During this long and difficult experiment we have discovered a number of ultimately unsurprising but vexing limitations to moving toward our goals.
(1) Designing and implementing a web site that is beautiful and functionally capable of meeting the demands and rhythms of thinking has proved extremely challenging. Even with the most gifted, experienced and committed designers — which we have — it is the case that the web in its overwhelming majority of cases functions for blogging, exhibits, and updates. This discovery is not surprising but how comprehensive it is does reveal something significant.
(1a) This work is expensive and time-consuming. Be prepared.
(2) Collaborative work in the human sciences and humanities runs against the grain of career patterns, egos, life trajectories in the United States (and no doubt elsewhere). It turns out to be time-consuming, hard to accomplish, and risky for the existing framework of human relations.
(2a) We have created a venue in which collaborative work could be facilitated. We have created a space where one or more modes of veridiction in the human sciences could be experimented with such that we could learn more. We have been least successful in supporting a mode of subjectivation in which collaboration, friendship and truth-seeking are essential components. Since these aspects are not high on the academic agenda and we are academics, this is not surprising. It is however frustrating.
(3) Onward
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1. Soylent Green. We have all drunk the kool-aid. The utopianism of a free relationship to technology blinds us to the realities of massive human energies directed against freedom. It’s happening all around us.
1a. If only it were acceptable that thought could be expensive and time-consuming. Alas, we are no longer allowed to be expensive and time-consuming. Worse outcome: expensive, time-consuming and *irrelevant*.
2. It’s also expensive and time-consuming. Why allow two people to think together when you are paying them to do twice as much thinking on their own. Co-teach? Not efficient, too expensive. This is all well known.
2a. I don’t think this is a venue. It’s more like the HVAC and Interior Design of a venue. A venue requires building and dwelling. The work here is good because it makes our venue(s) a nice place to meet, and that is important to facilitating collaboration, friendship and truth-seeking. But venues need to be built, maintained, organized, and people need maps to get there… this work requires more than HTML and CSS. Biggest lie: make a website and they will collaborate.
3. indeed. doubleplusonward.
“We have been least successful in supporting a mode of subjectivation in which collaboration, friendship and truth-seeking are essential components.” Yes, I agree that this is the most challenging aspect. Having just made myself into one kind of subject (you know, the job-getting kind), I find myself wanting to remake myself into another kind (you know, the collaborating kind, a far less hyper-individualistic kind, albeit still a job-having kind).
There are obvious historical tensions in this, i.e. I learned the old way and now *we* have to invent the new way. There are also tensions with academic reward structures, though I think these are much more surmountable than we commonly suppose. If we reward ourselves for work well done, then the rest will follow, maybe not fame and fortune of course, but at least stability and a job and friendship and the critical results of patient inquiry.
Still: the questions for me are… How do we do this? What will it look like? How do we integrate these new opportunities into who we are and how we work? I feel out of my element here. But that’s exciting! An opportunity to learn, right?