Hello.
Hi, everyone.
Welcome.
I think we're ready
to get started.
My name is Justin Stern.
I'm a second year PhD
student here at the GST.
And I'm joined at the podium
by my colleagues, Adam Tanaka
and Marianne Potvin.
And we are the co-chairs
for this week's events.
On behalf of the entire doctoral
program in Architecture,
Landscape Architecture,
and Urban Planning,
we would like to welcome
you to the keynote lecture
for the ninth
installment of Cambridge
Talks, the annual spring
conference organized
by our department.
In the interest of time,
we'll save our thank yous
for tomorrow morning, and
there are many thank yous.
But I do want to extend our
appreciation to the director
of our program, Erika Naginski,
for her generous support
throughout the
planning of this event.
Thank you, Erika.
[APPLAUSE]
This year's
conference is entitled
"Inscriptions of Power, Spaces,
Institutions, and Crisis."
Our primary question is,
how is institutional power
manifest in the
built environment,
and how does it shape
modes of academic discourse
and professional practice?
Tonight and tomorrow,
we will explore
some of the complex ways in
which space has been imagined
as well as actualized by
the design disciplines
in different
institutional entities.
We have three very
exciting sessions tomorrow.
The first, entitled "The
Disciplinary Expectations
of Scale," includes
presentations
by Eve Blau, Mark Jarzombek,
Preston Scott Cohen,
and Vittoria Di Palma, and will
be moderated by Dean Mostafavi.
It will be in Piper
from 9:30 to 12:30 PM.
And our second panel, "The
Spaces of Institutions,"
features presentations by Elihu
Rubin, David Theodore, Jesus
Escobar, and Brian
Goldstein, and will
be moderated by Jana Cephas.
That will be from 1:30
to 3:45, also in Piper.
And we will conclude
the day tomorrow
with a roundtable
discussion featuring
Reinhold Martin and Erika
Naginski conversation.
We warmly invite you to
join us in Piper tomorrow.
Before moving on
to the lecture, we
feel the need to acknowledge the
tragic events that took place
at Garissa University
in Kenya today,
where nearly 150 people--
students, professors,
administrators,
and support staff--
were senselessly murdered.
While this puts a
dark cloud on the day,
it also reminds us
of the significance
of the university as
a symbolic institution
and a site of crucial
intellectual exchange.
To introduce Reinhold
Martin, I would
like to invite to the
podium Edward Eigen,
Associate Professor
of Architecture
and Landscape
Architecture at the GSD.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.
I wish to thank the
organizers, and in some way
in particular Adam Tanaka,
who I met on his first day
as an undergraduate
and have been following
with much admiration since.
But I want to thank the
organizers of Cambridge Talks
for affording me the
honor of introducing
tonight's keynote speaker of
Reinhold Martin, Professor
of Architecture, in the
Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning, and Preservation
at Columbia University, where
he directs the
Temple Hoyne Buell
Center for the Study of
American Architecture.
He is also co-founder-- founding
co-editor, I should say,
of Grey Room, in which our
own Antoine Picon published
an essay on anxious
landscapes, which
appeared in the
journal's inaugural issue
in the autumn of 2000 now.
I will turn in very
brief order, I promise,
to the problem of introductions,
or what the Cambridge School
historian Quentin Skinner, in
his recent study of forensics,
called "failed beginnings."
But first a preliminary comment
on the discursive setting,
or heading, implied by the title
of this edition of Cambridge
Talks, "Inscriptions of Power."
Inscription, the act and fact
of it, the material reality,
and the asymmetric
moral predicament
it creates between
writers and readers,
precisely in mutually
constituting them,
gains added if not perhaps also
local significance with a talk
delivered this very
afternoon by the sociologist
of the text, Roger
Chartier, as part
of the series "Harvard Library,
Strategic Conversations."
The subject, "Consuming
the Written Word."
The talk itself was followed
by an edible book festival.
Now, about this I can
say coincident but not
necessarily correlate to
the recent neurological turn
in architectural studies, I
would argue a dispeptic one.
The renewed interest in
food waste and gastronomy
at least brings to
mind Nietzsche's sense
of the difficulty of getting,
or rather keeping, things down.
The German mind, he says,
has a case of indigestion.
It never is done with anything.
Thus, in his Inscription
and Erasure of 2005,
Chartier addresses
in most elegant terms
the need to overcome the desire
for inscription and the anxiety
it produces.
The written text is
another anxious landscape,
given to its own forms
of rust and ruin,
as well as persistence
and imperishability.
Chartier juxtaposes the
fear of obliteration
that obsessed societies
of early modern Europe,
an anxiety quelled
by preserving, quote,
"written traces of the past,
remembrances of the dead,
glory of the living,
and texts of all kinds
that were now supposed
to disappear."
But the very success
of this project
threatened its own form
of self-obliteration,
the accumulated
weight of authority.
He says the excess of writing
piled up useless texts
and stifled thought beneath
the weight of accumulating
discourse, creating a
peril no less ominous
than a threat of disappearance.
Obliteration, though dreaded,
was therefore necessary,
just as oblivion is a
condition of memory.
Thus, inscription and erasure.
But that said, it
is not inscription
that gives me pause--
and I use the term here,
advisedly-- even as Cambridge
Talks are set to begin.
It is the curious
appearance of a semicolon
in some of the publicity
for the conference.
It is replacing in
others by a colon--
and I'm referring
to this usage here,
and I refer you to the
poster that's outside--
that either separates or
connects "power" to "spaces,
institutions, and crisis" that
I said gives me pause and raises
some questions in my mind.
Evidently, the substitution
or choice preliminarily
for a semicolon-- for a
colon, that is-- semicolon--
was a matter of design, some
sort of proleptic response
to the stated question,
how does space
bear the mark of
bureaucratic networks,
typological assumptions,
lived experiences?
I will leave it entirely
to Reinhold Martin, who
is uniquely competent in this
regard and in several others
to address the problem
of bureaucratic networks.
As for typological
assumptions, I
assume this refers
to the phenomenon
of punctuation itself.
According to the Keble College,
Oxford Paleographer M.B.
Parkes, in his masterwork
Pause and Effect:
Punctuation in
the West, of 1993,
the primary function
of punctuation
is to, quote, "resolve
structural uncertainties
in a text and to signal a
nuance of semantic significance
which might otherwise
not be conveyed at all."
It's a medium of communication,
though perhaps not explicitly
in the sense of medium in
which Martin refers to it.
Lived experience, the
other stated term here,
is of course a part of this.
Punctuation in part
serves to introduce
pauses for the purpose of
breath into the reading of text
originally understood as the
transcription of spoken words.
But in a more
immediate sense, Parkes
writes that punctuation,
quote, "encourages readers
to import to the process
of interpretation
elements of their own wider
behavioral experience."
This is what he calls the
pragmatics of the text,
and I would argue is in
line with the epigraph
from Henri Lefebvre, which
appears in your conference
proceedings.
In any case, upper or
lower, here of course
is not the place to
get into specifics.
But still, why the semicolon?
Because the colon
was already employed
to separate "Cambridge Talks"
from "Inscriptions of Power"?
Was the a Giulio Romano-like
play of aperiodic symmetries?
He was practicing,
as it happens,
precisely when the
art of punctuation
was being conventionalized.
Was it a fear of too
sharp a distinction
between "Inscriptions of Power"
and "Spaces, Institutions,
and Crises"?
And by the way-- and here
I use a parentheses, which
were amongst the six original
punctuation marks-- including
indicating medial pauses and
other forms of textual incision
and dissection, but rather
is the sense of a comma,
or that of a
clausula-- or a cause
or a phrase-- that together form
a sentence, the term of which
is marked by a
period or punctum--
but as I was saying, now
doubly parenthetically,
why just crisis?
Crisis-- well, either
our work is mostly done
and we have settled upon
if not reconciled ourselves
to the right crisis
to be anxious about,
or we have much work to do
dealing with but one crisis
at a time.
Because in this
school, we're already
speaking about
crises in the plural,
and we love them fondly.
Well, let me say this.
Punctuation in the
most general sense
has to do with
colocation, and this
comes from the Latin
origin to kind of colocate,
to place things
side by side, which
seems to me an eminently
architectural act and feature.
Indeed, the spatial and
sensible arrangement
of meaningful signs-- this
is the act of colocation.
Colocation-- early,
if not perhaps
originally-- had this
architectural implication.
The Frenchman
Pierre de la Ramee,
known to us as Petrus
Ramus, built on the edifice,
as he called it, of the art
of punctuation elaborated
by the Lyon printer
Etienne Dolet
in his Grammaire
Francaise of 1562,
where he insisted not only
the syllogistic essence
of colocation, the
ordering of ideas,
but as his latter-day student
Walter Ong has argued on the,
quote, "drive toward
thinking of thought itself
in terms of spatial models
apprehended by sight."
With that signal
word, apprehension,
which is a form of
anxiety all its own,
let me bring this
to a conclusion,
and especially inasmuch
as what I meant
to offer as an
introduction, a wrapping up,
or what Dolet called the period,
a comprehension of words,
while evoking its
Latin equivalent
catalepsis, an impulse
or active seizure,
or as Glyn P. Norton
writes, "directed
at ideas through the
concrete medium of words."
Punctuation is the form and
structure of comprehension,
of apprehension, of deduction.
It liberates the
meaning of the sentence.
The sentence itself might
sound now more like something
that is handed down
by statute, a term
or expression of judgment,
something to be served.
What I have to briefly or
overindulgently discoursed
upon is not so much a
symptom of power relations
but what grammarians
and rhetors would
have considered questions of
energia, a force or energy,
or the way in which language
actuates a reader's response--
questions of
inscription and erasure.
Brevity is the soul of wit, or
so says Polonius in his report
on the, quote, "true
madness of Hamlet,"
which he cannot help but
self-regardingly embellished
with foolish gestures
of his own making.
In all, as Skinner
notes, a failed beginning
is one marked by drawing
unnecessary attention
to one's own use of language.
The point as it were,
the punctum-- as Cicero,
himself a victim of
a political violence,
would have it-- is to
briefly lay out what matters
are going to be explained.
And that, I imagine,
is the service
of a well-delivered
introduction.
So here I introduce to you
Reinhold Martin, architect,
a scholar, a writer, and
perhaps most conspicuously,
the social conscience
of our field--
indeed, a field which
he early recognized
to be global in its
contours and pitfalls.
The author of the
generation-defining The
Organizational Complex:
Architecture, Media
and Corporate Space,
and Utopia's Ghost,
he is currently working on a
history of the 19th century
American university as a
media complex, a work which
I very keenly anticipate.
So please join me in employing
the punctus admirativus,
or the punctuation
point, whilst we welcome
to the podium Reinhold Martin.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Come back up here.
We should just do
this together, no?
It would be fun.
Well, in many ways,
this is for my friends
and, as was well
said, in solidarity
with our colleagues in Kenya.
So to thank, first of
all, Ed from whom I always
learn a great deal, even
punctually, in this case,
and Erika for the dialogue
that begins now and I think
continues through tomorrow.
And of course, to Adam,
Justin, and Marianne
for bringing us all
here this evening.
Well, it is indeed a great
pleasure and an honor
to be invited to address this
ninth edition of the Cambridge
Talks.
I hope that the direct relevance
of my remarks to the questions
that again Ed
elaborated so well,
that were posed
by the conference,
will quickly become clear.
And in that sense,
I'm going to try
not to detain you for too long.
There are things to do.
But I do ask you to bear
with me through a few steps.
In that spirit, and in honor
of the conference title,
I begin with a quotation.
"Last Thursday, he
walked to Cambridge
and with some tremor he set
off-- to be on the spot at 6:00
in the morning since which I
have heard through others he
passed a very good examination.
He came home on
Saturday pleased to find
he was admitted-- without
being admonished to study,
as was the case with many."
This, as you can see,
was Ruth Emerson,
the mother of Ralph Waldo
Emerson writing on September 1,
1817, to her sister-in-law,
Mary Moody Emerson, who
was a surrogate
parent and teacher
to the young poet-philosopher.
His mother describes the
ordeal of the college entrance
examination.
As she reports, young
Emerson passed the exam
and was admitted to Harvard
College, which by then, 1817,
was also referred to with no
small exaggeration as Harvard
University.
Now, 20 years prior, in 1797,
at around 100 miles away,
a 15-year-old Daniel
Webster traveled alone
to Hanover, New Hampshire,
from his hometown in Salisbury.
Upon arrival, he proceeded
to a house across the street
from Dartmouth Hall, the main
and, indeed at that time,
only building on the grounds
of Dartmouth College.
There he stood before his
examiners in a new suit
that a neighbor had made for the
occasion, the blue dye of which
had begun to run
in the day's rain,
and announced-- this
is Webster, quote,
"Thus you see me as I am, if
not entitled to your approbation
at least to your sympathy."
The oral examination tested
young Webster's ability
to translate English into Latin,
to recite from Virgil, Cicero,
and the Greek testament, and
to perform basic arithmetic.
He passed, barely.
In Discipline and
Punish of 1975,
a text that has justly
influenced several generations
of architectural scholarship
with its treatment of Jeremy
Bentham's Panoptican Michel
Foucault observed that, quote,
"The examination
combines the techniques
of an observing hierarchy and
those of normalizing judgment.
In it are combined
the ceremony of power
and the form of the experiment,
the deployment of force,
and the establishment of truth."
This is what Foucault
meant in conjoining power
with knowledge, a
couplet that we recognize
at work as young Webster,
his wet suit, dripping blue,
presents himself
before his examiners
for observation and judgment.
"Thus you see me as I am."
The announcement
for this conference
begins with an epigraph
from Henri Lefebvre
that associates power with
the organization of space.
Foucault's treatment
of the Panoptican
and of the panoptic gaze to
which young Webster submitted
is certainly on that order.
However, Foucault's broader
notion of the [FRENCH],
of the dispositive
or the apparatus,
he calls it the apparatus
of the carceral, of which
the Panoptican is merely
an idealized diagram,
complicates things a bit.
The apparatus in question
in this aspect of Foucault--
the Deleuzian term
is assemblage;
we can also say complex--
this apparatus connects space
with institutions
deriving from the state,
like prisons, or in some
cases from the church,
like colleges, as well as
with the social institution
of the family.
Oops.
Colleges [INAUDIBLE].
You know that one, right?
And as well the social
institutions of the family,
the functioning of which
for both Emerson and Webster
had made their
education possible.
In the early American republic,
as in Foucault's Europe
but differently, the family,
the point of entry into college,
was newly subject to
governmental practices
mirrored by
educational ones, like
the meticulous
documentation that
made of every examination
and every student
a case to be
counted and measured
against others, as Webster was.
To do so, social, political,
and cultural bodies
combined into
infrastructural complexes
to form the material,
procedural substrate
from which power and knowledge
emerged and circulated,
bound together by what Foucault
called "the deployment of force
and the establishment of truth."
The modern research university
and its predecessor,
the residential college,
was one such body.
This evening, to address the
concerns of the conference,
I have assembled four
brief nested loops
that show the workings
of power and knowledge
in and through
college and university
infrastructures in the
19th and early 20th century
American context.
Though architecture
appears periodically,
I warn you that this is not
a history of architecture.
I've only gathered
pieces of history
that bear certain
architectural characteristics.
Think of this, then, as doing
history with architecture,
and if you will, doing
theory with history.
But I must explain
that by architecture I
mean a complex of material and
discursive infrastructures,
or technical media, with
irreducibly aesthetic, social,
and technological
properties and consequences.
By infrastructure, I
mean that which repeats.
Infrastructure is what repeats.
Institutions within
institutions,
like exams, lectures,
seminars, but also
technical systems
defined by repetition,
like the electric
light that comes
on every night with
the flip of a switch.
My focus on hardware is
sympathetic with a subset
of the new materialisms, as
they're sometimes called,
that have circulated
widely in North America
and in Europe, some of which
are associated, for example,
with the name of Bruno
Latour-- but with two
notable differences
that I want to mark.
One, that I propose going
back to the basics of power
knowledge with Foucault.
And two, that when I say
material, materialism,
or technical media,
I want you also
to hear means of production,
and with it all of the
struggles that this
expression elicits.
Foucault said it
straightforwardly enough.
"Power produces."
So to simplify, running in the
background of my presentation
will be an operating system that
combines without reconciling
them the programming
language known
as Foucault with the programming
language known as Marx.
I combine these
programming languages
on the motherboard of what
is known as media history--
there's got to be
hardware there,
right-- which some
have renamed the study
of cultural techniques.
We can talk about that
later, if you'd like.
Although I will not
cite its canon directly,
I want to be clear
that by this I
do not mean a historical
critique of mass media,
as elaborated so fruitfully
by the Frankfurt School,
nor do I mean to analogize
architecture with visual media.
I mean instead, to quote from
The Organizational Complex,
"to construe architecture
rather literally as one
among many media."
This avowedly
architectural formulation
is somewhat
paradoxically, I think,
what enables us to do history
with architecture, provided
we recognize the deeply
intermedial or relational
character of our objects of
study and their processes.
All right, what is
a university, then?
It is a media system.
To explain, here is the
Professor of Philology-- nope,
not that one-- Professor of
Philology Friedrich Nietzsche,
age 27, in the last
of five lectures
delivered before the
Offentliche Akademische
Gesellschaft, or public academy,
at the University of Basel
in 1872.
This is the university--
"One speaking mouth,
with many years and half as
many writing hands-- there you
have to all appearances the
external academic apparatus,
the university education
machine in action."
Now, in Nietzsche's
university, a new-found zone
of academic freedom separated
professor from audience.
But as he pointedly remarked
to his European listeners,
standing behind
it all, behind it
all, at some modest
distance, as he said,
was the state, to remind
all concerned, quote,
that it is the aim, the
state is the aim, the goal,
the be all and end all of this
curious speaking and hearing
procedure.
That's Nietzsche.
Nietzsche and his
extramural audience
were bound together by a
continental university system
that reflected the Prussian
reforms begun around 1810,
in which universities became
knowledge seeking instruments
of the new nation-states,
reorganized around
the kind of primary research
the young philologist was doing
in Basel, as he
prepared to publish
his first book, The
Birth of Tragedy,
which was published in 1972.
But even in translation,
we can hear the indignation
in Nietzsche's voice at
what he took to be servitude
and mass disfreedom,
administered at a distance
by feeble, sycophantic
bureaucrats,
guardians of a national
culture dedicated to nothing
more than their and
its self-preservation.
Now, in the United
States, the authority
that stood at a modest
distance from the speaking,
listening, and writing
machine of the university
in the 19th century was less
the state than the church.
And behind that,
industrial capital.
In the 1870s, as
Nietzsche wrote,
the small
denominational colleges
founded during the
American Colonial period
began rapidly expanding into
large research universities,
largely on the German model--
but not exclusively, I
should say.
Although federal, state,
and municipal bodies
were central in establishing
and governing the land grant
universities and administering
educational legitimacy,
it was first the
Church, or rather this
or that Protestant
denomination with ties
to business, that watched
from a modest distance
over the research university,
as ears and hands recorded
spoken words in the new lecture
halls and seminar rooms built
on religious foundations.
I keep doing this.
Wrong button.
Hardware.
Thus, in 1904, we find
William Rainey Harper, then
president of the
University of Chicago,
issuing a simple command
in a lecture to students.
He says, "The sum and substance
of the Christian faith is found
in two words-- follow me."
Now, at the University
of Chicago circa 1904,
follow me meant, in essence,
listen, take notes, read,
and exercise practical
religious and moral judgment
in the conduct of
everyday affairs.
For Harper and many, but not
all of his faculty, all of whom
were expected to participate
in weekly chapel,
this was perfectly compatible
with scientific rationality.
Despite the university's Baptist
origins and the huge sums
donated by the country's
wealthiest Baptist, John D.
Rockefeller, and although
Henry Ives Cobb's master
plan included a centrally
located Gothic revival chapel,
none was built during the first
three decades of the University
of Chicago's existence.
It was only in 1910, having
already given approximately $25
million to the university,
that Rockefeller made
a final gift of $10 million.
Not bad, huh?
1910-- $10 million of which he
stipulated that at least $1.5
million be used for the
construction and furnishing
of a university chapel.
That chapel was
ultimately designed
by the New York based architect
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue,
and was completed following
Goodhue's sudden death
by the successor firm of Mayers
Murray and Phillip in 1928.
As it happens, in 1926,
while this building was
being designed, Floyd R.
Watson, a professor of physics
at the University
of Illinois Urbana,
who had gained prominence in the
new field of acoustic science,
together with his colleague
from the architecture
department, James
White-- here we
have Watson-- were engaged
by the University of Chicago
to study the
acoustical treatment
of the chapel interior
proposed by the Goodhue Firm.
Now, at this point the most
significant acoustic issue
for churches, auditoria,
and lecture halls
was the overlapping
of sounds and blending
of words due to reverberation.
To minimize this,
the consultants
Watson and White recommended
that a total of 32,000
square feet of sound
absorbing plaster and tiles
be installed on the ceiling
and in the side walls-- which
is what you see
here-- of the chapel.
The architects complied,
specifying that the ceiling
vaults be clad in the
Guastavino Company's
proprietary Acoustalith tile--
here's the Sweet's Catalogue
cut-- and that the
walls of the nave,
as well as in the
transept and the tower,
be coated with sabinite, an
absorbent acoustical plaster
from US Gypsum.
Not incidentally,
however, the design
also called for a hard-- that
is, non-absorbent plaster,
in the choir and aisle
walls behind the pulpit,
as well as behind the organ.
So basically, around the
speaker in the south gallery,
which you see here.
Now, this detail is significant.
Earlier, criteria for
auditorium acoustics
had focused on the
experience of the audience
by minimizing reverberation.
But by the time Rockefeller
Chapel was completed,
the criteria had enlarged to
include the auditory experience
of the speaker as well.
In her study of the early 20th
century American soundscape,
Emily Thompson argues that
the engineer dampening
of reverberation prior to the
advent of electroacoustics
yielded a quintessentially
modern product--
discrete sounds rationalized
into serial units.
But by 1928, the
acoustician Watson,
fresh from the experience
of the Chicago chapel,
had added the suggestion that
the speaker gains, quote,
"confidence" by hearing, quote,
"the immediate reinforcement
of his voice through very
rapid reverberation."
Thompson notices
this change but fails
to recognize that what was
thereby established was not,
or was not only, calculated
noise-free communication
between speaking mouths
and listening ears.
It was also a short circuit,
made possible in this case
by the calculated absence
of sound-absorbing materials
near the pulpit and the lectern,
which localized reverberation
around the speaker.
Outside this
reverberant circuit,
the audience, like
RCA's Nipper the dog,
ideally heard the
speaker's voice
as a series of deadened
mechanical sounds.
While inside the
reverberant circuit,
the speaker, severed
from his audience,
like Nietzsche's
professor, heard
himself speaking as
the sound reverberated
around and behind him.
The acoustics of
Rockefeller Chapel
therefore split the
speaking voice in two--
the serial voice of reason,
audible in the pews,
and the reverberant voice of
a displaced, sublimated god,
a master standing at some
modest distance and audible
only to himself in a
technical diagram that
would become axiomatic for
academic auditoria and lecture
halls until
microphones took over.
Next-- and I can
assure you, it works.
It feels good.
It feels good.
All right, tables.
Now, in apparent contrast,
maybe you're thinking,
what about the seminar?
OK.
Well, the format of the modern
research seminar developed out
of the intimacy of early modern
professorial tables or student
boarding arrangements,
like eating
as it helps us recognize,
collegia and learned societies,
mainly in Germany,
with deeper roots
in seminary-like
Protestant convocatoria,
as well as out of the tutorial
system at Oxford and Cambridge.
By the early 19th
century in Germany,
these philologically
oriented seminars
had proliferated as
a primary research
environment, along with
the scientific laboratory.
By and large retaining the
formality of the earlier
collegia, the German
research seminar
was, as William Clark
argues, an important vehicle
for the reenactment and
nurturing of academic charisma
through the regular presentation
of individually argued papers
as disputational
lessons rather than
through informal conversation.
By the late 19th century,
seminar and laboratory
based research-- and
Clark makes the connection
between these very
explicit-- had
begun to predominate
in the newly founded
or reorganized
American universities,
where it retained what Clark
calls its cultic aspects.
It was only later that
the seminar became
a site for training
undergraduates
in how to read books, when
at the University of Chicago
and elsewhere, speaking mouths
multiplied and assembled
around an infrastructure
that doubled up the master's
voice into a genial dialogue.
In 1921, Columbia
University established
the college General Honors
course, a two-year seminar
in which advanced undergraduates
read a comprehensive selection
of canonical works in Western
philosophy, literature,
and science, under the
guidance of non-expert tutors,
led by John Erskine, a
professor of English literature.
Erskine testifies that he merely
wanted the students, quote,
"to read great books, the
bestsellers of ancient times,
as spontaneously as they
would read current bestsellers
at the rate of a book a week."
So he wanted to match
the paperback-- or not
the paperback, the
bestseller market.
A book a week.
But the Columbia General Honors
course was, before all else,
a list.
A dismayed colleague,
fearing the end
of what he called true
scholarship at Columbia
College, argued to
Erskine that, quote,
"It is better that
a man should get
to know 10 authors well in
his last two years of college
than that he should learn the
names of the 84 men presented
to him on this list."
How are your syllabi doing?
Yeah.
Unlike undergraduate-- they
still do this at Columbia,
you know.
It's very good.
It's a great-- yeah.
Yeah, but we invented it.
Unlike undergraduates at
Chicago, those at Columbia
were universally male.
And it would be decades
before the gender
and racial uniformity of
such lists-- in other words,
84 white men-- would be openly
contested in culture wars.
Instead, around
1920, Erskine's lists
and after him, those of his star
pupil, the philosopher Mortimer
Adler, were mainly
reactions against
the laissez-faire system
of elective courses adopted
at Harvard and elsewhere-- heh--
around the turn of the century.
It's true.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, OK.
Erskine held the
inaugural seminar
around a large oval table,
a detail that is generally
overlooked in discussions
about the formation
of literary canons.
Seated at this table,
the form of which
lacked a head-- it's
oval, right, you
can hear Marx, maybe,
in the background-- were
approximately 25 speaking
mouths and 25 pairs of ears,
plus those of the professors.
Professors, plural-- since
in their definitive form,
Columbia's General Honors
sections were taught in pairs.
When Mortimer Adler
graduated from student
to preceptor--
right around here,
like right there--
in General Honors,
his teaching partner was
the poet and philosopher
of English Mark Van Doren,
who according to Adler,
asked the first question
in the first class.
Here's the question.
Quote, "What is the ruling
passion in The Iliad?"
Van Doren then,
quote, "went around
the table soliciting
proposals from every member
of the group," thus showing
that with a good opening
question, quote, "you
can call on everyone
in rapid succession, and with
a wide variety of answers
on the table, you can
play one against the other
to carry the
discussion forward."
Failing that, Adler,
who's speaking here,
Adler advises that,
quote, "the second leader
can correct his
partner's failure
to understand someone else's
response to the last question."
Anybody ever team taught?
Yeah, it's interesting, huh?
So "you can correct
your partner's failure
to understand someone else's
response to the last question.
Listening with the
inner ear to answers
is even more difficult than
asking good questions."
Cultivated amateurism
was preferred
over professional expertise,
since, as Adler complained,
most professionals
teach by telling.
Amateurs, among whom
Socrates was a paragon,
teach by questioning.
That's, again, Adler.
The seminar therefore
trained its teachers
into a distinct set of
pedagogical techniques,
posing calculated questions,
going rapidly around the table,
putting responses on the table,
listening with the inner ear.
To reinforce the
dialogic premise,
exams were oral
rather than written.
These techniques
worked together to make
knowledge that was strictly
tabular in character,
in two senses.
First, such knowledge
centered on the seminar table
in its primordial
oval form at Columbia,
and in countless
cognate forms elsewhere.
And then second, it
was tabular in that
it centered on the list.
Moreover, eliciting responses
from students around tables
required an inner ear sensitive
to resonance, pitch, tone,
and timbre.
Like the speaker here
at the lecture podium,
but for different reasons,
this new form of professorial
attention was doubled up in the
two teachers so that it could
listen and learn from its
own leading questions,
all of which was set into
motion by an administrative
imagination that fed off
of lists meant to replace
the book-a-week lists
of modern bestsellers,
with what Erskine's course
called "classics of Western
civilization"-- this, in order
to avoid the stenographic abyss
of the lecture in which,
as Adler put it, quote,
"the notes of the teacher
become the notes of the student
without passing through
the minds of either."
So please, stop taking notes.
All right.
Well, what seemed a hermeneutic
textual exercise, an exercising
in the interpretation
of texts, was therefore
a logistical procedure.
In one of several
reflexive turns,
Adler's most widely read
work was the 1940 bestseller
How to Read a Book,
which grew out
of the pedagogy he brought
to the University of Chicago
when the university's new
president, Robert Maynard
Hutchins, recruited him to
join the faculty there in 1929.
So Adler was recruited
from Colombia to Chicago.
At Chicago, Hutchins and
Adler reproduced together
the two-year honors
seminar on great books,
based on Erskine's list.
The class, which Adler
later taught with others,
as you see here, was assigned
a special room-- again,
with an oval table as a
centerpiece and a stage.
Within five years, the
Adler-Hutchins seminar
had become a
talisman for what was
by then known as the Great
Books Movement-- here you
see the great books, of
course-- which was not,
however, without its detractors.
The sociologist
Edward Shils, for one,
regarded Adler as an
intransigent bully
and remembered hearing Adler
for the first time in a seminar
discussion on systematic
social science speaking
in a domineering tone and
slapping the table repeatedly
and resoundingly--
this is Shils--
with his palm to add
weight to his declarations.
Likewise, for the
Great Books Seminar,
about which students were
so enthusiastic that Shils
wanted to see for himself.
Visiting a class he
encountered, again,
quote, "as harsh a
piece of academic brow
beating of a student
as I've ever witnessed
carried out by Mortimer Adler.
Table slamming was as
much part of the technique
of interpretation
of texts as it had
been part of the
technique of exposition
of systematic social science."
So, tables.
Well, though the
Hutchins-Adler reform suffered
a mixed reception in this
sense, one notable outcome
of the table slapping was indeed
The Great Books of the Western
World, and 54-volume
collection published
by Encyclopedia Britannica
and the University
of Chicago in 1952, edited
by Mortimer Adler and Robert
Hutchins.
In 1947, Hutchins
and William Benton,
a former University of
Chicago vice president
who had become proprietor
of Encyclopedia Britannica
in a joint venture
with the university,
established the Great
Books Foundation
for the purposes of promoting
great books reading groups,
extramural seminars
across the United States--
adult education, in many cases.
These seminars were organized
and conducted locally
around tables in public
libraries, schools, colleges,
churches, and other public
and private settings.
By 1953, a nationwide survey
conducted by the Foundation
recorded a total of
1,176 such groups
with an average size of
14 participants, which
is to say that by the time
The Great Books of the Western
World was published, the great
books were more than a list.
They were a system.
Now, the Great Books
Collection is introduced--
this series is
introduced-- or collection
is introduced with a volume
by Hutchins titled The Great
Conversation.
Now, although Hutchins strains
to define Western society,
as he calls it, as
progress toward,
quote, "the civilization
of the dialogue,
we should read in
place of that society
the undergraduate honors seminar
gathered around an oval table
at the University of Chicago."
Adler and his co-editor,
William Gorman,
supplied a two-volume
guide to the system.
This is an amazing thing.
I really recommend it.
It's called The Great Ideas:
A Syntopicon of Great Books
of the Western World.
Adler's Syntopicon tabulates
The Great Conversation's subject
matter in 102
chapters, each devoted
to an alphabetically
listed great idea--
from angel to world, it goes.
He was a specialist in
angelology, actually,
Adler-- yeah, yeah.
So these chapters,
102 great ideas,
that had been
inventoried, annotated,
and recorded in a building on
the Chicago campus, nicknamed
Index House.
Adler's Syntopicon breaks
down these 102 great ideas
into approximately 3,000
subtopics and 163,000
references, with a range of 284
to 7,065 references per idea,
supplemented by an
alphabetical inventory of 1,800
terms, an index to the index by
which the reader might locate
specific subtopics
without having
to peruse the entire list.
In a majestically,
manically reflexive gesture,
this inventory in the
publication, this index,
is preceded by an
exhaustive 80-page appendix
on, quote, "the
principles and methods
of syntopical construction."
Thus was the Columbia
and Chicago honors
curriculum extrapolated into
a system of lists and tables
that, more than just recording
the voices of dead white men,
also elicited speech in a
sort of perpetual seminar
that was meant to
compensate in its intimacy
for the abstraction of the
lecture, a great conversation.
All right.
Well, Socratic chatter
around seminar tables
complete with oral
exams is, however,
to be distinguished
from the recitations
and oral examinations endured
a century earlier by students
like Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The seminar presupposed hours
of silent nighttime reading
in place of rote
oral repetition,
and silent reading required
light-- the electric form
of which led, according
to Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
to a certain disenchantment of
the shadowy night, though not
necessarily in the libraries
where undergraduates read
great books and where, in the
new research universities,
professors wrote them.
In 1898, two decades before the
General Honors seminars began,
William Hallock, a
PhD from Wurzburg
and associate professor of
physics at Columbia University,
published a modest
article titled--
I keep doing that--
"Diffused Illumination,"
in the engineering journal,
Progressive Age, which
was previously known
as The Gas Age,
so you can imagine where
we're going, right?
The article described
a new system
of indirect, interior,
electric lighting,
devised by Hallock to
illuminate the main reading
room of the domed
library that was
the centerpiece of
Columbia's new campus, which
had opened in the fall of 1897.
I have to point to
my office over here.
1897.
Hallock emphasized the
desirability for reading of,
quote, "a mild,
diffused illumination,
without glare, without
sharp shadows."
Explaining the physiological
benefits of such lighting,
Hallock offered a
plan for what he
called the general illumination
of Columbia University
Library, achieved by suspending
a seven-foot diameter opaque
sphere painted in a dull white
in the center of the rotunda
reading room on a nearly
invisible quarter inch steel
cable.
So you have a sphere
and this cable.
He described the mysteriously
suspended sphere as follows--
there it is, sorry.
"To all appearances,
it floats in the air.
Even by day, this
seeming giant pearl,
seen against the dark blue
of the interior of the dome,
possesses a unique beauty."
While at night, eight automatic
focusing arclight criterion
projectors, manufactured
by the JB Colt
company, the manufacturers
of Colt revolvers
and early cinema projectors,
located on the second floor
balconies-- so you can see
one here-- projected onto it
the sphere, such
that-- see, and here's
the diagram, right-- balconies,
sphere, projectors-- such that,
quote, "the whole
sphere seems to glow
with a pale, diffused light."
Again, our physicist
waxes poetic.
Quote, "the effect is
beautiful in the extreme.
The surface seems
translucent and the light
seems to come from a
certain depth within
and to make the whole
glow with warm life.
And as the ball floats below
the ceiling of invisible blue,
it is impossible to locate it.
Whether it is a pearl near us
or a moon in the clear blue sky,
miles away, is left
to the imagination."
A century earlier,
Etienne-Louis Boullee
had envisioned the combustible
sun of enlightenment
as a starburst of
fireworks in the center
of another, even grander dome.
In New York, that
sun became a moon.
And Boullee's dramatic
architecture of shadows
was diffused into
a cool, mild light
by which to read without
excessive strain.
Now, in actuality, when
librarians switched it
on at night, Columbia's
electric moon
only supplemented the
incandescent lamps
on reading room desks,
that you see here.
All gone now, of course, if
you've been into the space.
Hallock, working with the
building's architect, Charles
Follen McKim, had
designed and made the moon
through a series of trial
and error experiments
which involved fabricating
a large wooden sphere
and covering it with
different finishes--
white paint, tin foil, and even
projecting onto its surface
a photographic slide of
the actual lunar surface.
So they protected slides of
the moon onto this thing.
And actually, what they
discovered, by the way,
is that it corrected the
optics and it made a better map
of the moon astronomically.
However, this particular
multi-projector attempt
at verisimilitude failed
to produce moonlight.
The lunar slides were
therefore replaced
by the unfiltered light
of the arclamp projectors,
and the surface was
painted a dull, dingy white
and suspended into place.
Now, to what
historical processes
does the diffused light of
this fragile moon bear witness?
Until the mid-1890s, gas light
was still the main alternative
to daylight in domestic
reading rooms and libraries,
including that of the most
direct antecedent to Columbia's
dome-- and it actually was
excluded from many libraries
because it was
dangerous, obviously--
Thomas Jefferson's
library rotunda
at the University of Virginia.
So it must have been that
the electrical wiring shown
in an engraving of
the burned out rotunda
on the front page of
The Richmond Dispatch
on October 29,
1895, it must have
been that the wiring that you
see here was relatively new.
What The Richmond Dispatch
called "the Calamity of Sunday"
resulted in the
ruination of the rotunda
and the loss of about 45,000 of
the library's 53,000 volumes.
This is one of the things
that happens frequently
with books-- they burn.
Harvard famously lost many
books a long time ago.
A fire had started in
the southwest corner
of the annex, a
105-foot-long addition
at the rear of the
library-- that you see there
on the left-- that was
completed in 1852 by Jefferson's
apprentice, Robert Mills.
Though the fire's
actual cause was never
discovered with certainty,
initial speculation
pointed to the electrical
wiring-- there-- used mainly
for illumination
in the new teaching
and research spaces-- the
engineering labs, basically--
in the annex.
This is what was in the
annex behind the library.
The Richmond Dispatch and
the university archives
are sprinkled with near
immediate reflections
on the ruined rotunda's
architectural significance,
along with calls to rebuild it.
Most of these calls exhibit a
preference for a reconstruction
faithful to the original.
Accordingly, in 1896, the
University of Virginia
engaged McKim, Mead & White
to rebuild Jefferson's library
and to add an
ensemble of buildings
to house a new lecture
hall, physics laboratories,
and engineering shops
and classrooms--
and also to move the
power plant of the campus.
By this time Charles McKim's
designs for the Columbia
Library-- these--
were almost complete,
and his scheme at Virginia
expanded the previously modest
reading room-- which you see
here-- from one story to two
by eliminating the
original mezzanine
and running a giant Corinthian
order around its periphery that
confidently monumentalized
emerging American hegemony
and also used the same
lighting fixtures as Columbia.
Thus, the Columbia
University Library,
with its melancholy
electric moon,
was built on the ruins
of Jefferson's rotunda,
even as that rotunda was being
rebuilt by the same architects
to resemble Columbia's,
thereby tracing
the symbolic arc
of enlightenment
from a fiery luminous dawn
to a studious imperial dusk.
OK.
Well, another way
of saying this is
that accounts of today's
corporate university,
site of imperial decline, tend
to retrace this arc in which
enlightenments light smolders
in the embers of what
Bill Readings elegiacally
named, in 1997, The University
in Ruins.
Earlier, many thinkers,
from Gilles Deleuze
to Donna Haraway, many
of which were also
thinking in the
aftermath of 1968,
had recognized profound
epistemic consequences
in the coupling
of the university
with the corporation, which
is only the latest modulation,
however, in the hard-wiring
of power knowledge to capital.
Jefferson's rotunda was partly
built by enslaved persons.
At the other end of
the 19th century,
Columbia's Lowe Library was
built in part with money
from the China trade.
That library's name
memorialized the patriarch
of a family business,
university president Seth Lowe's
father, Abiel Abbot Lowe.
Now, although A.A. Lowe and
Brother-- the family business,
tea traders-- closed in
1887, Columbia University
had itself been incorporated
by royal charter versus King's
College since 1764.
So Columbia was,
like many colleges,
incorporated much earlier.
And indeed, as a
corporation, the university
was, by the time Lowe Library
opened in 1897, a legal person,
entrusted with the
care of its students
in loco parentis,
a trust that is
commemorated by the statue
completed by Daniel Chester
French in 1903 that still
commands the steps leading up
to the library, Alma Mater.
Dartmouth College,
where we began,
and to which we now return,
occupies an inflection point
in the history of corporate
personhood, which, as you know,
is a key feature of
neoliberal capital.
In 1819, as Emerson,
Nietzsche's muse,
studied classics at
Harvard-- the same Emerson,
by the way, who would later
exhort American scholars
to leave the library and
turn away from what he called
the courtly muses of Europe--
at the same time, in 1819,
Daniel Webster represented
his alma mater, Dartmouth,
in a landmark case before the
United States Supreme Court,
known as Trustees of Dartmouth
College versus Woodward.
Like Columbia, Dartmouth had
been incorporated in 1769
by royal charter.
In 1816, the State
of New Hampshire
sought to revise the
college's charter
to render its
trustees and president
answerable to government.
The trustees objected, arguing
that this violated the contract
clause of the US
Constitution, which
prevents the state
from impairing
the obligations of contracts
among private individuals,
or among individuals
and the state.
The court found that the charter
amounted to such a contract,
and hence the
actions of the state
were in violation of this
constitutional clause.
From there, it was
but a few steps
to the conclusion that
corporations were,
in a legal sense, persons,
possessed of many,
if not all-- beginning
with contractual rights--
many if not all of the
rights and obligations
held by their biological
or natural counterparts.
Most of these steps were taken
in the later 19th century,
and in 1910, in Southern
Railway Company v. Green,
the court concluded,
quote, "that a corporation
is a person-- that
a corporation is
a person within the meaning
of the 14th Amendment," which
ironically guaranteed the
rights of freed slaves--
"that a corporation
is a person is
no longer open to discussion."
This was our Supreme
Court in 1910.
Already in 1819, in
his closing argument
before the Supreme
Court-- so almost 100
years before-- Webster exclaimed
of his alma mater that, quote,
"it is a small
college, and yet there
are those who love it," at which
point he reportedly choked up,
tears filling his eyes.
Tactically successful as
it was-- he won the case--
Webster's declaration
of familial love
for Dartmouth College
was genuine, I submit,
not because his apparent
spontaneity testified
to true feeling rather
than calculation
but because as the
court's decision bore out,
the corporation called
Dartmouth was well
on its way to becoming worthy
of a singularly human emotion,
like love.
Around the time
that Webster spoke,
Dartmouth was indeed a
small-- it was indeed small,
consisting of about
95 students taught
by a handful of
faculty, overseen
by a president and a
board of 12 trustees.
Its campus comprised a single
building, Dartmouth Hall,
which was an early example of
the all-purpose, double-loaded,
phalanx or phalanstery like
residential and educational
halls typical of American
Colonial colleges.
Sorry, I jumped.
There.
Webster's love for
Dartmouth had likely
been consummated, if only in the
platonic sense, in that hall,
where he lived for
three years and where
he and his 30 classmates
performed regular recitations
of classical verse.
That love would likely
have been further secured
in the after hours
antics, in which
he and his cohabitants
no doubt indulged,
as well as in his enthusiasm
for public speaking, which
on one occasion included
a funeral oration
for a classmate.
Scattered accounts of college
life in the early republic
remind us of the relative
youth of the exclusively male
students like
Webster, who was not
from a family of great means.
They also remind us of the
relative lack of discipline
that reigned over
collegiate life.
Probably the most infamous
instance of indiscipline,
indiscipline, during these
years is The College of New
Jersey's-- later
Princeton's-- Nassau Hall,
which had burned in 1802 and
was rebuilt shortly thereafter
to designs by Benjamin
Henry Latrobe.
Nassau Hall, which comprised 42
living chambers, some of which
were used as recitation
rooms, a prayer hall, library,
and basement, kitchen,
and dining room,
had all the attributes
of Foucault's
disciplinary apparatus--
enclosure or confinement,
a system of cellular
partitioning,
distinctly marked
functional sites
and ranks-- these are all
Foucault's categories--
ranks, both within rooms, rows
of beds, as you see, or desks,
and among them, ranks
by year, and so on.
Likewise, class schedules,
daily recitations,
the teaching of proper
handwriting with proper
posture, the
student-pen-paper-chair-desk
interface, various prohibitions
on time-wasting, et cetera.
As you know, Foucault argues
that when joined together
into a disciplinary
system, these properties
combine to produce supple,
trainable, docile bodies.
But the bodies trained in
Nassau Hall were hardly docile.
On the contrary, the
decade prior to 1820
was punctuated by what
President Ashbel Green called
every kind of insubordination.
During Green's first
term, three students
were expelled after gunpowder
exploded in Nassau Hall.
Another was expelled
for climbing the belfry
and ringing the bell at
3:00 AM, while yet another
broke into the prayer hall and
vandalized the Bible-- this
is a good one-- by cutting
a deck of playing cards
into its leaves.
It's a chapter in book history.
The following
year, 1813 to 1814,
saw firecrackers set off in
the hall and graffiti scrawled
on its walls.
Then, on the night
of January 19, 1814,
in the words of one
historian, quote,
"a cracker, consisting
of a hollow log charged
with two pounds of
gunpowder, was set off
behind the central
door of Nassau Hall."
See the door?
"Windows shattered, walls
cracked, and a piece of the log
crashed through the
prayer hall door."
So you can see, it
went straight through.
The mayhem was especially
acute in the building's
long hallways, before
and after evening meals.
One evening, President Green
performed the duly panoptic
ritual of standing outside the
refectory with a lit candle--
another meal.
He recalls-- this
is the president--
quote, "they passed me in
perfect silence and respect.
But as soon as they
had got out of sight,
some began the usual yell."
Indeed, in Green's diary,
discipline and indiscipline
stand in close proximity.
On April 7, Green wrote,
quote, "attended examination.
We had a cracker in
the college today.
And in the evening, a
company of students in front
the campus behaved in a
very improper manner."
If that was not enough,
in 1817, students
nailed all the
building's entry doors
shut, shouted
rebellion and fire,
broke windows, and
generally ran amok.
Fitting neatly as they do
into the encompassing grids
of Foucault's apparatuses,
the acts of indiscipline
and of love called forth in
the halls of these institutions
were also among the
conditions necessary
for corporate
personhood-- not merely,
as Foucault would have it,
because disciplinary failure
inscribed a vicious circle
of subjectification-- this
is Foucault's argument-- in
which docility and delinquency
were two sides of a coin.
Not just that, but also
because the apparatus
itself directly elicited
familial if not libidinal
affect.
A final scene of seduction
makes this clear.
In 1825, there was a mass,
drunken, 14-person riot,
as it was called, on the
lawn of Thomas Jefferson's
recently opened public,
but still incorporated,
University of Virginia.
The following year, a
17-year-old Edgar Allan Poe
enrolled at the university and
took up residence on the lawn,
moving shortly
thereafter to a room
on the western
range-- that's where
he lived-- in a section
known as Rowdy Row.
From his perfectly
carceral cell,
Poe witnessed fights,
including the biting
of an arm which led
to an expulsion,
gambled away what little
he had, and read classics.
Although not himself a
troublemaker, Poe was indigent,
and he withdrew
after only a year,
resentful of the wealthier,
drunken classmates
to whose company
he was condemned.
A few years later, he eulogized
in the persona of Helen
"the beauty of fair Greece
and the grandeur of old Rome."
Some speculate that Poe's gaze
in this ode to antique beauty
was still fixed on
Jefferson's neopalladian,
though not exactly Roman
and certainly not Hellenic,
campus architecture.
But we must remember
that its gaze,
like that of
Bentham's Panopticon,
was also fixed upon him.
It is therefore tempting to
ascribe the near madness that
stalked Poe and the
hallucinatory explosiveness
of his writings
to the implacable,
inversely productive logic of
the apparatus, a lifelong rage
against the machine.
But I want instead to
risk another suggestion--
that Poe's Helen is one name
for the corporate person whose
birth we are witnessing,
an apparatus, let's call it
classical rather
than carceral, shaped
by the insubordinate love of
those subjected to its iron
will, even as it shaped them.
Now, in conclusion,
then, I have to say,
I've only been able to
offer you a few glimpses
of the university
apparatus as it spills out
into the corporate body
without organs and folds
back in around its folded books.
Most of these nested loops
belong to the infrastructures
of industrial capitalism, for
universities, like factories,
are a means of production.
But perhaps you also recognized
in these loops geneological
antecedents to today's
power knowledge couplets--
the political theology of
the technologically mediated
lecture, the infantilization
of co-workers, sitting
around oval conference tables,
the rekindled light that
now emanates from our books
rather than falls upon them,
and the human capital, trained
in colleges and universities,
whose loving devotion
is sought and gained
by today's corporate persons.
Finally, I hope that
you will have also
recognized these loops
as links in a chain,
a piece of infrastructure that
binds its subjects to others
elsewhere-- slaves,
agricultural workers, miners,
dock workers, factory
workers, sailors, and laborers
around the planet, who made
the fortunes of those whose
names are on our buildings as
well as those women, bearers
of literacy, whose
domestic labor
reorganized the institution
of the family 200 years ago
such that the Daniel Websters
and the Ralph Waldo Emersons
could present themselves
before their examiners and say,
"thus you see me as I am."
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
Are you going to--
Molti complementi.
We have time for about
five minutes of questions.
And so we just take them
directly from the audience.
Is there a microphone or
is it just a cappella?
A cappella, as it were.
That reminded me very much of
my experience at Milton Academy.
Ah.
Well, probably.
Especially with the
alcoves and the hierarchy
down to the first classmen
on the first floor.
Well, that's in a sense
where it comes from.
You said that this wasn't
an architectural history.
And in a sense, you
offered us these vignettes
that we might describe as
peri-architectural-- aspects
of architecture that
aren't necessarily
at the center of our practice.
But I wanted to push
back against that,
because if you really do
think that architecture
is a medium, that
it's put in between,
then there is no central
core to architecture,
whether it's structure.
And so wouldn't this
be for a new kind
of architectural history?
You can take that
and run with it.
Go for it, yeah.
Sure.
I mean, basically what
I say provocatively--
I borrow this phrase from
the Chinese authorities,
who say capitalism with
Chinese characteristics.
So we could say history with
architectural characteristics.
But yes of course,
reverse that as well.
Basically, I think
it's time that we
grow up and
deprovincialize and refuse
the call, which is
continuous, to bind the work
that we do always
to the authority
of this phantasm called a
discipline, which is invented.
This is, of course, one
of the many subtexts here.
You know, if you'd like, we
can talk about the architecture
schools.
But that's what's
being invented here.
This is, in that
sense, a history
of-- when we say discipline and
punish, we mean many things.
And that's one of them.
So this is what we do as
historians and theorists.
We historicize.
But we also think
about contingency.
We think about power
and, in this case,
knowledge interacting
in particular ways.
So that would be, in a sense,
the most literal translation,
I think, of your
question would be then
to move it into
the more directly
explicitly-- you know, the
architecture schools, and ask
about how analogous work is
being done there, which it is.
I really like this image
that you kind of conjure
of bratty, coddled undergrads.
I didn't make it up.
Undergrads who then becomes
bratty, coddled CEOs, which
is sort of like, I guess,
the ultimate direction
that it's going.
And it's interesting
because it does
sort of remind me a little
bit of my own teaching
experiences here as
a teaching fellow--
Excellent.
--where I realize that the
power isn't coming necessarily
from my mouth at the
end of the seminar table
but is actually coming
from the other direction.
From where the students sit?
From the students.
Well, of course, you would have
recognized here the argument
that the power is
coming from the table.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And at certain points, you
know, I sort of realized
that if I don't give a certain
grade to this person who's
been complaining about it,
I Google that person's name
and find that, in fact, that
person's mother or father
has donated.
So could one kind of rewrite--
so that's sort of the direction
that I see where
your story is going,
is that the kind of coddling--
How to deal with the parents?
Could the story be
told, not necessarily
from the authorial voice of
the professor but somehow
the endpoint of your
story is actually
saying that the
direction of the power
is coming from the
other direction?
Well, surely we recognize
that at any table,
power criss-crosses
in many directions.
In a sense, it's what
produces the table
and is produced by it.
But I wouldn't limit it to just,
in a sense, denominating power
in terms of, let's say, the
passive-aggressive behavior
of a student, or conversely, the
authoritarian, or authoritarian
passive-aggressive
behavior of a teacher.
In a sense, that's one of
the potentials of a media
theoretical perspective, is
to put subjects and objects
in relation such
that it's sometimes
difficult to tell
the difference.
So that's how
persons show up here.
In other words, if I
say to you, take what
I say literally all the time.
Media theory, OK,
what are the media?
We list a few-- person.
So in that situation
it's possible
that both you and your students
are subject of the table.
I don't mean that literally
in some functionalist,
behavioralist sense.
I mean it historically
in the way
that I tried to explain
of the table apparatus,
to speak like Foucault.
Difficult to pin down,
to be fair, to be honest,
and there are lots
of questions that
could be asked about that
that I tried to signal.
I had a question about that
particular historical moment
in which your
analysis is situated
and how you're incorporating
the kind of reconstruction
of the American
subjectivity into your now
in a kind of media
kind of analysis.
How?
Particularly on the
questions of race and gender,
given that this is
a time in which it's
particularly in an
educational setting
an integration in some respect.
Yeah.
You know, there are many,
many strands, let's say,
of this question that
pass through all of this.
I should say that this
is the usual excuse.
It's excerpted from et cetera.
And interesting-- OK,
I'll tell you a story.
One of the other excerpts has
to do with Tuskegee University,
which was set up so that
emancipated enslaved persons
could, and their
families or descendants,
could build their own sort
of knowledge in a hands
on, self-help way.
They went so far as
to make the bricks out
of which the
buildings were made.
That's one of the sort
of facts that-- it's
kind of running right parallel
with at least some part of what
I'm talking about here,
that constellates here.
So just leave that--
that fact is over there,
and suddenly we have, in a
sense, the bourgeois elite,
which is basically first
generation bourgeois
elite for the most part,
maybe second generation
in the case of the low
family and these folks,
sort of figuring out power.
This is the moment-- the
first, proper, formal moment--
of American imperialism
in the European sense, not
continental internal imperialism
but you know ventures abroad.
And so I think that's what
we're actually seeing in these--
it's not like somebody's
sitting around and saying,
how do we deal with the
fractures that were not
repaired by the Civil
War, on the contrary that
were displaced and reproduced
during Reconstruction
and so on and so forth?
And the one thing
that I can say is
that what you see, what I
think you see very frequently,
is not, as in let's say a more
classical way of understanding
what these kinds of institutions
like libraries or universities
even, do in the context
of state formation--
is not the simple
consolidation of an enlightened
public sphere.
In fact, you have many,
many counter-public spheres.
And so if we take
that Columbia one
as a sort of
allegorical instance
of a bourgeois public sphere,
a la Habermas, et cetera,
then immediately that thing,
we must recognize the way
that that thing is hard-wired,
not just to the aftermath
of slavery in the
US, because that's
what industrial capital
is doing in the north,
is learning to
exploit differently,
but also to what we now call
globalization, the China trade.
And I suppose I would
say that my effort here
is to articulate--
this is why I give you
the Tuskegee example,
because actually right now,
if I give you that example,
it stands apart, to articulate
the infrastructural, if you
will, connections Amongst
and between these processes.
I mean, something as simple
as remembering that UVA
was built by slave labor.
But that, too, is
itself an entire chapter
that many historians
are working on.
I'm certainly not the
only one to say this.
I think Michael wants
a teeny, teeny thing.
Yeah, go.
Give him a chance.
We can be late for dinner.
It's OK.
But the Tuskegee
example is fascinating,
because it's a
case where a group
outside the symbolic authority
of discipline or corporation
nevertheless construct, with
all the artifice of construction
apparent, something
that nevertheless, it
self-gains authority.
And there's something
like a bit of a kind
of after image of-- OK, an
after image of discipline.
This is what I want to pursue.
So you come right
up against making
us choose between a
kind of acceptance
of a disciplinary
authority and its legacy
versus a rejection of
that which would be-- I
don't know what would
be the alternative.
I mean, someone like
Penelope Dean would say,
design in the kind of
empirical, pragmatic,
embracing of
corporate capitalism
is the alternative
to a continuation
of the moribund, disciplinary
authority of architecture,
right?
And you come close to making
us choose that, it seems to me.
Except the Tuskegee
example gives
a way of not endorsing
anti-disciplinary,
pragmatic, empirical,
embracing of the situation.
It gives us a third way.
Well, maybe.
I don't know.
Tuskegee, I wouldn't
see-- first of all,
Booker T. Washington
was not outside.
That's the whole thing.
So it's part of this
apparatus-- differently, though.
And certainly,
that's what power is.
It's difference.
It's differentials.
And he sought to leverage
that in some sense
in a particular direction.
So speaking of
discipline-- so you
know that-- so
architecture wasn't taught
at Tuskegee first right away.
But the students were
building the buildings
and they were actually
designing them.
And then, later
Robert Taylor-- one
of the very early
African-American architectural
graduates-- came down from
MIT and basically set up
the architecture program.
I'm actually interested
in the moment
before Taylor arrives
because I think
that's the moment of
truth in the sense
that I think you're pointing to.
Now, I say that I'm
writing this out loud here.
It's the part that
isn't developed yet.
But what I'm interested there
is in following the bricks,
because I think the bricks are
doing a certain kind of work.
And yes, that work
is architectural,
in a strictly
architectural sense,
with all the burdens and
authority and pleasure
of the discipline and
whatever name we give it.
But those bricks, what do
those bricks want to be?
Well, it's a
complicated question.
And at some level, they
do want to be persons.
But that's the thing.
It's not that everything
is all sealed up hopelessly
in this machine.
On the contrary, I
showed you the students.
And at some level, I hope
we hear '68 is behind.
But it takes work.
It takes real work, I think,
to not work through it,
simply to work
out, to understand,
to make sense of what I
was calling here the folds,
where just the moment
you think that you've
stepped aside or outside,
you find yourself--
but which is not at all to
say that this thing is--
in a sense, it's our
only hope, or at least
one of the very few.
This whole project, honestly,
is really spoken and done
in defense of the
university, even
in defense of good
old enlightenment
in a certain sense, but
with all the caveats
and necessary rejoinders.
I just wanted to say I
appreciate the fact that you
started with Van
Doren's question, what
is the passion of The
Iliad and ended with Helen.
That was for you, Ed.
Thank you so much for that
beautiful presentation.
[APPLAUSE]
