[-empyre-] engineering the university

[Chad Wellmon]

These are direct questions and deep concerns with which I struggle every day, even now as I type away in my office. I’ll address them through two concepts and a historical anecdote. 

First, I’m increasingly thinking of these concerns––what do I write about, what do I teach, and why?––as matters of attention. What do and what ought I pay attention to? To “pay” attention is both metaphor and literal: given our limited, finite conditions, we’ve got a limited supply of attention. I’m a scholar, a husband, a father, a friend, a citizen, a lover, a reader, a writer . . . and each of these social identities and spheres make certain demands of attention. “To pay” attention, as Alan Jacobs puts it, is to engage in an economic exercise: a management and exchange of scarce resources. Within a more traditional university context, disciplines were technologies of attention; they filtered and focused scholarly interests. They tell us what to read and what not to read. They give us traditions to work within and against. So, in a university atmosphere that celebrates inter/cross/trans/post disciplinarity what technologies would aid our attention, focus our thought, filter our reading? And I haven’t even mentioned the lure of Twitter and the lust it evokes in me to think and write about any and everything.

Second, I’m increasingly thinking of these concerns in terms of temporality. To attend appropriately––I do think we ought to embrace various forms of attention and not fetishize “deep” or “immersive” forms as the only possible or apposite ones––requires time. The economy of attention is one of desire, energy, love, and, yes, time. Since its emergence the research university has been a bastion of many things, good and bad, but it has regularly been a bastion of different form of temporality; it has organized itself according to a distinct sense of time, telos, and history. It has at different points mediated between the demands of a pure pursuit of truth (knowledge for knowledge sake types of arguments) and the demands of social and political utility, be it in the forms of economic utility or social justice. When Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote of the university, he described it as a “medium”––that which was in between the demands of the state and the demands of science (Wissenbchaft). It was not reducible to either but was a space that ought, to his mind, struggle to embody and make possible forms of thought and imagination that flourished in distinct rhythms, ones not immediately or necessarily in line with political exigency, social justice, or eternal truth seeking. 

Just before Nietzsche left the academy, he railed against the emergence of "Grosswissenschaft” or big science, what we might call the first instance of ‘big humanities.’ He was talking about the new practices of philology pioneered by the great classicist Theodor Mommsen. As secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Mommsen introduced an entirely new way of practicing and conceiving of science. He wanted to create the archive of the past and that required dozens of scholars working across Europe. And it also required a severe division of labor. No one scholar knew exactly what the whole looked like. They just collected their documents, their inscriptions, their bits of the archive and sent them to Berlin, where Mommsen oversaw the entire process. Nietzsche worried that these practices fostered intellectual alienation because they separated individual scholars from the ends of their labor and one another. It introduced a truncated vision of scholarly attention––focus only on your particular slice of the world––and an industrial temporality. The university, he lamented, was quickly becoming an extension of modern capital. Nietzsche, of course, left the academy. 


Chad Wellmon
Associate Professor of German Studies
University of Virginia
chadwellmon.com <http://chadwellmon.com/>

Author, Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University <https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/organizing-enlightenment>




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