SEMINAR 1: We Begin!
[Class write-ups — DGB first]
Great to get started!
Our initial gathering, on a drop-dead-gorgeous early-autumn Wednesday, had no real reason to extend for the fullness of the two-hour-and-fifty-minute session. But it basically did. We just got going, and the conversation rolled along…
After introductions (great to have folks from so many different departments!), we turned first-and-foremost to the unusual wager of our class: a final collaborative project, the nature of which we know not – as yet. Because we are committed to the idea that it will emerge, in the course of our work together – and we are committed to honoring the process that gives rise to something we will do as a group (exactly how Christy and I will participate is TBD, but I have been willing to do my part in past years – and have generally contributed symmetrically with the students).
We talked a bit about some of the past projects that have come out of the course: the Keywords book, for instance (also a website); and there was the annotation exercise that was realized in a deck of cards (finalized in 2023, but it was the 2022 class that did the work). And other things too – some that took formal shape, and some not. We also discussed the way the projects have emerged, in the past, and spent some time on the “structure” that any such project has to honor (that there are components to be achieved individually, even as the whole wants to be greater than the sum of the proverbial parts). There are off-ramps, if we cannot get it all to work. But let’s shoot for the stars – and hope for the best.
🙂
We also spent some time on the structure of our sessions (with our initial hour together as a group, followed by the time with our weekly visitor), and reviewed the way we will use the “discussion thread” for a series of class “write-ups” aimed at documenting our work together over the semester.
The class’s special relationship with the IHUM program got some air-time, as did the nature of the IHUM program itself (though it was only after the break that we dug in on the “inside story” of IHUM’s origins – as a kind of consolation prize to the humanities after the creation of the Lewis Center pulled the arts out from under the “Humanities Council”).
That parenthetical above actually signals some of the substance that we got into AFTER that short break. Because it was post-break that we rolled up our sleeves and began to talk about what the class is actually “about.” And I hazarded that it has generally operated on two “tracks” in its pursuit of deeper understanding of the nature of the “disciplines” (and the various ways of scumbling, crossing, and defying them): on the one hand, we aim to follow a kind of “high road” of historical epistemology aimed at investigating the underlying conceptual rationale/geneaology of the modern university’s parsing of the domains of learning; on the other hand, however, we also try to stay mindful of the “low road” analysis of similar terrain, namely the “follow-the-money” project of understanding how universities actually work (which turns out to have considerable implications for what fields are available for study in what ways).
And what about our title words? “Interdisciplinariy?” “Antidisciplinarity?”
We have more work to do here. But we did circle the central fact that what organizes disciplinary endeavor in the modern university is the “production of knowledge.” That is what we are all here to do. That is what original research in a “discipline” amounts to – and each of you will need to achieve this in order to be “certified” with the Ph.D. That degree will designate you as a person who has created original knowledge in your field – as attested by a set of acknowledged scholars in that discipline.
Why take the time to scrutinize all of this in the critical/creative way that characterizes HUM 583 (if it works!)? Well, the answer to that lies, in good measure, in the way that the humanistic side of this “knowledge producing” enterprise seems to be in relatively serious straits – indeed, may even be coming to an end in its recognizable forms. And that means it is seemingly necessary to think hard about where we are (and how we got here) so that we can move to someplace else!
And in many ways THAT is the real program/ambition, I think, that churns at the heart of HUM 583. Let’s see what we can figure out!Very much looking forward to the semester together – and such a pleasure to have the chance to co-teach with Christy!
-DGB
[CNW here below…]
Am very eager to spend the semester with you all and to see what our unique combination of interests, talents, personalities, and knowledge sets will yield in the coming weeks. Was especially excited to meet students from so many different disciplines – Music, Classics, Architecture, English, French, Anthropology, History (of Science) – and to finally teach with Graham, which has been in the works for a while.
This is my first seminar co-teaching experience, so I’d never really thought about the extent to which one’s own professorial style takes on new meanings when put next to someone else’s professorial style. It is a rather intriguing feeling, and I see great potential in this new situation. There will be chances for speaking or being silent, playing devil’s advocate, making jokes, brainstorming, trying out wild experiments, arguing, agreeing, etc. etc.
Most of my pedagogical training has been in language teaching, and in past courses, I’ve borrowed language-centric techniques and applied them to literature, philosophy, culture, film, whatever I happened to be teaching. One certainly could bring in some of those principles into an experimental course like this one – particular ways of thinking about the time allotted to students vs. profs for speaking, the accumulation of more intricate tasks throughout the session, toggling between different skill sets (vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, etc.), which in our case might involve shifting from discussion of theory, to the anecdotal mode, to the possibilitarian mode (Möglichkeitsmensch or possibilitarian, a term from Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The Man without Qualities]), to a project-oriented or makerly headspace. Our guest speakers will surely bring their most natural pedagogical modes with them as well.
A tip, if I may offer one: As a grad student, you may not receive much pedagogical training, but I encourage you to watch each of our visitors and see if you can discern anything that one might describe as a pedagogy. Accumulate as early as you can a list of ways you’ve seen others impart knowledge and add them to your own storehouse for your potential future as a teacher.
Re: our first session, I very much enjoyed its rather strange order, which established itself seemingly organically. The collaborative project was the first order of business (wasn’t it? or it was at least alluded to) – DGB described it several times as EMERGENT, which I intuit may be one of his best-loved words – then lightning-fast introductions, some talk of class structure, then some chalk diagrams of everything from enrollment numbers to general education requirements to the arcane truths of program funding. Taking a page from the thespian arts, DGB did an impression of a wealthy donor who loves ethics, throws money at the university, then hobbles out the door. The IHUM program was explained. Only at the end of the session did the beginning happen: We addressed the question: What is HUM 583 about??????
Our session got me thinking about how much one’s perspective of the university changes from each vantage point. The ways that undergrads, profs, lecturers, grad students, staff, administrators, parents, donors, alums, etc. experience the place, make judgments about it, and move through it are quite incomparable. I hope that in the coming weeks, we will keep in mind that it is quite difficult to say anything definitive about this particular institution because it changes so tremendously depending on the subjectivity through which it is filtered.
Regarding the General Education Requirements that undergrads have to meet in order to graduate, DGB brought up the specific impact of the HA requirement (Historical Analysis) on the numbers in Kevin Kruse’s 20th-Century American History course and other classes in the history department. Here are the other requirement categories, which, you’ll see, certainly have a disciplinary (and sometimes thematic) understanding of undergrad education:
- Culture and Difference (CD)
- Epistemology and Cognition (EC)
- Ethical Thought and Moral Values (EM)
- Historical Analysis (HA)
- Literature and the Arts (LA)
- Quantitative and Computational Reasoning (QCR)
- Science and Engineering (SEL/SEN)
- Social Analysis (SA)
I would be quite interested to hear what you make of such requirements. Also, does your particular program require specific courses or specific families of courses? What is the rationale for this course distribution?
In other university cultures – I have Europe in mind in particular – students begin to specialize early, making important choices about their disciplinary direction much earlier than Americans, sometimes even in high school. Perhaps we could talk about the advantages and disadvantages of such early specialization, about the idea of a “well-rounded education” or the goals of the liberal arts college (versus places like community colleges, trade schools, big public universities, research universities, etc.)
A final surreal note: I printed out the pages for the Week 2 readings and when I got to the Foucault pages, I found a surprise. On the screen the page looked normal:
But on the printed page, the letter “O” had gone on sabbatical:
Surely an OCR issue? A printer issue? In this format, Foucault’s text seems less like a scholarly contribution and more like a code to be cracked.
Excited for our first guest, the unparalleled Jeff Dolven, who will likely give us other enigmas to solve.
-CNW
SEMINAR 2: With Jeff Dolven
The first third of class, we were among ourselves. CB placed the Reunions button with its divestment QR code on the table, summoning up the past (last year’s protests), the present (Beshara Doumani’s recent talk in NES), and the future (talk of a future Palestinian Studies unit on campus). I was quite sad that we weren’t able to get LJ’s object on the table by the end of class but really hope we’ll be able to see it first thing next week. Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems) got passed around the room, its versed strips bending into new configurations in each student’s hands.
Jumping into the knowledge reader, wide-ranging observations came in quick succession. We talked about the styles and themes of the readings by Wittgenstein, Vico, Ryle, Foucault, Haraway, Harvey, Moten, and Hegel. Many of the articles were about typologies and finding ways to name and categorize various types of knowledge. SW pointed out the humanities-centric nature of the reader. The poles of constraint (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) and freedom (Surrealism) were played with. SS offered interesting observations about the music program, which separates the musicology, composition, and performance tracks in substantial ways, causing potential tensions between them. This made us dwell on the problem of interpretation: How to describe the similarities and differences between the task of literary interpretation (the act of the critic) and musical interpretation (in the performance sense)? Which is valued more in contemporary academia? The interestingness of our discussion caused time to accelerate markedly.
During JD’s visit, we moved into a specific discipline – literature – but what quickly came through in the discussion is that poetry (not poems) transcends the category of literature. We spent a lot of time on the commonplace and tried to figure out how specific commonplaces from Grossman’s text did their work and what a commonplace is and can do more generally. I threw in the problem with commonplaces – I described them as pithy dispatches of truth – and their tendency to provide what I guess you could call situational truths. Commonplaces offer one meme for this situation (“Absence makes the heart grow fonder”), an opposite meme for another (“Out of sight, out of mind”). The example I offered is the variants of “Clothes don’t make the man” (near synonyms in English being “Don’t judge a book by its cover” and “All that glitters is not gold” and funny equivalents in other languages, including the very Catholic commonplaces from French (“L’habit de fait pas le moine” [the habit doesn’t make the monk]), Italian (“L’abito non fa il monaco”) and Spanish (“El hábito no hace al monje”). German provides an opposite commonplace: “Kleider machen Leute” [Clothes DO make the man.] Grossman’s primer offered a catalogue of poetry-related commonplaces that sometimes contradicted each other, sometimes mutually reinforced each other, and sometimes stood as outliers, having less the feel of a commonplace (accessible to, legible by, and maybe even producible by all) and a one-off poetic reflection written in aphoristic style. A favorite line from the intro that we didn’t discuss: “An aphorism is a proposition with a horizon.”
The word speculative caught and held my attention most tightly. About 10-15 years ago, there was a trend especially strong in European and American philosophy of pinning “speculative” to a lot of other terms: speculative realism, speculative materialism, speculative justice, the speculative turn, etc. (The philosophers Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman are probably the most well-known people attached to it). The language of a “radical shift in philosophy” was omnipresent then, but if you are not a philosopher, you probably took no notice. (I wrote a critique of speculative journalism some years ago, in a completely different vein from the above-mentioned philosophical exercises.)
What does Grossman mean by “speculative poetics”? We speculated about what he might mean but didn’t settle on an answer. Or rather, we offered multiple potential answers. I was disappointed that we didn’t get to JD’s wonderful * A New English Grammar, which is a poetic experiment of the richest kind. My favorite sentence: “A complication arises with verbs like die” (22).
Wanted to flag the discrepancy between the first half of class and the second half, which piqued my curiosity. In the second half, some people spoke much more than others. Was it because some were familiar with the lexicon of poetics and others weren’t? Was it too abstract for some, comfortably so for others? Did it have to do with shyness in the presence of a guest? Will there always be a vibe change between part one and part two? Almost certainly. Just wondering about its causes. This has broader implications – I think – for many of our future discussions on pedagogy, the classroom, types of learning environments, classroom dynamics, etc.
-CNW
[DGB here below…]
Walking back across campus after our seminar today (the late afternoon light already autumnal, the quad quite embarrassingly beautiful – most lively and contemplative, in a very start-of-the-semester way), I found myself feeling genuine waves of very deep gratitude. What an immense privilege (and pleasure!) to be able to spend two hours and fifty minutes doing that! And with all of you!
I suppose it is really a little cheesy, all that: a middle-aged professor getting tingly about the joy of seminar. Good heavens.
But it’s true. I can’t deny it. I experienced, across that last eighty minutes or so a genuinely exquisite, even exhilarating, sense – the sense that we were actually doing a thing that I love very much; that we had, together, with Jeff’s deft leadership, successfully made a set of genuinely profound questions vibrate.
Is that the right way to put it?
It is obviously a metaphor. It captures something, though. Because we didn’t exactly “answer a question” – or not in any obvious way, I don’t think. Nor did we “produce knowledge,” did we? Certainly not in any way that would be recognized through the social technology of peer review.
What did we do, then?
We read. We thought. We talked.
And in the course of those activities, I began to feel a certain vibration in the room. Was this an illusion?
If it was a “vibration,” what was vibrating?
I am reminded of Jeff’s touching valediction – that part where he drew the distinction between an interdisciplinarity of hyper-specializations (imagine two disciplinary “trees” whose most extended ramifications can rub together… and produce an article) as against the “interdisciplinarity of the fundaments” (the going down into chthonic foundations).
Do you remember this? Did it make sense? I think we will come back to this idea, but for now I want to invoke Jeff’s parting words. As I heard him, he left us on a note that harmonized encouragement and warning: that second kind of interdisciplinarity, the one that involves going toward the fundamental (basic?) stuff, is, he seemed to be suggesting, where the best of the good stuff lies; however, going there demands that we be a little fearless, because there is no place to hide, really – no sophistication or referentiality that will protect us from the taint of shame/embarrassment. “Take heart,” Jeff seemed to be telling us, “you have to risk seeming a little silly if you hope to enjoy the riches and satisfactions that are to be had down there where the most basic questions get asked.”
I suppose I am thinking of that moment because, reading back over what I have written above, about “vibrations” and all that, I am struck by how goofy it can easily sound, how pre-stressed for sardonics (“oh really? you guys had a seminar? and you felt, Graham, that you were all…really vibing?”).
But I guess I mean it. And I want to stick with it, despite feeling bit of that shame that Dolven invoked. Vibration. It’s the best word I can come up with. It felt to me like we made some very large and very old and very deep questions vibrate. That we did that together.
Vibrations, of course, are the stuff of sound – indeed, of music. And so it might be more poetic (though not for that false) to say that we made those deep, old problems sing.
Yeah. Well. Hmmm.
What does Grossman say at one point? “While I am doing this, you are doing something else.”
So true. So true. And it applies RIGHT NOW! I am trying to explain what it felt like to me. You are reading what I wrote. (Something of this problem will be in the first-hour reading set for next week, on the problem of “experience”…)
And, as far as “what it was like for me,” I’m not sure my writing is especially helpful, as I look back on it. Oh well. As Grossman asked us to acknowledge, this is rather the central problem we circle, we who care so much about humanistic objects (“texts,” “works”) and their situations.
As for “vibration,” there is, as it happens, some nice peer-reviewed literature out there. I know a little bit. Has it informed my metaphor? I can’t say. Does it actually help? I’m not sure. But here it is, for what it’s worth: Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World.
Oh, and vis-à-vis the whole business about the embarrassment of fundamentality”: I use the word “fundament” above advisedly – it does, of course, in English, mean, somewhat dismayingly (or should I say delightfully?), both “the foundation” and “the buttocks” (the artist Matthew Barney, in his endlessly queasy way, helpfully taught us to keep both meanings in view…).
Onward!
-DGB
In thinking back our conversations over the assigned texts on truth/knowledge and in the time shared with our guest, JD of English, three themes stick out to me as particularly prominent (and fascinating!). None of these ideas reached resolution or closure – perhaps/hopefully none have one. And each overlaps and intertwines substantially. I’m looking forward to continuing to pull at these and others over the semester.
[I’ll also acknowledge, in partial response to CW’s posted note, that my descriptions lean slightly more heavily on the first half of class than the second, and that I likely missed some key points on account of being disciplinarily/theoretically out-of-depth!]
(1) What is knowledge, and what are our obligations as knowledge-producers?
[CB] got us started with a powerful object, drawing us in to recent discussions on campus, and around the nation, about the importance of Palestinian (different from Palestine) Studies as a discipline, and potentially department. We thought about the legitimization of disciplines, the powers (high-road and low-road, re: Session 1) shaping the development of this sort of department, and the need for the thinking and knowledge-production/doing that a department like this would foster.
A good bit of our first-hour conversation dealt with questions of knowledge-production, and the ways the University/Academia differentially values knowledge and modes of production. The language used for roles within that spectrum arose in multiple ways, including [CM]’s example, and [CW]’s additions, on the differences between French’s chercheur and English’s academic, intellectual, researcher, etc. The Ryle excerpt called us to consider tensions between thinking and doing, those who design the product and those who carry it out, the clock-maker and the clock. [SS] named the ways in which this is explicitly played out in the musical world, with musicologists and not compositionists holding tenure, and those who perform compositions unrecognized for their contributions in the economics of university degrees.
Continuing in this tension, JD opened by naming that interdisciplinary work often most-comfortably takes theoretical forms, and that he intentionally confronted that tendency by assigning readings on doing, on craft. The foundations of the Grossman piece, as a set of commonplaces that aren’t theory, but instead points of outlook, forced us to sit in the practical, even within knowledge-production. We discussed the moves that Grossman made in the structure of the Summa Lyrica, decontextualizing things that are familiar, and in doing so emphasizing their striking nature, producing the commonplace as something we know but must also learn. (I might add here a connection to Hegel’s discussion on the knowability of the familiar in the reading).
(2) Communication, distancing, and representation: is there ever proximity?
Much of our discussion with JD centered on ideas of communication and proximity. [AK] began this with commonplace 16.7, on ideas of hearing vs. overhearing. We discussed multiple forms of art that pull at this tension in different ways, including the power in art of representing subjects in states of absorption with objects invisible to the viewer, and the oppositions between absorption and theatricality. [MM] drew us to Said’s work on eavesdropping, and [CM] to Baudelaire’s contrary direct address of the reader. We held in tension these directions of intention with ideas of the production of poetry itself as necessarily in-community (Moten).
Hand-in-hand, [MA] pointed us to commonplace 2.3, grounding us in the practicalities of conversations to determine-the-relationship. We discussed Grossman’s fascination with identifying/exposing the hidden, and with the aesthetics of distance and participation (later in the conversation, re: commonplace 32s) as intertwined and contingent. [DGB] and others contextualized Grossman’s work to the moment wherein communication theory was burgeoning. This allowed us to wrestle briefly with the mismatches always between what is said, what is heard, and what is inner/unrepresented, and particularly with Grossman’s proposition that you can never fully Say No (2.3, p.215).
JD closed us on commonplace 30s, drawing urgency to our tasks as knowledge-producers with the claim of the “banishing” that is done in interpretation. We touched on the perhaps-inevitable impossibilities of interpretation, our tendencies to get at what we want a text to mean (or, Haraway, perhaps our incapability of doing anything else) and our pursuits to get at what we think the author means.
(3) Is there a way to theorize and make-knowledge free of this “factory” (Moten & Harney), this “disciplining” [MM] and “constraint” [CW]?
[SW] noted the theory- and humanities-heavy nature of our readings in the first half, wondering how truth and knowledge are defined in more empirical realms. This led to a brief discussion of the ways in which the humanities’ traditions have been formed from, and are constantly in the position of proving themselves to, the traditions and empirical values of sciences.
Interlinked, [MM] brought up the disciplining power of the academy – seeing us, students/academics, as the clock/seal/worker, and not the thinker/producer – and posed the question of freedom. This led to multiple board-discussions, including [CW]’s on the range from freedom to constraint, creative work produced at both extremes (e.g., Cent mille milliards de poèmes, Queneau). [MM] challenged this line, pushing instead for a new model:
Freedom ——————————— Freedom
with one being AAS’s ‘emancipation,’ or freedom only to be workers within capitalism, which isn’t really freedom at all, and the other being some True freedom, which might be undefinable by definition. [CB] added the example of Mark Walliger’s il/legal+unpunished recreation of Brian Haw’s il/legal+punished protest art (https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/mark-wallinger-state-britain).
Our time with JD ended with a discussion of one seeming-response, if not to this question, then perhaps to one parallel. In looking at the Summa Lyrica’s Commonplace #30s, on the “crisis of interpretation,” “the community can be healed when the members turn away from the text and toward one another” (p.285). We discussed the challenge these claims bring to our work, as interpreters, the importance of form and structure because of the ways they bring us together, and the potential for hope in “looking up and allowing the text to be present.”
Does this sort of abandonment/letting-be get at a freedom, as [MM] articulated? Is this so radically different from the “disciplining” and “constraining” of our factory as to provide hope?
-GS
Wow, thank you to GS for that synthesis! My discussion post will be a bit more about my personal takeaways and questions related to the first half of our session; specifically, the first question GS posited: “What are our obligations as knowledge-producers?”
I imagine many of you have also spent time this year puzzling over what education is “for.” As CW and GS mentioned above, we began class focused on CB’s button from the 2024 Reunions Divestment protest, which reminded me of the flurry of student activism on college campuses nationwide this past academic year.
(As an aside: encampments themselves were denigrated by the media and university officials, even criminalized. However, some schools have “acceptable” traditions of encampments: for example, Duke has a long tradition of months-long encampments for basketball tickets. Basketball tickets! Hundreds of people camp outside in a school-sanctioned endurance marathon that, in my eyes, makes the argument that ‘encampments are disruptive’ moot.)
CB’s discussion of Beshara Doumani’s talk on the academization of the field(s) of Palestine/Palestinian Studies led to a conversation about the recursive relationship between activists and the (uppercase A?) Academy. As an undergraduate, I majored in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (WGS), which was, unlike a department, an interdisciplinary program that did not have a single devoted faculty member until my last year of college. It baffled me as a student that despite high enrollment numbers, most WGS classes were taught by visiting assistant professors and adjunct lecturers.
I was thus intrigued when SS mentioned that the Music department’s two tracks, composition (creative) and musicology (analytic), are treated differently. The fact that composition faculty are not tensioned thus led us to ponder: What type of knowledge is valued—or holds “economic value”—for the university? The University’s decision to create different “tracks” even within departments signals how it values “knowledge producers” differently and sees each of us as investments of different economic value.
We concluded the discussion of Christian’s object with three questions: what is education for? Is it to make “good citizens,” and if so, is good citizenship what students should aspire to?
The question reminded me, once again, of universities’ (or the university-industrial complex’s) inability to reconcile students’ dual identities as consumers and citizens.
This past May, I volunteered at my alma mater’s commencement, where all three of the school-sanctioned student speeches deplored the decision not to allow several of the students involved in demonstrations for Palestine to graduate. The faculty voted to allow students to graduate, yet the university’s corporate board overturned the faculty vote. This decision signaled that the ultimate decision-makers for the university were not its producers of knowledge but its shareholders (producers of capital). This begged me to ask: what is (or should be) the “product” of the university as a corporation? Is it tuition, the degrees, or its revenue-generating investments for the endowment? Who ultimately benefits from this perversion of value? Finally, if tuition-paying students are the “consumers” or “customers” of the university, are those who attended with full or partial financial aid considered secondary or even noncitizens?
This last question relates to the issue of the position of class in academia, both within the student body and as a professional category. The question about what education is for leads me to wonder who different versions of education are for and how we signal our investment in them accordingly.
Last week, I talked with two friends about whether humanistic studies (from Latin to Shakespeare to cursive script) will be taught to future generations. One of them, a poet turned venture capitalist, wagered that the question required us to ask what K-12 education should be for: should federal education policy intend to create workers or managers?
As a product of public schools, I was quite jealous of my peers who came to college laden with the knowledge needed to follow (and dominate) humanities classes and spaces. In addition to other class differences, one that I saw was their comfort in thinking out loud and their much wider understanding of canonical references.
Though I took many “AP” classes, these classes were geared toward acing multiple-choice questions and writing essays formulaically. Searching “AP Lang” on YouTube provides us with an insight into the “essay formula,” as videos with hundreds of thousands of views help students “Get a PERFECT SCORE on the SAQ (APUSH, AP Euro, AP World)” and teach them “The ONLY AP LIT THESIS Template You’ll EVER Need!”. It is an unfortunate reality that many of the undergrads who come to Princeton received similar instruction from their teachers at schools where getting 5’s on AP exams influenced both school funding and students’ college applications. At the same time, many of our students will come from private institutions where teachers hold doctorate degrees, grades are not given, and coursework is designed to improve students’ reasoning, not memorization, skills.
I wager that critical reading and thinking should be skills that a democracy should value. If so, students of all ages should be encouraged to learn the many ways of knowing, not just memorization. Thus, should we not aspire to create a truly “educated” citizenry, where each of our citizens has been given years of training in critical thinking?
As (re)searchers (As Claire introduced, ‘chercher’), we have what Foucault calls “noted, political responsibilities” peculiar to our specific class position as “intellectuals” (a category I aspire to but also find… a bit distasteful? Classist? Performative? Dare I say, cringe? Or as Gen Alpha says, ‘Ohio’). Harvey and Moten pointed out that my anxieties about the cringiness of the “intellectual” profession stem from my complicity in it as someone who made conscious decisions to seek and accept opportunities in the Ivory Tower. Woof!
Many of our seminar members and JD had insights about the Summa Lyrica that I never would have thought of. My mind was truly blown that the Summa was a reference to Aquinas’s Summa Theologica (again, an instance of the type of reference that may be lost on future generations if robust humanistic studies do not continue). Had I known this before, many of my questions about Grossman’s form and writing style would have been answered! At the most basic level, I did not realize that ‘commonplace’ was the term used to reference each numbered paragraph of the text.
Thus, as I left our time with JD, one of my questions was: how do other people read??? That is, how do others approach a text for the first time? What do you do while reading—do you scribble in margins, underline, or look up words you don’t understand? Do you bulldoze through and then re-read (as I generally do)? And what do you do when you read and re-read but still don’t know what is happening?
-SY
SEMINAR 3: With Brooke Holmes
[DGB writeup starts here]
I am writing this within 45 minutes of the end of our seminar. And that means I still feel, quite strongly, a kind of tracer or afterglow of our time together. We covered quite a lot of ground (as the photographs of the blackboard indicate), but the dominant intellectual “mood” that holds me in the wake of our seminar is something like “dissatisfaction.” Not my own (I am afraid I again found the session almost too pleasurable to bear!), but rather the compelling, fully inhabited, and well-nigh heroic dissatisfaction that our extraordinary guest, Brooke Holmes, seemed, somehow, to radiate, relentlessly, in relation to the work of… well, doing whatever it is we do.
I can hardly think of a more charismatic manifestation of a critical sensibility. I really found myself mesmerized by the fluency with which Professor Holmes brought us in not only to the fundamental/profound thematics of her current book project (on nature itself — or, the emergence of a concept of nature that can “orchestrate relations”), but also to the actual quality or character of her thought itself. This, too, she shared with us, I felt, and did so with an uncanny generosity.
This is a hard thing to talk about well. It intersects with ideas, but is not coextensive with, or entirely composed from concepts. It is not a matter of mere affect, though affect is relevant. To suggest that the issue is one of “psychology” or (heavens!) “personality” would be quite unsatisfactory — and yet perhaps not entirely wrong. Brooke Holmes showed us the way she again and again thinks the thought, and then thinks the conditions of possibility of the thought (which thereby condition the thought), and then thinks the limits of the thought in its contingency, and thereby the alternatives and the adjacencies of the thought which confound and/or exceed it, and then thinks the conditions of possibility of THOSE thoughts, and so on. The word I keep reaching for is the one I have already used: relentless. Coupled with another, which I have also already used: critical. I felt I was experiencing a very pure and very precious manifestation of relentless criticality at its very best— its most brilliant, its most faithful, its most richly equipped.
There was a moment in all of this (I wish I had it recorded, so I could get it exactly right…) in which, as I recall, Professor Holmes seemed to throw up her hands, only partially in jest, and to call out what could suddenly seem, in the glorious churn, like an impossible problem: how to get it all down! Putting it into some kind of “narrative” (this was the term that got used several times across our conversation) could exactly feel (I felt it myself!) like nothing other than a static betrayal of the exquisite and continuously clarifying/destabilizing other-thinking moves by which the actual thinking itself did its work.
I am not, myself, that kind of thinker. But my admiration for that enterprise/sensibility is enormous. To have the opportunity to sit so close to such a powerful display of this project genuinely felt like a privilege.
So I guess I was “vibing.”
🙂
There’s that term again. We shall probably need to dispense with it relatively soon. Although it was especially relevant this week given the centrality of “sympathy” to Professor Holmes’s analysis of nature and the body and “relationality.”
Although it is all so hard to understand. After all, I definitely felt that I was “sympathetically connected” to Professor Holmes’s account (of the challenge of holding genealogy together with historicism, of the challenge of coordinating ethics and physics within the framework of secular modernity, of the challenge of dislodging the givenness of this or that naturalism while refusing to naturalize such dislodging, of the challenge of holding space for aesthetics without embracing the mystification of a “mythos”), but I actually don’t really “agree” at all, on some level. Which is to say, I feel as if I was understanding what she was saying in an enormously gratifying and clarificatory way, even as my own positions are, in the end, I believe, quite different from her own.
I think that puzzle (if it is a puzzle) — that understanding “not” (or whatever we want to call it) — came up directly in the course of our conversation. Or, at least, I think it did. I am referring to our effort to reckon with the Joan Scott, as occasioned by MM’s probing the “non-vibing” of difference.
Do I have this right?
This stuff gets too hard to do well this way (in a short and effectively personal/informal reflection). And it may be too hard to do any way at all. But one senses a kind of trembling parallel between the understanding-of-that-which-is-outside-of-one’s-understanding and the classic philosophical problem of attention-to-something-that-is-not-present (see Jonardon Ganeri’s fascinating essay, “Attention to Absence and Imagination” in this book I helped put together recently).
I won’t try to do much with this hard problem. Although perhaps I can conclude with a brief reflection on “history” and “genealogy,” which can be understood to play their own parts in this drama.
Historicism, in its commitment to pinning everything to its place on the timeline of chronos, can be understood to be a perpetual mechanism of distantiation: everything is in its moment and it is held there by time itself; things don’t move around, and every time is its own.
Genealogy, by contrast, is all about tendrils of connectivity. It is exactly the project of threading lines of continuity between then and now. By these lights, historicism lines up with the endlessly differentiating and specifying activities associated with particularizing and difference-making/seeing. Genealogy, by contrast, lines up with those “rightfully suspect” (?) programs of transhistoricity and universalization.
But such a simple-minded chalktalk hardly does justice to the complexity of the whole thing. After all, as soon as we have filled in all that monadic specificity on the timeline, we have in fact achieved a continuum, a plenum or manifold linking everything to everything else. Something like this is what I was getting at as I sort of feebly enquired as to the ways that difference continuously reconfigures itself in patterns of coherence and coordination. But I am susceptible to the allure of such jumping together….
Anyway, this stuff gets complex beyond my kenning. But I felt we had those problems alive in the room on Wednesday. Not sure more can be hoped for?
Oh, and then there was this ^^^^. To think on…
-DGB
[CW starts here]
LJ brought us wooden blocks of her own amazing design – I especially liked the permission she offered not to be shy about their loud clacking against the table – which brought the concept of play into our discussion. (Barthes’ famous essay on toys from Mythologies came to mind… He argues that the role in France of toys is to indoctrinate children, preparing them for their future social roles.) There was a quick collective brainstorm re: toys (their social meanings, materials, experiential/educational possibilities; LJ and SY – I think? – also mentioned the term “modularity” and various ways that play, gaming, experimentation, etc. might be used for the final project.)
Experience was the word of the day: What does it mean to have an experience? How does one accumulate experience(s)? Where does experience come from? How does age relate to experience (we didn’t really talk about this aspect, but some of the readings gestured toward it)? Who has permission to narrate one’s own experience or the experience of others? Under which conditions? How can one experience art, writing, music, cinema, a traumatic event, a particular state of mind? In what form(s) can it be transmitted to others?
Like AK, I found the Dewey reading especially fruitful. Without using the word Erlebnis, he dwells quite a bit on that type of experience – the kind that lets you say after the fact that you’ve had AN EXPERIENCE. He writes, “[…] we have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences. […] Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency” (35). Such experiences exist as discrete units in time, something finished that might still exert influence on the person who had it. The other kind of experience – Erfahrung – is cumulative and involves an increase in one’s abilities: “I have experience with/in …” It can have professional connotations – CVs are filled with lists of this kind of experience.
I was particularly struck by SW’s remark about modernism and the way it tested out so many different modes of representation in order to capture new kinds of experience (or its loss, as Benjamin alluded to) caused by a situation of total war, technological acceleration, social upheaval. The Woolf passage from Mrs. Dalloway I mentioned happens after a car backfires on the street and the shell-shocked Septimus descends into his own combat-worn consciousness:
Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what purpose? (15)
We got to talking about the fact that knowledge isn’t necessarily what Princeton markets to undergrads but rather EXPERIENCE. Out of curiosity, I tried out the keyword search “Princeton Experience” in my browser. Lots of stuff like this came up. Everyone in the group seemed to acknowledge pretty quickly that grad students are “marketed to” in a very different way. More emphasis is placed on academics and less on extracurriculars. Perhaps because undergrads are paying to go to Princeton and PhDs are being paid? Hope we will pursue this further in our discussions.
BH’s presence brought me lots of joy, if for no other reason than the chance to witness the vastness of her knowledge and the thoughtfulness with which she approaches every problem, all with great humility. I appreciated her exasperation with a genealogical model that traces everything back to the Greeks. We are all doing our work at an American university whose administrative structure, architecture, course structure and content, etc. are mostly modeled after European universities, which turn constantly toward Greece (and Rome, to a lesser extent) as the root, cradle, foundation [pick a metaphor] of the modern university. [Loved the Foucault interview subheading: “Why the ancient world was not a golden age, but what we can learn from it anyway”] (256). What to do with these default settings? I suspect that in coming weeks, we’ll begin discussing the “unnaturalness” (to use a term from one of the readings [not sure which… maybe more than one?]) of these settings, to brainstorm about new settings, ones more suited to the current political, social, and technological realities in which we find ourselves.
Too many thoughts on the Foucault interview and BH’s wonderful book chapter to sum up here, but these pieces added a lot of new terms to our course lexicon: biopower, history, storytelling, the “modern subject,” nature (phusis) and law (nomos), etc.
[SD & CMP starts here]
While reflecting on this past Wednesday and our meetings together so far, I was struck how we keep imagining or creating couplets. One part of the couplet is more scientific. The other is more amorphous, or “vibes-y.”
Last week (9/11) we put ACADEMIC vs. INTELLECTUAL up on the board. Though one can be an intellectual and an academic, the two are not synonyms. We posited that “academic” implies something productive, professional. “Intellectual” is more nebulous. One could be an intellectual and spend their life thinking without channeling said thought productively. “Intellectuals” are often ridiculed as the folly and recalcitrant individuals who refuse to conform with the norms of a corporate society.
This week brought several new couplets.
[LJ]’s wooden Blocks set the stage for a conversation about the relationship between the material world and text/thought—and play as a way of connecting to the places we call home. [DGB] latched onto PLAY as concept we might take up as a counterpoint to the university and its insistence on disciplinarity/professionalization (self-seriousness?).
With play as a seemingly lighter, but no less rich alternative in mind, many further couplets emerged through our discussion.
First, a thought. Are we entering the Mind-Body debate once again?
“Where has it all gone? Who still meets people who really know how to tell a story? Where do you still hear words from the dying that last, and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious ring? […] Wasn’t it noticed at the time how many people returned from the front of silence? Not richer but poorer in communicable experience?”
(W. Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty”, p. 731)
As we read selections from Walter Benjamin’s “Experience and Poverty,” [CW] proposed that the German words “Erfahrung” and “Erlebnis” reflect two discrete meanings of EXPERIENCE. As previously with ACADEMIC and INTELLECTUAL, eRFAHRUNG and eRLEBNIS fall into two distinct, broad categories. “Erfahrung” connotes something more fixed, vocational, concrete linear: a set of experiences (work, competences, etc.) that one would list on their CV; practical knowledge accumulated over one’s lifetime. “Erlebnis,” meanwhile, suggests something that happens to you, that you might tell a story about, the forms part of your life, something extra-linguistic and not immediately transferable as a SKILL.
We also immediately questioned the notion of a “communicable experience”. What does it mean to talk about an experience that exceeds the two dimensional space of the words? That exceeds even feelings and understanding? [Is this a third category?]
Round-table discussion: what about your field? This part of our class resists categorization. And yet it too aligns with our couplet schema.
There is an ongoing debate in the field of history. [HH] asks, in intellectual history, is an “idea” an experience? [SD] wonders, is something “real” in history if it is not recorded, legible, part of the archive?
The position of the scholar. In the field, more and more people question the position of the scholar related to the history they are trying to tell. In other words, where can we find legitimacy in the narrative? Should scholars try to focus on their stories only? Or: should they be part of the story to access it?
And what does it mean to be part of a story? To EXPERIENCE it?
Once again, the “communicable experience” emerges in a two-dimensional space: the bodily experience of the element and/or the moment (EXPERIENCE), and the linguistic experience of the scholar telling (KNOWLEDGE).
- Literature and Realism: do the writers really want to show reality? Or to recreate it? As a scholar, what is your position: should you try to reach the experience of the reader? of the writer? of the character..?
- Exhibitions exhibiting: most of the museum nerds would have experienced it, museums are now becoming immersive. But what about the other experiences? Who should experience what in a museum?
[SY] discusses the Family of Man exhibition at the MoMA. Can people have different experiences that lead them to the same idea? [AK] brings in empathy theory.
[CMP] asks, [SS] discusses—Have you heard this musician playing? They clearly have no experience of this piece.. No emotion, no feelings.. Sounds mechanical.
BH arrives. We take a break. We’ll get back to couplets in just a second.
Story-telling with BH – why, what, when
Maybe you could start by presenting yourself?
[BH]Well, I chose Foucault and then my text and then I thought: ‘What am I doing?”. But I thought that you would help me with that.
Foucault chose to present a history of concerts, and Brooke started with two of them: nature, and sympathy, from the Greek SYMPATHEIA (transfer of affects between bodies).
- Isn’t it logical, given these concerns, that you should be writing a genealogy of bio-power?
M.F. I have no time for that now, but it could be done. In fact, I have to do it.
(On The Genealogy of Ethics – AN OVERVIEW OF WORK IN PROGRESS)
Foucault actually never had the time to properly work on these questions because he already knew that he was dying at that time. Instead, he just hint at this concept, the “bio-power”, thought as a mix between physics and ethics.
Couplets come back! And do they relate to disciplines? Are some humanities disciplines more scientific? Others more vibes-y? Or are there maybe more than two things?
Here, too, came the idea that disciplines could be sorted into one of our two categories. [BH] briefly mentioned the idea that Classics is a very “bounded” field—with each professional classicist expected to be fluent a set and contained canon [a note—there is an irony here in BH “disciplining herself” from the wider field of Comparative Literature while invoking Classics to explore modern bioethics]. History contains a set of methodological expectations, yet unlike the set classical cannon, one can feel overwhelmed by the “infinity of the archive.” [BH] insisted on the fact that, inspired by Foucault, she wanted to do an “oblique methodology” and a theory of reception, between ancient (Greek) and modern.
[BH] said “Oftentime, I think: ‘Oh no.. not the Greeks again!!’”
[DGB] said “Should we get back to the opposition between historicism and genealogy?”
Three terms emerged (three concepts? A triplet?) for [BH]: the question of GENEALOGY (Foucault’s method), the question of the MYTH (classicism and naturalism at the same time), and the question of the AESTHETICS (experience and existence of the everyday).
[BH] questioned the relation between history and storytelling in this context: How could we study the Greeks without the storytelling and the myths? [BH] mentioned a talk where the Odyssea was studied through the motif of the “sea”, instead of providing the usual long contextualisation.
Couplets strike back, again. Seemingly organically.
[BH] introduced us to the notion of CHRONOS vs KAIROS, or chronological vs. kairological time. “Chronos” falls on the same side of the divide as “erfahrung” and “academic.” Chronological time is necessarily linear, metronomic, plodding, mechanized, operating, scientifically, in the background of our experiences. Kairos, meanwhile, embraces a warmer and more qualitative vision of time, as a composite of moments we reflect on as being full and consequential. “Kairos” seems more accepting of the idea of time as a circular, ruptural, or fractured thing.
Reflecting this division were a few additional couplets [BH] mentioned: ONTOLOGY vs COSMOLOGY, where ontology carried with it a more “fixed” understanding of “being,” and “cosmology” something with more porous, blurry boundaries; genealogy vs. historicism, where genealogy invoked myth to trace the particular, monolinear origins of a present-moment thing, and “historicism” sought to embody the present as it was, employing narrative, individuals, “Kairos.” [BH] also pointed out the difficult reconciliation between the “Chronos” and the “Kairos”, since the Chronos is most of the time used as an instrument of domination. She offered to use the idea of “liquid Antiquity”, in opposition to the “iconic Classicism”.
I’ve been thinking about whether the class itself divides, in a way, into these two broad categories. Our first hour feels, to me, more in the realm of Kairos. It has tended to be more participatory and open-ended; time moves quickly; disciplinary boundaries are breached. The second half of our class is, by design, more “disciplinary.”
Our guest speaker, having not participated in our previous forum, brings his or her own visions and imaginings. Whether or not our first conversation has a natural ending point, we must begin our second, more bounded one.
[An aside on this also—can we ascribe meaning to the fact that our first set of readings has consisted, for the past two weeks, of a series of excerpts?
Our experience of engaging with texts, like that of the class, has involved an enforced stopping point that may or may not be a natural one. This is a thought I had, in fact, in the middle of our class “break”—something that itself might be worth further probing.]
What can we do in Academia when departments are structured through these times and themes?
Should the scholarship obey the Western dichotomy Kairos vs Chronos when in most of the non-Western cultures, time is conceived differently? Could we think about a Sufi experience of time in the scholarship?
[BH] What about Descola? And his four-section division of the relation to the self?
A half of the couplet dismembers itself. On to vibes.
A Bodily Experience in the class: the “vibes are good” or the “vibes are off”
We talked about SET and SCIENTIFIC vs AMORPHOUS and VIBESY.
Amidst speaking [BH] looked around the room and noted the “vibes were off.”
[CW] observed in her last summary a “vibes shift” between the first and second half of the class.
[MM] apologized in a comment tying [BH]’s comments in with our excerpts on experience for “bringing the vibe down” in addressing difference—as in Joan Scott’s “experience” excerpt.
Could these “vibes” and the “vibes” characterizing the umbrella under which “intellectual,” “erlebnis,” “kairos,” and “cosmology” fall be in anyway related? [DGB] mentioned some other fields where “vibes” ARE a THING. What about their EXPERIENCE in the class?
Should we feel good about vibing, or bad about vibing? Is the disciplinarity in the class supposed to make us vibe, or vibe differently? Sometimes in a class like that I feel that actually I should vibe, but oftentimes I also just vibe differently. Is vibing a question of intensity, preparation, knowledge, or understanding? Going with the flow is usually not one of the official definitions of academia. But if I am honest with you, it is one of its most common expressions.
Vibing questions the vibe: going with the vibe, on the vibe, over the vibe. Thinking?
In crafting this summary itself I feel I am indulging the impulse to grant terms more logic than they necessarily have—to conform with certain standards of what is Academic and what it takes to be a Professional Intellectual. I can see the form breaking down the further along I go in this. Historians write, almost exclusively, in the past tense.
Is that appropriate here?
–SD&CMP
SEMINAR 4: with Jeff Whetstone
[DGB starts here]
Just a few reflections on our session today — which both reviewed some territory across which we have moved in these first weeks, and also brought new views.
Some of the early conversation circled the semantic field of the word “protocol.” I won’t try to résumé this, but only underline how interesting I find the protocol as “form” (and we did a turn here into the idea of the “score” or the “action poem,” such as it found manifestation in the work of Fluxus artists, etc.). Protocol can also be a verb, it turns out — both transitive and intransitive. And the term certainly has something to do with norms and framing conventions. Discipline too? Surely. Also administralia and the world of diplomacy. Things to think about in all of this.
We did a loop out into questions of measurement, too. And the recursive/reflexive, as well as constitutive role of mensuration. This can be a metaphor, but also a highly material problem, too. And I mentioned Ken Alder’s The Measure of All Things, as a history of science and technology book I admire on these questions. Quantification and metrics have been a very important line of research in my own field, and the volume The Values of Precision was a field-shaping collection when I was just starting out as a junior scholar.
If there was an image I would like to hang onto from the first half of the session, it would be the little glyph on the board, above—which is meant to depict a table on the table. It reflects our meditation on the very notion of putting something “on the table,” a phrase to which we recur when hoping or intending to share, propose, wager, invite…well, what? Engagement? Consideration? Reflection? Something of all that. We dedided, I think, that we wanted to put putting things on the table…on the table. This felt like a potentially promising conceit/frame/query — perhaps even something that might prove thematically valuable as we continue to work our way toward collaborative final projects. What more could we do with this? Are there theorists who come to mind who have worked this question or its adjacencies? I am thinking. I am recalling a set of post-colonial theorists (folks like Paul Carter) who were interested in the inherent if sublated “violence” of the table — since it was on tables that the maps of empire were unrolled and marked up for possession and expropriation.
We should perhaps recall that to “table” a motion means (in parliamentary formalism) to place an issue aside for further discussion later. So “table” ends up having an oddly auto-antonymic register, as it is entangled with two very divergent meanings: to present to conversation, and to propose some deferral of that conversation. Odd!
Our conversation about the AAUP statement and the Butler rejoinder was compressed, but that created, for me anyway, a pleasing sense of pressure. I came away with a sense that the very idea of “criticality” with which Butler pushes back against the (not-perfectly-examined) positivism of the AAUP statement may not be entirely sufficient to the problem — or our moment. Criticality, too, can be bent to pragmatic effect. Defending the humanities in terms of “critical thinking” can feel like its own kind of instrumentalization. But that may just be me. We lofted the notion of “play” at this moment. And fretted as to whether it could ever feel like anything other than a dereliction of duty — a failure of seriousness. When the times are (always) serious.
Into that suspended question came Jeff Whetstone. And he offered a robust account of the essential significance of play. He showed us his…toy.
And took us into the incredible underworlds where he has been making his images. What did he say about the place of the artist in the university? Super interesting things. A few moments and phrases appear here:
Lots to say on all this, but for now, I will leave it with this amazing image—which depicts the actual costs of “making visible.”
Early atomist theories of vision mooted the notion that objects might throw off a kind of “skin” of themselves continuously, which the eye took in like a mouth, swallowing down the visibility of things. By these lights, opticality would gradually consume what came repeatedly into view. How uncanny, then, to see a kind of inversion of this in the work of the scanning electron microscope: that which is subjected to this gaze is literally “burned down” by that which is permitting it to be seen…
-DGB
[CW starts here.]
Working backward from JW’s visit, a few of us stayed around to see how the world looks through his 19th-century-looking camera – what I think might be called a tailboard camera, with bellows? It lends the world an eeriness more likely to be found in dreams than in waking life. That JW projected up the ablation sequences with the haunting soundtrack as a way to initiate the second part of class in the dark and that we spent some time with him in various cave systems certainly put us in a more ghostly headspace. In some ways, it generated a mood similar to that of JC and DX’s IHUM salon from last year, whose setting was a dimly lit space populated with self-animating objects and voices from the past.
That landscape is relative – that a microscopic object has its topology – was a wonderful direction for our thoughts to pursue. As JW showed beautifully, a landscape is never neutral. To make one, a photographer or painter has many choices to make, each of which is probably shaped by an explicit social or political position or by an unconscious one.
I wrote a thing last year about cave art and was so happy JW’s assigned reading and cave pictures let me revisit the Paleolithic underground. I liked DGB’s observation about the weirdness of Guthrie’s book as a scholarly object. While there are many books that straddle the university press/trade press divide, this one had a particularly hypothetical spirit and pretty wild form to it. I was curious about the author and found that he apparently invited friends to his home in 1984 “to eat stew crafted from a once-in-a-lifetime delicacy: the neck meat of an ancient, recently-discovered bison nicknamed Blue Babe.”
It seems like the table might end up having some presence in the final project. In the dark, I was thinking of Ouija boards, séances, and other practices of summoning that seem to require a table. Was thinking of the slippages there in a few different languages of the spirit/esprit/Geist/spirito/espíritu as mind but also as specter. Our bodies and the minds they contain are conjuring up thoughts together around the table. What might this have to do with other gatherings at other tables with other minds/souls/psyches/spirits working in unison?
Was also thinking about the continuity implied by ritual. That something might exist over time – a seminar that is repeated with its various protocols (or might we call them traditions?), a department, all of the university’s rituals – that preexisted and will continue to exist as various participants come and go, altering it sometimes in perceptible ways, other times leaving it fairly intact in its earlier shape. This is, of course, a thought partly set off by our own class. How does it change with each year with a new configuration of people? How is it different now that I am at DGB’s side? How was it when JD and DGB were team teaching? DGB solo? What about the combination of guests and the order in which they visited? The stuff they handed us to read, its relation to the world and contemporary circumstances? There is something fascinating to me about how all this happenstance can alter a thing – HUM 583 – that nonetheless remains itself from iteration to iteration.
Re: MM’s evocation of protocols, I was thinking how rarely I hear the word in a daily context except maybe in governmental or business settings? Maybe in relation to university admin but not in day-to-day life on campus. I dug around to see which synonyms might be more common and found a few that might be interesting for our continuing discussions (etiquette, conventions, formalities, customs, rules of conduct, procedure, ritual, code of behavior, accepted behavior, conventionalities, propriety, decorum, manners, courtesies, civilities, good form) and a few sort of weird funny ones (one’s Ps and Qs, the done thing, the thing to do, punctilio, politesse). In a statecraft setting, some synonyms include agreement, treaty, entente, concord, concordat, convention, deal, pact, contract, compact, settlement, arrangement, armistice, truce. Interesting how each of these has so much of its own baggage. One of the many simultaneous word clouds forming in the seminar.
A thing I wanted to throw on the table: The US News & World Report just released its annual rankings and Princeton is #1 again of all national universities, I think for the 14th consecutive year? What do you make of it? Just more food for thought at our plentiful buffet.
P.S. Thanks to AK for finding that Butler’s etymology of method (tracing back to the Methodists) was not quite right… Apparently, in English, it appeared in the medical field first. I thought that was a bit too perfect to be true.
-CW
[AT starts here]
Alright, it looks like it’s my time to bring my contribution to the table. This week’s seminar was an enriching one. The discussion of protocols felt fruitful. We spent some time thinking about what protocols do and why they’re important: they tend toward constraint and someone (I think MM, but I could be mistaken?) mentioned that one might be able to understand the structure of protocol as conditions of possibility for improvisation. In establishing a set of protocols, one enables the conditions of certain kinds of constraints. CW mentioned another word that has some resonances with protocol that I particularly liked—ritual. When a reoccurring event or a performance has protocols that we respect—for example, a seminar—it becomes ritualized. I started to wonder if thinking about protocols and rituals might encourage us to think a little more deeply on the importance of rituals and protocols in our disciplines. At a very basic level, I’m thinking of the protocols of academic writing when I say this: for instance, how do you work with a citation? (A question we raised at the beginning of the semester.)
JW came in and talked about his work, and the parallels between landscape painting and the photography he does was stimulating. As someone who knows very little about art history, and especially American art history, I liked his discussion of landscape painting from Breugel to Cy Twombly. It was exciting to get to understand the art he enjoys, his artistic trajectory, and how he got to the landscapes that he took photos of—fascinating and very exciting stuff! I especially appreciated the mention that the sample that he put under the microscope was something that “had to come from his own body,” and noticed my own gut reaction to it (cool and maybe a little gross). I liked hearing him talk about his process, and his remarks about art as a form of play resonated with me. I was struck by how frequently he called his camera and equipment “toys,” and we talked about this somewhat. If I remember correctly, his decision to call cameras toys was to highlight how he thought about the tools of his medium as being part of a poetical method as opposed to an analytical one. It complemented our prior discussion of constraints as a condition of possibility for improvisation nicely. “Generation” is a word that immediately comes to mind here; whereas I got the impression we were talking more about protocols in the university space before JW came, during his discussion we were broaching how the art object comes into being. Hearing him talk about artistic production as cultural and intellectual production only served to reinforce the theme of creation that felt so prevalent throughout the seminar. I also came away from the seminar thinking about how it felt important to meditate on the relationship between art objects and critique (which is what many of us produce) a bit more, and how we conceive of the relationship to primary sources and the archive, to which we refer so often, but it reminded me that it might be useful to spend some time really thinking through the circumstances of their production and how they relate to my own academic practice.
I’m going to start by talking about the end rather than the beginning, but what I found especially salient in JW’s talk was a word on which we more or less concluded: friction. I believe DGB mentioned it and I left our session wondering about how we handle friction as academics and, ultimately, makers of objects (textual, visual, musical, etc…), and found it a worthwhile question. I’m not going to venture a proper response, but will try to think about the various levels at which the question of friction is germane. I see it being relevant at the bounds that lie between one discipline and another; within a discipline, it can occur between competing, sometimes equally valid interpretations of an object; and even in terms of the media we use in the classroom. (The conversation started because of an offhand remark about how whiteboards don’t have the same sort of resistance as chalkboards do—I think JW said they weren’t as cool, which I agree with.) I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these conversations emerged as we talked about art as play, notably play as being only “a hair’s breadth from irresponsibility” (DGB). How do we make space for art and play in the university, especially when it can sometimes be dangerous or “irresponsible”? Does art introduce a kind of friction into the humanities that we need to learn how to live with? Where does that friction come from? I’m coming from a mostly literary background, where I work with various texts across a few languages, and have begun thinking about translation somewhat regularly as an area where friction arises. While I don’t think of myself as a translator in a professional sense, I’ve done occasional translation work, mostly but not exclusively from French to English, and one of the things I’ve realized in translating is that it is occasionally very difficult to find a word or phrase that captures all of the nuances of the original, and so something that I’d call friction emerges. How we tolerate discomfort—whether that be sensory/aesthetic discomfort or the unknown, more generally—seems to be a central question of art, and one lens through which we can think about what art is and can do. So, the question becomes for me: how do we, in the university, simultaneously hold space for discomfort and “mess” (I’ve been rewatching that Marie Kondo special that was popular when I was in college, and I like this word a lot) responsibly? I reflected on how space has become an important concern of mine during our seminars. For instance, I’ve been thinking of “the university” as “the university space,” very simply. I started to think about how spatial questions emerged for me when looking at the cave art that JW showed us: how do we mark our environment, and how does our environment bear traces of us? The cave art was insightful because it got me to start thinking about how we decorate spaces and what sort of significance that holds—there’s a whole cultural memory being created in the caves with the art painted inside of them. JW got me thinking about the identity of a place, in short. We could probably relate that more broadly to disciplines and disciplinarity and the space we occupy as academics in the university—what sorts of places do we want to occupy, and how do we see our role in them? How do they mark us as well, in a sense?
As you can tell, JW’s presentation raised a lot of questions for me, which is evidence of how exciting it was. What I came away wondering about was how practices of play can help us within our disciplines and potentially support us in pursuing work that extends beyond the reach of those disciplines. I don’t have answers at the moment, but I think the questions of play and how to tolerate discomfort/friction in the world are ones that come up for me. It was a great class and I’m looking forward to the next one.
-AT
[HH starts here]
We began with a discussion about “protocol”—from the unspoken expectations that structure the presentation of the weekly objects to the broader landscape of rules, regulations, norms, prescriptions, and disciplinary standards that organize and constrain our lives.
We spent some time discussing how we might go about defining “protocol” and many of us learned for the first time that it could be used as a verb. In this sense, “protocoling” seemed like another way to say “disciplining.”
Boundary drawing and positionality emerged naturally as complementary concepts, and from that—the question of whether measurement had anything to do with protocol. Insofar as protocols “call into being” our orientation to other people/things/institutions in the world, I think this jump to measurement made a lot of sense. “Measures” (n.) could conceivably be used in place of “protocols” to describe administrative procedures or processes, but it also brings to mind this idea of orientation, positionality, and perspective. With every observance of protocol we are submitting to our place in an administrative structure, abiding by a contract we didn’t know we signed but probably did? When we accepted our offer of admission at Princeton was there a clause about what constitutes “acceptable” speech or protest? I actually don’t know! Which also leads me to wonder whether, with every violation of protocol we are still—in acknowledging the transgression at all—submitting to our position in this structure.
There is also a spatial element to all of this—one “puts in place” measures or protocols. “Put on the table the ‘putting on the table’” came up a number of times. What gets said and what is considered worthy of a response? What gets put on board (and then immortalized on the website), what is permitted to just hang in the air, and what ends up floating above all of our heads?
At this point I thought back to Grossman’s Summa Lyrica and the idea of a “commonplace.” Are commonplaces protocols? They are, in some sense, rules or norms that structure our behaviors, conversations, and our general experience of being in the world. But there is, I think, an anonymity of authorship in the commonplaces that is not always present in protocol. University protocols might not have a name attached to them either, but there is not much ambiguity regarding their provenance or the institutional apparatus that produced them.
DGB also raised the example of Yoko Ono’s text Grapefruit and the collection of instructions (protocols?) it contains. One particularly silly piece I remember from her exhibit at the Tate Modern was “Carry a bag of peas. Leave a pea wherever you go.”
Some are more surreal: “Send the smell of the moon.”
And some more methodical:
Bandage any part of your body.
If people ask about it, make a story
and tell.
If people do not ask about it, draw
their attention to it and tell.
If people forget about it, remind
them of it and keep telling.
Do not talk about anything else.
(1962 Summer)
Are these protocols? Perhaps they are the opposite: surreal, illogical, intended to shift or disrupt your perspective—to undiscipline?
…
With the final 15 minutes of the first half of class, we briefly touched on the AAUP and Judith Butler pieces. The AAUP seemed to define (acceptable) knowledge in terms of its utility or pragmatic application, and above all of its generation under the strict observance of methods—or in other words: its adherence to protocol. To put it crudely, one should believe scientists—or more generally, “experts”—because they abide by a widely accepted and rigorously tested set of methods (protocols).
In a response to the AAUP, Butler asks what happens when method is broken? And what would it mean if this very act of breaking method were defined as a goal of education:
“What brings a discipline or field alive is precisely the moment when the metal on the instrument is wrecked and reformed by virtue of the obstinate character of its object, of what cannot be thought inside the prevailing frame. At such points, method is ruined, and critical thinking begins.”
The AAUP’s exaltation of “truth” ends up privileging a particular view of knowledge that suits some spheres of scientific inquiry but neglects the messier work of textual interpretation. Which is not to say that literary studies is without method. But perhaps it is the exercise of breaking and remaking method that is, as Butler suggests, the heart of critical thinking. Butler rejects the AAUP’s view of pedagogy as a simple transfer of Knowledge—“as a delivery vehicle to those seeking to gain expertise.” And here protocol returns when Butler asks, “Is pedagogy as delivery vehicle or transfer protocol really a fair and valuable way to think about what happens in the classroom…?”
I found myself ultimately sympathizing with Butler’s critique, though I know many of us saw good intentions in the AAUP piece. Perhaps the situation we find ourselves in is not, as Butler outlines it, a choice between critical thinking or the direct transfer of knowledge, but instead a much more dire question of whether these hypothetical humanities students will continue to exist? What will these internal debates about “truth” and criticality do to fill classrooms?
Part 2: JW’s visit
JW’s presentation brought some welcome texture and color to the room, and I wish I had more space to discuss it.
Without having heard our discussion about protocol, JW began with two points that I thought tied in rather nicely with our earlier conversation. Rather than “art practice,” JW preferred “play.” And instead of “apparatus,” “toy” would be the word of choice. Where practice, and to a greater extent apparatus, evoke the cold bureaucratic touch of “protocols,” play and toy feel just a tad more approachable (although we also discussed how toys often have their own protocols of play).
What I want to focus on in this conclusion is the idea of perspective, as it relates to JW’s work but also this class and more broadly the work of interdisciplinary inquiry.
JW began his presentation with a look at three different images: a bird’s eye (god’s eye?) view of a Tennessee river; a classic eye level photo with foreground, middle ground, and background; and finally, the perspective of a kind of detached but not quite god-like Narrator in Pieter Bruegel’s painting “The Harvesters.” This fifteen-foot-high view told a story about the life cycle of wheat, from its growth and harvest to its transportation and trade, and finally its inebriating afterlife in a drunkard’s [intended affectionally…] veins.
Though I’m not sure this was JW’s intention, this oscillation between different points of view felt like an apt way of conceptualizing the work we are doing in this class and the challenges that come along with it. As generative and enjoyable as our conversations often are, there are moments of friction when I become acutely aware of a difference in perspective. Interdisciplinarity, in my view, is a way of inhabiting—or playing with—these different perspectives, but it is not always effortless. Bruegel’s painting is a historian’s dream. But how would an ecologist depict this landscape? Perhaps a physicist would focus on the apples falling from the tree…?
The micro-landscapes JW generated with the electron microscope posed more questions about perspective and—returning to our discussion from the very beginning—measurement. I especially liked JW’s provocation that every observation is an act of manipulation. In this case he performed a more direct act of manipulation by heating his samples, but I think the point still applies to even the most seemingly detached (if such a thing exists…) or objective (kind of hate that word) photographs. As JW noted while sharing his cave photos, the color of the art could vary widely depending on the type of light being used, and he almost never knew what color would show up after he processed the film. To observe—or more precisely, to capture an observation—is to manipulate.
Finally, since I’ve already written too much, I wanted to conclude with one of the commonplaces that we read a few weeks ago and which seemed related to this confluence of observation and manipulation:
“at the moment of reading, the reader is the author of the poem and the poem is the author of the reader”
Taking the AAUP’s definition of ideal pedagogy, such a statement seems almost blasphemous or at the very least a little illogical. If the English professor’s role is to transfer (truthful) knowledge to students, one would think that they should retain rigid boundaries between author and reader. But does this overly exalt observation and reception as the goal of pedagogy? If the goal is critical thinking, would we not strive to encourage students to turn their observations into acts of manipulation?
-HH
SEMINAR 5: with Marshall Brown and Free Feral
[DGB starts here]
I felt somewhat refreshed, I must say, that we spent relatively little time today, in our first hour, on the actual readings we gave ourselves for the start of our session. Both the texts were perfectly useful, even worthy (perhaps) — but they are, at least to me, a little… dull. Nevertheless, this is a graduate seminar that is listed on the registrar’s website as a course on “interdisciplinarity.” Thusly we do most certainly have an obligation to confront this matter head-on!
I think we can congratulate ourselves on having done so: Jerry Jacobs is refreshingly unpersuaded by the pervasive vogue for trans-/inter- disciplinary endeavor (disciplines, he reminds us, do important work “disciplining” knowledge production); Klein and Frodeman offer a goodly mass of proper data that helpfully puts in evidence which disciplines are working with which other disciplines in what ways. There is a great deal of useful stuff in both pieces. I’ll underline just one basic fact on which Jacobs insists: a central feature of a discipline is the practical institutional/sociological/economic conditions of self-reproduction.
This is useful to keep in mind, and it basically just means that, to be a proper discipline, you need to have things rolling in such a way as that the people being trained to be the teachers of the discipline are being themselves trained by people who were trained in the discipline. This is actually a pretty good index of disciplinary robustness/coherence/maturity. For instance, basically nobody in the history department has a PhD in a field other than “history.” The same cannot be said, for instance, for a newer and more “emergent” discipline like, say, women’s studies. I realize that this may not feel like the most scintillating observation, but it turns out to be a simple fact with wide-ranging implications in the lives of graduate students (specifically), and the life of a university (more generally). Indeed, you could go so far as to argue that this fact is functionally constitutive of graduate school as such in the modern educational landscape — at least as far as doctoral-level training is concerned.
Enough with all that. What was really great about our first hour was the little brainstorm we did on thematics potentially relevant to the final project. We captured some of that on this blackboard:
And this one:
It was fun (to me, anyway) to feel like this idea of the “table” got us rolling. And we have given ourselves an assignment for next week: everybody agreed to find and contribute two things — 1) two pages (or two minutes) of juicy/inspiring “table-related” theory/inspiration/narrative/work, culled from wherever; 2) a nice bibliographical reference for a book/article/film broadly relevant to the theme. We will collect all that stuff in advance of class next Wednesday, and give ourselves the task of actually reading/watching it by the first Wednesday after break. (When we plan on digging in a bit more on final project thinking).
I’m not going to attempt a summary of the second half of class, but will drop in here this documentary image:
Before I call it quits, though, perhaps I will take just a last moment to mark down here something that I said in the course of the conversation — something I admire about Marshall Brown’s work. It is notable, for our purposes in this class especially, that Marshall Brown finds his way to the theoretically rich and generative notion of “seamfullness” from his artistic practice. Which is to say, we here encounter an analytic of considerable depth and scope that achieves its conceptual density in the course of a makerly activity. We are talking about cutting and pasting. We are talking about scissors and glue. I think it is fair to say that we are talking about the kind of “playing around” affectingly invoked by Jeff Whetstone last week.
It is my hope that we can hold onto this image of imbricated theory and practice as we move forward in this semester.
-DGB
[CW starts here]
I thought this was our best session yet, maybe because the final project is gaining in density (or its resolution is getting higher, as MB put it during his visit).
Something I’ve noticed in the latest sessions: there is barely any room for the readings. We start tossing around ideas – the word spitballing came up, I think? – and then suddenly, the clock’s cruel minute hand is pointing to the four, counting down the second hand’s last 10 orbits before the guest’s arrival.
Do you all have lines and lines of unvoiced thoughts in your notebooks or the margins of the readings like I do? What will become of them? Are they destined for the table’s drawer? Since the table seems to be the thing, what if that table had a drawer into which our unspoken ideas were deposited?
I mentioned the Athens-based artist Katerina Kamprani, who has designed many “deliberately inconvenient everyday objects,” but sadly, there’s no table in her collection but her chairs might give us ideas. What would ours look like were we to design one?
Maybe this?
Began looking at table etymologies, thinking about tabula rasa, neighboring words [the tablet (as Biblical object, as digital device, as pill), tableau, tablature, tabloid], digging around French meanings and English ones. There are so many directions we could take this. DGB also suggested we might do a campus table ethnography. I wonder to what extent we’ll be speaking in metaphors. Aside from metaphor, are there other rhetorical devices we might use to talk about tables? Was looking at a diagram and was immediately struck by the names of the parts:
BODY PARTS: knee, leg, foot, and also STRETCHER (a term from the medical arts).
WOMEN’S CLOTHES: apron, skirt
NATURE: leaf
One last table thing:
SY’s cat communication device got us thinking about animal communication. Here is the book by Gavin Steingo on interspecies communication we talked about. Here is Bunny the Dog, mentioned by MAA-H. Words for the final project appeared on the board: critique, communication, translation, the commons [our IHUM theme in 2020-21], commonplaces. publics, toys/play, MFA, ethnography. Hope in the future to talk about specialization/generalization. Also, was thinking about differences between “text-based disciplines” and those based on… not text???
Re: MM’s mention of Aby Warburg and DGB’s description of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, I agree that it would be a great model to help us to do some thinking via images. Here is a description (from the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg) of Warburg’s work on the Atlas:
[The Mnemosyne Atlas] comprises a series of arrangements of photographs, mostly affixed to wooden panels covered with black fabric, depicting sculptures, reliefs, frescoes, paintings, artistic and scientific drawings and sketches, as well as playing cards, pictures from newspapers and advertising graphics. Laid out in intersecting rows and arranged in different sequences, they trace the transformation and interpretation of particular visual formulas from antiquity through to the 20th century: for example, the figure of a dancing maenad from an ancient relief who reappears as a maidservant mid-stride in Ghirlandaio and again in the image of golf champion Erika Sellschopp, arm raised after playing a shot. The pose and silhouette remain the same, but the semantic content is definitively altered. His montages were initially conceived as a research tool, but he soon began to use them as a pedagogical instrument, displaying them at lectures, and later in accompanying exhibitions.
And here is a link to the Warburg Institute in London. I was lucky enough to see the reconstituted panels in Berlin at the HKW in 2020. Here are a few pics I took there:
Here are some “pathways” through the Atlas by a few scholars.
MB and FF’s Berlincriptions were haunting, especially since they were delivered partly through a “dead” medium. There’s that séance-like feeling again. A woman’s voice – an older voice, in English with a German accent – accompanying images of tragic places with tragic histories around the city. Before we got the show, MB told me it would involve Berlin, but he didn’t think I would recognize much of it. I had to think of AK’s interest in photographic abstraction throughout the slide show. Still thinking about the Singer brand, the sewing machine, and spooling technologies. Oh, and sewing tables. And cutting tables (for fabric, but also for film and collage). There are few more exciting places than the cutting tables at fabric stores, where wide tables are mounted with yard sticks. On one side, an expert with huge scissors; on the other, an eager sewer with ideas. A childhood memory resurfaces: Women expertly measuring out yards of fabric with a swift, repeated gesture. And then the sound of those massive scissors edging through the fabric’s grain like a shark, splitting it asunder. There is no good word for the sound. Something between a hum and a whisper, but thicker?
-CW
[SS begins here]
As we get closer to the halfway point of the semester, we have started to move towards synthesizing the past five weeks and moving towards a final project. Before MB and FF joined the class, we spent much of the time brainstorming what this project could be. Some of the ideas put “on the table” included a further investigation of play and toys (as sparked by LJ’s objects), a discussion of Latour’s critique of critique, and the relationship between the IHUM program and art. CW pointed out that there has tended to be an (un)conscious resistance to truly experimental presentations by guest lecturers and students alike, which may point to a tendency within this institution against blending artistic and academic. I wonder if it could also underscore the protocols (spoken and unspoken) that govern professional opportunities within the academy.
HH also brought up the centrality of communication in interdisciplinarity, highlighting how one of the major problems we face is communicating across disciplines. Someone mentioned the idea of translation, which I found to be an exciting provocation. In my discipline, the question of translation is particularly prescient, as there is an ongoing debate about the academic value of translated work. Princeton music theorist Anna Yu Wang has a fantastic article discussing the ethics of translation in the project of global music theory. I think her final statement, asking us to consider translation as a way of building bridges between people, is particularly important for the project of collaborative interdisciplinarity.
The bulk of our discussion revolved around the table, which MM invoked last week. When MM brought up the table as an object of inquiry, I didn’t realize just how affordant this object/concept could be. From the table separating the judge from the Princeton student protesters to the surgical table Arthurian round table to the conspicuous tables in cinema, this everyday piece of furniture is imbued with a myriad of associations, meanings, and significations. Since we will be going further in depth on tables next week, I will hold off on delving further into these tables. But this fruitful discussion has had my mind racing, thinking through the different ways tables have intersected with my own disciplinary and artistic work.
We briefly touched upon the readings for this week, focusing primarily on the ways in which the histories of our own disciplines have been told and the ways methods have been conveyed to us. While methods classes seem to be fairly ubiquitous across the disciplines represented in the seminar, the types of methods (and how they are packaged) varied significantly. MM mentioned that in anthropology, the methods course was really an ethics course though without that title. CMP discussed how her training in France emphasized a distinctly French method of writing with a thesis, antithesis, synthesis structure. As we come together for a final project, having an understanding of the methodological backgrounds we each have will be crucial for collaboration.
We were visited in the second half of class by MB and multidisciplinary artist FF, who brought (in addition to the wonderful articles on collage), a multimedia slide projector and their film Berlincriptions. After playing the film, MB spoke a bit about his journey into filmmaking as a professor of architecture and the making of this film. Translation and communication are particularly crucial for architecture as communicating the importance and value of architectural projects to the public is a major part of the job. This necessity was what led MB to video. After working on a few amateur projects using digital tools, MB started looking at how his architectural training could influence his filmmaking and ultimately started using sequences of still images. For Berlincriptions, he wandered around Berlin documenting architecture and imagining what would happen if the architecture was the main character in a film, instead of a supporting part. The multimedia slide projector actually came in fairly late in the process (I believe FF said this week?), and yet despite its late addition, it was integral to the experience of watching the film.
One thing that stood out to me with MB and FF’s Berlincriptions was the continuous click of the multimedia slide projector. Given the fact that the machine was added later, FF likely would have composed the score without this metronomic click in the background. This continuous sonic reminder of the machine’s existence emphasized the materiality of the project and MB’s own rejection of the notion of archaic media. As he mentions later, the affordances of this machine insist on an interactivity that a digital medium would not, particularly since him and FF have had to literally dissect their machines to fix them. I was really compelled by this intersection of digital, analog, sonic, and visual affordances that come together in this machine and I wonder if the type of affordance analysis MB does with the multimedia slide projector could be a good model/method for our future work thinking through the table.
-SS
[AK starts here]
If you stacked up all of the cubic feet of representational space in MB’s photographs for Berlincriptions, would it even fill our seminar room? The first question that occurred to me watching MB and FF’s film was: Why make a film about architecture composed of images that dwell in such shallow space? It seems like a choice that verges on paradox. We’ve talked at various points, starting when CW brought us Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, about the generative possibilities of constraint, and this seems to have been a constraint that MB imposed on himself, whether consciously or not, in making the photographs for the film. It’s interesting that the first architectural film that he mentioned as a precedent to react against was Blade Runner, which is as maximalist as it gets in its use of spatial effects—it’s all perspectival recession, flight and vertiginous drops. In its treatment of space, Berlincriptions is an anti-Blade Runner. What I kept noticing in MB’s photographs was how the surfaces of things pushed toward the picture plane, walling up the audience, disturbing our sense of scale and coming very near to abolishing distance altogether. There is hardly any spatial recession at all, and the one moment in the film that does appear at first glance to offer a commanding high-angle view turns out to be a scalar trick: it’s not a view from the Berlin Radio Tower, it’s MB’s tabletop covered in photographs. There seemed to be something of that same sense of spatial restriction in FF’s score, too—not much room for sweep or swell or expanse in that spare composition.
MB commented toward the end of our conversation that he thought of the photographs as fragments whose incompletion directs the viewer’s attention toward the edges of the image, making it impossible to ignore the cut that the photographic frame makes. He described this effect as “defamiliarizing”—a term with a long history in Modernist aesthetics—and there I understood him to be talking both about image content and about medium and process. At the level of their content, these are images that quite literally model a certain kind of “close looking”—in isolating these small, apparently banal and often overlooked corners of the built environment, MB’s photographs make buildings strange. But equally, photographs like these make strange the photographic frame itself. When a photographed object appears whole and neatly contained within the frame, the frame and the photographer’s act of framing may escape notice. But when the frame makes a conspicuous cut it intrudes, sets itself in front of us and becomes a problem. Its operations—excising a photograph’s representational content from the visual field, setting photographed objects in scalar relation to one another and to its bounding edges—in turn become conspicuous. In this way maybe it’s possible to say that MB’s photographs—even before they are combined into a montage itself constituted out of a series of cuts—are “seamful” as individual units: they insist that their edges are seams. So after JW’s scarified piece of corn silk the week before, MB gave us another set of images that perform a certain kind of critical reflection on the technical conditions of their production.
CW brought up the question of abstraction in photography, a research interest of mine (the big one, currently). Are MB’s photographs abstract? There’s no real consensus among theorists of photography about what abstraction in photography even is, or whether it’s possible (what does it look like, the argument against usually goes, to make a non-representational image in a resolutely representational medium?) I wish I’d asked MB whether and how he’s invested in that term, and how important it is to him that these photographs be understood within a longer history of so-called abstract photography. It is definitely fair to say that MB’s photographs do some things that photographs which have historically been designated as abstract do. Many of them, in their hyper-focus on defamiliarizing detail, deny immediate recognition of their representational content. And, as a consequence of deprivileging content, they privilege form; looking at those pictures and they flashed up on the screen, what I saw more than architectural details were spheres, circles, s-curves, right angles and diagonals.
In the format of the slideshow, this produced for me a productively disorienting viewing experience: as each new image appeared, I found myself straining to make sense of it—to decipher its content and to locate myself within it as a body in space. But usually, I couldn’t. The interval that each photograph was up on the screen was too short, and my effort was repeatedly frustrated. At one point when the reader of the poem misspoke, stumbling over a word and starting over to read it again, it occurred to me that what I was doing was a kind of mis-seeing. But if my conscious efforts at recognition failed more often than not, I did find myself more or less automatically registering formal correspondences from one image to the next: a diagonal bisecting the frame at the same point in two photographs in sequence, or a circle that appeared at a glance to jump from one quadrant of the screen to another as the slide changed. Sometimes those flashes of formal likeness would seem by coincidence to be synced to a cadence of the reader’s voice or to the metronomic (SS’s word, too good not to steal) click of the slide projector and seeing would take on an odd rhythmic-arrhythmic quality.
The history of the use of the slide projector in art history came up in discussion of MB and FF’s wonderful piece of extinct (undead?) projection technology. The great innovator and popularizer of the side-by-side slide comparison was Heinrich Wölfflin, who, not incidentally, was a hard-core formalist who codified an entire system for the analysis and stylistic classification of artworks on the basis of their formal characteristics. (Does a painting exhibit spatial recession along a diagonal axis? Then it’s Baroque.) The best account I know of Wölfflin’s use of the dual slide projector comes from Zeynep Çelik Alexander, an architectural historian at Columbia; she devotes a chapter of her book Kinaesthetic Knowing (University of Chicago, 2017) to the subject. Çelik Alexander argues that Wölfflin’s method of side-by-side slide comparison, in which a pair of artworks would flash upon a projection screen as Wölfflin’s disembodied voice narrated from the back of the darkened lecture hall, was orchestrated to produce a form of art historical knowledge that was as much, if not more, embodied, experiential and intuitive as it was conceptual and discursive. Çelik Alexander argues that Wölfflin was in effect training his audiences to execute rapid visual comparisons between artworks, recognizing isomorphisms and formal divergences intuitively. This kind of knowledge was nearer to reaction than thought, closer to the order of an impulse or a reflex than to ratiocination. Çelik Alexander is clear-eyed about the dangers and dead-ends of pedagogical programs such as Wölfflin’s, but she also insists on making room for embodied forms of knowing in epistemologies of design. I felt like some of the history Alexander narrates was in the room with us last week with MB and FF’s piece, with its logic of formal correspondence and its multisensory mode of address. Theirs is a project that seemed to me to contain both sensory-intuitive and critical-discursive dimensions.
-AK
SEMINAR 6: With Karen Emmerich
[DGB starts here]
A moving class — for me, anyway. A class for which I feel a genuine gratitude.
What can we hope for from a seminar? That is always, in some sense, the question. Or, to speak more carefully, that is always a question. It is a question I think about a lot.
And of course I don’t really know. Seminars don’t really “make” anything — nothing tangible, anyway, at least not under ordinary circumstances. They tend not to “do” anything very obvious either. I suppose it would be possible to answer the question “What can we hope for from a seminar?” by saying something like “direct action that improves the world in some specific way.” I would be open to that answer, and would not try to gainsay it. But if I speak from my heart, I would need to admit that this answer, however estimable, feels to me as if it proceeds from a category confusion. We might indeed hope for such a thing, but it is a little like hoping that our pet goldfish will give birth to a stapler — a fond hope, when one needs a stapler, but the probability is very low (though not, I would argue, completely impossible — I incline, basically, to magical thinking).
So what can one hope for from a seminar? There is that powerful proposition, offered by Gayatri Spivak, who writes: “the task of a teacher is to provide a non-coercive rearrangement of desire.” I’m inclined to modify that assertion slightly and to suggest that the “non-coercive rearranging of desire” is less the task of a teacher than the task of education itself — or at least one of the very most important aspects of “education” in its richest sense. So perhaps this is something for which we could legitimately hope — that in the course of a seminar the things we want or think we want or need or think we need might be changed. But just changed? That seems a little arbitrary. Changed, presumably, for the better. And what would that mean?
.
In the first part of our class today, in the course of that demanding, searching, and absolutely serious conversation that Karen Emmerich led (on translation, on epistemicide, on scholarship in the time of genocide), I found myself staring out the window and thinking.
Extremely difficult problems: the political entanglements of all thought and action and ignorance and inaction; the fatuous self-dramatization that dogs every decision to speak; the ethical derelictions incumbent upon silence; the moral obligation to, and/or perfect pointlessness of, “bearing witness”; the palpable inadequacy of well-nigh everything in the face of murdered children; the anathema of poetry after Auschwitz; the aspirations toward, and violence of, each effort to create some common ground; the necessity, and simultaneous/inevitable inadequacy, of the aspiration to subtend (transcend?) “politics” in the pejorative sense. And so on. Very difficult questions. And staring out the window, I found myself thinking about “understanding” — if that is what we pursue in a seminar, if this is what can be “hoped for.”
What, exactly, it is worth anyway? Is it a consolation? Can it “help”? Understanding the Krebs Cycle is obviously and demonstrably a precondition of any inquiry into the biochemistry of vertebrate metabolism. Would achieving or advancing our “understanding” in relation to any of the difficult problems listed above bring about any similar advantage, or advance/condition further understanding in any parallel way?
I stared out the window, and thought about this. And then I wondered, “is this what one can hope for in the seminar — what is happening right now? My staring out the window and thinking about this?”
For a moment I wanted to answer this in the affirmative. But very quickly such a thought seemed quite unsatisfactory, possibly even culpable.
.
There was so much in the actual conversation today, I will not try to reproduce it. But I would just like to recall two moments that will, I think, stick with me.
First, there was that little excursus into the super boring whale biology stuff. I know it is very dumb, and quite incommensurable in its triviality with the monstrous questions on our table. But it does bear, I hope, some small emphasis: if everything is “political,” then one thing that is interesting and important is to spend the time trying to understand the way certain questions, in certain situations are, however rhetorically and/or temporarily, “exported” from the (nakedly, frankly) “political” sphere and addressed otherwise.
Questions of science and policy are a choice domain in which to watch this work unfold. And you could do worse than define the sphere of “science” itself as that domain in human endeavor that has, somewhat mysteriously (?), successfully quieted salient accusations of “mere politics”.
Put that aside (although, this is what my actual disciple is quite a bit “about”).
Let’s take a moment to remember the other moment that will, I think, stick with me: it’s the moment when CW noted that the essay emerges in sixteenth-century France, in part, as a gesture of moderating defiance in the face of the ongoing wars of religion. How extraordinary that science itself can be thought of as emergent at roughly the same time — as, at least in part, an effort to solve the same problem.
And then, even more striking, is to read Adorno reprising the essay as, again, the genre capable of defying the blinding violence of conceptual precommitment — although, for him, of course, the enemy has become… science itself (in the aftermath of the atomic bomb).
That is a little too quick, of course. But there is something there.
Looking forward to TABLES, after the break!
-DGB
[CW starts here]
The I-spy vial, filled with sand and small letters and delicate shapes placed inside by grieving children, was passed hand to hand as GS told us its story. SS flew solo on filling in our visitor about the goings-on of our seminar, offering a wonderfully complete picture of things so far. There must have been a draft in the room, I noticed, when several people at the same moment wrapped their jackets and scarves a bit more snugly around themselves. The trees outside were just tipping into that fiery October color I look forward to every year. This is a season of privilege for those able to secure a seat that faces a window.
In this session, the pain was put upon the table. We’ve all been feeling it, each grieving in our own ways.
KE raised a host of new questions, some about putting the human back in humanities: What should scholars who grieve or who are angry or who cannot bear the status quo do in their classrooms, department meeting rooms, committee gatherings, conferences, office hours, free time? What is the place of politics on campus? What to do as scholars while the world burns? While KE spoke, thoughts drifted in and out of my mind: I was thinking of Luc Boltanski’s book Souffrance à distance (Distant Suffering) about humanitarianism, pity, and suffering as media spectacle; I tried to chase away the many images I’ve seen and stories I’ve read lately in the news that keep me from sleeping and that reinforce my belief that the human soul has a real darkness to it; instead, I thought of the student and worker uprising of May 1968 in Paris and the slogans and posters these generated and the Vietnam protests (Neil Young’s refrain of “four dead in Ohio” slipped in and out, interspersed with the hypnotic refrain of “Nuclear War” by Sun Ra and His Arkestra). Humans are decidedly bad at humanity.
At some moment, I raised the point that people are not their governments, that the individuals of any given polity or institution are simultaneously part of it but also perhaps against all that it stands for. (Any pacifist in a country making war recognizes this as a particularly painful truth.) I voiced my discontent with the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which asserted that corporations are people with the same speech rights as individuals (protected by the first amendment) and that money is a form of speech, creating the awful proliferation of shady super PACS and a virtually limitless donations to campaigns. We are coming up on 15 years of that catastrophic decision, which is one of the primary causes of the rottenness of contemporary politics in the US.
During this part of the conversation with EM, I kept thinking about Simone Weil’s book On the Abolition of All Political Parties, in which she makes three key arguments: “1) A political party is a machine to generate collective passions. 2) A political party is an organization designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members. 3) The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.” Since reading those persuasive words, I’ve realized that they apply not only to political parties but to virtually any institution, including governments, school boards, universities, unions, and maybe even something as seemingly innocuous as one’s local book club. Whatever the institution, when a group forms, it takes on a life of its own, eventually prioritizing its own perpetuity at the cost of almost everything else.
We didn’t have the chance to ask EM any questions about the powerful administrative roles she has held, including the directorship of our translation program and the presidency of the ACLA. Throughout the conversation, I kept thinking of the administrator as a particularly charged role in times of campus unrest, unhappiness, upheaval. In certain contexts, administrators are facilitators, those who make basically every one of our activities possible. They take care of so much that we would rather not be bothered with: budget planning, room reservations, endless emailing, keeping the cogs of the institution greased. On the other hand, many see administrators as the ones who habitually say NO. No to funding requests. No to outside-the-box requests for space and resource use, pedagogical experiments, travel, or simply things that have not yet been tried. In some respects, they are the arch disciplinarians.
Having gotten tenure and been promoted, the amount of administration I do keeps increasing (not sure how this development happened but it is inexorable). This, of course, has changed my perceptions about the role. Two things I didn’t really understand until recently are:
A) how little consensus there is on basically anything, from the smallest issues (what kind of coffee should be available in the departmental kitchen, how many events should be planned per month in a program, which day meetings should be held) to the biggest issues (what the objectives of humanistic study are, who should get tenure, what role one’s personal politics should play in the classroom)
B) one of the main roles of the administrator is to make room (somehow?) for large groups of people with wildly differing opinions, backgrounds, beliefs, moods, motivations, and political styles – many of them very unhappy and some hopelessly implacable – to coexist in the same space.
I write this not as a blanket apologia for all the administrators across the globe – there is certainly proof that some are insatiable power brokers with sketchy or downright nefarious intentions – but rather in the spirit that DGB started our class conversation: entertaining the possibility, if only for a moment, that the average administrator, like most of us, is just trying to get through the day. Everyone is angry at them all the time because they are metonymies of the institution. Probably most of them would rather be writing, reading, researching, teaching, or cooking than being caught in the endless series of skirmishes whose outcomes are predictably unsatisfying to all. All this to say: I’m sending future good energy, patience, and resilience to those of you who might eventually drift into such roles. You’ll need all you can get.
There is so much more to say about the essay and essayism. One thing we might explore further in a future session is the relationship between the essay and thought. The essay, often called a form of “prose of ideas,” is the place where thought is often directly transcribed, if only as the stable record of a reasoning process. We’ve been collectively recording our thought processes – or at least those details that remained most salient in the brains of the weekly chroniclers – so I’ve begun to think of this ever-growing document as a collectively produced essay.
-CW
[SW starts here]
After Karen Emmerich’s visit, our discussion in the second half of the class focused on Adorno’s “The Essay as Form” and Patell’s “Writing Migration: Multiculturalism, Democracy, and the Essay Form.” DGB pointed out that this week’s readings were timely as we have not yet settled on the form of our collaborative final project on tables. Reading some established thoughts on the essay form can thus give us some inspiration. For instance, we may present our final project as a collage of different essayistic reflections on the tables.
SD noticed two strands of our current table thinking and wondered whether and how we could reconcile them. The first focuses on the physicality/objectivity of the table, and the second is more about the extended, symbolic meanings of this physical object (e.g., the performative aspect of sitting at a table; what’s brought onto the table and what’s left unsaid). Relatedly, CW noted that the titles of Montaigne’s essays generally begin with des, de la, du (“of” or “on” in English), and it would be fun to name our final project “on the table” as the phrase playfully brings together the literal and figurative aspects of our current intellectual concerns.
We then jumped into the discussion of the Adorno essay. CW remarked on its fragmentary nature, its metaphorical use of concepts, and its challenge to systematic thinking. She further tied the essay form back to the theme of this course—interdisciplinarity and anti-disciplinarity—and commented on how the essay bridges scientific and artistic domains and tries out things without necessarily having a specific goal. For CW, the experimentalist and non-exhaustive quality of the essay also harks back to one topic recurring in the previous few sessions, i.e., the idea of play. Contrasting the Adorno piece and the Patell piece, she invited us to consider the difference between the critical essay (which holds a critical position toward, say, a piece of art) and the personal essay (which is more subjective, personal anecdotal, and visceral).
SW suggested that the Adornian essay form offers a way to approach the other ethically and potentially responds to the “vampiric” (to quote DGB) tendency of current humanistic studies where scholars merely use and reify their subjects. Knowledge production does not stem from preconceived transcendental categories but is based upon personal contingent experience. The Adornian essayist is fundamentally an ironic subject who is highly aware of their own cognitive and epistemic limitations, continually questions their own authority, and puts into consideration the object’s preponderance. HH connected the essay’s effort of “reflecting the object without doing violence to it” (Adorno 169) with our readings in week 4 (the AAUP piece and Judith Butler’s response), pointing out how the Adornian essay form questions the idea of pedagogy as knowledge transfer and instead brings us “something genuinely new” (Adorno 169). Building on that and going back to the formal aspect of the essay, CW highlighted that the essay is not merely an information delivery device, but the language through which the information is conveyed also matters. SD, DGB, and CW then discussed how the essay, with its fragmentariness and messiness, challenges the formulaic kind of academic writing and rhetorical works where the thesis statement and supporting evidence follow a fixed arrangement.
DGB drew our attention to Adorno’s strict distinction between knowledge production and creative expression and the philosopher’s belief that such a distinction is unsolvable. The essay becomes a place where doubts about methods can be nurtured, but it is not solving any problems for us. CW recalled a similar point made by Lukács in his famous piece about the essay form. For Lukács, the essay is an initial brainstorm suggesting knowledge production to come. Dwelling on Adorno’s idea that “[the essay] is the critique of ideology” (166), DGB understood the Adornian essay as the mechanism by which the ordinary sense of knowledge as science is open to critique.
MM was interested in what is at stake in the definition of a genre of writing for Adorno and the role of generic conventions in interdisciplinary work. Speaking from personal experience, he explained how anthropology and history of science call for different styles of writing and modes of address. CW remarked about the difficulty of defining what an essay is as we always encounter certain exceptions in our attempt at generalization. Such difficulty of definition has led scholars to regard the essay as a mode (that can be turned on and off in a piece) rather than a genre. DGB noted that at certain moments of the 20C, the essay was treated as something that could critically manage the philistinism of science while holding itself out of the complexity of artistic categories.
CW mentioned the origin of the essay in Montaigne’s context. The essay emerged amid the religious war between Catholicism and Protestantism and sought to counter the dogmatism of both camps. DGB observed a similar trend in the history of science field as the tentacular, empirical essay was created to steer away from blind spiritual commitments. The timing of the Adorno essay (1950s) is particularly interesting because while science seemed to have saved humans from the violence of religious dogma in the Enlightenment period, in the midcentury, science itself became a major source of violence (in the form of the atomic bomb, etc.). We see again the self-criticism and self-reflexivity of the essay form, which tried to save us from the thing that had saved us the last time. CW traced how the general attitude toward essayistic writing has changed over the years in academia, from delegitimatizing the form to incorporating it into the public humanities project.
Lastly, we talked about the format of next Wednesday’s (Oct 23) class. There will be no guests and the entire seminar will be devoted to discussing the materials we put into the “table thinking” google doc. We will hopefully break into smaller groups in the first half of the seminar and later report each group’s findings as a flash talk. Aside from reading and viewing the materials in the google doc, we were encouraged to collect notable examples of collaborative forms and bring them to the table later in the semester.
-SW
[CB starts here]
Towards the end of “Intifada, On Being an Arabic Literature Professor in a Time of Genocide,” Huda Fakhreddine writes “Gaza is not a subject to be chosen or dismissed. Its writers and artists are not bait for the next grant or fellowship. Its murdered children not material for an upcoming ethnographic study, a forthcoming anthology or art installation or digital humanities project. Gaza 2023 is a counterpoint in history, the end of the world as we know it. Nothing should ever be the same after this.” This excerpt quickly became, in my mind, the central point of discussion in the class. I’d like to center my reflection on Fakhreddine’s words.
Over the first half of our seminar, we’ve settled on the “table” as the course’s critical hinge, and each week we work through or around the table’s attendant questions; Who’s afforded a seat at the table? What’s tabled, sidelined, held in abeyance at the seminar table, at our dinner tables, in the halls of power? What can be brought to the table, and what can we do with what’s been brought? How does the table serve as a disciplinary site – encircled by seats of power, departmental chairs, etc.? What can be tabulated – deaths, wounds, historical facts – and what do we do with what’s passed over, what remains uncountable?
“We are a campus that is continually grieving,” were among KE’s opening words to us. They were the only words recorded on the board for the duration of her visit (What merits recording? How does the language that surrounds the table circumscribe what’s discussed at the table?). GS’s vials, created as a sort of talisman by grieving children, offered a parallel to the dead Palestinian children MM returned to again and again throughout the class. The class went on under the sign of this world-ending grief. But what does grief require of us?
KE visited in the first half of our class to discuss the four articles she’d assigned us this week, and “put on the table” the ongoing genocide, scholasticide, and epistemicide that’s being carried out in Gaza by the Israeli government with the bipartisan backing of the United States and its taxpaying citizens.
“Gaza is not a subject to be chosen or dismissed.” Fakhreddine tells us.
After some discussion (and correct me if I’ve misnoted this, or marked the question’s inflection wrongly), SD brought up the question of the academic’s position re: Palestine– who can speak, or not speak, on Palestine? What can we do as historians, music theorists, literature specialists, architects, anthropologists, etc., in this moment of horror – if there is something to be done at all? “Bearing witness” implies a distance, a kind of non-culpability for the genocide in Gaza that Fakhreddine might reject.
I wrote down some accompanying questions this raised for me, questions I’ve been thinking about often throughout this seminar. What are the humanities for? Is the primary action of the humanities scholar “inquiry?” (What do we do when we sit around the table together?) What governs the kinds of questions we’re capable of asking? What happens when those questions are formed by disciplinary norms that may obfuscate culpability, mutual precarity, differentially distributed harms?
These questions, on who can speak and how, on what the speech act imparts and implies, paired, in my mind, with DGB + MM’s brief discussion regarding the history of science – on the possibility of a separability of “politics” from knowledge-making practices. Is the laboratory, wherein knowledge is ostensibly the product of arbitrarily defined experimental conditions that allow for iterability, the pure de-politicked space it is habitually considered to be?
What do we hold in abeyance when we hold politics in abeyance? What does it mean to take Fakhreddine seriously – that Gaza is not a subject to be chosen or dismissed? Throughout our seminar, I was reminded of the absolute impossibility of having a conversation about the separation of the political from the epistemological at, say, Birzeit University; or the impossibility of having this conversation at all in Gaza, where all institutions of higher learning have been obliterated by Israel’s unceasing genocidal onslaught. I was reminded, too, of some of the work of Sylvia Wynter, and I wonder, per her lines of inquiry, how this historical sense of science performing its inquisitive task while keeping the political at bay could possibly be true today (consider, for example, “The Palestine Laboratory,” and the use of AI to optimize airstrikes to specifically murder Palestinians in their family homes), regardless of the seeming historical separability that circumscribes science’s inquiry.
The impossibility of that siloing off is clear for Palestinians as well as Israelis – consider, for example, Greenberg and Hamiakis’ explication of the teleological bent of archaeology in occupied Palestine, and the violence of the “historical” assignation – the anthropological and archaeological move that relegates Palestinians to an unceasing biblical past, and the transfiguration of ethnically cleansed villages into historical, archaeological sites while the Palestinian owners of that land live immiserated, hunted, murdered, scattered across the globe in anticipation of a return whose deferral the existence of the Israeli state is predicated on. Consider who is excised from “knowledge making” altogether, as we mark one year wherein all formal schooling in Gaza has ground to a halt.
Who is allowed to be a knower? What is legible as knowledge? What are the casualties of the knowledge making process? What are the casualties of our knowledge making processes? (Who is laid out on the operating table?)
There is a market industry for the incorporation of Palestine into academia – many have staked their careers on the explication of Palestine, on boosting post-Oslo two-statism, on the grueling work of consensus building. What’s the role of the academic today? “[Gaza’s] writers and artists are not bait for the next grant or fellowship. Its murdered children not material for an upcoming ethnographic study, a forthcoming anthology or art installation or digital humanities project,” Fakhreddine tells us. What does Gaza require from us?
In our discussion thread that goes on as living document, as a situated, historical essay of sorts, what does it mean to for Palestine to go unremarked on, otherwise unrecorded? What happens when the word Palestine is made invisible in a discussion on Palestine? What does it mean to encircle a name with the questions it provokes and the violences it endures? (Who is offered a seat at the table?)
If an education in the humanities can be considered a “training for our hearts and minds,” it’s worth considering what habits, what ways of knowing and being we’re being led away from, what we’re learning to leave behind or discount. The project of disciplinarity, like translation, can work “to incorporate knowledge within the borders of intelligibility and … to erase the knowledge of the colonized,” per Ronaldo Vásquez as quoted in “Translation and Epistemicide.” Disciplinarity can also constitute a refusal to look, a non-engagement. The political is kept from the table or must otherwise contort itself at the university checkpoint to be legible. Every checkpoint is a border crossing. The seams of our institutional support can reveal themselves as police cordons, demarcating the borders of the sayable, the legible. What are the stakes of defining a genre? (What happens when the table is visible as table? What’s the table doing?)
Again, there’s an analogue to translation. Consider Brent Hayes Edwards’s discussion of the translation of nègre: “[These translations] also frame it: positioning, delimiting, or extending its range of application; articulating it in relation to a discursive field, to a variety of derived or opposed signifiers (homme de couleur, noir); fleshing out its history of use; and imagining its scope of implication, its uses, its “future.” Our disciplinarity structures the knowable, the thinkable, narrates the very conditions of imagined or hoped for futures. What does “engaged scholarship” require of us? I’m not sure, but this seminar (on the structure of knowledge itself) seems like the exact place to seriously consider these questions. The global student movement worked at these very same questions.
-CB
SEMINAR 7: Table Work (no guest)
[DGB starts here]
A rich session, I thought — and even kinda “fun,” no? To me, anyway. Partially this was the outrageous beauty of an absolutely perfect autumn day. One gets only a certain number of days of such exquisitely placid glimmer: the trees in russet and lemon splendor, the sky dry blue, the temperature cool but sun-kissed.
And so, in happy deference to this invitation and in full communion with negative capability, we discharged ourselves into the day — and into the (nearly) wide open field of final project possibilities.
But before that, we did take a few minutes to review the parameters: we are feeling around for a project that we can do together (in some plausible way), that has some discrete and comparable “component” that can be realized by each individual in the course, and that can actually be completed by the end of term. Oh, and we have pretty much decided that it is going to be “about” TABLES — although exactly how is very much TBD.
And so, with all this in mind, we let the luck of the draw give shape to three groups of four persons each, and we set off to ideate. When we reconvened, each group took five minutes to sprint-present their proposal. I tried to capture some of this on the boards below:
There was just so so much in all of this. I am not going to try to recapitulate everything that the different groups “put on the table” about the table. But there were certainly a number of quite specific visions that surfaced — any one of which might conceivably anchor us, were we to commit. If anything, at this point, the challenge is going to be taking some things off the table.
Perhaps I will just note a few of the ideas that seemed to me to have noteworthy “actionable” potential.
In Group 1 there was this thematizing of the chalkboard (as a table, on the table — the portability and potential ubiquity of the blackboard, if we used blackboard paint to create blackboard surfaces in otherwise non-blackboard environments). Given the way the blackboard has functioned in relation to the table in our seminar (and the way that the blackboard traditionally sits in relation to the seminar table in a classroom), this seemed promising/suggestive — as well as “doable.” Although it was never 100% clear what we would do — Write on a chalkboard table? Do so in the context of some specific seminar encounter? And other questions followed: Would we preserve this? Share it with others? Invite others to participate?
There would be a lot to figure out.
Group 2, similarly, offered an embarrassment of riches: I, personally, loved the idea of a “user’s manual” for tables/tabling. But Group 2 did not really propose this — though they might be said to have “suggested” such a thing in their lovely juxtaposition of the “operating table” and/against “operating the table.” The possibility of generating a series of reductio-like exercises came up, whereby we would stretch a series of determinate table characteristics so far as to iteratively undo “tableness.” This was very cool — as an idea. Not perfectly clear how one would actually do this. But it was very suggestive. Then there was the whole photogram idea — as a way of documenting the “on-the-tableness” of a seminar. This seemed promising, but Group 2 also slightly backed away from this — or so it seemed to me. Anyway, lots of ideas.
Finally, Group 3 offered us the felicitous vision of “folding tables” — here meaning origami exercises in microtable-making. And there was also the sense that a larger table might be constructed out of smaller tables — and this was lovely, although it is possible we were all imagining it in different ways. And it would also be quite challenging to realize, no? Still, very appealing. Group 3 also has a satisfyingly clear vision of the comparable element in their proposal: a thousand words, written by each of us, dilating upon our respective offerings in our collaborative table syllabus.
We went through three rounds of follow-up questions, and a final “reckoning” chat — in which we realized only five or six of the folks in the class actually want to get their hands dirty trying to make some stuff. That, obviously, meaningfully affects our visioneering process, and needs to be kept in mind as we move forward.
And what is the plan for moving forward? No plan, really. It felt as if trying to make a plan would maybe be too much agenda-setting, and might canalize the delicacy of something emergent — which is much to be preferred.
So let’s just see if something happens…
-DGB
[CW starts here]
All those liquid thoughts we’ve been stirring in the previous sessions began to froth up in our first hour before the backdrop of a summer day. Warmth, liquid, swirling – a true percolation.
Then we split into groups in separate corners of campus and did some of the harder – but maybe more enjoyable? – work. During our quick pitches – a format similar to the one to be used at the European Review of Books pitching panel on Nov. 19 – we identified a few thing to take into consideration as our project moves forward:
Who will want to make physical objects?
How with the conceptual be conveyed (potentially) through the material?
How will the seminar’s central themes – interdisciplinarity and antidisciplinarity – be represented in the final project?
How will our personalities manifest themselves in this project?
How will the plan for the project differ from its execution?
What will be the afterlife of the project?
Will it continue to live somewhere else on campus? Online? As an exhibit? A publication?
Will more work be put into it after December 2024?
Should our project be inward or outward facing?
How will the labor be distributed?
-CNW
SEMINAR 8: With Kinohi Nishikawa
[DGB starts here]
A productive session, in my view — and one that saw special resonance between the first and second parts.
We used our first hour to continue to discuss the final project, and we touched only lightly on the Singerman reading. But the question of “making something” was live for us, as was a version of the problematic that launches Singerman’s investigation: what is the relationship between “art” and the kind of thing that happens in a “university”?
We got at that in our own way by circling the issue of what aspects of our final project could be a proper reflection of what we do best — of whatever is specific to the forms of inquiry and analysis that characterize the seminar room (in the humanities particularly, at the graduate level).
And we stayed with our “Tables” theme across our conversation, drilling down a bit more on the supplementary material AK added to the shared doc. Of the tentative proposal elements, some form of “documentation” of a seminar (or performative iteration of a seminar-like encounter) by means of a photogram seems to hold real promise. Not that there is consensus—or even, yet, a proper “proposal.” Everything still very much in-process. But we did note the way that the presence/absence formal feature of the cyanotype potentially expresses/invokes, in a promising way, the table/tabling dialectic with which we have been concerned. Lots here to think on.
Our guest, Professor Kinohi Nishikawa (English and African American Studies), picked up the table/tabling dyad in a really generous and generative way. After setting up for us a little of the nuts-and-bolts of his own disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) identity, Professor Nishikawa took us into the critical and creative work of Nathaniel Mackey — powerfully invoking the “hinge” between reading and listening, between speaking and mis-speaking, between understanding and action.
It was an affecting conversation. One in which the “wringing” of the word, and its graphical (dis)placement, were the subject—but also alive in the room as we spoke.
For me, the moments in which geography and specialization/territorialization came up were especially redolent. My first book, Masters of All They Surveyed, is a study of the science of geography and cartography in the context of nineteenth-century imperialism. But the book’s subtitle, “Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado,” locates the inquiry: it is about Guyana. And it had its origin, in meaningful part, in a reading of Wilson Harris’s great and pathbreaking volume The Guyana Quartet, a book that activates so many of the themes and preoccupations manifested in our readings for this week. Harris himself was…a surveyor in Guyana, and his sense of the specialization and structuring of space (and language) is linked to, and breaks from, that mathesis.
-DGB
[CW starts here]
KN’s visit raised a single question in particular for me, one that is quite relevant in our planning of the final project. As we read Mackey reading Brathwaite (who is reading other unnamed writers) for the readers of World Literature Today and as we read KN reading Harris for readers of the PMLA, these swirling readerships brought to the fore the problem of AUDIENCE. While we’ve talked about potential inward- and outward-oriented projects – in other words, those concerned with the seminar itself and those regarding the wider world – we haven’t yet broached the subject of audience directly. Who is the audience of our project? Are we it? If not, to whom are we speaking? How much of a future audience are we seeking?
I find that before I can begin writing anything – an essay, a conference talk, an article, a chapter, a public lecture – I spend a substantial amount of time figuring out exactly which audience I’m addressing. Why spend so much time on this part of it? Because it will determine everything from the style of the writing to the emphasis of certain themes, from the boldness of the claims to the rhetorical moves that get the arguments from points A to Z. Maybe in our next session, we could spend some time on this important aspect of our task.
Once again, in the beginning of the session, we never got to the reading (in this instance, the Singerman text). This strikes me as quite unique to the HUM seminar experience. The undiscussed texts are almost certainly doing some subconscious work on all of us, coaxing the conversation in ways we might not quite be aware of, but I often feel a mild yearning for more time to discuss the texts at hand, to make all of the implied brainwork more explicit.
I brought this up in an earlier post but want to re-up the “mild yearning” for an expression of the unexpressed as a potentially useful sensation that could be channeled toward the final project. At certain moments along the way, we have each almost certainly felt the subtle twinge of disappointment that a thought we’d put out there was not taken up or – maybe even worse – that the bundle of ideas we’d prepared for the conversation was left tied with a string, receiving no audience at all for lack of time.
If you’ll permit me, I want to make the case that we accommodate the “mild yearning for an expression of the unexpressed” in the collaborative project, first because it is compatible with the photogram portion, which is the most solid proposal we have yet and which already dwells on problems of presence and absence. Second, because it will allow us to fold back in the superabundance of amazing ideas that have gotten left out. For this particular recipe, I think the more ingredients the better.
How to incorporate some of the brainstorm day ideas back into the project? The origami element? The “breaking the table into its constituent properties” idea? The chalkboard idea? The wonky table idea? The “unsaid ideas put into table drawers” idea? The table of contents idea? What about all the cool stuff we collected in our Google doc? Choreography? Cinema? Building stuff? Toys and play? Vibes? Couplets? Conceptual work? It isn’t too late to think maximalistically about this. Exactly HOW MUCH can be squeezed onto our table (or put into its drawers or stored under it)?
Thinking forward to our next session, whichever elements we choose to incorporate, a more active divvying up of responsibilities will be necessary. The thinking will need to transform into doing, and the sooner this happens, the more our future selves will thank us. Given all of our responsibilities outside the seminar, a clear consensus should be reached on what we’re doing, who will do what, and when these things will be done. This part probably feels alien to those of you who – like me – have spent much of recent life alone with concepts and texts rather than on projects whose execution requires manual labor, coordination with others, and experimenting outside one’s comfort zone. Admittedly, it feels weird. But I feel the tingle of possibility and can almost envision what our ghost of a table will be once we summon it.
-CW
[LSJ starts here]
IHUM Discussion Assignment
[LSJ Below]
KN’s visit was the most enjoyable session I’ve had in this seminar thus far. I describe it as enjoyable for many reasons, but at the core of this sentiment is that KN is one of the most pedagogically thoughtful professors I’ve had the pleasure of learning from in the classroom setting—another is Simon Gikandi. I have so many notes from watching them teach and manage their seminars. They did so with much leadership and patience, not to mention the rigor illustrated in how they prepare for each session, make collaborative pivots when necessary, and build an infrastructure that I interpret as being on a journey of close study where each session carefully builds on each other and is responsive to those assembled in the seminar.
As he mentioned during his visit, I took a seminar with KN during my first semester, and it was on Black archival thought through the lens of Toni Morrisson’s papers at Princeton (English 556 / AAS 556 Sites of Memory: Black Archives in Theory and Practice, Fall 2022). Although the course was co-taught, the sessions that KN led taught me so much about what it means to approach the classroom with generosity toward a community of learners. Watching him teach not only demonstrated pedagogical tools that will be useful for the future of my career but also taught me how to be a better student and reader in a community of diverse thinkers and practitioners. Where no one’s ideas, comments, or silences are left behind, it made me want to show up and show out each week and push through any patterns of laziness or judgment. It is professors like Kinohi who have always made it quite clear that teaching may not be my calling. When you meet a scholar or educator who exudes practices of care for the classroom (that is practiced and rarely uttered), the depth of work, thought, and practice it takes to be a good teacher beyond one’s own intellectual and professional esteem is made apparent. I question if I have what it takes to be a good teacher. Questioning this is why it took more than a decade to return to school for my PhD – I was clear that my scholarly and writing practices were inherently selfish endeavors. Until now, I did not want to consider these practices within the collective and collaborative context of teaching. Teaching is its own practice of study and critical analysis. It is an intellectual project to be engaged as such, regardless of one’s point of disciplinary origin. I’ve always considered it sacred work that only a chosen few are called to step into. In a way, teaching has a sharp civic edge that I don’t believe it can shake. Although the academy seems to simply churn out scholars and very few good teachers, the practice of educating is at the core of this professorial trajectory (if one decides to stay within the academy). Good educators have always been an important lifeline throughout my girlhood and young adult years; therefore, I do not want to be a bad teacher or simply a scholar at work. Good teachers, especially Black and Brown teachers – both inside and outside of the classroom – are the reason I am on this intellectual journey. They are my second line of interveners and co-conspirators outside of kin folk and community members.
I am not sure KN’s pedagogical prowess was fully displayed during his short seminar visit. However, I bring it up in relation to the directions we are heading for our final project. I was in breakout group one, and the pedagogical nature of the table shaped our contribution to the brainstorming around the final project. We presented the idea of tabling the chalkboard for the shared use and intimations of notetaking, record-keeping, and cross-engagement. Reflecting on KN’s visit and our focus on the table, I wonder if there is space to consider the mechanics and abstractions of teaching and pedagogical practices for us to explore within the final project. Concerning the high-low roads of inquiry into interdisciplinarity, what does it mean to take on the role of teacher from our various disciplines? Are there methods or gaps we want to address in our future classrooms? What pedagogical techniques do we want to bring to the future tables we will lead? I believe in MM’s push for us not to let the formalism(s) of writing go to the wayside in our conceptualization of the final project. Although we may not all identify ourselves as writers, writing (alongside teaching) is a great part of the work we do. As MM expressed, there are many formats and experimental prompts we can consider beyond a short-form scholarly text. In relation to the textual experimentation we explored between the readings by Mackey and KN’s conceptualization of Black pagecraft, what are the possibilities to explore around the sonics and spatiality of the classroom table for us to explore individually or collectively? I imagine so many formulations of wordscaping, stammers, speech acts, and (w)ringing that can take place along the chalkboard table or on the page. Overall, a final project that considers our discussions around the table and teaching is where I am leaning for my contribution, as it would be incredibly useful for me at this junction of my PhD journey and career at large.
-LSJ
[MM starts here]
I counted the 8 seconds it took for the screen to turn on.
I counted two open windows.
I counted 6 lights and one table that reflected the glare of the incidental late afternoon sun, filtered through minimal cloud cover.
I counted three clouds.
I counted four incandescent lights above the table, they might be fluorescent, maybe something close to 5000K, but it was hard to count the kelvin temperature as the light mixed with the mahogany veneer.
I counted six streaks of the broken wood effect that glinted with the residual sweat stain of countless fingerprints, and I counted two parts of a coffee-induced stain at the south east corner, at the perimeter of our tabled inquiry.
I counted 5.5 meters between me and the screen. The light of the LCD screen is 6500K, a cool neutral white with a slight shift to the blue end of the spectrum. I remembered a fact about the mechanics of a sunset, where the perception of its colours is altered due to the surface (of the sea) changing the light between the light source (the sun) and its viewer. The 6500K light was minimally scattered by the table, but I had to account for the stigmatism in my right eye and the headache the screen induced.
I can’t count in feet.
I counted out three objects I put on the table.
I recounted the interest in the table as a pace to hold things and concerns together without bridging or reducing them into equivalence.
I counted DGB leaving the table 29 times during the course of the seminar from three separate seats.
I counted three blackboards and two pieces of chalk.
I counted no mention of the Singerman text.
I counted the 1353 words in the shared google doc that AK employs to elucidate a proposal for a photogram as a group project, the 1353 word count producing a seductive proposal that can be imagined and completed in the four weeks that are left. I counted on our desire to see what is feasible and possible,
I counted four people writing in a notebook, scratching their pens.
I didn’t count how many people typed on their laptop during the seminar.
I counted one mention of not mentioning the Singerman text.
I have counted three different occasions during the last eight weeks in which the seminar was punctuated with the sound of a siren by a police car, ambulance or fire truck. I know that they each emit a sound, at the frequencies of 700hz, 900hz and 875hz respectively. I cannot count sound in frequencies through just listening, but I know that a baby’s cry can reach a frequency of 600hz.
I counted the 1353 words in the shared google doc that AK employs to elucidate a proposal for a photogram as a group project.
I counted SW represent last week’s session in ten minutes.
I counted CV represent last week’s session in two minutes.
I counted 8 weeks of four ‘reflections’, I counted 32 representations of a prefix-disciplinary study seminar.
I counted KH leaving the table just once after he joined us on it and before he left, where he stood at the door, and hovered over the hinge.
I counted the door opened six times during the seminar.
I counted 17 notifications on my phone.
I counted the sound of four different birds, I recognised two of them as the sound of the Blue Jay and counted on my desire that the one I didn’t hear to be an American Goldfinch.
I counted 14 moments of chatter of passersby when I was listening to count them. I recount the mention that one possible goal of a seminar is to spend time looking outside the window, to contemplate the world outside, but I cannot count on my attentiveness.
I counted the spoken American English’s ‘umm’ sonic proximity to the Arabic م but I stopped counting these as my ears got better. I accounted for a slight adaptation in my ears after I played too much of Al Jazeera Arabic’s news broadcast all day.
I counted KH laugh nine times.
I counted five audible sighs, their exasperated exhalation dispersed without being able to count how many people participated.
I counted KH wringing his hands four times to illustrate Mackey’s metaphor as material.
I counted page 786 that Mackey writes, “the bone of the plantation will come ringing to meet her …the ringing of bones redefines resonance, takes it in a direction contrary to expectation. It is a ringing which can only be imagined, a ringing which is difficult to imagine. Hearing the dull thud of bone as resonance epitomizes and offers an apt figure for Brathwaite’s antithetic, oppositional poetics. Rooted in disaffection and critique, “skeletonality” submits the ground to a qualitative audit, accenting the toll taken by the plantation past and its continuing repercussions.
I recall counting eight people who want to physically make things.
I counted one of them who acknowledged their background in making.
I counted one vocal defence of the written word.
I counted five people nodding in defence of the written word.
I counted three scowls.
I counted no tears.
I counted three professors
I counted three students in IHUM. I counted 12 weeks of obligation in a course to obtain the 12 months of funding that IHUM provides.
I counted three groups with three approaches to the table, approaches that, is important to submit to what Mackey’s calls, ‘a qualitative audit’ like the way the bones do to the ground.
I counted 26 ideas that were put on the table.
I counted no mention of the word Palestine
I counted two allusions to Palestine.
I counted news updates on my screen. The pictures of a ground broken by an American supplied machinery, as Brown University’s Watson Institute tabulates.
I counted the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s 43,374 who were murdered by the Israeli state, a count that keeps much unaccounted for.
I counted 6348 days since the blockage of Gaza that turned it into an ‘open air prison’ on June 14 2007.
I counted 389 days since October 7 2023.
I counted The Lancet’s count of more than 186,000 Palestinians killed at the hands of the Israeli army. I counted the 115 days since that article was published and I couldn’t account for the count today.
I recounted the seminar on experience, on the impulse to describe an experience as providing social cohesion and on the isolated nature of an experience that I counted only some of us recognise.
I counted my concerns. What is the possibility of a group of scholars in a seminar guided by an ‘emergent’ syllabus approaching the theme/genre/modality/gesture (or is it really an enumeration) of prefix-disciplinary study? Is it really that making something together, as the physical labour of a form of ‘art’ production, a place to gather and align appropriately? Is that gathering an easier one to coalesce around than a gathering on a shared politics (one that takes critique as its mode of operation) that exceeds our respective disciplinary concerns and ultimately necessitates that we bring the politics back home?
I counted zero readings that were suggested by students in the group. They emerged maybe from us without our needing to suggest.
I counted two tables on the chalkboard two weeks ago. Is the table the rhombus shape with four rectangular legs that DGB draws on his chalkboard the object we are holding to account for? Or is it the table that sits on the table that is in fact, our inquiry? The second table as standing for the choreography of our intellectual habitus, the on-the-table gesture as a commonplace crutch to more comfortably operate and dissect a matter of concern with sharpened critique without putting one’s own body in the way, so that the scalpel of academic dismemberment doesn’t accidentally splice open our person, and the vascularity of our politics that keeps it pumping and makes everyone around the table deal with the unsavoury innards of our deeper concerns.
I counted the six years I spent in architecture school, and a subsequent six years of an art practice making installations – do I really not believe in the physical production of an object as not a political project? Do I just not believe in it here, at this table? Who will take the table we make home? Who will keep it with them as an account or proof of this project’s future? What are we tabling and putting on the table that sits right, that feels palatable? How do we count the things on the table? What politics counts and doesn’t count? Can I count how much more the table can hold as its buckles under the weight of what is being placed on it? Can we count and hold on to things without letting them go?
I count on the table to produce a protocol that tables things away.
I count on us seminarians to make a project that is not an account to affirm our existence around a table. I count on us seminarians to produce an account for the existence of those that cannot be on the table. I count on that now.
I count page 453 where KH tells us that “Black pagecraft sets the stage not only for reading in the present tense, but also for future hearings, which are ultimately readings in the ear of the other…The capacity to ‘receive the message’ is not guaranteed, of course …[it] resists the compulsion to mean something now as demanded by reading lists and books clubs or that matter diversity statements and revised syllabi.”
I counted Palestine within and beyond the seminar window.
I counted the 13 students arrested for the protest for holding the university to account for its complicity in Israel’s genocide.
I counted the 13 students sat around the current seminar table.
I counted the disciplinary differences between those students and their demand for the university to come to the table.
I counted the legal process’s different tables that appeared as an accountability for demanding to be at the table.
I counted 6 months counting the judges’ training in tabling, as the court delays its procedure.
I count the sit-in protest as an exemplary project for a prefix-disciplinary study of the table.
I count the 8 weeks where I have counted what does not count as a topic for prefix-disciplinary study. Is the count in accountancy versus accountability a different shaped gap / break between tabling and the table.
I counted no more clouds.
–MM
SEMINAR 9: No Guest (final project work, cont.)
[DGB starts here]
Our meeting today was the second (and final) full session dedicated to the conceptualization of our final/collaborative project. In a basic way, it was process, process, process. I myself thought the whole thing was both deeply interesting (in terms of group dynamics), and pretty darn successful (in terms of functional/operational consensus-building and careful/critical cooperation). I hope at least a plurality of you feel similarly…
We launched in the way Christy outlined in her group email this past week — meaning we led through the explicit “proposal statements” that some of you had put in the group doc. Then, because it felt like there was a reasonable sense of possible integration/coordination of these elements (or at least of elements of these elements), we did not go straight to a “vote,” but instead circled around the table so that everyone could say a few words about the table-object they had brought (I have dropped images of these into our Object log).
This opened up some very lovely moments. The chalkboard above captures one of them — a new/surprising invocation of the way tables get covered/protected: COASTERS! I’m not sure I can think of another moment in my life in which the invocation of a coaster felt so conceptually rich and also so downright surprising. I was also really moved by the moment we spent with the two little spoons. They invoked table settings, to be sure — but they also addressed delicate problems (theft and gift, the failure of “traditions,” etc.). Oh, and the coffee table book. I’m not sure that this particular intersection of tables and texts has previously come up in our discussions. If it did, I missed it. Lots of stuff to think about in all of this.
We took a break. And when we reconvened, we did so outside, and in a notably tableless environment. There, Christy made a bid for an integrated project: a final session of the class in which we do an hour of some formalized “seminar” on a prepared table that will be, in some sense, self-documenting (in the form of a photogram); a component of this seminar to be a plexiglass box of some sort in the middle of the table which will serve (in a way yet to be determined) as a kind of repository for contributions in the course of the hour-long seminar session; a circa 500-word contribution from each of us engaging/testing/manifesting major characteristics or attributes of tableness and offering some form of table ”operation.”
This all remained loose (lots of details to be worked out, including whether, downstream, some form of publication might emerge…), but specified enough that it could be presented as a “are we all together on something like this… we’re not” proposition. Alternatives included the group breaking up into two or three subgroups, each pursuing an element of all that — and/or some people getting off the project-boat altogether, and moving into what has always been the “off-ramp” option if collaboration proves absolutely impossible (writing some kind of “term paper,” assignment TBD).
Pretty much everybody felt enough “in” on this, that we have essentially moved forward with this as the collaborative final project. There remains plenty of stuff to be worked out, and not a ton of time in which to do that specification/elaboration (we only have two more meetings before the final class, and that means we have two one-hour blocks in which we are guaranteed to all be together in a room thinking/working on this stuff). We agreed that people who wanted to be active in giving shape to some of these elements of the collaboration would email Christy and me by noon on Friday. And I also suggested that people who did not choose to volunteer in that way might make an effort to be as cooperative as they can manage, given that other people may be taking on more of the organizing work. But of course, everyone can do whatever they want!
Finally, we did spend a little time on setting a kind of structure/armature for the 500-word final written element of all this. That 500 words will be due on the Friday of reading week (so, after our final class). We agreed that we would each take one attribute of a table from the list we worked up (see image, supra) and write about 300 words on that — with a special emphasis, if possible, on how the bending or stretching of that attribute might provide insights into the conceptual or material limits of tableness. In addition, each of us will provide one brief “instruction for use” of a table. While firming up this template does straighten/narrow the full ambit of our respective creative capacities, it does have the prospective advantage of generating a whole that is likely to be richer than the sum of the parts.
Difficult work, collaboration — always! Always lots of process! Many ways for things not to work!
And, the truth is, there isn’t all that much collaborative work in grad school in the humanities!
I wonder why.
Anyway, I thought it was a pretty promising day — now, who knows what will happen?
-DGB
[CW starts here]
First part of the session was spent in the summer-like stuffiness and quiet. We sat for what felt like a minute or two in silence. Not much sleeping had happened the night before. We sat together, each haunted in their own way by the unsettling future that democracy has surfaced.
Distracted vibes emanated from all the room’s edges. It felt nice after a moment to have a task to focus on. AK showed the successful photogram experiments. These look incredible and remind me of early Surrealist photography experiments and the plant cyanotypes of Anna Atkins. The Erlenmeyer flask, whose translucence made quite a captivating image, might give us ideas about interesting objects for the table surface for our final “performance” of the semester. So happy to see transparencies again… for people of my generation, these were the key pedagogical tool (paired with the always whirling projector and its eerie glow) of elementary through high school and even into college (I used them myself when I began teaching French and Italian in ca. 2000), long before projection of laptop images. I just recalled that the markers used to write on these – perhaps now obsolete – were called Vis-à-vis. Let’s use transparencies! If only because the name marries so well with the translucent box that might be part of the final project.
Random pic from internet: But it encapsulates the feel of the transparency. The yellowish glow. The underlit teacher face. The silhouetted hand — often female — creating arabesques of red, blue, black, green (standard Vis-à-vis colors). If you sat next to the projector, a subtle breeze toyed with your hair.
It occurred to me that making a permanent photogram of the erasable transparency is a slightly different iteration of the chalkboard idea that came up earlier. Without necessarily meaning to, we’ve happened upon the media history of pedagogy: the chalkboard, the transparency, the laptop. All of these will leave traces in our final project.
And what a variety of objects that were put on the table: books of several sorts (SD’s evocation of the coffee table book as a pretty weird genre was especially enticing), spoons, a miniature Japanese garden, coasters of various formats (GS’s made me think of tree rings as markers of time, for example in this famous scene from Vertigo, cited by Chris Marker in La Jetée). Like termites, we’ve been burrowing deeper and deeper into the table as a concept, into its properties and pedagogies.
Thinking more about the clear box… There is so much potential with the spectrum of legibility of the words we put inside. Advantages/disadvantages of each idea: Put in envelopes (zero legibility BUT at least we’ll know there’s something IN the box vs. an earlier idea of the drawers, which could be completely empty or full of who knows what). I personally like origami, which will give us fragmented legibility, sliced along clean lines. Or we just put the papers in, unfolded, fully legible. Or we cut them up? Collage them? Securing a good clear box is feasible in the time we have left. We’ll want to come to a consensus about what goes inside it.
I want to express my enthusiasm for the project’s afterlife. Could we please make a book or magazine? I am tempted to bring my Sony A7IV to class on our last session to document the whole thing, maybe partly as photos, partly as video. I could imagine such images making their way into the book, along with the photograms, the texts we write, and maybe even some of the chalkboard images from the whole semester. There is so much potential here. We’ll need stalwart editors to volunteer, but I have no doubts that the final book will be an object that we each cherish when we go our separate ways.
SEMINAR 10: with Esther Schor
[DGB starts here]
We gave our first hour together to final project thinking, and it feels as if we may be closing in on something that just might work. We will see. But there is surely a sense of promise. Practically speaking, we spent the first fifteen or twenty minutes simply reviewing, slowly and in detail, where we actually are with the components of the project — making sure everyone is on the same page about exactly what is, at this point, “settled,” as well as what remains to be worked out. I won’t try to rehearse this in any detail, simply because it is all already laid out above (and in the emails that have circulated).
We have some folks who are taking the lead on what we might call the “documentary armature” of the final project: a photogram table surface; the clear “depository” box that will sit in the middle of that table. There is obviously plenty of work that remains to be done to get all that stuff ready for the 4th of December. But for present purposes I think we can put checkmarks next to those items.
What very much remained to be worked out at the start of our seminar was exactly what kind of thing will “happen” during the discrete and bounded seminar enactment (to take place in the course of our final session) that will make use of these documentary apparatuses.
I think there is a general sense of the kind of thing we are pointing to (some sort of formalized, seminar-like, participatory encounter). This would not really be a “performance” (I don’t think I myself would not feel quite comfortable calling it that), but I think it would probably be fair to say that it will have some performative elements. I think we all hope that it will have some of the structured coherence that marks certain forms of play/ritual/theater. I think we all probably hope that it will be a seminar that is sufficiently self-conscious about certain features of “seminarity” that it will merit being documented in ways that are of formal/conceptual interest. Once again, we may fail at this (meaning here we may actually succeed in “doing” it, but we may all ultimately decide that it wasn’t that “good”), but the ambition is certainly defensible – and, I believe, very much in line with the wager to which we committed ourselves at the start of the semester.
So we actually spent most of the first hour brainstorming this final seminar-seminar: tossing around some possible components of the “protocol” (see image of the board, above) that might shape the occasion; thinking about what might be called a “shooting script” for the hour in question; and continuing to refine themes and elements. We spent a good deal of this time thinking about the texts that could be “on the table” during this time, as well as what might be done with them in the course of our time together — particularly what we might do with them that would productively/expressively make use of our documentary ecosystem.
There was, it seemed, a fair bit of uptake on the notion that we might each excise from our semester’s reading a small number of exemplary/suggestive/notable passages, and transfer those to transparencies such that they were available to be laid out on the table. Might they be stacked or sorted in the course of the session? If so, that might (depending on timing) produce some interesting visual effects on the photogram. In addition, might there be some process or “move” by which some or all of these texts were removed from the table? If so, they might end up in the plexiglass repository at the center of the table. I must say that an appeal of something along these lines might be the way that we would activate the table as quite literally “common place” — literalizing the textual tradition of the commonplace (book). All things to think about. In addition, annotation and/or commentary might be achieved (again, by means of transparencies — this time making use, presumably, of sharpies, etc), and notes might themselves become part of the photogram. Could some folding/origami happen? That too was discussed.
It will fall to Christy and me to take all this stuff on board and try to codify a rubric for our final seminar’s seminar-seminar. She and I committed to having a document along these lines for our next session — it will be a draft, so there will still be time for comment/feedback/input, but it will be sufficient to let everyone decide if they are “in” or not for participation in all of this. And we set next Friday, the 22nd of November at Noon, as the deadline by which folks who want “out” need to declare that they are taking the offramp final paper route. Reminder: regardless, everyone will do the two-part 500-word written assignment on table attributes and a table instruction — due the 13th of December.
Oh, and also please remember that if you have any additional thoughts about the protocol/seminar-seminar-structure, etc (texts that could be on the table, thematics, rubrics or “rules of play”) do send those along by email by Noon this Friday the 15th…
.
So after all that we took our break, and were joined by Professor Esther Schor, our guest for this session and the Director of the Humanities Council at Princeton. After introductions, and a really thoughtful pair of opening presentations by MM and L’SJ, Starry took a few minutes to situate her own intellectual trajectory to and through the study of English literature, sketching her own early encounters with “discipline” itself (a rigorous formation in music) as well as her first encounter with the emancipatory power of the invitation to defy/transcend the formal rigors of such training.
What followed was a generous set of conversations about administration, service, and advocacy which nicely threaded between our “high” and “low” roads of analysis of university structures. Nothing was more exemplary in this regard than Starry’s poem “Harvest” (which we learned was initially titled, in draft, “Protocols”), which emerged out of Professor Schor’s service on the IACUC. I found it very moving to think about how Starry achieved such a compelling work out of, in effect, a series of transits across disciplinary and institutional boundaries on campus. I had a summer job killing mice and removing/fixing their pancreases in a laboratory when I was younger, and remember reading an archaeological report on Pompeii (also about killing and “fixing”) that same summer. Death and preservation worked in very different registers for me across those months, and I don’t think any work could have thickened my memory of that period quite like “Harvest.”
There was other stuff that happened before we turned to the Augustine. We talked a little about plans for a “Humanities Institute” at Princeton, and learned about the kind of committee work (and research — visiting comparable centers around the country) that goes into such an initiative. We got some details about what it’s like to do the work in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere of holding space for humanistic endeavor. Looking at my notes, I find a number of phrases that feel weighted with a wisdom: “the humanities address all those problems that can’t be solved by means of a data set”; “in interdisciplinary work you have to make your own community and you have to find your own coaches, tutors, friends”; “I was seduced by the archive.”
We got to Augustine, too, and banged our heads against it for 45 minutes or so. Did we make progress? I’m not sure. We reflected a little on the relationship between the confession and the essay as genres, and that felt like a rich avenue for further reflection. I find I have written down (was it a challenge? an exhortation? did I misquote?): “unthinking the interdisciplinarity of Augustine.”
I am not sure what this could mean, exactly—though it is true that, from a retrospecting vantage, moments of the Confessions can read like psychology, like therapy, like cognitive neuroscience, like religion or theology, like… a symptom.
We talked about the interiority, the Kierkergardian ambition to “think one thought,” the Foucault effort to recover curiosity in “The Masked Philosopher.” We wondered (but did we?) what it would be like to think so hard about how to control one’s thoughts…
-DGB
SEMINAR 10: with the editors of the ERB
A few quick thoughts on our session today. I think this was the first session of the term in which the board did not get used — hence the blank above. I did take a note to myself on my computer, and if I had put something on the board myself it might have been this: “You don’t need to do the connections.” That was George, one of the European Review of Books editors in the second half of our class. You may recall that it was a catchphrase to which he recurs when giving advice to academic authors seeking to stretch into an essayistic/review idiom.
But it feels to me like it has wider applicability.
Our first hour was also our last hour of collective conversation about the final project — and Christy and I circulated our proposed “protocol” for the final project seminar session. We spent some time just trying to get on the same page about how it all might work. And it might — and it might not. Hard to say. But by the end of this week, we should have a firmer sense of who’s in and what “in” is going to look like.
The editors of the ERB were extremely generous in their visit, and had clearly done quite a bit of work to think through how to discuss the editorial process specifically in relation to the essays they shared with us. It is a peculiar feature of published textual material that, as a rule, it bears no visible trace of the amount or character of the editorial work expended upon it. Indeed, one could argue that publication itself is, in effect, a technology for erasing editorial labor. Some published texts have been edited a lot. Some haven’t been edited at all. Sometimes one has an intuition about this, but there are essentially never grounds for certainty, in the absence of proper forensic/archival inquiry. I suppose something like this hovered for me across the second half of our seminar, in that our editorial visitors were, with us, able to recover and foreground the enormous amount of (elided) labor they had invested in these two pieces. And, in a way, the whole occasion of their visit to Princeton permits a surfacing of the editorial labors that make a publication like the European Review of Books possible.
And what a good thing!
One can reasonably worry about the future of such good things (it has been a difficult couple of decades for literary/intellectual press — particularly on paper), and, as we discussed at the end, the economics of such activity don’t “work” in any conventional sense. There are exceptions (the New York Review of Books is, and long has been, actually profitable), but in general critical/cultural/textual enterprises, in the United States and elsewhere, are dependent on a patronage model. This isn’t bad — indeed, it might be a point of pride, to be thrown in the face of Capital. But even so it is an index of a certain very real precarity.
Be that as it may, it was special to think about editing as a very very particular form of “close reading” — and to think about “the editor” as a particular kind of inter- and anti-disciplinary figure.
-DGB
[CW starts here]
One of DGB’s mantras this semester has been “Collaboration is hard.” That came through in this session as we tried to do that difficult work of giving a final form to the protocol. Several constraints limited the range of possibilities: the intractable problem called TIME (the short semester length, the short amount of time for making progress between each new class meeting, the short span of an hour before the arrival of guests for working toward a common goal, the lack of available time in each class member’s schedule), the technical constraints required by the photogram component, the classroom’s constraints (how long we may use the room and what we may do TO the room), the individual desires of each member and their ability or willingness to participate, and the list continues.
I do want to acknowledge the incredible amount of effort that many people put into the project over the weekend. On Friday morning, the photogram group (AK, GS, SY) met with our amazing resident photographer JW who advised them on lighting, the viability of the photosensitive cloth idea, what should be taken into account regarding the conditions of the room, the process for developing the megaphoto, etc. He also kindly agreed to lend us some VISArts equipment (lighting stands, development equipment) and visited the room with the students to be able to advise in the most informed way possible how we should choreograph the final day. AK informed us in class that because we will have UV lights shining on us for the duration of the protocol hour, we should wear sunscreen to protect ourselves from their rays. I ran into JW during our evening with the ERB people and he said, with wide eyes, “This is a true experiment. I have NO IDEA if or how the final photogram will turn out.” That is a happily essayistic attitude if there ever was one. Try, try again… and again… and again…
On Saturday afternoon, AK, GS, and I went to the Container Store for the box and Lowe’s Hardware for box supplies and photo supplies.
We got THE BOX.
Material objects needed for a creative project – contractor bags, nitrile gloves, extension cords – provide a certain grounding effect that counterbalances the loftier spirit of art that reigned during the ideas phase. We asked an employee to cut us a custom lid of plexiglass for our box, which was an intriguing thing to watch. I got an education about the benefits of a particular plexiglass solvent that will fuse the lid to the box without creating ugly glue lines. However, one needs to wear a respirator mask during the process to avoid the inhalation of dangerous particles. Over coffee, we ordered the rest of the special photo supplies online and went on our merry ways.
Meanwhile, members of the textual component group – AT, SD, HH, CMP, LSJ, SS – met in person and/or drafted ideas in a shared doc regarding the potential range of operations that could be “performed” on the transparencies, paper, and objects that will be on the table during our documented final seminar. The group came up with a wide range of these, many of which we thought through in class.
And also meanwhile, DGB and CW spent time trading versions of the protocol, talking on the phone about each new version, trading again, reworking and refining, until a document existed that looks pretty darn good given all of the aforementioned constraints.
I would personally be interested to know, if we tallied them all together, how many human hours were put into the final collaborative project. However the it turns out, I want to celebrate the process part of it over the final “product.”
Was delighted to come into the room to find that AK and GS had conducted some very successful tests of the light sensitive fabric. I am quite surprised about the high quality of the images and the legibility of the text (at least the stuff in a larger font). I expected something rougher and more illegible, but these test strips look sharp and truly beautiful.
The ERB visit was a delight. (I found SW’s comments about Xi Jinping’s Big Beige Books particularly enlightening). To have these editors showing us their process had me thinking about how it relates to ours. I saw so many parallels between their collaboration (which is perpetual) and ours (which will last ostensibly for only one semester). They each have very different personalities and skill sets, which sometimes complement each other and sometimes cause friction. Hearing how an article goes from a pitch to print, how their meetings unfold, the debates they have, how they constantly are working toward a future issue while also trying to keep the whole operation viable, seeing a real example of a detailed critique (GB’s email to the author of an article that was difficult to edit), and thinking of the sensitivities present when a writer has to make themselves vulnerable to an editor (and eventually a reading public) who may respond harshly: All of these were quite edifying, giving me new ways to think about the many themes we’ve covered this semester and about the final project in particular.
-CW
FINAL SEMINAR: ON THE TABLE
[CW starts here]
We started the seminar with the theme of experience and ended it with an experience. A fairly magical one. As we moved toward the final collaborative project, there were doubts about whether we could actually pull it off. We did though.
AK, GS, SY, LSJ, and CW were the setup team, arriving to our reserved classroom on the second floor of Scheide-Caldwell at 11am. LSJ put on Miles Davis in the background as we taped black cloth to all the windows and the door, changed the lightbulbs from fluorescent to UV, set up the rig in the middle of the room with the more intense UV lights, ironed the light-sensitive cloth, stretched it across the table, and covered it. We had dressed too warmly. The room was hot and unforgiving. We moved most of the chairs into the hallway to have room to drift around the table. The administrators who know us well had funny smirks as they watched us in the hallway doing unusual things throughout the afternoon. In the corner of the room, a camera on a tripod was set to take a picture once every minute.
1:30 rolled around. DGB brought the old-school projector – I forgot to ask him the model year – and we sat it on a box and tried its projection capabilities on a pale cloth taped to the chalkboard. The vaguely yellowish images were feeble and ghostly. You could hear the hum of its fan. We began by reading aloud the protocol for the session. Five phases would happen:
First, each person in the room received an envelope containing transparencies of table images and excerpts from our reading they’d selected beforehand as meaningful to them. Each took a turn showing these transparencies on the overhead projector and saying a word or two about them. This was the most fast-paced action in the sequence. Our transparencies stuck together or to the translucent protective paper between them. We fumbled with them, tried to put together a quick coherent summary of something complex. How to tell what these five different objects were and why we’d been motivated to choose them in under 2 minutes? A nearly impossible task. I personally felt discombobulated. For recipients of these objects, there was the problem of illegibility. The text was often hard to decipher when projected through that obsolete whirring dead-media contraption. But wow, what a flashback. DGB and I both began our teaching when these were core to every classroom experience. Some people didn’t quite know how to position them right so they would be right-side up and facing the right direction and positioned correctly to fit in the white box on the chalkboard. The pacing of it all gave the whole thing a somewhat breathless quality. Multi-faceted frustrations. We were like the definition the OuLiPo gave to its members: we were rats who built their own labyrinth out of which we proposed to escape.
For phase two, we turned on the lights, removed the projector from the table, removed the covering to expose the light-sensitive material, and taped all of our transparencies to the table’s surface in whatever configuration we wanted. The tape had been pre-cut and was lined neatly along the chalk ledge of the chalkboard for easy use. These looked like little square tongues, ready for our fingers as we peeled them away. We placed a clear plexiglass receptacle on the table. A short break happened to give us breathing room before the hour-long ACTIVATION/DOCUMENTATION of our final seminar. We put on sunscreen or large hats to protects us from the UV rays that would blast us harshly for the next hour. An administrator saw me in my sun hat in the hallway on this cold winter day and shook her head: “I’m not even going to ask.”
Phase three began when the regular lights were turned off and the eerie indigo UV lights were turned on. SOLEMN RAVE is how I’d name the aesthetic afforded by the light and material conditions in the room. To signal the official beginning of the exercise, DGB pulled a bell from his pocket and tapped its rim to set off a resonant knell. (Several students told me after the fact that this added a ritualistic aspect to the whole enterprise.) The 20 minutes of the annotation phase began. In near silence, we circulated around the room, using Sharpie markers on fresh transparencies to add commentary, drawings, emphasis, symbols of connection to what was taped to the table. You could hear scissors cutting pieces of thin transparency plastic and soft whispers of “sorry” when people bumped into each other or reached toward the same object.
The bell resonated to announce the 20-minute tablework phase. We took turns, each person performing one “operation” on the table and signalling to the person to their right to go next. People made very interesting moves. Transparencies and paper were cut up, superimposed, crumpled, folded, inverted, objects were added or moved, sunscreen was squirted on a transparency and then wiped on the cloth. HH made an image of a table using only tape.
The bell tolled to start the final 20-minute tabling phase. Taking turns, each person either placed an object in the transparent receptacle in the middle of the table or took it for themselves. DGB returned the little wooden whale he’d placed near the middle of the table to his pocket. SY put the handprint in the box. CMP hung a tent of white paper emblazoned with WE FOLLOWED THE PROTOCOL on the lip of the box and used tape to make a kind of high wire across one corner of the box for others to suspend various transparency pieces and paper. I placed a tiny green table someone had drawn in my bra, only to forget it and rediscover it again late in the night. SS folded a transparency into an airplane and threw it into the box. AK taped two eyeballs to the box’s side. Chalk, scissors, twisted paper, and many transparencies and thicker plexi sheets ended up in the box.
The bell ended the exercise. There was much rejoicing.
We took a group photo and then emptied the room of its alien contents.
I didn’t expect to see the developed photogram for a few days. But suddenly, just two hours later during the annual IHUM Open House in Chancellor Green rotunda, the photogram group stormed in with the sheets – still soaking wet – to show the world that the thorny experiment had succeeded. We could clearly see the traces left by our quotations, annotations, the silhouettes of scissors, tape, pens. We draped the broad sheets down over the second-floor railing to display them in all their blue splendor. It was rather like something out of a movie.
I am so grateful for everything the students in this class brought to each session. So much energy, heart, brains, care, provocation, creativity, initiative, humanity.
[DGB starts here]
Dear all! Just adding my words of appreciation and enthusiasm — that final session was really rich, and had moments of genuine intellectual/experiential intensity (for me, anyway — and I think for a number of us). Thank you for the willingness, the patience, and the good work. I’ve sent my 350 words on the “History” of tables to CW, and my “table instructions” too — keen to see what comes of all of that stuff when we put it all in one place!
Onward!
Oh, and a final shout out to AT for this (!):
-DGB
