[Hi there, please read Karl's post!]
Failing Together
Failure is much on my mind these days.
Not just because of THIS, but because of a
recent visit to our campus from J. Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011) and the brand-spanking-new Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012). [See
this video about Jack's week-long residency at the GW English department; note what Jack says about talking
across disciplines and the importance of the humanities, at 2:10.]
For those of you who might not be familiar with
his work, J. Jack Halberstam is unabashedly anti-disciplinary; if academic life
were an animated Pixar film, the disciplines just might be ominous and threatening
sharks and the kooky literary-cultural critic its queer fish-protagonist. In
Jack's lecture earlier this week, Halberstam carefully distinguished "Lady
Gaga" (the recording artist and performer) from the broader notion of
"going gaga" -- something one could provisionally define as engaging
in wild, crazy, and/or unintelligible modes of performance. This talk examined
(among other things) the purported "failure" of #Occupy
demonstrations and anarchist modes of collective disruption. Jack points out that
such demonstrations might be seen as "failures" by some people -- in
that these movements don't appear to produce concrete outcomes -- yet such
manifestations aren't actually striving toward a known goal or seeking to
articulate any univocal set of demands. They are social performances agitating
to perpetually (re)remind us that another world is possible -- even if
we don't know (or might never know!) what shape it would take.
Halberstam, in this anarchist mode of
agitation, calls for the end of the English department as we know it;
disciplines (as Foucault suggests) constrain knowledge and reproduce particular
forms of mastery -- we need to think more creatively across languages,
cultures, times, engage in high theory and low theory, and "go gaga"
on the university itself.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jeffrey and other colleagues with Jack over dinner after his talk, and the conversation inevitably turned to "the fate of the university." Is it time to
call for the end of English as a discipline? In my department we might already be "post-English" -- that is, we not only deal with the
complexity of literatures in Anglophone settings across time, but more broadly
speaking we engage in the study of language, culture, and theory in transnational, comparative, and global frameworks. But would we ever be so bold
as to re-christen ourselves "Global Literary and Cultural Studies and
Theory" (etc. etc.) ? Probably not -- but the reasons for NOT doing so are
manifold: for some, this boils down to a belief there really is "something
special" that we can gain by examining literature (literary history,
literary theory); for others (and these things are not mutually exclusive)
there's a worry that an expansive designation like that would fail to
distinguish us from the policy-oriented professional schools that already seem
to claim such prominence (something humanists are acutely aware of in DC). I
happen to appreciate a degree of flexibility-within-structure: under the
unassuming and (disarmingly) commonsense designation of "English," we
are each able to each do our own thing -- from more "traditional"
historicist literary work to "cutting edge" theory and cultural
studies and everything in between (note the deliberate scare quotes throughout
this statement by the way). There are ways, in other words, to rework
disciplinarity from within, and (to some extent) do so under the radar.
Two Visions
Where might this blog entry be going? I'd like
to think about where the post-BABEL conversation has gone over the past week or
so -- and where it might take us -- through two different images.
Above: behold the stunning cover to the BABEL 2012 program (entire program available for download here). Featured here is an image by Lori Nix; I greatly admire this artist for using a meticulous craft of miniaturization to create evocative photographs of post-apocalyptic urban spaces.
As well-suited as this photograph is for the title of BABEL 2012 Meeting, this image ultimately struck me as way too bleak in capturing the spirit of the event itself. In my mind this gorgeously detailed
mural captures my
sense of what BABEL was all about [click to embiggen; see full hi-res image here].
This mural (a detail from "The Prologue and the Promise" by Robert McCall) once appeared in the Horizons pavilion
in Disney World's EPCOT center (part of its "Future World" attraction,
which permanently closed in 1999). One
might say that McCall's utopian vision is "dated" in its style and
fashions, and it is not without certain conceptual limitations. As much as this
mural embraces a multiethnic society that includes non-Western cultures, its
left-to-right unfolding scripts a teleological model of scientific and cultural
progression -- only one "line" of history here -- and people at the
"climax" of this timeline who gaze toward an unspecified source of
light rising above a groovy space-age Minas Tirith comprise what appears
to be a normative Western nuclear family: a blond, able-bodied social unit
consisting of a man, woman, three children, and a dog.
While we might take issue with certain aspects
of this mural, what I like about McCall's detailed vision here is a dynamic
sense of collective striving, and its portrayal of what I might call
(for the purposes of this blog posting) "co-disciplinarity" -- a
being-together and becoming-together in, through, and among varied modes of
knowledge and different cultural/social orientations towards the world. While
it's easy to view this image as naively utopian, the light and dark portions of
this panoramic vision (which you can see when you view the entire mural; again see here) could suggest a range of unanticipated effects that
result from radical modes of becoming-together: yes, there are the positive
resonances of "co-disciplinarity" (collaboration, progress, pleasure,
belonging), but we might also think about its unintended negative effects too
(a broad sense of threat, vulnerability and "co-dependency,"
jealously, failure, or persisting exclusions).
Co-Disciplinarity
What I find so nice about coming-together-across-disciplines
via the "co-" (rather than "inter-" or "multi-"
or even "trans-") is the idea of simultaneity and concurrence as
well the term's unintended resonances and connotations. If co-disciplinarity
suggests "co-dependency," so be it: we might be well served to think
about striving among disciplines as a form of collective caregiving,
attention to many modes of experience, and enabling forms of collective change.
Co-disciplinarity -- to gesture towards disability studies -- might be a mode
of articulation for disciplinary orientations with nonstandard bodies; as
Eileen states in a Facebook status relating a dream she had post-BABEL, we
might "create a new university as a work of
art...developing new embodied social practices...and the citizenship model
would be global and nomadic."
When I reflect upon the BABEL conference (which
seems so long ago already!), I realized how wonderfully the plenaries enacted
modes of co-disciplinarity, each through a different type of configuration:
through Jeffrey and Lindy we witnessed an improvised and stimulating
conversation between a humanist and a scientist (more HERE); the next day
offered two individual presentations with themes that implicitly intertwined
(Jane Bennett on sympathy; David Kaiser on collaboration and "productive
failure") and BABEL concluded with two different co-presentations: one by public art instillation team sans façon (see the "Limelight" installation!) and one by Carolyn Dinshaw & Marget Long that each conjoined what we'd typically
consider "academic" and "artistic" modes of thinking.
Beyond the "event" of the academic
conference, we can rethink our ongoing work in the university itself and the
perceived boundaries between "it" and "everything else" in
any number of ways: from teaching free public courses in local communities to
open-access publishing and building meaningful connections with the so-called
"para-academy" and "alt-ac" worlds (and ugh, those terms
really bug me as they posit the corporate university as the norm and everything
else as deviance -- but I don't know what else to use at this point).
As
I see it, the BABEL conference "cruises in the ruins of the
university," but (to evoke another foundational medieval associational
form) we can also thrive and strive through the pleasures of an open confraternity:
reinventing medieval models, we can reconfigure ourselves into a fully
inclusive community that encourages acts of scholarly mercy, fosters
earnest engagement in the world, and enacts mutual care. Whether or not a newly
configured (in)corporation can ever be achieved, let us at least try,
even if things don't work out. Let us boldly fail where no one has failed
before.
8 comments:
It's like you read my mind/heart, or something.
http://ttbook.org/book/carol-dweck-psychology-failure-and-success
-dmf
failure/experimentation as part of learning is vital, see the related works of Donald Schon on training reflective practitioners. The looming question seems to be how literally/far will folks be willing to go beyond the yokes (and the perks!)of the academy?
@Eileen: Little did you know that I actually *implanted* that post-BABEL Facebook dream in your brain, "Inception"-style.
@dmf: yes, that is a big and important question. Kaiser's talk on "hippies saving science" made the great point that some people can innovate and take bold intellectual risks (at fist) out of necessity, precisely b/c they aren't "gainfully employed" or don't have access to mainstream institutional structures. When it comes to your question re: people within the academy, the level of risk-taking and "un-tethering" one is willing to pursue certainly depends on the individual. Academic tenure (at least the way it works in the US) was supposed to be in place precisely to enable people to take risks. And in many ways you could say you're able to create a stronger platform (louder megaphone) to agitate for change if one holds a secure, "legible" academic position. I guess I'd say it's both/and - we can agitate for change from within and from without.
jh, certainly there is still much, tho less than ever, freedom in tenure and yet not much evidence for widespread changes/experimentation in the life's-work of many (most?) profs.
As for a stronger/louder megaphone I see no evidence for this.
And sure inside and out but what will such efforts be measured against?
all good stuff to be wrestling with...
-dmf
Thanks for this thoughtful call to companionship, Jonathan! In my own portion of the plenary I used the Greek "sym" (as in feeling together, sym-pathy) in a way that I hope resonates with what you've written here: shared endeavor, yes, and shared affect as well.
Are there really only two problems with English renaming itself "Global Literary and Cultural Studies and Theory"??? The intellectual arrogance that fantasy implies is staggering. And yet surprisingly typical.
Academic disciplines and the departments structured around them play an important function that many English scholars probably fail to recognize: they defend smaller disciplines against the encroachments of large ones that imagine the skills they teach are somehow translatable to the world.
I know that isn't the intent of Jonathan's post. In fact, the intention appears to be the exact opposite: confraternity.
Still, it's important to remember that the dismantling of the university may be at the expense of disciplinary differences and modes of intellectual rigor that are immensely important to the study of the Middle Ages.
@Jeffrey: Yes, thanks for that! Sympathy, a "feeling with" among disciplines -- as you've suggested -- is certainly something I'm after here.
@Anonymous: I do appreciate that you see my intention really is confraternity across disciplines, I do want to stress that that bit on the grandiose hypothetical renaming of English is at its core a call for intellectual *humility* -- I write above that we would NOT be so "bold" (presumptuous) to ever re-name the department in that way, and that there are *manifold* (not just two!) reasons this is the case. Yes, I truly do appreciate that English departments shouldn't simply presume they can do all the important things that other disciplines do. In that hypothetical renaming I was more trying to convey how a number of "English" departments have become so internally diverse (some might say incoherent!) so as to act as a sort of humanistic and institutional "kitchen sink" umbrella category under which many types of intellectual pursuits can and do occur -- varied pursuits that extend way beyond the purvey of just "studying literary texts written in English."
As a medievalist "housed" in English who works on multilingual texts, I am well aware that other disciplines -- language and literature departments, linguistics (social and historical), history, philosophy, and many others -- perform very real and important work and English should not act as a humanistic discipline that somehow "bulldozes" or subsumes others. In stressing confraternity, I'm earnestly trying to convey this sense that we are all in the same boat, and we should *talk more to each other* and bring our many respective modes of intellectual inquiry into conversation -- and, hopefully, put our heads together in meaningful ways to pursue shared endeavors. Creating this sort of intellectual confraternity is risky -- and can indeed provoke entirely legitimate and understandable forms of pushback -- but I do think it's worth a shot.
I'm interested: is it really the case that the disciplines aren't already cooperating a lot? I see it everywhere and throughout time. Jonathan can you explain what about your vision is new (if I'm right in taking you to be saying that)?
Also: how is "transnational, transglobal cultural studies" any less of a discipline than "English"? If it's just another disciplinary formation (as I think it is), is it any the worse for that? Why the worry about disciplines? I don't see it. Whatever name you put on what we do, there's great stuff going on all over the place, whether folks do transglobal oceanic and disability studies or the rules governing the Middle English alliterative long line--right? Surely it's not a choice between those two: we want both! (Right?) --Lawrence W
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