first attended Re:Enlightenment in 2012, at UC-Santa Barbara. Mark Algee-Hewitt, then a brand new postdoc in the Stanford Literary Lab, and I drove the four or five hours south on the 101 to get there. As we drove, I remember reading out loud some of the responses which the participants had submitted in advance; confused, unfamiliar with the genres of the exchange and even many of its topics, I remember asking Mark what it all meant. What was Re:Enlightenment, really? The event itself was thrilling, partly because I never figured that out. At the same time, I felt always on the verge of doing so: a perpetual dawn of undernstanding that never fully arrived, but was always in the processing of becoming. Eight years later, I still feel this way, and it’s precisely what I most love most about Re:Enlightenment. The experience of something big, something truly new, always on the tip of your tongue; some repressed frustration always about to come out, to be articulated for the first time; of great minds and concepts, forged in entirely different contexts, oddly sparking and starting fires.
Conceptually, what that fission has most taught me is—though I am not sure others would agree with this framing—how to think more dialectically, more
paradoxically, more attuned to the contradictions between past and present and the possibilities those contradictions afford. If the Enlightenment’s fundamental spirit of analysis (as Cassirer put it) produced the disciplinary silos we now inhabit; then, paradoxically, to overcome those silos we need another Enlightenment. To honor the spirit of the Enlightenment, we need both to undo it and redo it. To save the disciplines, we need to abolish them.
This turn of thought has profoundly influenced my work. Returning now, after a hiatus, to my dissertation and book project, on forms of abstraction and their history through language, literature, the economy and society, what I find most inspiring about the project is this contradictory doubleness of historical and theoretical perspective. If abstraction today is a dirty word in the literary humanities, which instead everywhere emphasizes materiality, concreteness, and specificity; then, paradoxically, what we most need is to apply the very forms of technologies of abstraction we are repressing in order to uncover the history of that repression. These technologies have revealed that the history of abstract language has a literary history: from the Romantics through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, poetry, fiction, and drama
have descended steadily into a thicker, more concrete diction, and eventually drag down with them extra-literary or non-fictional genres like biographies and magazine profiles. That our literary sensibility of physicalized, bodily experience, inherited in our own discipline, has a history which can be revealed only by its own opposite, remains for me the guiding light of my work—and a direct result of the Re:Enlightenment exchanges.