he following are *very* rough notes squeezed from a brain with roughly the same consistency as the pureed everything we’ve been trying to cram into the baby, with, in both cases, mixed results.
I have been aware of or attached to the Re:Enlightenment project since staffing its foundational conference as a graduate student in 2007. Iterative self-definition has been part of the project and process of Re:Enlightenment since its inception; as members have cycled in and out and exchanges have added new layers, the group has considered, or considered considering itself, an unconference, an incubator, an organism, a platform, and now an operating system. Re:Enlightenment has thus become a kind of palimpsest the re-reading and re-writing of which often recalls to my mind Wordsworth’s description in the Prelude of “something ever more about to be” and has required me to exercise something akin to Keats’ negative capability.
The above description has a lot of mixed media, metaphors, and periods, and if they have sometimes left me irritably reaching after fact and reason, then they have also shaped my scholarship. Beyond the personal relationships and illuminating individual exchanges, Re:E has as a whole provided one principal question and one practical lesson to which I regularly return, sometimes productively and sometimes in desperation. Both are part of The Ends of Knowledge collection I’m now working on with
Rachael Scarborough King and to which multiple Re:E members are contributing.
(1) The Question: What would Enlightenment look like/what forms would Enlightenment take now?
The Enlightenment (rightly and understandably) has a baby/bathwater problem, and adding insult to injury is that the language–if not the substance–of the values, principles, or concepts its architects professed now too often appears in the mouths of bad actors and malicious agents of disinformation: conspiracy theorists and anti-science propagandists regularly exhort people to “do their own research” and “make up their own minds” in a distorted echo of Kant’s sapere aude and his motto of Enlightenment: “have the courage to use your own understanding.” I have started to think about this as a problem of mediation—one that with the latest election cycle is nearing or has reached a(nother) crisis point. We, or many millions of us (in the US, at least) have come to view many forms of mediation as inherently suspect: “the media,” we are told, are the “enemy of the people” (a phrase itself entangled in the Enlightenment), experts of all stripes are mistrusted, and nothing not seen with one’s own eyes is to be believed. At the same time, however, we are told not to believe what we see and hear and to trust exclusively in our own “chosen” mediators, whether human or algorithmic. We’re awash in anti-knowledge sloshed across all forms of media in an effort to–as (ugh) Steve Bannon put it in a phrase no doubt only accidentally reminiscent of
Pope’s Dunciad and Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower”–“flood the zone with shit.” It’s the Bizarro Enlightenment.
Direct access to “knowledge” is rarely, if ever, achievable at scale. Not every flat-earther can go into orbit, an individual can’t review every ballot, and we can’t all become epidemiologists, microbiologists, or biochemists before taking the coronavirus vaccine so that we’ll reallyunderstand what’s in it or how it works.
Part of the work of Re:Enlightenment must therefore be to remediate mediation. I don’t really know how to do this, or if it can be done, but in the background of the Ends of Knowledgecollection is the hope that by asking the same question to a diverse group whose areas of expertise are vastly different from my own, and whose responses will be aimed at a public unfamiliar with, skeptical of, or devoted to the disciplines and institutions represented, the book will the offer a larger view of knowledge production and some resistance to the idea that, as Shaw wrote (possibly borrowing from Smith), every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.
(2) The Lesson: Dedisciplinarity and Collaboration
At the Mediating Enlightenment event in New York, I was one of a few graduate students in English helping a Professor of English run what I thought of as in essence an English Department conference. Now, the project website features on its home page a dialogue with Peter Atkins, a Fellow of the Royal
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Society of Chemistry, and David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto of the Quantum and Nanotechnology Theory Group at Oxford.
The Exchanges and other initiatives have led me to think of myself as English faculty at a small liberal arts college but also part of a larger university less encumbered by conventional infrastructures, processes, and social dynamics. As was discussed at the first Exchange (NYPL), a department is not a discipline and vice-versa. If the modern university and disciplines emerged from Enlightenment, then Re:Enlightenment has asked me to think beyond my institution and outside my silo. The Ends of Knowledge will feature chapters on (among much else) English, Law, Physics, Forensic Anthropology, AI, Biology, and Activism. The collection is open-ended and its findings highly speculative, and we’re not at all sure yet how or how well it will cohere, but the question it asks is one that, without the example of Re:E, I would not have thought to pursue.