Here is an amusing rendering from a conservative-(neo)liberal perspective of the state of current higher education.  Given Kandice Chuh’s project of transforming the social field through alternative humanisms and aesthetic rationality, I wonder how inaccurate this conservative-liberal perspective is.

As Chuh writes regarding the work of Leslie Marmon Silko and Ruth Ozeki “one of the challenges confronting minoritized discourses now is precisely the need to generate ways of making sense beyond the paradigms of identity and representation, an effect of which has been to hold discrete what are in fact deeply imbricated histories, formations, and conditions” (loc. 1740).

In examining Monique’s Troung’s 2004 novel The Book of Salt, Chuh writes that for illiberal aesthetics “what is effected is not a simple reversal whereby the particular (the colonized, the racially marked, the other) takes the place of the abstract universal (the ideal subject of modernity), but rather, a sensibility that understands that the desire for universality, trafficked forcibly beyond specific time and place of emergence by the processes that realize imperialism and colonialism, subtends the modern world” (loc. 2183).

The conservative-liberal campus as depicted above thus “operates in this way, to narrow via common sense the parameters of acceptable and laudable desires. Rather than trying to expand such parameters, illiberal aesthetic inquiry takes the metrics of acceptability as object of knowledge, to remember and remind of their interested constructedness and to ask: What worlds correlate with the desires incommensurate to normative paradigms of judgment? To what and whose (dis)advantage is the regulation of permissible desires directed?” (loc. 2224)

I would perhaps add that the conservative-liberal perspective and aesthetic operates through a fundamentally anti-progressive mindset that can only reference static models of reality from a reactive rather than a fully and curiously aware sensibility.

Reference:
Chuh, Kandice. 2019. The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man”. Durham: Duke University Press. Kindle.

Re: Grading During Covid-19

“While we may be reticent to tell our classes that everyone will get an “A” and that the syllabus work is optional, this gesture encourages us to cultivate intrinsic motivation to engage with the course materials. We have a historic opportunity to grow beyond familiar canons to focus on how this social pandemic offers a pedagogical moment with an explosion of new primary sources to reflect upon. Countless emerging scientific studies, sociological surveys, poetry, and personal testimonies can become our collective COVID-19 curricula.” –Jesse Goldberg, Jane Guskin, Vani Kannan, Marianne Madoré, Conor Tomás Reed, and Dhipinder Walia

On the eve of our final class meeting, bringing the end to a derailed semester in which institutions failed to provide students with the “product” promised to them, I encourage all of us to read this article, written by several adjuncts working within the CUNY system: https://medium.com/@conortomasreed/a-for-all-yes-all-transforming-grading-during-covid-19-a3a24de4e249

At the inception of distance-learning, I wanted nothing to do with school. All I could focus on was reading every bit of news coming in through The Guardian and The New York Times. I read, and read, and read, keeping myself up to date on global infections and deaths, even learning several basic epidemiological terms, such as R0 (pronounced “R naught”). This time was marked by an immense fear, a fear only worsened by living in the epicenter of the pandemic, as the future had never quite seemed so uncertain. The fear hasn’t gone anywhere, as I can feel it stalking me in all that I do, and while I still find myself glued to the news, my level of obsession isn’t quite as concerning as it was in late-March and early-April. But within that, I’ve still been asked to “attend” class, to complete assignments, to engage with material that has nothing to do with the pandemic or how we can restructure the world (including academia) as we know it. And this is coming from someone whose modus operandi as an undergrad was molding reading material/assignments in his image. Yet, I feel lucky in that I’ve been granted the opportunity to pivot my final assignment in the direction of Covid-19, specifically a pivot towards the lived experiences of several essential workers near and dear to me. Am I sticking close to the assigned topic? Barely. Am I going to put all possible effort into this project considering my subpar technological capabilities and the current state of my mental health? Absolutely. With that being said, I cannot help but think how absurd the notion of punitive grading is during the 2020 spring term. As mentioned in the attached article, “students did not prepare to distance learn during a pandemic.” Enough wasn’t changed within our classes and CUNY as a whole to allow for adaptation. Instead, a lot of us feel left behind, both materially (in regard to access to computers, Wi-Fi, etc.) and emotionally. Just as Covid-19 has exposed social disparities via who it afflicts and ultimately kills, distance learning has proven that not all students can effectively turn their bedrooms into classrooms.
I love school, perhaps more than anything else, but having the stress of getting a “B” my first semester in graduate school added to the stress incurred by not having paid rent the last two months, hastily dwindling funds, and a rising death toll across the country is nonsensical, if not insulting.

In the words of my film studies professor, “No one thinks of the essays they wrote during the Bubonic Plague.”

Even if we were to be judged on our performance before the shutdown, none of us deserve less than A. Considering we’ve even shown up to class once throughout this crisis, while capitalism’s swan song permeates New York’s empty streets, only solidifies that notion.

The Problem of Dualism

What this week’s reading stimulates me to think about is the problem of dualism: what does it really imply? And when do dualisms matter?

Dualism,” according to the scholar Costall, “is institutionalized within the structure of our academic disciplines. On the one hand, there are the natural and the engineering sciences, and, on the other, the human or social sciences” [1]. In addition to that, he also mentions that interdisciplinary efforts, as a response to this kind of dualism, often fail because “they either fracture along the old divide or else retreat to the side of ‘hard science’” [1], [2].

In this week’s reading, Chuh also tackles this problematic division between “hard sciences” and humanities – a division that has been built into the structure of traditional, educational institutions. As Chuh writes,

Now, with concerted emphasis on STEM fields deemed necessary to success and national competitiveness in the global workforces, outcomes towards and relevance to those goals serve as primary measures of institutional performance. It is thus that it seems necessary to defend the humanities as a means of resisting the rationality that authorizes and resources certain kinds of knowledge at the expense of others” [3].

As one can see, the structural dualism between “hard sciences” and humanities in the end disconnects what and how we experience the world (i.e., who we are) from what has been taught.

Chuh’s suggested solution to this dualism is kind of pessimistic in the way that she communicates it; as she writes, “we can at the least stop submitting to its demands as we claim the humanities as a ground for bringing forth sensibilities that grapple with rather than cover over its constitutive violence” [3]. To put it in another way, by stopping submitting to this structural dualism that gives more power to one kind of knowledge than to the other kind of knowledge, we can just let humanities be humanities rather than “a means of resisting the authority of sciences” and therefore, sciences can just be sciences rather than something that has been overestimated or underestimated. 

Reference

[1]       A. Costall, “Socializing Affordances,” Theory Psychol., Aug. 2016, doi: 10.1177/0959354395054001.
[2]       C. Kwa, “Representations of Nature Mediating between Ecology and Science Policy: The Case of the International Biological Programme,” Soc. Stud. Sci., vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 413–442, 1987.
[3]       K. Chuh, “Knowledge under Cover,” in The Difference Aesthetics Makes, Durham : Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 26–50.

Whispers from the New (Vol. I)

Friends,

I hope you’ve all had a swell break.

Here’s a link to my zine which, I’d like to stress, was a collaborative effort. Ideally, I’d expand on the themes found within its current scope and have a final project, so any and all feedback is welcome.

Proposal for an e-zine: a non-situationist journal of the ministry of human potential

In spirit of human e-zine potentiality, the committee for real culture and the revolution in everyday life proposes a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Situationist International, that non-conformist, non-consumerist social movement of détournement, social collage, and anti-capitalist imaginaries.

a non-situationist journal of the ministry of human potential

Enjoy!

Caveats and Disclaimers: As with existence itself and pandemics notwithstanding, the journal prefers its human potential to be under permanent construction. Your mileage may vary using any browsers other than Chrome; living links are not guaranteed.

Acknowledgement (or: A Dispatch from the In-Between)

In anticipation of our zine-sharing conference on Tuesday, I’d like to post some of the text found within the zine I collaborated on with the Crown Heights Collective:

Singular.

A friend and I wanted to collaborate on a longform poem, something along the lines of a lesser quality “Desolation Row” or “The Wasteland.” But they said they didn’t want to create any art that was “Covid-related,” seeing as how they believed it’d be in “bad taste.” So, naturally, we didn’t collaborate. Not all are granted the morbid possibility of commenting on history as it is occuring–you and I now shoulder this burden.

The pandemic is all I can think about, and it’s a multi-faceted thought process, including a difficulty in quantifying the thousands of people being hospitalized or dying on a daily basis, a complete unknowing of when this will end (“Nothing ever ends, Adrian,” says the godhead, Dr. Manhattan, to the off-brand Rameses II, Ozymandias, in the latter moments of Alan Moore’s Watchmen), and what the new world will look like, because, let’s face it, the old world, the world we were residents of several months ago, is gone, and it isn’t going to come back.

“It was a matter of time, I suppose.”

What follows are pictures and words from the old world, before the Pause, and some from the In-Between, within the womb of the Pause, compiled with the help of the friends with whom I am confronting history.

The Paths of A City

In the second section of his essay “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” [1] (entitled “The Flaneur”), Walter Benjamin presents a literature that could not appear in a setting other than the nineteenth century Paris. This panoramic literature, of which “the inconspicuous, paperback, pocket-size volumes called physiologies” are but an instance, is mean to be sold on the street [1]. According to Benjamin, “these works consist of individual sketches which, as it were, reproduce the dynamic foreground of those panoramas with their anecdotal form and the sweeping background of the panoramas with their store of information” [1]. It is when examining the question of what is the flaneur Baudelaire’s relationship with those works of a literature that I wandered into the site “Paris: Capital of the 19th Century” [2] for the purpose of obtaining a better understanding of what panoramic literature really is.  

The website is painted mainly with the colors of brown (#4a2e2b), gallery (#E2D8CC), stonewall (#7B7367), crab apple (#853830) and copper rust (#914d43) according to a color analyzer. On each webpage of the site, a navigation sidebar menu is located on the left column whereas the main content is on the right. 

The page that I browsed while studying about Benjamin’s text presents an essay revised in 2005, entitled “Panoramic Literature in 19th Century Paris: Robert Macaire as a Type of Everyday” [3]. If you scroll down to the very bottom of the page, you would find that this student essay was originally written in partial fulfillment of requirements for a class in 2004. The introduction of the essay provides me enough information to continue to read Benjamin. The author of the essay wants to know what is special about the hybrid panoramic literature, why it could not have existed in any other time or place, and what does its exceptionality tell about the culture of Paris in the nineteenth century [3]. In the introductory paragraphs, what has also been briefly mentioned is that panoramic literature is a product of the mechanical age in which printing technology is prevalent, paper is cheap and new modes of marketing and selling aid the reproduction of a variety of materials from the first daily newspaper to physiologies.

The “Paris: Capital of the 19th Century” site is a project of the Brown University French Studies and Comparative Literature Departments; developed and hosted by Brown’s Center for Digital Scholarship; constructed by PhD students and professors. As it claims in the “About This Site” page, the project aims at offering free access to the full texts and images of selected books and periodicals from the University’s Library collections – mainly, the Anne S. K. Brown Collection and the Starred Books Collection, so that researchers, students and faculty who are interested in history, art, literature of the 19th century Paris can use this site as a visual tool to facilitate their understanding of the complexities of this time-period [2]. Since the site offers a lot of ways to access the texts and images, navigating those paths towards data is just like navigating the streets of a city. Hyperlinks, search engines and filters are the available means of finding materials in which you might have an interest. 

For example, in the “BROWSE” section, navigation buttons would lead you to all images collected by the library. Those images are sorted into categories in two ways; you can browse them either by metadata categories (“creators and contributors”, “subject”, and “title”) or by thematic categories (“historical period” and “thematic category”). Although labelling the last one “thematic category” makes the broader term “thematic categories” sound redundant, the image collection pages themselves are very easy to navigate. 

By using the button next to the label “historical period” and then the button paired with “1852-1870 (The Second Empire)”, the reader is able to get to the page where the first image presented is edited by Geirges Guillain, published in 1925 and titled “Le “bois” de la Salpêtrière et la chapelle”. This image is “a view of the chapel of the hospital, taken from the adjoining woods. The chapel was commissioned in 1669 by Louis XIV” according to the description [4].

Overall, the site is like a huge collaborative notebook; every text or image of the selected material is annotated with explanatory notes. In addition, it also provides researchers a long yet useful annotated bibliography which can be accessed by a content filter. However, some of the contents of the website, just like some of the city paths, are temporarily blocked. You can only access from one side but not from the other. For instance, I am only able to get to the Panoramic Literature essay page by googling the key words “panoramic literature” but cannot work out how to get there through the entrance of the home page.

Reference

[1]       W. Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006.
[2]       “Paris: Capital of the 19th Century,” Jun-2011. https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/about.html (accessed Mar. 20, 2020).
[3]       A. Zevin, “Panoramic Literature in 19th Century Paris: Robert Macaire as a Type of Everyday,” Paris: Captial of the 19th Century. https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/Zevin.html (accessed Mar. 24, 2020).
[4]       “LE ‘BOIS’ DE LA SALPÊTRIÈRE ET LA CHAPELLE,” Paris: Capital of the 19th Century. https://library.brown.edu/cds/catalog/catalog.php?verb=render&id=1399399202590012&colid=6&view=showmods (accessed Mar. 24, 2020).