’ll try to be rather personal and practical, even trivial about this. For me, the main point of Re:Enlightenment has always been to connect with other people, who bring different backgrounds, traditions, thinking habiots, knowledge formats, ambitions, concepts, tools, methodologies, moods, and self-perceptions to the table. Perhaps more for me than for many others in the group, based at some of the metropoles in the academic world, the project has challenged the center-periphery logic. Based in the periphery, I was invited into the center – only then to acknowledge that many of those who occupied this presumed center perceived themselves as belonging to other peripheries, in their departments, their institutions, in academic communities etc. If society has no center, as Nick Luhmann had it, may be knowledge doesn’t either. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t hierarchies, institutional, personal, epistemological, disciplinary, gender-based, race-based etc. Over the years, we have been struggling with quite a few of these.
What I always found daring about Re:Enlightenment, was the continuous, even incorrigible efforrts to experiment with new and different ways of interacting, avoiding at any cost the ubiquitous format of the academic seminar, which leading voices in the group looked upon with scorn and ridicule. Often it didn’t work, may be even mostly. But we tried again. I, for one, really sympathize with the ambition: to change the way we interact, find new ways of thinking and talking together – which was probably never illustrated better than by Seth’s reworking of the London subway map for the Re: meeting there: no conference schedule, but a map of ideas and possible trajectories between them. To be frank, the
actual conversations mostly felt more like traffic jams than swiftly moving subway cars. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. Other examples of the same include the Oxford protocols, the operating system Bill B. is constructing on our website etc.
Moving forward, one way to capitalize on work already done in Re: is to consider these formats and procedures for conversation as outputs in their own right, and work to perfect them ahead of the NYC meeting. What have we learned? What are the most important take-aways. I’ll just suggest three:
1. The Now of Knowledge.
New knowledge is an event; it happens. What Re: has always tried, in my view, is to create the conditions for new knowledge to happen, under the temporal conditions of a certain immediacy and urgency, a Now. The most basic model has been to put a select group of people in a room to see what happens, in response to that temporal and spatial confinement – be it in the NY Public library, the British Museum, or on a boat we never got onto. Another Now is the Now of digital experimentation, which Mark and Ryan have been trying out at several occasions: Make an algorithm, see what comes out and what questions it raises – in real-time. The NYC event will inhabit a new, post-pandemic Now, in which the event of knowledge will be different from any of the Nows that Re:Enlightenment has inhabited before. One way to plan this event would be to think about what kind of Now we want this to be.
2. The Trans-Disciplinary Exchange
As opposed to cross-disciplinary exchanges, which mostly are limited to sharing results, putting them
together like pieces in mosaic, trans-disciplinary exchange involves understanding and engaging with each other’s methods and approaches, even trying to work with them. As I understand it, this kind of exchange of methods and methodologies has always been the goal of Re:, most vividly perhaps in meetings with interlocutors from the natural sciences, but also and may be more fruitfully, within the group itself, between literary and cultural historians, sociologists, and STS-scholars. How can Re: (continue to) be a framework for sharing methods, that is, for refining working practices and procedures into something that can be shared, taught, and transferred, between fields and projects? The goal is not a methodological esperanto, but a knowledge project, in which methodologies sync up, entangle, and align in order to reach a common goal, or multiple parallel ones.
3. Public Knowledge
Talking on Zoom like this might feel rather isolated, detached, even elitist, but this has never been the point of Re:, at least not as I perceive it. On the contrary, it has always been the aim of the Re: Conversations to reach beyond the academic community, and engage a broader audience, most successfully in the Optimism meeting at the RSA as well as in some parts of the Oslo Exchange. During the last year, the Covid-pandemic has produced innumerable examples of how knowledge can offer better explanations, be error-corrected, and solve problems, but also how it is fundamentally situated, political, and ambiguous. Not least, it has become abundantly clear that for knowledge to work in the world, it has to be circulated, translated and applied by politicians, journalists, and not least ordinary citizens. The next Re: event need to find ways of engaging in the same kind of polyphonic knowledge work.
Nice Helge :-). On the trans-disciplinary side of things, I’ve latterly been taken with the term from John Dupré of ‘promiscuous realism’ – the assertion that within and between sciences there are often contradictory ways of looking at describing phenomena – the point is not to have one view winning, but to learn how to be productively promiscuous.
Really refreshing to read Helge’s succinct history of Re. He captures the tension between the intense desire to experiment with formats and the self-imposed desire for outputs. That helps me to explain to myself my fixation on a ReOS: can the output BE an experiment in formats? Yes, I’m attracted by the computational/machine/technology implications of an operating system, but the biggest factor in my current enthusiasm for an anniversary output is to derive an experimental yield from our decade of experiments.
Thanks Helge, I also have a strong desire to work with people in quite different fields.
Re: all comments above- what if one of the outputs were a serious engagement with other senses of reality to those in which we work?
This is really in response to all the statements and replies, which I have just had read to me by my phone using the “VoiceDream” app: itself an interesting Re:OS-like experience.
But to jump off from Helge’s great sentences here: “If society has no center, as Nick Luhmann had it, may be knowledge doesn’t either. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t hierarchies, institutional, personal, epistemological, disciplinary, gender-based, race-based etc. Over the years, we have been struggling with quite a few of these.”
Hierarchy; explanation; knowledge; freedom of speech; conservatism; and authority were all words and themes from the responses.
What do these words and themes have in common?
They each seem to express some form of explicit structuring principles for public and scholarly discourse and knowledge: some explanations work better than others, speech can be free or constrained, knowledge is or is not attained, etc.
Each of these themes and words is also descriptive of something real in the world while at the same time implying a generally positive attitude toward it.
Not to be too ‘positivist’ (a term I use here lazily) but I wonder if we can work on isolating this descriptive component.
One idea: do these principles *actually* structure discourse today?
More specifically: consider the ‘Substack’ revolution whereby many prominent writers (Yglesias) who have decried woke censorship of their free speech have left their traditional media outlets to write for Substack (basically a private blog/newsletter) charging a fee and giving Substack a cut.
An empirical question then might be: if speech is so free on Substack, what does it talk about? What does free speech even look like from distant view of digital methods? Is it computationally detectable from traditional media speech?
Or, though I’m not sure how one could do this: do people explain things? when? where? how often? Do people invoke authority? Of course, some do, some don’t: but what kind of social network would the sharing of these tendencies form?
Anyway, just some last-minute thoughts. Looking forward to seeing you all in 3 hours.