Absence of knowledge // Developer: Pete de Bolla
What is discovered in knowledge work and thus known as not known. See also wandering, wrestle above. Fundamental state of knowledge in a Re:Enlightenment mode.
Accounting For // Developer: Tony Jarrells
“Accounting for” is the phrase I turn to when I want to make a move from description to explanation. So, if I identify and describe a particular tension within, say, a text, I then try to account for this tension either by finding internal evidence that helps to explain it or by moving to another register, domain, or discipline (such as history) to find another means of explanation. The word “context” feels like the more obvious one to use here. But “accounting for” nods to a potential context while also signaling the move from description to explanation, text to beyond-text.
Archives // Developer: Rachael Scarborough King
The Re:Enlightenment Project has developed an archive of its own work that it draws on as texts for study and further knowledge production. Many members of the project also employ archival research in their own work or theorize the concept of archives. But project members have expressed discomfort with producing work that will simply be “archived” rather than continuing to be used and discussed. The Re:Enlightenment project archive represents both the successes and sticking points of our ongoing work.
Bother // Developer: Lisa Gitelman
I’m thinking of Seth’s “workshop” entry but of others as well. Seth introduces bother as a term, and I take this in the sense of detecting that which rankles, a kind of case-finding sniffer tool, perhaps, an oyster speaking to some grain of sand, or what in my slightly more upbeat moments I call simple gee-whizzery.
Certainty // Developer: Mark Algee-Hewitt
a) While many of the workshops reject the possibility of absolute certainty (that is, the possibility of generating a complete system of knowledge or the “right” explanation), certainty remains an important tool in the process of refining explanations. Whether following Kuhn’s or Popper’s theory, scientific advancement relies on the certainty of error. That is, when we are certain that our explanations (or theories) no longer fit the available facts, then, within a scientific framework, we are forced to discard them, despite their aesthetic or intellectual value, in favor of deriving new explanations that fit the data that we have. In this sense, certainty of error becomes the driving force of change in knowledge systems. While this kind of “negative certainty” (the certainty of being wrong) suggests an opposition to the ways in which we think about certainty in relation to knowledge, both still require confidence in the relationship between theory and fact. Declaring that this theory is wrong, or this explanation is insufficient requires a certainty about both the data and the theory that demonstrates the importance of this tool for the ways in which many of the workshops are invested in the creation of knowledge through the scientific process.
Example from the workshops that use the tool of certainty in this sense:
Dorian: “It doesn’t matter that the term was in use in the 18th century; nor does it matter that many scientists and philosophers of the past 400 years have believed that they were deriving knowledge from experience. They were all simply wrong about the actual nature of their work.”
b) Certainty as epistemological uncertainty. In contrast to the tool of negative certainty, other workshops are rooted in the idea that any kind of certainty is impossible. Just as Kurt Gödel showed that no formal system can demonstrate its own consistency, so too do many of our knowledge systems reject the possibility that we can be certain about either the rightness or wrongness of our theories and instead seek different grounds on which to compare competing ideas. Such platforms are not always invested purely in relativism and the idea that all knowledge is relational and situational; rather, they call into question not just our explanations, but the underlying logic through which any explanation can be formed. The tool of uncertainty (or certain uncertainty) allows us to shift the grounds of our process away from a positivistic advancement of knowledge through, for example, continual falsification, to a potentially more fertile set of criteria along which our theories can be compared.
Examples from the workshops that use the tool of certainty in this sense:
Johanna: “…consider all received knowledge with skepticism.”
Seth: “I’m a perpetually frustrated comprehensive completionist–even when playing video games. I wrote an article about that, too.”
Debapriya: “The book argues that writers negotiate the loss of epistemological certainty by marshalling the knowledge-making potential of poesie”
Connectivity // Developer: Leslie Santee Siskin
Connectivity is a Re:Enlightenment touchstone, an element identified early on and kept as central to the whole Re: project.
But it is also a tool, a practice. . perhaps a skill.
- Finding, or designing ways to connect people in joint work within groups or teams (Mark, Pete, Leslie), or
- ‘experimenting’ and ‘navigating’ to find connections, complementary ideas, or even shared values across disciplinary divisions, subdivisions, and worlds (Aaron, Mike, Geoff, Tony), or
- challenging, cross checking, and bringing constructive skepticism (Murray, Paul, Johanna).
This does not happen automatically, or even easily. It requires intention, and protocols?
Complete knowledge // Developer: Pete de Bolla
Knowledge that is finished, done with. See absence of knowledge (below)
Desk/Desktop // Developer: Helge Jordheim
Reading through the workshops, I was struck by how many of the methods statements that thought about working surfaces: workbench (Mike Hill), lab table (Mark), writing desk (Lisa) – probably prompted by Cliff’s use of the term “workshop” in the first place.
Perceived as a tool, the desktop is a space, on which – or may be rather in which – we organize objects, tools, and inscription devices. I guess the choice between on and in has to do with the desk as a two- or three-dimensional space and eventually the shift from a physical to a virtual desktop.
Anyway, when we think about our tools and their relationship to our objects of study, we should also think about the two-, three-, or indeed four-dimensional space, into which we place these tools and objects. This space is a tool in its own right. Does it have pre-given structure (objects of investigation to the left, writing tools to the right), or is it completely contingent (stuff stacking up after use). What do we keep within reach? What do we place in front of our eyes? Is it a one-person desk, located along a wall or a window, or more communal, even round one, with chairs for more people? Depending on the tasks we want to perform, we can furnish and arrange this space in different ways. In the moment we shift into a virtual environment, we have other possibilities of arranging our desktops, but may be also other limitations. For my own part, the ways I arrange my desk have everything to do with what I write and how I write. Maybe others have similar experiences.
Disciplinary envelope // Developer: Pete de Bolla
Formulation of the nature of knowledge in a Re:Enligthenment mode that seeks to exploit its material affordances: envelopes commonly have addresses, contain material (paper) that may be folded, are a means for efficient transmission of their contents. See also frame, site.
Discipline. -inter, -de, -re // Developer: Mike Hill
As a long-standing keyword and constant source of consternation, I propose we continue thinking disciplines are useful tools. But the problem can be reframed this way: In the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries disciplines took on their modern conception. The hard and soft sciences parted ways; fiction became both distanced and distinct from empirical knowledge; and print canaled creative from objective kinds of work. Most of us know the history of disciplinary difference, and many are reminded to tread lightly moving between and within disciplines. Here I think about entering my home-building on one side of campus, the “HUMANITIES”; while skirting the other buildings far away, the ones with “SCIENCE” emblazoned overhead.
More recently, inter-disciplinarity gave over to a moment of moderate epistemic promiscuity. This was a time when some were comfortable enough on home turf while trespassing just a little on a different discipline nearby. History, for example, made its “new” debut in English departments during this phase of inter-disciplinary work. Film, identity, and non-canonical Literary writing entered the scene at this moment too. But the disciplines themselves failed to evolve.
At a third moment, when “culture” was the rage, disciplinarity was all but entirely demoted. From disciplines, to inter-disciplinarity, to this latest de-disciplinary phase, new a form of freedom adhering to no method in-particular provided one more way to work. But the de-disciplinary free-for-all emerging turned out to be neither as “free” as we’d hoped (what the heck is culture, anyway, once cut from its ecological roots?) nor as “all” encompassing as we’d come to congratulate ourselves for imagining (how come nobody prepared for the great contraction in humanities jobs in higher education?).
Is it possible for us to think about what tools may be useful in a re-disciplinary context? Re-disciplinarity might promise the crossing over from, and finally beyond, one’s old discipline into a new one where some tools are abandoned, and others leaned anew. If we think about disciplines as categories done up in brick-and-mortar, genres not just with walls but also doors, what might we have in naming a new knowledge category? What tools might we want within it? What tools will we leave behind? I suspect the answers to these questions have something to do with the learning techniques disciplines exclude from each other, but also a possibility traceable in this very act of exclusion. New tools replacing old ones subsume the shrinking disciplines into bigger, better, and well-funded ones. (For me lately, this means trespassing into the College of Emergency Preparedness; as well as The Institute for Health and Environment.).
Fielding’s awkward term for the novel before “novel” came to mean what it does brings to mind the problem of re-disciplinarity: “a comic epic poem in prose.” Lots of residual parts are being put together here, and clearly something not yet named is trying hard to emerge. Like Fielding’s naming problem, going back, and going forward, what name would the re-disciplined disciplines have, once examined side-by-side (the inter– phase), parted out (the moment of the de-), and (one can hope) re-combined? The goal of re-disciplining is to move from difference to cooperation.
Overlap with the following workshops:
Geoff “moving freely between Lucretius and modern thermodynamics.”
John B. “writing on fiction in early science and in the novel.”
Peter avoiding the “of ‘knowledge’ is relative” impasse.
Aaron and Ryan “intentionally experiment with other [disciplinary] paradigms.”
Mike being “a Professor-of-English-when-English-is-gone.”
Tony seeking “hybridization.”
Murray naming how “knowledge rests on frames and frames on exclusions.”
Leslie “concentrating on anticipated, hypothesized regularities…across departments.”
Cliff conceptualizing genre as “already mixed,” having “ratios of continuity and discontinuity,” and providing opening as well as closings”
Dynamic network of knowledge production // Developer: Pete de Bolla
In a Re:Enlightenment mode the network itself is dynamic, and thus emergent. This entails the production of new sites of and for knowledge which may discount prior sites as one pays attention (see below) to new configurations (networks). This necessarily involves wandering and the discovery of the absence of knowledge (see below). See also error correction.
Embodied/Epistemic Mediation // Developer: John Regan
I have an idea for an ‘enabling restraint’ that came to mind when reading John Seberger’s workshop notes. I want briefly to explain my thinking about it, before laying out its steps. Thanks to John for discussing this with me and sharing an article which I will cite below.
I have been reading about multimodality, in which domain the phrase ‘modal affordance’ refers to how particular modes of expression or understanding produce particular types of knowledge or experiences.
For example, an investigation of the visual culture of Athens in 1934 in video form, will bring particular affordances, where a written essay on the same topic might provide others (although these may of course overlap). An Instagram post about public health will afford certain ways thinking and doing, where a government white paper on the same topic, will afford others.
I think this awareness is related (although different) to studies in what is sometimes referred to as ‘material culture’. An example might be the price of paper in the eighteenth century, the tactility of types of writing implements, how books and pamphlets were made and disseminated physically; how these material factors were determining with relation to concepts such as ‘the novel’ or ‘the literary’, or ‘polish’ or ‘rudeness’ in the late century.
But in the recognition of the importance of material factors, I do sometimes worry that the structures of knowledge which are agential in our lives, do not receive adequate scrutiny. Instead of accepting unreflectingly that material circumstances play a role in cognition, (which I think they do, by the way), my protocol would keep in play a more discrete sense of the physical realities of modes of expression on the one hand, and epistemic structures that shape our knowledge and our experiences on the other.
Of course physical and epistemic structures interact but I think it would be a good use of time to think of them as distinct things, at least for a while. To phrase this another way, I think it would be useful for me (and maybe others) to routinely note how material structures such as ‘the smart phone’ afford things that are not necessarily the same thing as ‘the concept of social media’. The protocol, as I will write below, would be to articulate some aspects of the material thing, but also of the epistemic structure which is sometimes elided with it.
Epistemic structures jostle and interact with things in the world. We interact with collectively-produced epistemic structures, practices, traditions, institutions and norms, which have no physicality as such, but which are nonetheless absolutely agential in our lives. The smart phone has a structure and it is importantly different to the episteme ‘social media’.
Another example is ‘role playing game’. The epistemic structure ‘role playing game’ is not necessarily the same thing as the experience of playing a role playing game: the two may be in opaque relation to one another. The game will likely involve some level of physical interaction in order to control the avatar, and the player will have certain sensory experiences whilst playing. These are aspects of the physical embodiment of the mode. However, both designer and player are being influenced by non-physical mediatory forms: traditions of knowledge that have structure and are agential. A role-playing game is an episteme freighted with a massive, popular history of tropes and expectations. It contains traditions and practices that have an agency. They are no less real for not having a necessary physical instantiation.
My proposed protocol or ‘tool’, then, is a way of thinking:
Think about both the embodied and epistemic mediations of your experience and knowledge by anything that you do. By ‘chart’ I mean try to lay out the physical, thing-ish aspects of one of your modes of expression (Discussing something in a window-less room? Having a zoom discussion with numerous other people? Writing an article? Making food? Tinkering?). Then try to articulate the epistemic frameworks which are also in play in this activity.
I am interested to see if there are disjunctures between the structures being articulated. Perhaps, for example, one’s activity might be physically very basic but the epistemological traditions and structures practices involved may be highly wrought or sophisticated (or vice versa).
Error // Developer: Pete de Bolla
Move in an information system which causes it to malfunction. Useful tool for exposing the constructedness of knowledge.
Frame // Developer: Pete de Bolla
Discernable outline that indicates scope of a knowledge claim (see knowledge domain above) thereby exposing its limitations.
The Genealogical Tool // Developer: William Warner
I am not going to repeat what I’ve already said in our Workshop section about my reason for valuing the practice of genealogy for the way it captures the variety, the contingency, and the surprising turns that are part of history. In my current work on the way the university is being transformed in our own time, I’ve traced some of the paths by which the early university, which committed itself to the perfection and teaching of Christian doctrine, was given a new purpose in the 19th century as an institution committed to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge. Now there are rumblings of a new change in the university’s mission. In studying this change, I’ve been inspired by a passage from Nietzsche quoted in an essay that Foucault wrote on the genealogical method:
“[T]he cause of an origin of a thing and it’s eventually utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated.” (The Genealogy of Morals, II: 12)
Going too far ‘afield’ // Developer: Pete de Bolla
Practice of discerning where a team would lose cohesiveness, thus a process of testing the frame (see above). Needs to be combined with other processes: see wrestle, wandering, merge, error.
Irreverence // Developer: Johanna Drucker
This is a tool that shakes things up, pulls the ground out from under the self-serious and stable practitioner and their self-assured practice. Irreverence is the capacity to refuse seriousness as a premise, to recognize the impossibility of authority as absolute, and to engage with the profound energies of levity as a lubricant to thought. Glib and slick, deft and mischievous, irreverence annoys the sanctimonious and plagues the smug with the dismissal of the premises on which their authoritative approach to knowledge is based. Irreverence suggests a levelling of authority to a diverse field of unequal players and positions none of which can ever succeed in establishing a final hierarchy of judgment since the basis on which a single standard might operate is mooted by the rejection of the grounds on which such judgment might be taken seriously. In other words, irreverence is play and play is movement within a system that allows it to articulate—and without this mobile articulation, nothing can be made anew or created, only repeated. Intellectual repetition is death by dullness, the slow downward halting of creative imagination. Irreverence is a flywheel that sparks intellectual activity even as it drives so many serious persons crazy with frustration and annoyance in the process.
Knowledge domain // Developer: Pete de Bolla
Where knowledge imagines itself to be at home so as to recognize itself as knowledge, and thus inherently self-reflexive.
Knowledge zone // Developer: Pete de Bolla
Zone: state of mind most commonly produced by repetitive action for which one no longer needs to pay attention (see above). Often associated with very high skill achievement (see sport, musical performance). See also thinking through. Zone: area in a geographical array (a city, a continent) that can be legibly discerned from the total array (see frame), often used in representations of such geographical arrays (see London Tube map). Cashes in on the economic implications (movement across zones is calibrated according to price), hence knowledge zone implies that there is a cost related to movement from one zone to another.
Latent exchange // Developer: Pete de Bolla
Process of introducing different sites of knowledge to each other. Forms of such introduction include posting something, marshalling some things. See also merge, disciplinary envelope, knowledge zone.
Marshall // Developer: Pete de Bolla
Process of siting knowledge in a domain. Needs to be combined with counter-strategies, see Re:Enlightenment concordance.
Merge // Developer: Pete de Bolla
A process of knowledge formation that is inherently fuzzy (see also fuzzy concepts).
Network // Developer: Mark Algee-Hewitt
a) In the social sense, networks are the tools that make collaboration possible. Networks provide a framework for the connections that we make, whether collegial or intellectual (or both), and, as such, they enable our ability to work together. Not only do networks allow us to understand our own place within the complex web of interactions in terms of who we are connected to, but they also make legible the various roles that members of the network fill. When putting together a collaborative project, whether in my own workshop, or participating in others, the network is crucial for identifying who I may know who has the skills and interests to complement my own investments. Only by understanding my various connections as an integrated whole can I begin to effectively collaborative with a large group of fellow scholars. To the extent that the Re:Enlightenment group itself is a tool of knowledge production, it functions largely as a network.
Examples from the workshops that use the tool of network in this sense:
Yohei: “My ways of knowing also include two individuals with whom I bounce off ideas and share nearly all of my half-baked thoughts and writing.”
Helge: “Finally, and may be most importantly, my workshop is full of people. Over the years, different grants have enabled me to build a group of some 10-15 people, who in different ways are engaged with this knowledge work, going at it from different angles and with widely different empirical and historical starting points.”
Leslie: “…because these tend to be somewhat large projects, and ‘mixed-methods’, that usually means bringing together a team of researchers, with different (one hopes complementary and collaborative) skills in their own tool kits.”
Cliff: “We collaborate. How best to do that is the ongoing agenda of the virtual meetings we have convened over the past year.”
Seth: “…To follow the workshop metaphor (with a nod towards Samuel Johnson), I can scold a bad carpenter and make my own table, but if I want to build a house I’m going to need help.”
b) While it frequently describes a social formation, networks themselves as mathematical objects are an invaluable tool of modeling. By visualizing connections between disparate points, network graphs provide a legible but mathematically robust representation of a collection of data organized by its internal connections. In this sense, networks can be both intuitive and highly flexible, connecting points that represent everything from abstract ideas, to points on a map, to embodied individuals. Networks are a tool that must be used carefully (for example, recent research has demonstrated the effectiveness of network analysis for uncovering both conspiracies and revolutionary movements simply by analyzing the connections of known members of both), but in our workshops they can offer both a compelling visualization, as well as a model of the system that we can use to experiment on or test various parts in relation to the whole. While they can misrepresent connections or give a false impression of the strength or weakness of various edges within the network, when used with appropriate caution, they are invaluable tool for discussing the production of knowledge.
Examples of workshops that use the tool of network in this sense:
Seth: counting things by hand, consulting with statisticians, playing around with
Gephi, wondering to what extent Mark is secretly bemused when I say “playing around with Gephi.”
The Northwest Passage Tool (see the Bowker Workshop) // Developer: Clifford Siskin
Re:Enlightenment is an adventure in knowledge to which the Northwest Passage is a guide. The first
challenge is epistemological optimism: the conviction that we can get there from here because all
problems are soluble. In its temporal version, that journey is the first Re:Enlightenment touchstone:
how do we move between past and present–and back again?
The Northwest twist is that there’s no permanent route to chart. In the short term ice floes shift; in the long term continents move and climate changes. Just as the route shifts, so do the things it links.
Re:Enlightenment’s second touchstone is connectivities. Here, too, the lessons of the Passage apply. In the effort to link West to East the nature of both change, precluding some connections and enabling others. And what enables the whole enterprise is Re:Enlightenment’s third touchstone: mediating technologies. The history of the Northwest Passage is a tale of tools told to the sound of ice cracking wooden hulls, a tale of how and why new knowledge matters.
Observation // Developer: Leslie Santee Siskin
A tool used in different fields (science, anthropology, sociology), observation emerges in several of our workshops in what might be a distinctively re:tooled way—or two.
Mark refers to visualization, and to “pieces of permanent material technology visible in the snapshot [] engineered for visualization: the screen on one wall, and the whiteboard on the other” in the production of knowledge, John B to art images and to the visual about which knowledge can be produced. Ryan gives us images of alchemists’ workshops, visualizations of a past way of working which can inspire in present and future. Helge has shared maps and trees—visualizations and representations of knowledge itself. And Kim takes us to essential questions about the ‘object’ of study, starting with (but not limited to)–what does it look like. In all of these ways, Re: taps into diverse past practices of knowledge production, and may have mixed (bricolaged?) a newly useful tool for the production of knowledge.
Observation can also be a key aspiration for the knowledge that is produced—here Kim talks of exhibition, and ‘how to make it for others to see.’ Helge’s maps and trees, the network analyses, many of our graphs and charts are data visualizations designed to provoke informed or understanding observation from others.
Play // Developer: Gretchen Woertend
Playing as a tool for foregrounding the creative arc so important to intellectual work, knowledge production, engaging others in re-creating, and seducing in order to activate curiosity and collaboration.
Reading to Teach // Developer: Tony Jarrells
For the most part I try to read carefully whatever the context. But I’ve noticed that when I read something I have to teach I read differently – not necessarily more carefully, I don’t think, but with an eye to communicating the structure of a given piece to others, whether it be a critical argument, a novel, a poem, or an essay. As a way to try to better understand how and why I read this way when I read something I have to teach, I am trying to write as if I am teaching something I just read (to teach). See also explanation and description.
Re-Enlightenment Concordance // Developer: Pete de Bolla
A structure of information that is emergent, and hence disobeys the fundamental rule of its type: organisation of heads alphabetically.
Regulative Ideal // Developer: Aaron Hanlon
The conventional philosophical distinction between the nouns ‘method’ and ‘methodology’ goes something like this: ‘method’ is a tool or behavior, while ‘methodology’ is a theoretical or analytical framework. Both of these terms describe what knowledge workers do, and have value as such. But both would better serve explanation if we make a distinction between ‘method’ as a descriptive term (what do people do?) and ‘methodology’ not as any rationale or theoretical framework, but a rational or theoretical framework guided by a regulative ideal. A regulative ideal is a framework for progressive knowledge that guides method and methodology by outlining the conditions under which we can say knowledge has progressed or an explanation has improved.
Repeat // Developer: Pete de Bolla
Process of knowledge inquiry that exposes the error of reiteration (see error below)
Retrospective understanding // Developer: Pete de Bolla
The discovery of where one is through inspection of where one was. See wandering.
Scaling // Developer: Geoff Bowker
Scale shifting is always a rich exercise. ‘Memory’ was thought of as occurring in the brain until Bartlett, Neisser and others shifted out and discovered that it was equally a social phenomenon. Scaling gets you beyond great divides: equally ‘cognition’ was once trapped in the skull but is now often thought of in terms of the 4 Es (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended). And how much richer is Richard Lewontin’s triple helix (genes, organisms, environment) than Dawkin’s selfish gene? Equally, it is becoming abundantly clear that tiny mycorrhizal networks undergird the heatlh of huge forests – see the wonderful mapping effort at The Society for the Protection of the Underground. The semiotic tools of upshifting and downshifting discourse generates new insights. And scale itself has its own laws, as Geoffrey West illustrated in his book on Scale: motorways and cul de sacs follow the same scaling laws as blood flow within organisms. When in doubt, scale!
Skepticism // Developer: Johanna Drucker
Skepticism is a goad, a prod, towards intellectual discomfort with any received information, knowledge, or tradition. The skeptic meets all formulated discourse with questions that suggest some other way of thinking must and might prevail. Whatever is already known, constituted as an accepted construct, has to be limited by that very condition since it is a human formulation from within the limitations of historical perspective and cultural circumstance. The only solid ground for knowledge is the shifting one that recognizes whatever is known is, as Vico suggested, what can be known through existing paradigms. That means the paradigms will shift and change. Our understanding, always from an “inner standing point”—collective as well as individual—evolves through emerging continua and also jumps and starts, the ruptures and breaks of intellectual traditions that mark change. Progress is not essential as a notion in this formulation, only difference, the distinction of one phase of knowledge from another. But the tool of skepticism is in its refusal to accept any knowledge formulation as a given. Everything, the skeptic suggests, is up for question.
Stuff // Developer: Pete de Bolla
Categorisation that deliberately maintains fuzziness (see merge above).
Synthesis // Developer: Mark Algee-Hewitt
a) As a form of combination that includes the notion of transformation, the tool of synthesis runs throughout many of the workshops that we proposed. Linked to the final movement of a dialectic (although more capacious in the way that I am trying to describe it), synthesis moves beyond simple additive mixture as the constituent parts are significantly and unrecoverably changed through their combination. When, for example, Dorian conducts an orchestra, the resulting sound is not simply the combination of the individual instruments: rather, the harmonics and resonances that result from the proximity of the instruments to each other produce sounds that are more than the sum of their individual parts. In the same way, our blend of disciplinary skills and knowledge production strategies require an assemblage of parts that, when they work, fundamentally transform the work of the individual components into a synthetic whole. My own practice of Cultural Analytics/Digital Humanities lies at the intersection of literary criticism, computer science, statistics, and design (among other fields), but the resulting mixture cannot be disassembled into its individual disciplinary components as all have been altered in proximity to each other. A constant theme of the workshops is the way in which bringing together disparate parts to create a new whole (whether a new form of knowledge production, or a new experiment) works through synthesis.
Examples from the workshops that use the tool of synthesis in this sense:
Pete: “This is to note that when working in the kitchen it is vital that all one’s sensory abilities are attuned to the making practice: a good cook must be able to feel, smell, see, listen as well as taste with considerable acuity.”
Ryan: “… with the greatest anticipation I would re-heat and re-mix a few hundred novel .txt files over and over in strange vases and scripts.”
Tony: “The goal, loosely, is to bring together faculty from all over campus to ask […] how value and / or values are conceived of and theorized across different disciplines”
Seth: “In the past, that has meant venturing beyond what I thought were or would be my areas of expertise and more see-what-happens, trial-and-error experiments”
b) Synthesis as in the creation of synthetic objects, which are artificial, imitative, and yet crucial to the work that we do. Although we have arrived at a cultural moment at which the suspicion of the “synthetic” (for both environmental and aesthetic reasons) has become the norm, it remains a crucial tool for knowledge production. Thought experiments, for example, rely on synthetic interactions for their predictive power and when we create theories or abstractions, which many workshops point toward as a critical step in producing better explanations, we are producing artificial knowledge objects that offer a comprehensible proxy for the complex systems that they stand in for. In this sense, much of the knowledge work of the humanities relies on the synthesis of new, imitative, mental objects.
Examples from the workshops that use the tool of synthesis in this sense:
Dorian: “The antidote: become comfortable with ideas and explanations that cannot be observed, yet which can be the subjects of criticism and conjecture.”
Helge: “The other kind of words are concepts, like “progress” or “crisis”, that are used to assemble and align innumerous events and experiences into one temporal form, either a progressive developmental line or a sudden, immediate disruptive change, even the end of the world as we know it.”
Aaron: “‘All philosophical systems…are mere inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phenomena of nature.’ —Adam Smith”
Thinking through // Developer: Pete de Bolla
The process of removing the process of thinking.
To pay attention // Developer: Pete de Bolla
A protocol for knowledge work that acknowledges the cost of such work.
To pick up // Developer: Peter de Bolla
Type of knowledge work that misdirects in proportion to the satisfaction it creates in the knowledge worker.
Universities // Developer: Mike Hill
If we consider the University as a tool, or at least, a way of organizing, evaluating,
conserving old and discovering new knowledge, then what can we say about how new tools
challenge the life span of the University? Why no new Universities? Re. Enlightenment
functions nicely (but still provisionally and only occasionally) as an alternative workspace. We
are bringing together knowledge workers from far and wide–intuitionally, geographically, and
professionally. For most of us, I venture, our time together is not a centralized part of what we
do in our home space. How else to explain all the “alt.university” terms popping-up in the place
of disciplines: labs, zones, abodes, conceptual architectures, field-flows, properties, subjects,
continents, infrastructures, not to mention the term workshop itself. Would new tools require a
new institution? What kind of knowledge does Re.E produce, and how do we get its name on a
building?
Overlap with the following workshops:
Mark using “collaborative technologies of communication, facilitating a sharing of
knowledge within a collective space.”
Peter looking to share (?) “a common unshareable.”
Helge recording how “time operates, across disciplines.”
Seth witnessing the “perpetual crisis in the humanities and our endless arguments about
it.”
Leslie highlighting how tools “refract horizontally across contexts and disciplines.”
Cliff searching for an alternative working space to the universities, museums,
knowledge zones, and departments that are our primary abodes.
Gretchen noting the “experience of loss.”
Wandering // Developer: Pete de Bolla
The practice of finding where one has been, not where one is.
Wrestle // Developer: Pete de Bolla
Type of knowledge work that utilises disappointment or unsatisfying conclusions as a motor for further knowledge work. Repeat. Expose impossibility of reiteration. Thorn in the side of models of knowledge production that assume reiteration is possible (some models of machine learning).
Writing // Developer: Gretchen Woertend
I write, am a writer, and writing is my primary tool of knowledge production – even beyond reading, teaching, listening to lectures, podcasts, etc. I know, produce, circulate, revise, imagine, through writing.