[-empyre-] engineering the university

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

"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)."

Chad, given that quote, what do you think of Madrasas?

Murat

On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 9:36 AM, Chad Wellmon <mcw9d at virginia.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
>
> 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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