EDuCATInG The CReATIVE
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La Genèse des Places Scoles: Co-Producing
Scholarly Places and Scholarly Habitus
By
Gregory Bringman
"Places" originate
mysteriously and remain as mysterious as the agents who inhabit
them, although places are not simply environments for human agents.
In fact, "place" is an inchoate concept that as much as
notions of "hybridity" is poised between agent and
environment, subject and society/nature. Not only is the notion of
"place" hybrid, but also when we look at the discursive
contributions of scholars and their texts to this notion, we find
that "place" follows self-reflexive attempts by these
scholars to locate themselves within the disciplinary fields that in
turn reproduce them.
In describing any model of
"place" in education, we must use both ontology and
epistemology to develop an historicist picture of our past. In order
to manifest what are spatial and metaphorical instances of places,
we must see these as not only spatial and metaphorical however, but
rather deposited by co-dependent and co-producing interactions
between intellectuals and worlds. Scholarly places, then,
dynamically record and are recorded by these intersections of
spatial and metaphorical places, as a third type of place. Scholarly
work may show us not just simply that of the subject of which it
literally speaks, but may
allow us to participate in the reflexivity of scholars, reflecting
in turn on our own production and location in historical, local, and
disciplinary fields.
The impetus for examining,
reflexively, scholarly "places", follows three
interventions in the history of ideas that may be applied to more
than simply the scholar and his or her texts; yet in so applying
them one can evaluate one's own or others' scholarly, productive
acts. With an ultimate championing of reflexivity in intellectual
practice - any intellectual practice - these three provisions lay
the ground for understanding how scholarly place is a product of
scholarly habitus and scholarly fields ("habitus" being
Pierre Bourdieu's term for transposable, durable, and historical,
bodily dispositions). "Places" in the field shaping and
shaped by the scholar develop through models of historical method
and change: Braudel's and De Landa's models of
"intensifications" juxtaposed to strictly forward
progress, the model of generative structuralism after Bourdieu (part
of his notion of habitus and field), and the contemporary
understanding of the importance of strategies of
"particulars" in idea construction.
All
three models for looking at scholarly place and co-producing
scholarly habitus are themselves possible to see as co-producing
each other, in the sense that when one throws out the attainment of
a singular goal for history,
one is much more interested in the particular qualities of
historical periods. While the ultimate meaning of scholarly place is
found in the relations between artifact and action, between
overarching principles and particular details (the objects of
history) this does not mean that it is impossible to anchor one's
historical methodology in details, in objects, in artifacts--as a
means rather than as an end. Qualitatively, details are important to
the establishment of non-linear history in Fernand Braudel's and
Manuel de Landa's senses of this construct, and the notions of
habitus and field in turn glue both the particular and the period
(historical) together.
Interventions
in the Historical Context of Place
In Braudel's
and de Landa's works, history may be understood to occur in
non-linear fashion, seen as a series of intensified milieus or
paradigms, but not necessarily creating direct lines of upward
development. In his monumental three-volume work, Civilization
and Capitalism 15th-18th Centuries, Fernand Braudel sets the tone
for a new kind of history, one that proceeds from micro practices
embedded in larger fabrics of history1.
These micro practices are an alternative history made from the
sometimes "bottoms-up" approach of locating, within
historical perspectives, material objects, in turn creating patterns
which are recognizable from macro perspectives.
One should not say that larger structures move or orchestrate the
material objects, objects such as maize, rice, meats and delicacies,
but that they take on patterns, "flows" of material
culture. While not purely informational, these "flows" are
rich in information or in particular qualities that put their
qualitativeness into the production of cultural/economic value, and
therefore disturb tendencies to read history as merely an
accumulation, a perfunctory execution of "mute" events for
only upward progress.
From the notion of
"flowing" historical and economic processes (for instance
the occurrence of rice in the diets of Chinese from 2000 BC to the
present2), a leap can be made to
what are called "intensified" histories. According to
Manuel de Landa, agents acting simultaneously (yet independently)
create either for their own experiencing selves or for others'
recording of patterns in historical processes, ways of thinking
about how histories fulfill their own short-term trajectories,
analogous to chemical elements reaching a state of solidity or
gaseousness (with the potential to re-transition)3. This transition to state provides a
metaphorical way of looking at patterns found in historical and
economic processes. Instead of each successive period of history
leading to an an ultimate good (as in early Darwinian evolution) or
to the best of all possible worlds (in Voltaire's reading of
Leibniz's ontology), small pockets of history swell and intensify,
making subjects of history act on the material relations they
structure and by which they are structured.
To
foreground the way in which these interventions in historical method
and perception make their way into collectives of humans and
non-humans (as Bruno Latour has phrased contemporary commonwealths),
it should be said that these intensified histories are in fact
written in "certain ways" by scholars and historians. Not
only do persons of commonwealths (another kind of state) act on some
form of material culture, so too do historians in the tradition of
Braudel create histories from intensifications anchored across time
but taken as sets of facts, disjunctively and non-linearly
orchestrated to critique the forward movement of progress. In fact,
historical writers choose purposely and disproportionately from the
record of human events and objects to create arguments akin to
"meta-narratives" of these intensified histories or
"intensifications." The notion of meta-narratives, in
Post-Modern philosophy of the last century, Jean Francois Lyotard
significantly demonstrated by arguing for a similar consideration of
historical processes to that of Braudel and de Landa: instances of
scientific, technical, and moral progress that often redeem
themselves only in the poignancy of the stories we tell about their
place in human development4.
A meta-narrative could be, for instance, a story about a Hegelian
methodology for philosophically transcending rough points in the
course of expository, philosophical arguments, arguments which
provide a basis for the Western philosophical tradition. Hegelian
dialectic allows us to narrate the history of Western philosophy
with an archetype for thought and ideas. It leads to the Marxian
dialectic (another story or meta-narrative) of Capitalism and
Communism, in the inversion of its procedural order. Instead of
having consciousness go from spirit to matter, Marxian synthesis and
the instances of consciousness that it analyzed proceeded from
matter to ideology. Yet with time, the Marxian way of looking at the
world redeemed or redeems itself only in the narrative content that
it has provided5.
The historian or scholar is therefore involved in the construction
of these meta-narratives and may choose events across great spans of
time to create stories which are anti-stories in their
non-linearity: the use of facts and objects from history anchor the
historian's application of an historical procession of events. These
events may be composed of (for instance) stagnant moral progress
mixed with events that embody Western moral rectitude, events and
artifacts of history from ancient Greece (i.e Lucretius's atomism)
with contemporary Russian histories of science (Ilya Prigogine's
contemporary physics)6, or a
seemingly infinite number of combinations. Seldom is a history
created to simply be a mechanical recapitulation of events, except
where this serves to illuminate the history of "what?".
The events of history, abstracted from a time that moves in one
direction, are separately composed into, not only meta-narratives,
but into micro-narratives of particular readings of topical
subjects. While pulled in a non-linear fashion from time's arrow,
they are reconstructed as partially linear arguments, which
duplicate the effect of very particular contents in historical
events and objects, in these initially linear arguments (the
methodology is non-linear; the exposition, written linearly).
In coming from the appearance of written history from a
macro viewpoint or the view of flows, we must proceed to locate the
embodied history and places of the scholar or agent who creates
these patterned histories. The French social theorist's, Pierre
Bourdieu's concept of habitus, or an agent's embodied history is an
adhesive agent for the preceding two macro-artifacts of place-based
historical methodology offered by Braudel and de Landa. A
historian's arguments allow the historian to locate himself or
herself within a disciplinary field in which he or she acts to
produce texts, acts on texts and is set into "place" by
others acting to "place" him or her into similar
disciplinary fields. According to Bourdieu, writers, philosophers,
scientists, artists and others act according to habitus, a principle
organizing a person's histories "installed"
within their bodies by their experiences 7.
Physical bodies of scientists and artists create "durable
dispositions" 8, relatively
stable ways of carrying oneself or acting within society that follow
from years of inculcation and transformative experiences. Being made
by and making society, these durable dispositions overcome the
dualistic natures of orthodox sociological and historical systems.
Not only this, but when a scientist or writer is conscious of how
his or her disposition makes meaning within a discipline--or across
disciplines--he or she may structure his or her behavior to reflect
on that very position in the field of production through which he or
she puts forth and articulates ideas.
The very
reflexivity of an artist, scientist or writer acting in a field
allows scholarly place to articulate scholarly activity as so many
"flows" and short-term intensifications/ trajectories as
are common to histories such as Braudel's. The after effect of these
micro/macro patterns is a sense of location or environment that is
part material and part immaterial. Because of its location in
non-visible structures (What is a disciplinary field made of? Many
things, but not one or two material objects in particular), the
concept of place is partially formed, inchoate, hybrid.Not only do
philosophical categories have to incorporate both "body"
and "environment," but all the binary oppositions of
Western philosophical discourse restructure and deposit
these artifacts of the intensifications of history into places
neither actual nor metaphorical.
Not precluding
particulars, notions of place may still, however, be modeled on the
play between empirical and theoretical knowledge, a binary of
Western philosophical discourse, structuring and structured by
particular knowledge. An epistemic artifact of 17th century
empirical science, then, scholarly place achieved its grand
historical form as a product of the new emphasis in incorporating
qualitative in addition to quantitative information into the
production of knowledge. Empiricism along with mathematics laid the
foundation for modern habitus and disciplinary fields to manufacture
both material and immaterial places associated with scholarly
activity.
The current essay seeks to reflect on
scholarly activity somewhat rooted in the nascent empiricist
tradition9. And in reflecting on its
own structure in choosing subsequent examples for the construction
of scholarly place, it seeks to create an argument that acts as a
scholarly intensification showing the genesis of scholarly place in
its examples as well as in repeating this motif for itself. Its
meta-narrative is like much historical method, and in particular it
seeks to illuminate celibate scholarly spaces, scholars of
marginalia, scholars of contemporary politically infused discourse,
and visual scholarship, in order to illuminate, reflexively, the
processes by which scholarly place is created.
Puritans of the corps/e
The
1998-1999 research project and symposium on scientific personae at
the Max Planck Institute, Berlin, Germany, explored a number of
aspects of the personhood of scientists, the topic also having been
under broad definition to include scholarly personae. Gadi Algazi's
research/article on the waning celibacy of scholars and subsequent
domestication of scholarly activity through marriage in the Western
Renaissance and Reformation period suggests a framework for hybrid
scholarly places located between subject and object formations in
social contexts of habitus, field, and the shared historical ground
of these concepts.
The coincidence of scholarship
and male celibacy in the 1500s along with celibacy's subsequent
demise in the professorial ranks in the mid-1500s thereafter
provides a way to characterize a "place" of the scholar as
an "intensification." This event most definitely should be
read not as a fulfillment of progress, "for who's progress is
this?" may have been the conceit of the Universities of Cologne
and Freiburg, institutions of Western Christendom that required
their rectors to be celibate10. And
in fact, Algazi suggests that even in the mid 1500s when the rectors
of the universities were frequently married, this practice
(marriage) was "still considered a problem"11. The very fact that the institution of
celibacy is present in some
capacity in the 21st Century with Catholicism having the same
requirement for its pastors, shows how, dropping the number of
celibate men with the domestication of scholarly activity,
"intensified" the living arrangements of scholars formerly
of solitude (even though Algazi remarks this was a slow-going
transformation12).The potential for
previously celibate scholars now participating in human reproduction
also lends itself to an intensification of previous social norms of
the celibate. Because of the connection of this shift to all three
interventions discussed above: non-linear history, habitus and
field, and details or artifacts as anchors, one begins to see a
metaphorical/actual place (inchoate and hybrid) emerge from the set
of relations linked to history and to the bodies that have created
the patterns or flows seen from macro-perspectives.
This "place" may be richly imbued with other narratives,
more overarching and that elevate this intensification to a grand
but not master narrative, while keeping it rooted in the qualities
of scholarly "place". While the waning of celibacy
intensifies as the Protestant Reformation progresses, Algazi takes
some space to show that domestication did not follow simply with a
"breach from Rome", as Catholic scholars as well as
Protestant ones became concerned with the relationship between
marriage and scholarly life13.
Additionally, some of the misogynist habits of previously celibate
men persisted in marriage even to the point of misogynist tracts
against "Wyves"
as with Chaucer's Jankyn, a literary character who delights in these
books aimed to uplift male "self-sufficiency" and
independence within the domesticated unit14.
Evident here then are two grand narratives that because of the
historical investigation into the context of these stories, leads to
a recognition of traits, not seemingly within these stories in
orthodox historical accounts. The grand narratives of Protestantism
and masculine domination as these developed, distinct from the
particular conditions of their genesis, therefore cannot be
maintained as master narratives. The overarching sense of the
"flow" of Protestantism and the "flow" of
masculine domination in the period of waning celibacy can be seen
then as simply a few more qualities that, with a multiplicity of
other narratives, contribute to a sense of historical past. From a
rich cross-section of historical qualities, the Protestant and
misogynist tendencies in the shift to family scholarly households,
appear as the agency of a non-linear history counter-posed to the
forward movement of progress. It is this Braudelian form of history
which produces a "place" between agency and structure and
that has the effect of being one in a range of metaphorical, actual,
and hybrid places.
And yet the particulars of
places lend them their distinctiveness. A rich history has sprung up
surrounding the domestic study or in Latin, "studiolo".
The scholar's physical room for study, according to Algazi
originated
with the transformation of celibate male scholars into married men,
newly married men wanting to continue their research15. The spatial apparatus of the study
for solitary work then became a mediating point between a
husbandhood with older wives possessing large inheritance and support
structures, and the philosophical desires of studentry and scholarly
activity. There was, from 1405 on, a disconnect between family life
and scholarly activity also shown by the place of solitude where the
gendered subject (male) avoided household tasks16. Although, Algazi interestingly points
out how the study could not in fact consecrate for itself a true
space of purity, as in the case of the daughters of Philip
Melanchthon whom were prohibited from urinating in his study,
although only when he was there entertaining guests17.
It also is the
case that non-traditional families in which the male scholars'
position was occupied by women while the wives' position was
occupied by the mothers of the women were seen in Renaissance and
Reformation households. While it may be easy to point to
psychological factors that articulate "place" such as
bodily needs, women impersonating male scholars (only by the
ingrained roles set forth historically), and misogynist tracts by
previous celibates now isolated to pursue their higher faculties
within the museum or studiolo, it is also possible to see the
construction of an architectural space as a product of human
relationships within disciplinary and cultural fields.
It is this set of relationships between humans and relationships
between humans and disciplinary or cultural fields that tell us
about the genesis of the immaterial senses (although not ultimately
essences) of "place" that are comprised of neither solely
its architectural structures nor solely institutions with use-value.
Scholarly place in the Renaissance and Reformation therefore is lent
several senses stemming from the institution of celibacy in those
male subjects who chose a life of study, yet who, through economic
transformations, found themselves in marriage. This intensification
is all the more so intensified by the conflicted and (Algazi says)
ambiguous18 nature of the domestic
household when this transformation began to take place. The
"starts and stops" of marriage life of scholars previously
celibate, the emergence of middle class families concerned
eventually, not with passing down scholarly habits, but only
monetary stability19, and the rich
set of particulars involved in the construction of actual spaces
that are not only actual, all contribute to qualitative nature of
what have become set pieces for non-linear histories, only rescued
from non-linearity by their lower level construction of
"place-based" meta-narratives.
The
transformation of the celibate scholar in fact presents, in the
Braudelian sense, a very interesting "story" associated
with transformations that we see today in intellectual culture. As
old as the printing press, which served
up an economized means of scholarly activities in technologized,
portable documents of history, texts, this transformation is
paralleled by a grand but not master narrative. In comparison with
contemporary meta-narratives of a switch to visual literacies from
so-called "logocentric" ones, the entire literary and
scholarly field moves in the direction of a writing through
technological dematerialization and rematerialization, and toward,
at the same time, the theory of practice through the development of
more material and necessary scholarly lifestyles. The
intensification away from written erudition even in the very act of
becoming more astute at this activity is a tendency that is repeated
over time, primarily in the 18th Century when charlatan performers
who were also experimentalists battled with the philosophes for the
attention of the public, and for the soul of conceptual education
(Was it visual? Was it textual? Or both?). The new innovations in
ways of seeing common to art and science that produced, from
constructed art and constructed science, complexity in visual
education, resulted in both the intensification of this new way of
communication and the intensification of the backlash against it20.
Thus the scholar
who chose marriage in the Renaissance and Reformation periods, found
himself at once carried away by everyday married life
independent of intellectual activity, and also interestingly
situated to express the problems of superficiality of existence in
lives of no intellectual activity-- in rebellion, in forming a
private space for celibate times of yesteryear. This pattern
interfaces with the larger "story" of the death of the
scholar and the emergence of the artist as homo faber. The
studiolo created from two non-mutually exclusive threads of
scholarly activity and the distractions of everyday life, and the
texts of the scholar, such as in the satirical dialogue by Erasmus,
The Ciceronian, in which detached modes of the scholar
first confronted those of family life and domestic living spaces,
are just the sort of artifacts that neither posited nor posit but
instead co-produce the field of cultural production in which
intensified "place" forms from texts, spaces, practices
and non-texts, non-spaces, and non-practices.
Protectors
of the word
Another "intensified
place" may be shown to result from Encyclopedist traditions,
from Pierre Bayle and Diderot to historians such as Gibbon, all of
whom used the footnote to situate themselves in relation to sources,
primary and secondary. In the encyclopedia, not only did Diderot and
d'Alembert want to encompass all human knowledge, but all types of
knowledge regardless of genre, type, or high/low status could be
publicized in their encyclopedia21.
In fact, the enlightenment project for an
encyclopedia begins the project of Gustave Flaubert's political one
aimed at a scathing critique of "received ideas"22. With each sentence demarcating the
global knowledge of the encyclopedia, as well as with the many
"hyper-linked" instances of cross referencing, the
philosophes of the Eighteenth Century positioned themselves in
relation to common knowledge, while turning common knowledge into a
weapon for political subversion. The great interest today in the
eighteenth century, stems from this very political positioning, in
which writers (of dialogue, of the encyclopedia) reflexively
positioned consciousness within Western modes of commenting about
the world. The 18th Century habitus and the places into which it is
connected, attempted to take a leap of faith dependent not upon the
support of institutionalized religion, but the pursuit of truth in
relation to all human peers of the philosophes.
The erudition of the 18th century crystallizes in the footnote and
in the equivalent of the 21st century hypertext link, marginalia and
cross referencing. For every statement made about a fact of the
world, there is a set of historical concepts that explain this
particular conceit. As an intensification, reading is a perceptual
experience, where readers consistently, as they move through the
encyclopedia, see greater and greater detail in marginalia.
Marginalia were previously conceptually "marginal" regions
of texts that at the time were starting to express the actual
"main content" through an inverted, idiosyncratic lens.
The whole world or such as was the subject of the encyclopedists was
inverted in the 18th century with the development of footnotes as an
art, beginning in the late 17th with Bayle's Historical and
Critical Dictionary23. The world as
text was represented by voluminous erudition that put forth the
relations behind "main content" as the inverted, more
central content. "Meaning" for philosophes and
encyclopedia contributers was in between "main content"
and marginalia, although rooted in marginalia. Not only was this way
of looking at the construction of the world through texts an
inversion of reading and cognition, the footnote created dedicated
and "interested" intellectuals more so than did rhetorical
or superficially political writing based upon a "main
argument".
As Anthony Grafton shows, these
quixotic producers of marginalia were "defenders of the
word" as well as textual poachers, transposing source material
into their own texts and reinventing it transformatively24. Grafton shows how the invention of
modern historiography in the figure of Ranke, needs to be
historically peppered with "Laboratory Life" intimations
of the construction of historical facts.
For according to Grafton, Ranke, in constructing modern rigorous
methods of historical writing, often did not take the approach of a
linear inputting of historical texts through reading to be followed
by the simple execution of his historical script, but rather read
all the material on his subject and wrote the text only to return to
the written corpus to insert footnotes25.
Additionally these footnotes were not always absolutely accurate in
how they represented collective notions of the facts of history26. Grafton has taken lengths to
dramatize (in Polyhistors...) the peculiar operating logic of
writers of secular, "sacred" texts27.
Reference material imbued with literary content by encyclopedists
eclipses any modern incarnation of reference material in the
Encyclopedia Britanica, for instance, with its writers committed to
the pursuit of "truth" in spite of their immediate
surroundings, although they are like the scholars that Algazi
describes, who were no doubt constrained by social, economic, and
cultural factors. While this is true, they attempted to transcend
their own personae but for an interest in how material words could
politically shape material actors or persons within 18th century
society. The encyclopedists were "interested actors who engaged
themselves in the texts of the collective to, through the inversion
of "main content", proceed away from received notions and
ideas.
Footnotes longer than the main argument signify the ways in which
Bayle and others mounted textual defenses masking a hyper
reflexivity and invention of details for these details themselves.
Not only are the details put front and center in Pierre Bayle's
Historical and Critical Dictionary, the addendum, the supplementary
text emerge as both defenses of "real" historical
processes and as political defenses of religious belief, as an
intensification. The afterword of the Critical Dictionary takes
pains to elaborate the ways in which there is no simple relationship
between the presence of the morally bad, and the presence of morally
bad actions28. Bayle remarks how,
not only is his method of detail truer to the experience of history,
but that censorship of his text is a failure to acknowledge the role
of the vices of historical actors in establishing, conversely, their
virtues. And in the notion that the Epicureans were as noble moral
actors as some Christians, despite their supposed atheism29, Bayle focuses on the distortions of
religious belief in order to invert moral centers, for, in his view,
greater moral centers. The inversion of who's whom in moral activity
is an intensification and an expression of how the mechanics of
professed faith in contrast to actual historical, material
conditions, leave the literary field conflated with the reference
field, but most importantly, show how moral practices and cognitive
perception swell from being pressed into inversion by the levers of
erudition, by Bayle.
It may be interesting to look at the encyclopedists' inversion of
bodily necessity, reading and cognition, and the centers of moral
rectitude, as producing an artifact, a place that is at once ironic,
yet targeted to put the common human in the place of the philosophe
and vice versa. Political subversion through inversion of received
orders, performs all the necessary mechanics of the 18th Century
Encyclopedist project. Its "place" is formed from the
denial of bodily necessities, the denial of truth in linearity
(traditional arguments with little footnoted material), and a denial
of the supposed logic behind cognition and perception through the
Western Corpus. It is well documented that the modern concept of
information emerges in the 18th century with the ordering of
censuses of the people, and the mathematics of probability applied
to smallpox and other "social phenomena"30. The structure of footnotes in the
encyclopedia additionally show how the concept of information arose
through the transposition of non-linear erudition onto reading and
cognition. Therefore, if the Renaissance and Reformation place
posited from scholarly habitus and text was the studiolo, the
Enlightenment scholarly place is the particular construction of
informational texts in light of the networks between them.
Protesters of the posts
The
third intensified, habitual, meta-narrated place returns us to the
meta-narrative expressed in the eclipse of learning and erudition
with a technology that strives towards a portability,
interoperability and efficiency despite its effects on human use of
knowledge. Seen from the macro perspective of historical and
economic flows or trajectories, the introduction of proletarian
forms of revolt into the established moral and political discourse
shows how revolution--at least in its proletarian form-- disturbs
master narratives, and intensifies social norms, transforming them
to life and death ultimatums. We are reminded of figures such as
Alexander Dumas debating the best place, when all hell broke loose
in an 18th century insurrection, "to shoot from"31. We could describe the French
Revolutionary movement as "protest" against master
narratives. Yet in moving up to the 20th century and to the
construction of the modern university, we can qualitatively point to
how the secularized future of Renaissance and Reformation
scholarship crystallizes in the protests in French academia in 1968,
showing the political, social, and economic motivations of
university faculty.
In 1968, the devaluation of diplomas and the influx of professors to
the French University system, involving the inequalities in economic
compensation for junior professors, culminated in the protests of
1968. Pierre Bourdieu was a young but senior faculty member who
performed statistical and sociological analyses for his later, Homo
Academicus (1988) which addresses how professors in academia
receive their authority or do not receive it based upon the subjects
they choose to research and teach (so-called soft versus hard
sciences and arts and the extent to which they have a career based
principally in academia as opposed to one in the outside world of
freelance writers and other knowledge producers). The project of
Bourdieu is to show the arbitrary ways in which established
professors not only receive monetary and intellectual benefits from
their positions within the university but how they encourage the
symbolic domination of students pushed into to college, through what
are just like the received ideas of the encyclopedists however, for
academia--the correct ways to read, write, perform computations, and
do science32. To Bourdieu, the
system of dispositions and disciplinary constructs of the French
university make it impossible for those coming from the outside to
achieve credibility as writers or producers of knowledge33.
Senior professors, who are also hierarchically indoctrinated and
organized, put forth their scholarly fruits within the academic
hierarchies of proper writing and speech. The outside writing
community approaches the subject and practice of writing production
rhizomatically, as any number of points that, as ubiquitously as
networks in online content and information systems, have the
potential to disturb the steady cycle of academic production from
greater social, economic, cultural, historical, and political
influences on writerly habitus--from the whole world, and not just
schools of scholarship and academic writing, localized and formed
into niches. The intensification of political agencies, senior
professors against assistant lecturers, in the placement of
scholarly fruits proceeds in dichotomies of professor/proletarian,
proprietor/protester. Scholarly fruits are, according to Bourdieu,
arbitrarily and with an autonomy of the literary and professorial
field able to produce similar texts of academia, while the outside
authors, able to grasp more of the diversity of relations rooted in
the world, fail to always use the proper ways of writing, speaking,
and engaging in professional practices. Yet the outside writerly
community has its own "correct" ways of writing and
speaking, so much so that academia and outside of it co-produce any
number of types of "correct" expository and novelistic
erudition34.
Embodied historical agents of the French University and outside the
French University mutually reproduce so-called correct ways of
thinking and writing, through universalizing their scholarly fruits
against particular cases that may alternatively function as
solutions to research. Bourdieu describes the philosophical error,
in other texts35 of
"universalizing the particular case." Sartre commonly
universalized the particular case of his own subjectivity into a
supposedly universal philosophical system, for instance. In
Distinction, Bourdieu argues that institutionalized artistic
training is not a particular case to be universalized into an
unchanging theory of beauty or aesthetics36,
that such theories result from other practices (such as middle class
interest in realistic photography), so much so that any non-naive
consideration of taste will address this construct from all levels
and divisions of social and cultural life. The particular case
therefore is held in high regard as a way to unmask the falsities of
received notions brought by young college students to academia, but
also as a concrete way of supporting theory by putting factual
infrastructures in place.The pursuit of particulars in
experimentation begun in the 17th century culminates also in the
particular interpretation of scholars on both sides of academia, as
to the material of valid exposition and exegesis.From the waning of
scholarly activity in the very fulfillment of conditions that make
it possible, to the inversion of writerly and readerly cognition in
the encyclopedia,
the pursuit of particular knowledge finds itself intensified in the
location or place of conflict between generations of producers of
knowledge.
Professors of the
practical
With the transformation of the
university in the middle to late 20th Century, the emergence of
practical instruction whether in visual or technical fields provides
my final "intensification" of the scholar: it resides in
getting the readers of one's work to take "action" and to
do things with one's texts. The philosophical emphasis on practice
has implicitly been with us for a long time, as is communicated in
the fact that readers "do things" and have done things
with texts since time immemorial. Yet the explicit programmatic
arrangement of students of culture or vision into activities which
cause them to generate their own learning scenarios in productive
activities, provides the quick fixes for learning found in many
technical certificate programs, but ideally suggests that even when
lectures worked in traditional learning situations it was because of
the speaker's transition from abstract ideas to the concrete and
back. Lecture engages students when they know part of what the homo
academicus speaks, just as in the other direction practical
activities that require active participation increase learning in
students, explicitly--known
ever since 20th Century educational psychology's constructivism.
The emphasis in hands-on teaching, on educational
psychology from constructivists, ie. Vygotsky could be seen a model
for engaging readers in "action" upon their consumption of
scholarly works. The implicit idea of Vladimir's Vygotsky's model of
peer learning includes the notion that social interaction is
important to learning. Social activity only being known by its
practices, suggests that interaction in which the more knowledgeable
student teaches the less knowledgeable student while learning
himself in the effort to articulate "correct theory" is
basically reflection on the procedures of life and the constructions
of social action. What is learning, but the transformation of
symbolic content into ideas that matter to the learner, and what
does a reader do with the texts that he or she reads if not act upon
the ideas in them? Readers are known by what they do with
texts--producing more texts for instance--but also this action upon
the text is a conversion of abstract capital into concrete capital,
although still within the realm of ideas. The classroom could be a
vicissitude of life employed by active learners, despite whether the
media identity of the work is textual or visual, and despite whether
lecture or hands on activity provides the entry-point into the
theory of practice and the practice of theory in classrooms.
The inciting of bodies to action comes through the construction of
abstract and concrete schemas, frameworks from theoretical stances,
which in turn create the reader as not only an empirical observer
but a writerly reader (thus an interested actor). Professors of the
practical are all professors who create texts, histories, for
instance from relations of history mapped through the gestures of
research. The location of photographic archival material, produced
but eclipsed by history's first path to knowledge users, can be
reintroduced in direct proportion to the interestedness of the
scholar. Discoveries of research and the development of abstract
schemas represent material actions behind fields of letters, words,
sentences, paragraphs, sections, chapters, books, and encyclopedias.
Readers write and writers read in traditionally mutually independent
activities. The writer must inscribe the programmatic scenario of
the text in order to incite bodies to action, and this is the
project of the reader in retracing the inscription artifacts and
their implements, so that he or she may act on the politics and
cultural aspects of the text.
With action, I
would like to end the meta-narrative as one that is continuous and
continues to redefine itself in multiple practices created by all
divisions and participants in the life and work of scholars. In this
trek through qualitative examples disjunctively pulled from the
corpus of history, I have painted a story, albeit non-linearly
of both the
eclipse of writing and scholarship and at the same time the
emergence of the new university. As a "flow" of learning
and production, both so-called practical and so-called theoretical
orientations towards texts -be they images or traditional
inscriptions, relationally proceed towards short-term climaxes and
intensify regardless of a supposed singular, overarching goal for
their trajectories. Place emerges relationally, hewn from both the
collision and insertion of objects, people and environments,
material and "immaterial", into both aggregates and
continuities of meaning. This method of reading place as not actual
or metaphorical but created by the interaction of social actors in
disciplinary and cultural fields may certainly be applied to other
inchoate or hybrid institutions or artifacts.The application to
scholarly life is contingent on the refusal to oppose agent and
environment, subject and object, nature and society, a general
project of reflection by which scholars as well as social and
civilian individuals make sense of the world. Scholarly places
created by practices that also may be spatial or architectural, lie
between produced texts, the actions they incite, and the world that
could be seen as the genesis of inscription practices. Here the
meta-narrative ends: it is possible to see the qualities of
highlighted events and how they, together, produce an invented but
reflexive reading of objects, events and persons common to agents in
the field of scholarly and cultural production. Braudelian history,
Bourdieusian
sociology, and the empiricism of particulars are frameworks for
constructing a history against simple upward progress. In the
conflation of history writing and history reading, scholars and
their texts form a third type of place in between the actual and the
metaphorical, co-deposited from their interaction within the field
of cultural production.
Notes
1. Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th
Century. 3 Vols. Trans Sian Reynolds. New York: Harper and Row,
1985. Volume 1, The Structures of Everyday Life. See Table
of Contents [9-13]; Braudel remarks of material civilization as
like a layer covering the earth p. 23.
2. Civilization and Capitalism: Structures...p. 146, 147
3. Manuel de Landa. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.
Swerve Editions, New York:2000. p. 14 "Whether the system in
question is composed of molecules or of living creatures, it will
exhibit endogenously generated stable states, as well as sharp
transitions between states..."
4. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge. Trans Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984,1991. On the
problematic of legitimation (stories told to legitimate...): p. 27
“It is remarkable that for along time it (scientific
knowledge) could not help resorting for its solutions to procedures
that,overtly or not, belong to narrative knowledge.” p. 28
“... the apparently obsolete solutionsthat have been found
for the problem of legitimation are not obsolete in principle, but
only
in their expression...”
5. Ibid., p. 30 Lyotard argues that everyday humans and persons of
science tell stories to
approximate truth in legitimation
narratives: “the people debate among themselves about what is
just or unjust in the same way that the scientific community
debates about what is true or false."
6. I am thinking of Michel Serres' La naissance de la
physique dans le text de Lucrece, translated as, The Birth of
Physics by Jack Hawkes. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000.
7. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard
Nice. Stanford: Standford University Press, 1990,1997.
p. 54 In reality, the dispositions durably inculcated by the
possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and necessities,
opportunities and prohibitions in scribed in the objective
conditions....
8. Ibid., p. 53
9. The current essay begins its own meta-narrative that
encompasses the roots of the empiricist tradition in Sir Francis
Bacon through the 18th century, and into its aftermath as well as
continuation in the 21st, as its first case study is of the
Renaissance and Reformation in transition towards something else.
10. Algazi, Gadi. “Scholars in Households: Refiguring the
Learned Habitus, 1480-1550. “ Science in Context
16(1/2), 9-42 (2003). p. 9 “The first recorded case in the
university of Vienna dates from 1397; by 1470, a married man was
elected as rector.”
11. Ibid., 10.
12. Ibid., 9
13. Ibid., 15. “The movement toward establishing scholarly
households began well before the
Protestant Reformation,
although in certain regions it eventually merged with the
Reformmovement and thereby
gained its particular flavor. The process of constructing
families and reorganizing scholars' everyday life was evident among
Catholic scholars as well.”
14. Ibid., 18
15. Ibid., p. 25 “Moving closer into scholars' homes
around 1500, we are likely to encounter a new division of domestic
space. Scholars carved out for themselves a room of their own - the
study, termed in the Latin sources studiolo or museum.”
16. Ibid., p. 26 on Christine de Pizan and her role as scholar
in her own studiolo, leaving chores to one in the role of wife,
from her City of Ladies (1405); p. 28 on Phillip Melanchthon
locking himself in his study...
17. Ibid., p. 28.
18. Ibid., p. 34 “the model adopted by early modern
North European humanists seems to have been characterized by a
systematic production of ambiguity: combining involvement and
detachment within family settings, intimate presence with studied
absent-mindedness.”
19. Ibid., pp. 24-25 “on the other hand, this pattern
closely resembled the models of relationship prevalent among
the urban middle class. It was not a model likely to
reproduce scholars as a distinctive social group, but rather (25)
to promote their gradual assimilation in urban society. Wives were
expected neither to take part in the world of learning nor to
prepare their offspring to assume positions within it.”
20. Stafford, Barbara M. Artful Science. Enlightenment
Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1994. p.74, “ The clever technician as the crafty
fabricator of non-intellectual goods became the target of the
philosophes' attack on fraud. Most fundamentally, to enlighten
meant unmasking charlatanism of every stripe by teaching the public
its conning stratagems.”
21. Diderot, Denis and Jean d'Alembert. The Encyclopedie.
(Page 1:448) ANDROGYNES. Chicago: ARTFL rev 2.1 06/2005. The
philosophes eclectically used various sources, including scripture,
for the articulation of ideas with very different social and
political senses than those in biblical times. For instance, in the
above article, Diderot says: “Beaucoup de Rabbins
prétendent qu'Adam fut créé homme & femme,
homme d'un côté, femme de l'autre, & qu'il
é toit ainsi composé de deux corps que Dieu ne t que
séparer.” (trans. Many Rabbis claim that Adam was
created
man and woman, man on one side, woman on the other, &
that he was thus composed of two bodies that God, simply
separated).
22. Flaubert, Gustave. Dictionnaire des idees recues. Le
second volume de Bouvard et Pecuchet. Paris: Denoel, 1966.
23. Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. p. 194.
24. Ibid., pp. 211-12, on Bayle's omissions and inaccuracies
.
25. Ibid., pp. 64-65 “All of the notes, finally, were
added after Ranke had written out the entire text.”
26. Ibid., p 65. This is shown by the contemporary of Ranke,
Heinrich Leo, who in competition with Ranke, disputed his
scholarship, according to Grafton.
27. Ibid., pp. 63-93; pp. 190-222.
28. Bayle, Pierre. Dictionnaire historique et critique.
1697. Historical and Critical Dictionary. Trans. Richard Popkin.
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1991. p. 399 “The fear and
love of God are not the sole springs of human actions.”;
“ The love and fear of God is not always a more active
principle than all others.”
29. Ibid., p. 399. “Those who have been scandalized by
what I said about there having been atheists and Epicureans whose
moral conduct surpassed that of most idolaters are requested to
reflect carefully on all the considerations that I am about to set
forth.”
30. A good discussion of this Enlightenment tendency to use
mathematical probability to model social phenomena can be found in
Daston, Lorraine. Classical Probability in the
Enlightenment.
Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1988.
31. Dubreton, J. Lucas. The Fourth Musketeer: The Life of
Alexander Dumas. Trans. Maida Castelhun Darnton. New York:
Coward-McCann, Inc., 1928. See also my text: Bringman, Gregory. Mighty
Morphin' Historical Objects. 1998. p. 8: The Tent of Alexander
Dumas and the Urn of Theodore Villenave. He went to the house of
the sister of Amaury Duval, a few steps away, sighted the Louvre
through a window and remarked , 'this would be an excellent place
to shoot from...'.
32. Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Trans. Peter
Collier. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1988. See
the postscript: The Categories of Professorial Judgment and
specifically charts, Classification 1 Classification machine no. 1:
from social classification to
academic classification and Table 9. Synoptic table of some
professorial epithets for an overview of the pedagogy of correct
learning.
33. Ibid., on difficulty of outsiders succeeding in the field
of insiders where performance relies on a personally internalized
state rather than experiential knowledge see p. 59 See also the 2nd
chapter (pp. 36-72): The Conflict of the Faculties for the
difficulty arising from inherited capital as opposed to acquired
intellectual capital.
34. Ibid., See chapter 2 in which Bourdieu describes the
relationship between location in a field and the type of subjects
that intellectuals or scholars choose because of that location,
suggesting that the impossibility of success is only in certain
fields, while other disciplinary locations have their own
structures of supporting capitals.
35. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1984. p. xi It is, no doubt, only
by using the comparative method, which treats its objects as
a case of the possible', that one can hope to avoid unjustifiably
universalizing the particular case.
36. Ibid., See pp. 458-59 “...political education
cannot be reduced... to the conscious transmission of the
representations most directly linked to the sphere of the
'political'... It would be at least as absurd... to reduce the
social conditions of the production of taste which is also a
political disposition - to speci (459) cally artistic
training.”