#undisciplining

[rgr-pop]

if i had the ability to be doing any kind of intellectual work it really would be bringing the thinking about corporate architecture / publics / late modernism + the historical arguments about capitalism 1960-2000 to bear on the american domestic interior

[rgr-pop]

had a version of this thought when having a conversation about a niche periodization interest with a friend who was not trained the same way i was, i was trying to explain how i am interested in this particular period as a way of thinking about how we constantly periodize next to it, and what that means for the shapes of the interpretive categories, and she was like, yes well, we all know periodization is fake. i was influenced by a historian who is really annoying about this in his own way--and also a "i found an earlier fiscal crisis" guy (i love these guys - no hate to them!). he also was the guy who undid my requisite undergraduate anti-counterfactual habit (in undergrad you are trained against the counterfactual; your true mentor will show you it's not that simple.) in a similar vein he was kind of like, historians like to be cute about this or self-conscious, and historians love to say we are over periodizing, but this posture is more often just evasive. we're not just looking at "change over time," we're looking at how we decide what's change and what's time. if you're not periodizing you're periodizing worse (by submitting to periodization as it stands.) it's really the meat and potatoes of historical thinking. it's also one of the best ways to make both your analytics and your actors posable. anyway i'm particularly into this way of thinking because i have a mercury in libra

[rgr-pop]

From the beginning, the new Duke was not just about critical theory, it was about critical theory in pairs. Indeed, couples hiring was an important status symbol for this nouveau-riche department. If for a particular couple a joint hire was the ultimate proof of desirability, evidence that they–not the university–controlled the terms of their appointment, then for the social-climbing Duke spousal hires were a showy way of publicizing deep pockets and infinite largesse. While Fish was chairing the English department at Johns Hopkins, Tompkins was teaching at Temple University, and they were eager to find jobs in the same place. Fish’s colleague at Hopkins, Lee Patterson, and his wife, Annabel, a professor at the University of Maryland, had similar desires. By 1986 Duke had made both couples offers, and an academic empire was born.

inneresting...! you should read this i think you’ll enjoy it 

[rgr-pop]

a few months ago i helped a friend pull together some representative-seeming history of sexuality syllabi to help them argue for credit transfer. i accidentally found this delightful one from the one and only margot canaday, and i’ve become totally captivated by this assignment:

Select an established historian of sexuality and read their “canon.”  Write an intellectual biography describing what you see as their central preoccupations, methodologies, and contributions.  What are the questions their work raises and does not answer?  How do they exemplify (or fail to exemplify) the broader development of the subfield?  What is the relationship between earlier and later work?  Note that in order for this exercise to be successful, you will need to select someone who has written at least two books and several articles in the field.  (See me for suggestions.)

i’ve been thinking about this in the context of several popular (left theory) reappraisals i’ve watched happen over the past few years--not necessarily a new approach, but definitely something i’m noticing, not as much in the form of a zeitgeist (although the most recent zeitgeist around ep thompson has interested me) as personal scholarly preoccupations. the biggest example in my mind is sophie lewis picking up firestone as a kind of duty and personal dedication, and lewis does this kind of long-arch marxist reappraisal intellectual biography a lot. this piece on lillian faderman, for example, which i didn’t like--i almost never like anything at the baffler, awful editing--but which is essentially good work. gabriel winant’s work on barbara ehrenreich is another great example. winant does a lot of really i think field-shifting reappraisal of thompson, but ehrenreich is really his blorbo. i’m totally blown away by his ability to pick up one of the most well known public intellectuals of our time and force us to look at their body of work in its context, asking brand new questions--can’t even describe it. “a place to die” is the name of the article he primarily does that in, it’s one of the works of history that has impacted me the most. that’s kind of the work i’m imagining can come from the prompt above--that and something like an intellectual biography. that, and the introduction of gayle rubin’s deviations, which is like...one of my favorite things i have ever read. the way she tells us the story of her own work in its own times is such a treasure, in part because her way of historiciizing her own thinking serves as an emulation of the project of particularizing social life that her work was doing. it’s very clever. i think also of katherine mckittrick’s work on sylvia wynter, and certain (non philosopher) traditions of writing about your mentors--robin kelley on cedric robinson, for sure. there were some other scholars who did some interesting work on betty friedan, but i can’t think of them.

i’m thinking of chasing after this: who are the thinkers i am compelled to reevaluate, but who i also really love, enough to become their keepers? with the kinds of big bodies of work that require keeping? (margot canaday is an excellent example of a scholar whose intellectual biography i’m fascinated with, who i adore, and whose work i think is underratedly important, but who, because of the conditions of the institution under which she w,orked, has no “body of work” to speak of.) who are the thinkers that i keep finding myself thinking, nobody really knows what they were about, or up to? 

i’m very interested in this approach to historians, who don’t get approached like this very often, and who, over the past twenty years or so, have stopped producing bodies of work [structurally] as such. charles and louise tilly come to mind since their appearance in rubin’s autobiographical notes (whole side interest on the intellectual couples biography--the other one that has for some reason always hung me up is joan ockman and robert slutzky). old public school laborists--sidney fine is probably the most bizarrely forgotten labor historian, i have an attachment to him because i came across him early (since he wrote about flint). leon fink and dorothy sue cobble--basically people whose work show us something about an extinct relation between labor thought and public education. historians who were able to produce criticism alongside their monographs (other than just as timely pegged promotions of their monographs...)

i have a lot of this already with architecture thinkers--venturi and scully maybe obviously, but particularly charles jencks, who i became quite obsessed with when the public was looking toward “late modernism” and found themselves very wrong about both skyscrapers and what jencks said. i still think i love him, as a writer, more than almost any of them. above all though, insanely, and i think really getting at the heart of this prompt, are the critical/cultural turn/media studies 90s-on capital-T Architectural Theorists that nobody will even touch: beatriz colomina, reinhold martin (who has produced the most writing of anyone that i’d describe as “exactly the book i want to write exactly how i wouldn’t write it”) and, more than absolutely anyone, sylvia lavin. she’s one of the most powerful thinkers in architecture but the self-consciously populist critics loathe and ignore her, no one cites her, no one outside of MIT reads her, and everyone thinks she’s a huge bitch. sylvia lavin is one of only a handful thinkers who published something that fundamentally changed everything i thought about everything (outing that venturi and scully both lied about the antennae on guild house, which she says is the foundational myth of postmodernism). i would really love to understand everything she’s written, and how it came to be. also uncover the truth about whether she fired charles jencks from ucla (my white whale). also to say something stupid and insane like “actually she was a materialist. here’s why.” 

but there is one figure above all else, the most important and famous and widely assigned and influential culture writer of the second half of the 20th century who absolutely no one seems to ask any questions about, or really know anything at all about, or be able to summarize in any comprehensive way, or make any claims about: rosalind krauss! with the distance of being outside of her discipline, and in a historical moment where lacanians are kind of camp, and also kind of in need of defending from us (marxists), i may decide to become a rosalind krauss guy.

[rgr-pop]

people are always saying Things about me that I’m just trying to Manipulate Everyone Into Giving Me Sympathy and Directing a Cult of Personality meanwhile I’m just over here trying to periodize! like yes I would like to direct a cult... of followers of my specific periodizations which I believe to be correct

[rgr-pop]

I’m sitting on a project that is bigger than I knew it was and I have been handed a way forward through it that has so much creative potential but it’s not like anything else I have done before and don’t know how to shape it out!

[rgr-pop]

also for later: tracing the cultural use of “neoliberal” through separate disciplines

[rgr-pop]

“Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange”: An Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley

Rethinking Marxism: It is our great honor to be talking with Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U. S. History at UCLA. Robin, let’s begin with your biogra…

obvious to say, in many ways, but big for me: kelley (and only kelley) always reminds me that i could and want to do cultural history and music writing