[-empyre-] Engineering the University - Closing Week Two

[Hamilton, Kevin]

Chad, Ned and all,

I'm so grateful for the span of ideas and scales that came up this week
through Ned and Chad's exchange. I heard in it some important insistence
on the co-presence of several lines of thought sometimes left
over-delineated and organized into disparate domains.

Through Ned's prompts Chad led us to examine how claims to "newness" in
the form of crisis or abundance impact both the conditions of our work
(the imagined shape of knowledge accrued, or not yet discovered) and the
ways we orient our bodies within those conditions (the tasks that bind our
attention). In inviting us to see the university as the medium wherein we
engage knowledge of a particular scale through unique temporal habits,
Chad challenges our tendencies - as did Mimi last week - to fall back on
structuralist critique of our institutions.

We see in stories at University of Virginia and here at Illinois where the
consequences of reliance on structuralist analysis are social and ethical
- we stand to end up divided from one another, from the world, and from
our bodies, with little to stand on in debates over such matters as
academic freedom (a topic Fish has taken on directly). In place of, or
next to, structural critique, Chad asks questions about what we desire,
alone and together.

Given that we've been talking about Enlightenment, it's probably no
accident that we find ourselves here in a picture resonant with much
de-colonial or post-secular critique, which consistently shift attention
back to desire, bodies, and values over structure and causation logics. In
struggling to get out of what seemed some lock-tight traps here at
Illinois of approaching our own debates over academic freedom, for
example, I found some respite in the work of Talal Asad, who in discussing
free speech and blasphemy calls out the often unacknowledged constraints
on which differing freedoms depend. (More here if you're curious :
http://medium.com/@complexfields/avoiding-the-issues-48022e77bd3f)

I find in Asad's work some more helpful paths to addressing institution as
"medium." Asad, like Murat in his questions to us, rightly identifies that
where religions and the state intersect is often one of the best places to
understand the shape of our current states. (I think, Murat, that Chad's
reference to Humboldt there wasn't so much a statement of expectation that
universities would always respect the state, but that in universities one
might always be addressing or even producing state demands through the
mediation or modulation of contingent discovery and fixed norms.)

I'll be back later today to introduce this week's turn of the topic. But
for now, I wanted to warmly thank Ned and Chad for their generosity, and
the important markers laid for future conversations, praxis, and design.

- Kevin Hamilton