the one hand, I expressed a lot of interest in what we might think of as the “brave new world” of a fully polychronic / networked teaching-and-learning environment (the more devices the better, the more distributed and rhizomatic the inquiry, the better, the more “distractions” the better — since, following Paul North, it is possible to argue that “distraction” is, in effect, the highest form of absorptive attention); on the other hand, I also have an interest in what N. Katherine Hayles’ identifies as “deep” attention, also thematized by the late Bernard Stiegler (where an effort is made to create the very particular kind of “infinite” and “reflexive” and, where possible, shared immersion in a thought / text / object).

Practically speaking, I in fact do not allow laptops in my current undergraduate seminar on historical consciousness, and explained having gone to considerable lengths to give the students and opportunity to sit together in a room in which everyone has the same page of the same edition of the same text on the table in front of them, and can perhaps catch a glimpse of what this dramaturgy of interpretation / inquiry can yield. There is quite a bit about all of this kind of stuff (Freud’s famous “free-floating” attention, monastic disciplines of attention, poetic modalities of attention) in the book I just co-edited with Justin E. H. Smith. 

The final loop in all of this was a brief mention of the larger political economy within which our current debates concerning attention are unfolding — namely, the intensifying “commodification” of attention in our “attention economy.” As I mentioned, I have a strong sense that this billion-dollar enterprise wants scrutiny whenever we are thinking about our current screen-lives. My co-authored OpEd on this stuff should come out next week in the New York Times (and there is this, too, which is recent and on the topic).

*

But then, our guest arrived! So we took a quick break, and got ready to dig in on the rich material Jeff Whetstone gave us for this week.

And rich it was. Professor Whetstone jumped right in on the problematic of our class as we set it up for him in the introduction. It became clear that, as an artist (and, these days, as a university-type-human as well), Professor Whetstone has done a lot of thinking about the ways that critical and creative practices intersect and diverge, and also on the way the arts articulate (as practices, as professions) with academic norms and forms. It was a very dynamic conversation, as documented by the board (shown above).

Perhaps the best part, though, was the generous way that Professor Whetstone screened his film for us while talking candidly about his own process. He foregrounded, again and again the importance of honoring the messy and non-teleological nature of the inquiry / investigation. There is no substitute for the time with the “stuff” and in the place. In his case, that means continuing to take the photographs (in order to be able to “see”).

There was so much to think about in the film (traditions of landscape painting, traditions of maritime views, ecological problems, questions of race / class / immigration, questions of culture and exploitation, questions of geopolitics and global trade, etc, etc), but Jeff was very clear that, as he conceptualizes artistic practice, the whole point is “to think before you have thoughts” — and I felt that this meant my own thinking about the film was deliciously complemented by a kind of experiential “proto-think” for which we had been at least aspirationally prepared.

When we pulled up out of the film, conversation turned to the Sekula (such an amazing text! Such an interesting artist! And so rich in relation to Jeff’s film!).

On the one hand, there was a lot to say about the actual analytic enterprise on display in the pages we had. Sekula yields space to no one as a dialectical thinker in the Marxist idiom. At the same time, Fish Story as a whole presents a fascinating conjunction of extremely sophisticated critical / expository writing and a series of charismatic (if casual and off-kilter) art photographs. What kind of thing is this — a practice so simultaneously “heady” (even scholarly), and at the same time so frankly open-ended / elusive / visual?

A remarkable conjunction, and Professor Whetstone walked us through a series of artists he takes to operate in a similar conjoint idiom.  Of particular interest in this regard was the turn to the larger question of “research” within the arts, and Jeff talked with us about the way that his own practice (particularly, recently, in relation to Trenton) activates a range of participatory/investigative/exploratory techniques.

I hope we can return to these issues, in that the ways “research” works in the creative arts can be understood to differ notably from the enterprise of “knowledge production” with which we have been preoccupied in this course.  Stuff to think on there. If you are curious, Howard Singerman’s fantastic book, Art Subjects was mentioned. Worth a look…

A great class, and special thanks to Jeff Whetstone for the time and thought!

-DGB

*  *  *

[FP follows…]

Our class on November 8 welcomed Prof. Jeff Whetstone, photographer and chair of the Vis Arts program at Princeton’s Lewis Center. I was particularly excited about Prof. Whetstone’s visit because he is fundamentally an artist/practitioner, and I expected his perspective would provide some balance to a conversation that has so far been dominated by theorists/researchers. Seeking such balance seems particularly relevant when one of our tropes is the question about the relation between research and artistic practice, and about the status of art within a research-oriented institution, so I was looking forward to hearing from someone whose academic position embodies that duality. 

Needless to say, I find this problem pressing because my home program (music composition) is fundamentally practice-based, so the question of knowledge production is, to us composers-within-the-academia, as ubiquitous as hard to answer. One idea that came up in class is that, in supporting and fostering art-making departments and programs, what the university is doing is taking on the role of an art patron. But then the question remains: in creating these art works, what type of knowledge is being produced?

In advance of his visit, Prof. Whetstone had asked us to look at Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Ship of Fools, to read a fragment of Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, and to watch his own installation film The Batture Ritual, and it was the latter around which most of our session revolved. Whetstone said he is interested in de-romanticizing nature and fascinated by spaces that, like the Mississippi River’s batture near New Orleans, are unkept and unpreserved. The French term batture, he explained, refers to a portion of land between the edge of a river and the levee—an interstitial space that comes and goes, disappearing when the river is high and reemerging when the tide falls, and that as such has no economic value, for it has no owner and no jurisdiction. Through his minimalistic approach (one essentially static shot, one minute of video for every hour of the day), Whetstone’s video shows the batture as a kind of aleph where wilderness and industry, humble fishermen and cargo ships mingle, and I couldn’t help but link that scene to our discussion with Jeff Dolven about scale and scalar alterity.

A sense of austere nostalgia pervades Prof. Whetstone’s film, whose main focal point is a stoic (trashy, weed-like) single tree that seems to observe the global economy passing by it. In Bosch’s painting, a group of fools (including a representative of the church) fish, eat and play music while wandering aimlessly on a small boat that carries another tall, trashy tree. There is a political resonance to The Ship of Fools, Whetstone said, seeing how modern-day ships go up and down a river that is condemned due to pollution and contamination. Whetstone described his creative process and told us the story of the editing of the video, of how he started by wanting to tell the story of this tree before diving down a footage rabbit hole of cargo traffic and international containers, all to eventually end up right where he had started—the film about the tree. “The first thought was the best thought”, he said; the lesson being that, if an idea grabs our attention, we have to trust it and go for it. 

So going back: what type of knowledge does art produce? I offer: a different form of thought, maybe? If, instead of thinking in terms of its scholarship production, we see academia as a more diverse, multi-brained thought factory, then what both theorists and practitioners have in common is they are both trying to come up with new ideas. And here comes one of the most beautiful concepts Prof. Whetstone offered: the importance of art in academia is that art teaches to think before one has thoughts—or, as he put it, to “proto think”. As unmeasurable as it might be, that think-before-thinking state is a beautiful metaphor for how ideas ignite: like the batture, the proto-thinking brain is like a magnet, a melting pot of ephemeral but potent forces, where “the best thought” might be found.

-FP

*

SEMINAR 10: w/ guest Catherine Clune-Taylor

A good and ranging session today — the first part of which consisted of working out a lot of the details for our final project.  We hit upon doing three things:

1. each of us is going to contribute 10 theory-sentences according to the template set up by HG and VB (which will go into our combinatorial card-game thing);
2. each of us is going to do one “exercises in style” article abstract (according to a rubric set up by CG and folks leading that group).
3. each of us is going to contribute not less than 500 words (and maybe a pic or two, etc.) to some aspect of the emergent (parafictional) “Department of Negative Capability” website — according to a rubric/sign-up-sheet/architecture set up by SA and the folks leading that group.

Deadlines on that stuff will come on in an email, but basically:

1. 10 sentences due in the spreadsheet EOD Monday 27 November;
2. abstracts due EOD Monday 4 December (we need rubric by 27 November!);
3.  website contributions ALSO due EOD Monday 4 Dec (ditto on rubric by 27 November).

And we will actually “play” the card game (and look at / share the other components) in our last “charrette” class on Wednesday the 6th (there will be an IHUM open house starting at 5 pm that day — all are welcome!).

Let me know if you have any questions!  And thank you to all for the work to this point!  Let’s get over the finish line together with good energy!

*

I’ll leave most of the summary and discussion of our class session with Professor Clune-Taylor to RC and SM below, but I did want to just add that we were again so fortunate, I thought, to have a guest who was willing to jump right in on the question of professional trajectory — in a personal way, but also in a way that strongly informed our ongoing conversations about the “high road” (conceptual and critical) and “low road” (financial and institutional-political) dimensions of academic/disciplinary life.  Really rich!

-DGB

[RC follows here, with SM further on below…]

I found Prof. Clune-Taylor’s visit this week to be quite engrossing. I especially enjoyed hearing about her intellectual trajectory, her meandering from one dream and discipline to another, the floundering before eventual grounding. I found myself, too, returning to the idea of Experience, as Clune-Taylor described the unofficial training and education she received as a fifteen-year-old aspiring physician working part-time at a clinic, and also as she discussed growing up with two disabled parents. Experiences that seem to resist quantification or mechanization, and yet no doubt have informed Clune-Taylor’s navigation of and location in the system of knowledge production.

There was no real “infrastructure” for Clune-Taylor’s work, and so she had to build it. I wonder if this is one possible definition of what it is to be “interdisciplinary” or doing “interdisciplinary work” — the absence of existing infrastructure to pursue one’s project. It seems the process of creating or fashioning this infrastructure is just as vital as the project itself, impossible to talk about one without the other. It makes sense that the interdiscipline, if you will, moves, even careens, toward becoming a discipline (e.g., history of science, as we discussed) — that these kinds of scholars leave behind maps or blueprints that others find and follow, in their own ways, and that a thing like a discipline begins to form. What if disciplines are more like languages? (Rather than, say, a set of methods, a set of concepts, and a set of materials all having to do with each other?) What if the problem isn’t the disciplines themselves, but that institutions will them to be static, stagnant — when the disciplines would, like languages, like to be more alive, more churning and changing?

Another possible definition of “interdisciplinary” that I love: a person interested in a “particular set of problems” and “willing to follow anyone meaningfully taking them up”; and “following what’s generative.” This is in fact how Clune-Taylor described herself.

At one point, Clune-Taylor said something along the lines of, “I read too much Foucault. I’m a little freaked out now.” She was describing how learning, as an undergraduate, about the sociopolitical dimensions of medicine in essence “broke [her] brain.” Although I’ve never described it in those terms, I too can recall at least one undergraduate experience that completely upended / fractured my intellectual (and sociopolitical) framework. Perhaps we all can. It seems to me that this is a good thing, if (at the time) a harrowing thing. I wonder if this is also how many of us come to interdisciplinary work? Some experience — a course, a text, a current or life event — or set of experiences reveals that the framework on which we’ve depended, the narrative we’ve been told and that we’ve told ourselves (and it seems to me a discipline can be thought of as a narrative) — it reveals that something in it is fundamentally flawed, or at least missing. Interdisciplinary work is how we are able to forge on.

[DGB commenting here:  Wow!  Really struck by this idea that having one’s “mind blown” (as we say) might be a kind of experiential encounter with the essential aporetics of “disciplinary” orientation — or, perhaps more generally, that the experience of having one’s mind “blown” is some kind of condition of possibility for a certain kind of intellectual ambition/hunger…  More to think on here, and it picks up on our sub-theme this term of “interruption…”]

Also on the note of theory: I love what Clune-Taylor said about feminist philosophers: “We got into the theory because of something in the world.” I love this because I remember feeling so unmoored in my early encounters with theory. (And it can often still elicit that feeling.) But Clune-Taylor’s framing reminds me that theory is, must be bound to the material.

-RC

[SM follows here…]

• We started seminar by looking at the Excel sheet HG and VBLDS have created for our game quotations.
• I had entered a Beauvoir quotation into the sheet but had not properly entered the nominal group. We decided, as a class, that the best way to proceed would be to replace nouns and the articles preceding them like so:

It is not too clear just what the word happy really means and still less what true values it may mask. —> It is not too clear just what ___________ really means and still less what true values it may mask.

(This would not work if you simply removed “happy” or “word happy.”)

• We then discussed some stylistic/citational conventions. Would it be better, for instance, to write, “It is not too clear… and still less…” or to write “It is not too clear […] and still less”?
• For our project, DGB proposed, it is essential that we all adopt the same conventions for indicating the status of the material we cite. We opted to keep fragmented sentences as long as we reproduce them faithfully and—this is important—we write ellipses without brackets around them wherever we cut words. If someone, however, quotes a sentence that has a natural ellipsis in it, this will pose a problem. Thus, no one may quote on their white card a sentence with an ellipsis. Or bring your sentence to the group and we’ll decide how to proceed. Key take away: Every comma and every period must be placed exactly as they are in the original text. I’m still not exactly sure what our reference style is: Author, Title, (Date?), Page Number?

[DGB let’s use Chicago Style for FOOTNOTES, as in, not bibliography style — hence: Author First Name followed by Author Last name [Comma] title, etc.]

• We also discussed coming up with a new title for our game. We may need to vote on new titles.
• Here is our plan for our final project—everyone will do the following three things:

1. Submit ten theory sentences by the end of the day on Monday, November 27th
2. Write one abstract (approx. 300 words?) by the end of the day on Monday, December 4^th
3. Write one 500-word contribution to the negative capability website by the end of the day on Monday, December 4^th

We need to make a template for the abstract project and a comparable template/spreadsheet for the neg. cap. website ASAP (before Nov. 27th, but ideally sooner).

[DGB: Note!  This exactly reproduces what I wrote above, SO WE SHOULD INDEED ALL BE ON THE SAME PAGE! YAY!]

• We do not need to worry about the “production” part of these products (nor making rules for our game); we can continue tinkering with them after the semester ends.
• I left class feeling excited—not only about our projects—but also about CCT’s future projects (in particular, I loved when she spoke about radically transforming medicine/the health risks of whiteness AND about the necropolitics of childhood).
• Last, I’d like to thank JN for asking a splendid question that went something like: “What are you doing that a journalist or a citizen organizer couldn’t do? Or how you see yourself bringing about change in the world?” I thought this last part of our discussion—about how our skills can or can’t be transported outside university ecologies—was a wonderful way to end the session.

-SM

*  *  *

SEMINAR 11: w/ guest David Reinfurt

We are very definitely in the home stretch at this point — just one class left (next week), and today we had our final guest of the semester. David Reinfurt joined us from visual arts, and we used the occasion to think about “design” as a discipline/enterprise/problem. It was a very rich session in a whole bunch of ways.

More on that in a moment. First, though, a few words about where we are in the final projects. We spent our first hour going over our progress on the three distinct-but-overlapping things we have agreed to do by way of culminating exercises for our semester: 1) our theory mad-lib sentences; 2) our “Exercises in Style” journal abstracts; 3) our parafictional “Department of Negative Capability.” 

The good news is we seem to be in really good shape on each of these — special thanks to everyone, and special-special thanks to those of you who have taken on more leadership roles in shaping all this. As far as the “progress report” goes, we each submitted ten sentences (and citations) into the spreadsheet for the mad-lib/humanities-cards thing (on which we are still seeking final consensus for a title!). CG and the journal abstract team have prepared a lovely précis and template for all of us, and we have a deadline for our deliverables: end of the day Monday, the 4th of December. That is also the deadline by which the “Negative Capability” team (thank you SA and others!) are expecting us to fill in our contributions to the very helpful shared doc and template they have created. 

So, basically, all we have to do is do the stuff we have said we are going to do by the date we said we will do it — and then we should have a pretty interesting final session next week to look over and experiment with the results. I am looking forward!

*

A few words, then, about our stimulating visit from one half of the design collective known for many years as “Dexter Sinister.”  I was so struck from the outset to discover that David was the first person to teach a design class at Princeton, now fifteen years ago. This was interesting in itself (for what it suggests about the trajectory of “design discourse” over the last twenty years, for what it says about Princeton University, etc.), but it was also notable in connection with last week’s guest — Professor Clune-Taylor, who was, we learned, the first actual hire into the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

In keeping with our “low road” considerations of institutional structure and administration and money and hiring, we recognized some differences between these two “firsts.” Professor Clune-Taylor represents (as I understand it) the first full-time tenure-track FTE fully located in a program that already existed (having been made up of faculty more or less “on loan” from other departments), whereas David Reinfurt initially taught a design class (presumably) as some kind of elective within Visual Arts from a pedagogical position that was, in effect, a part time, “adjunct”-style footing. At least initially. I believe he would now be afforded a newer designation, one reflecting changing institutional efforts to do justice to non-academic-traditional-disciplinary domains: a “Professor of Practice.”

We also took a moment on the fact that David has been able, across these last fifteen years, to, in some sense, “build out” design here on campus, in that there are now two other (part time) instructors each of whom offers a one semester design course, bringing the total design curriculum to perhaps four or five or maybe even six classes that can be offered on a rotating basis. As we have now seen, this kind of thing can, in some cases, constitute the little sprouting seed of program formation. It needn’t, of course. And I have absolutely no idea if David (or anyone else for that matter) has any interest in such a thing in this context. I am guessing not. 

And some part of that “not” is presumably a little bit tied up with another aspect of the conversation that emerged: David Reinfurt is very much a “professional” designer. Which is to say, he centers a meaningful component of his identity outside the space of the university — and in the context of his actual practice as a person who designs things (for clients, on commissions, etc.). In this sense, he is in something of the same position as the other artists (dancers, novelists, filmmakers) who have, in increasing numbers over the last fifty years, found their way into relation to institutions of higher education. We have spent a fair bit of time on this dynamic (I’ll mention a very interesting book that deals with this subject both historically and critically/conceptually: Howard Singerman, Art Subjects), which opens up a host of difficult questions about what universities are for, and also what it is that the arts actually do. Can we think of creative practices in terms of “knowledge production”? What sort of “research” can artists do?

That last question was richly at issue in the core of David’s remarkable presentation about his work on the Meta-the-difference-between-the-two-Font. Not only did he tell us the story of the commission that gave rise to this “work,” he also brought us “in” in a very special way on his actual, current creative process — sharing with us his current struggles, with his partner, to settle on a “static” form of a font the central gambit of which was its temporal dynamism. David generously allowed us to puzzle on this paradoxical problem with him.

That was kind of amazing.  But I will put it aside here.  And instead take a moment on the conversation he led around the fundamental question “what is ‘design’?”  I put some notes on the board (an image of which features as the header of this entry) as we tested different ways of thinking about this problem: “design is a discipline w/o a ‘subject matter'” was one effort; or, “it is not a ‘what’ as much as a ‘how.'”  Another interesting line of inquiry: “The purpose is the consequences.”

Really good stuff.  Lots to think on…

I will throw the rest of the summary/reflection out to SA and JN here below!

-DGB

*

[SA here:]

This week, our discussion led us between the worlds of art, design, and creative scholarship. The first portion of class was dedicated to discussing progress on our final projects. It was riveting to hear everyone’s input on their respective ‘quote pulling’ processes for the ‘Grads Against Humanities’ project [I like the idea of calling in GAH! ’cause I still feel weird about suggesting that we are, somehow, “against” the “humanities” – though I understand that this is just a riff on the original “Cards Against Humanity” game… – DGB]. We divulged our delights in revisiting and sharing some of our favorites from our idiosyncratic canons, reflecting on the frustrations with standard citation conventions, and bonding over the overlaps in our reference themes. We also got project updates from the Department of Negative Capability and Exercises in (Abstract) Styles groups, confirming we are on course for a great culmination of interdisciplinary, metacreative collaborations to manifest by semester’s end.

Our guest this week was Graphic Designer and Professor of Practice David Reinfurt. I feel personally inclined to disclose the absolute bias in my reflection on the class proceedings from here on in. I, a font enthusiast, got to discuss fonts ad nauseam. I have never been happier on Princeton University’s campus. Even moreso, we got to explore the world of fonts through the split diopter lens of the artist and designer. In our discussion, a clear demarcation was set forth on those two titles, with Professor Reinfurt himself stating ‘I show as an artist, but identify as a designer’. The discussion of the art of design further stylized this distinction, with design being illustrated as a discipline of interaction, between idea and shape, form and function, concept and content. We discussed many morphisms, including the indelible project Professor Reinfurt and his creative partner undertook in collaboration with KADIST, to create a font that metamorphisized over a ten year span.

To think of a font as an artwork is to appreciate the flirtation between static and dynamic states of meaning. This was evidenced in the KADIST project, but bears relevance in our larger class theme around interdisciplinary embodiments of knowledge. If we think of a school of thought, a body of knowledge, an institution of collective scholarship, in the same manner we think of a font family, we may realize that our own conundrums with how to distill the changes in style are not all that different. Shifts in cultural vs. canonical relevance plague the font enthusiast and contemporary scholar alike, as we wrestle to reconcile the legibility and legitimacy of ourwork, whether it is to be consumed in public or institutional arenas. Furthermore, we are tasked with considering a problem that trumps even the physicists to this day: how to successfully reconcile dynamic dimensions into static states, or in our cased, how to resolve multimodal processes of ideation, expression, analysis, and epistemological exchange into concrete knowledge forms. This thought is still in formation, but I still believe holds true to the themes we’ve explored indivually and collectively throughout the semester.

-SA

*

[And JN below:]

Our time with David Reinfurt started with a plunge into the deep end: “What is the difference between art and design?”  A decidedly anti-Scholastic approach to the subject in question, proceeding from differentia to the sketch of a definition.  Art, we suggested, is useless, whereas design is applied.  Art makes its status as the product of human effort and imagination starkly apparent; design is sleek, frictionless, invisible.  Art responds to inspiration; design to an assigned problem.  Art is singular, design modular.

There followed the narrative of Reinfurt’s long-term project with Kadist, already aptly summarized above.  I want to dwell a little bit on the art/design question not as a matter of technics, nor yet of implementation, but of identity and affect.  As SA has mentioned, Reinfurt identified as a designer first and educator second, even as his work on Meta-the-differenct-between-the-two-Font evinces qualities of research and indeed of Art writ large.  What is at stake in positioning oneself as a (mere?) designer, or of describing one’s work as responding to a problem rather than generating its own terms?  To project these questions onto a more familiar domain, to what extent are various genres of academic writing analogous to design projects, and when if ever do they transcend to the status of art-object?

A brief and indulgent excursus, if I may.  The latest Ira Sachs joint Passages (2023) has been living rent-free in my mind for the past several months, and I’ve been turning over a few scenes in the film since last week’s session.  A brief sketch to set the scene: Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and Martin (Ben Whishaw) are partnered and living in Paris.  Tomas, a director, hooks up with Agathe (Adele Exarchopoulos) at the wrap party for his latest film.  Martin, the long-suffering steady partner, puts up with this until he doesn’t.  Agathe conceives a child with Tomas and briefly entertains a life with him until she doesn’t.  Tomas ends up alone, his obstinate if principled commitment to free love having alienated his two partners.

The reason this film came back to mind last week was the way Tomas’s and Martin’s characterization depends, in part, on their creative practice.  The first scene introduces Tomas the director, exacting and charismatic.  He is pure vision and will, frustrated when his actor cannot realize his vision.  It takes at least a half an hour for us to learn what Martin does, though he is clearly enmeshed in the art world through which Tomas travels.  It turns out he is a graphic designer at a print shop, working on a commission that seems to be advertising a festival at a small French town.  He never talks about work with Tomas, who is constantly airing his insecurities and frustrations with Martin.  This distinction between their artistic practices seems, perhaps, representative of their roles in the film writ large.  Tomas is often depicted as a man about town, speeding along on his bike.  Martin is seemingly always at home, often cooking or cleaning.

Without having personal stakes in the art/design distinction, I am now very intrigued by the idea of paired disciplines along these lines, and how such disciplinary differentiation corresponds to, reenacts, or bucks such other binaries as public/domestic, creative/reproductive, and yes, active/passive.

-JN

 *  *  *

SEMINAR 12: Final Projects!

A really successful final session, I thought!  We basically did just what we said we were going to do, and everyone came through.  The read-through of our final series of “Exercises in Style” for journal abstracts was a pleasure, and great to see the range of games and imagination and actual possible articles that emerged.  Our “Department of Negative Capability” materials also looked great, and we will have to see if actually building out a website of some sort eventually comes together.  And then, thanks to all the work of the “CARD TEAM” we through ourselves into an hour of humanistic play that hinged on substitution after substitution.  My group had an EXCELLENT time!  Just one, for the road:

That about says it all!

Thank you for an excellent semester!

-DGB