Month: January 2020

Emotions in intellectual networks (Randall Collins & Fire Emblem); tempora cum causis (13)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Ancient. Classes for the Spring 2020 semester began this week. I’m teaching Women in Antiquity (#womenancient) again, and a grad seminar on Roman Intellectual Life (#romanintellect). Here are the syllabuses for each of them: 

Modern. Intellectual and artistic life is often figured as solitary. And, yes, parts of it often are. There has to be time where you’re working on your craft, reading and studying and developing. There has to be practice. But the idea that there is one genius at work, a unitary soul, one which doesn’t rely on or need the presence of others feels fundamentally wrong. There is a social aspect to all of this. And an emotional one. In The Sociology of Philosophies (1979), Randall Collins consistently pairs thought with emotion in his analysis of how socio-intellectual networks form. There are at least three things which Collins suggests are needed for an intellectual interaction: 1) present individuals physically assembled; 2) shared focus and awareness of that shared focus; 3) shared emotional state, or mood.

We could really push back against the insistence that individuals need to be physically assembled (“face-to-face”); interaction rituals take place on the internet every day, where the embodied nature of human interaction is tested and extended. But an important part to linger on here is the function of emotion in creating intellectual as much as social structure. Awareness and self-awareness play a role, and emotions are a processing tool that allows mutual understanding and self-reflexivity.

Collins suggests that focus and emotion have a role to play in the empowering of actions (and texts/objects used in such action) and individuals alike. Ritual actions are “charged up” via repetitions which are needed to give them meaning; if they aren’t replenished in a timely manner, then they lose their significance (consider: going regularly to a therapist; to yoga; to a place of worship; to Latin class). Engaging in social actions regularly insists on their significance, and on the very significance of social interaction regardless of the activity; i.e. going to yoga is as much about communing with your social network and mutually affirming the significance of that shared focus as it is about the technical or spiritual actions involved.

Just as social actions need to be regularly “charged up” in this way (via repetition), so too, Collins suggests, do individuals need to be “charged up” emotionally. Collins writes (p23) that intellectual “encounters have an emotional aftermath”; an individual whose emotional energy is replenished is thereby empowered with charm and leadership capability, but an individal who is not emotional “charged up” will become demoralized — passive, depressed. The sliding scale of emotionality, Collins suggests, strongly impacts the individual’s ability to engage in the socio-intellectual structure which creates these emotions in the first place; consider: a beginning yoga student who feels alienated in their practice and does not feel adequately supported by their teacher; or a Latin student who is not given the emotional space to make errors by their instructor. Motivation is an extension of emotional state, and emotional state in intellectual networks consists in a relationship to the social structure (and hierarchy): the yoga studio; the Latin classroom. 

Interestingly, the theory of motivation and emotional energy in relation to the creation and development of community is a significant feature in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. In this game, you are a “professor” (of war), tasked with developing the skills of a group of students, each with their own personalities, desires, and talents. While you train your students, you must pay attention to their “motivation level” – the students individually have a bar with four “charges” of motivation, which you spend in distributing skill points. When student motivation is low, you can replenish their energy with a range of activities: share a meal with them, have tea with them, return lost items, answer their questions after class, etc. etc. This is actually a rather sophisticated reflection of a solid pedagogical theory: students will not progress and not level up unless you create an environment in which they become emotionally replenished.

Internet.

Excerpt. Randall Collins (1979/2002: 21): “Intensely focused situations penetrate the individual, forming symbols and emotions which are both the medium and the energy of individual thought and the capital which makes it possible to construct yet further situations in an ongoing chain.” 

Daily Life. Over the last two weeks I’ve been cycling as much as possible. I remembered that I had a copy of Eleanor Davis’ You & a Bike & a Road (Koyama Press 2017) and read it again the other evening. It’s a moving memoir of a solo cross-country bike tour. I remember following along on twitter back in 2016 when Davis posted updates as it was happening. 

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this is me rn
This is me these days.

On ‘self-care’ and ‘mindfulness’; Hayden White; tempora cum causis (12)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Modern. When new terms enter the contemporary lexicon, it’s natural to find them kind of annoying at first. (I remember when ‘selfie’ was new and now I have no shame in using it, or taking them.) I’ve been annoyed with two in particular: 1) ‘self-care’; 2) ‘mindfulness.’* Yes, part of the annoyance is that when new catchwords arise they seem to be everywhere; the combination of their novelty and their ubiquity is probably what really rubs me the wrong way. But also: a new term needs time and repeated use to develop meaning, and that process of negotiation can reveal subtleties which complicate the word’s original intent. And there are some reasons to be distrustful of ‘self-care.’ The whole point, as I understand it, of self-care as an idea is that you disrupt your work habits (which you’ve feverishly developed in order to become, or remain, gainfully employed in the unstable economic landscape of 2020) in order to spend some time doing things that you actually like, which make you feel rejuvenated, and return to you some of your innate creative abilities. Okay! Well, obviously, the first issue is that time to yourself – the time to contemplate, to ‘do nothing’ (see: Jenny Odell), should, by all rights, be a bigger part of our lives in the first place. Secondly, self-care is often pitched not as a rebellion against the commodification and infestation of our private lives, but rather as its tool; i.e. self-care is supposed to rejuvenate us so that we can get back to work. At the “Facing Race” conference (Nov. 2016), Roxane Gay put it well (paraphrase via live-tweet): “I can’t stand the phrase self-care. It’s what women can do, but don’t do. We do it so we can work, but what comes next?”  

Lastly, self-care is regularly figured as a consumerist activity; you should try searching “self-care face mask” in twitter. Self-care as the deliberate derailing of learned habits of overwork is itself a good thing, I think. But it’s hard to practice. And as a result, self-care has entered the zeitgeist as something quite frivolous, a superficial manifestation of something that is mostly invisible; a negotiation with yourself, and your self-perception. Likewise, ‘mindfulness.’ The point of this, again, as I understand it, is to consciously pay attention to what is happening in the very moment; including, if not particularly, your own internal, emotional landscape. To put it oversimplistically, we only really have what we are experiencing right now. Sure: we have indications of the future; and we have records of the past. But we are experiencing the present. Mindfulness as a practice is intended to remind us of this, and to encourage us to engage in the present fully, and to perceive its granularities. And to give us the ability to understand when we are being drawn into behaviours which are not totally within our control.

When it comes down to it, I love twitter. Over the years it has brought me community and a sense of belonging in a field that is often quite severe towards its members. I like its pluralism; I thank it for giving me more perspectives on certain issues. I think it can be empowering. In Classics, it’s where a lot of the social justice work starts. And because my personal life is deeply intertwined with my professional life, it has also been good for my work. I never want to write a screed against its use, and indeed, despite its documented toxicities, I still find myself encouraging people to use it so that they can get their work out into the world. But for all its functionalities, I don’t always like how I feel when I use it. I don’t like mindlessly scrolling; and I don’t like the possibility that at any given moment of casual scrolling, I can be made to feel all sorts of negative emotions that were not there seconds ago (and twitter privileges emotionally volatile content). It’s a turbulance which I volunteer for, but I don’t have to. I don’t have to participate in the parts that are engineering me.

I don’t want to leave twitter. I did a hiatus last summer to work on my book, and I hated it. As much as I want to have time that is my own, I also want to engage with the internet soul. So, here’s what I’ve been thinking. Snail mail (physical letters! some things, they tell me, still exist in “material reality”, whatever that means) only arrives once a day. You check it, and then you know what you’ve got, and there won’t be another thing to check till tomorrow. You get on with your day. But twitter (and email, don’t get me started) can come for you whenever you open that app. Sometimes, I think about social media in terms of the functionality of Stardew Valley. Long story short, this is a very charming, and calming, farm simulator, which operates on a calendar with days and seasons. Every morning when you wake up in game, the fruits and vegetables whose seeds you had planted previously have produced new growth, which you can harvest. But this harvesting should only take up a little part of the day. After which, you can explore the world, talk to the characters, maybe go fishing or mining.

Yes, it’s a farming simulator, but even this game understands there’s more to life than your occupation! I want to treat social media and work emails like this. Harvest (i.e. open, and deal with?) once or twice a day. What I’m doing right now is letting every twitter or email notification take my attention whenever it sends me something, and this is the equivalent of virtually sitting in my field and staring at my crops until they tell me I can harvest them. Actually, the more I think about it, video games in general have a built-in mindfulness which reality sometimes does not. You, the protagonist, receive missions, but you choose in which order, when, or even if you want to do them. You can dissent from tasks given to you, you can (usually) take your sweet time and indulge in as many side quests as you want. We can learn something from this. There’s an intentionality which we often (or at least I do, I’ll speak for myself) willingly give up. But you can always get it back.

* ‘Self-care’ as a term actually appears with the meaning ‘self-interest’ as early as the 16th c., where it was used by the English poet, George Turberville‘s translation of Ovid’s Heroides (specifically: 19.205). ‘Mindfulness’ too has a long history, appearing in English as “the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something; attention” in the 16th c. (see Oxford English Dictionary). These terms are ‘new’ to the extent that they have reappeared in the context of a specific socio-cultural moment, in which the modern human life is structured according to 21st c. philosophies of productivity.

Internet.

Excerpt. Hayden White 2010*: 114: “The kind of understanding we get from following his story is different from the kind of understanding we might get from following his arguments. We can dissent from the argument while assenting, in such a way as to increase our comprehension of the facts, to the story itself.” 

*repr. of “The Structure of Historical Narrative” (1972)

Daily Life. I recently fell in love with cycling again because of Boston’s city bikes. It’s good stuff. 

Tom Habinek, realism vs. the ‘glob’, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.; tempora cum causis (11)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Ancient. Last weekend was the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies. Since I was still back in the UK with my family over the New Year, I missed most of it, but I was there for the last day to take part in the panel commemorating Prof. Tom Habinek, who sadly died last year. Tom was my PhD advisor, and a major influence in the field of Roman Studies. The event was very poignant, but fitting. On Sunday evening I posted my part of the panel, which you can read here: “Tom Habinek on ‘generativity’.” 

Modern. In an essay originally published in 1971, “The Culture of Criticism”, Hayden White describes the frustrations of Ernst Gombrich, Erich Auerbach, and Karl Popper (respectively: art historian, philologist and literary critic, philosopher of science) with the avant-gardists as typified by, for example, the abstract expressionist, Jackson Pollock. Each of these scholars held an attachment to realism; in some cases considering realism, in historiography and art alike, to be a means of resisting authoritarianism, with its power to overwrite the experience of reality by means of ideology. White (2010*: 105) writes that for these critics, historical, literary, or artistic realism, i.e. an attempt to represent reality as it actually is or was “results from the controlled interplay of human consciousness with a shifting social and natural milieu.” In the face of the fact that realism is supposed to reflect the human perception of reality, the avant-garde is taken by these critics to be a frustration of perception rather than a refinement of it. More than this, this break with tradition is a challenge to perception. White writes (2010: 107): 

“The surfaces of the external world, so laboriously charted over the last three thousand years, suddenly explode; perception loses its power as a restraint on imagination; the fictive sense dissolves — and modern man teeters on the verge of the abyss of subjective longing, which, Auerbach implies, must lead him finally to an enslavement once more by myth.”

(The fear of “myth” — figured as an antitype to so-called “rationality” in tandem with “realism” — has probably produced a number of negative results itself.) By the end of this essay, White (2010: 108-110) points to one of the real comforts of realism, one which lies in its hierarchical nature. Realistic art or narrative reflects a grammatically syntactical worldview, i.e. a mode of composition which privileges certain ideas over others, and arranges information around that privilege; whereas artefacts of the avant-garde might be interpreted as paratactical — presenting discrete elements “side-by side” (= παρά) in a “democracy of lateral coexistence” (2010: 109).

In Washington DC last weekend, I found myself face-to-face with Hans Hofmann’s Oceanic (1958) in the Hirshhorn Museum. I was really struck by the large heaps of paint in certain parts of the work, which I have now affectionately come to call “globs.” It feels appropriate!

Inspired by that visit, when I returned to Boston I wanted to go and look closely at more oil paintings in the MFA. Last night we got up close with some more excellent globs from Lee Krasner (Sunspots, 1963) and Joan Mitchell (Chamonix, c. 1962):

Digitization is vital, and I depend on it for my teaching and my scholarship, and I would never want digital resources to be taken away from me. But there is pretty much nothing like looking a glob straight in the eye, if you get the chance to. You can get a general sense of texture from a photograph. But the glob is just so noticeable IRL. Krasner applied oils straight from the tube onto the canvas for Sunspots, and you can tell. Looking at that painting tells the story of its making. As for Mitchell’s Chamonix, you can see the movement of her body in its wide, energetic strokes. Each is a record of embodiment, one which figurative, narrative, and supposedly veristic accounts tend to leave invisible. Back to Hayden White (2010: 110) one last time:

“The avant-garde insists on a transformation of social and cultural practice that will not end in the substitution of a new elite for an old one, a new protocol of domination for the earlier ones, nor the institution of new privileged positions for old ones — whether of privileged positions in space (as in the old perspectival painting and sculpture), of privileged moments in time (as one finds in the older narrative art of fiction and conventional historiography), of privileged places in society, in privileged areas in the consciousness (as in the conservative, that is to say, orthodox Freudian psychoanalytic theory), of privileged parts of the body (as the genitally organized sexual lore insists is ‘natural’), or of privileged positions in culture (on the basis of presumed superior ‘taste’) or in politics (on the basis of a presumed superior ‘wisdom’).”

* “The Culture of Criticism” (1971) is reprinted in The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory (2010), edited by Robert Doran.

Internet.

Excerpt. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 1987: 44: “I thought about myself and art: that I could catch the likeness of anything I could see — with patience and the best instruments and materials. I had, after all, been an able apprentice under the most meticulous illustrator of this century, Dan Gregory. But cameras could do what he had done and what I could do. And I knew that it was this same thought which had sent Impressionists and Cubists and the Dadaists and the Surrealists and so on in their quite successful efforts to make good pictures which cameras and people like Dan Gregory could not duplicate.” 

Daily Life. We spent New Year’s Eve walking along the shore at Troon. 

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Tom Habinek on “generativity” (SCS 2020)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird ~ 1 Comment

On 5th January 2020 I took part in a commemoration of Tom Habinek at the SCS organized by James Ker, Andrew Feldherr, and Enrica Sciarrino; with Basil Dufallo, Zsuzsanna Várhelyi, Scott Lepisto, and Enrica Sciarrino, and myself as panelists. With the generosity of Hector Reyes, we were able to read Tom’s (incomplete) book manuscript on the topic of personhood and authorship. Here’s the text of my contribution to the workshop, in case of interest. Enormous thanks to everyone involved and everyone who came to the panel.

It is my task today to speak on the concept of generativity as discussed in Tom’s manuscript. When I think of Tom’s work and the influence he had on students like me, it is, indeed, particularly his theorization of generativity which I feel to have been the most impactful. In earlier works, Tom’s interest in generativity manifested in his study of social generation via cultural production and reproduction, with a focus on how ritual acts instantiated Roman community. In a key passage of The World of Roman Song (2005, p129), Tom cited the work of the anthropologist, Paul Connerton, who, in How Societies Remember (1989, p62) discussed Thomas Mann’s understanding of the Freudian ego: 

“We are to envisage the ego, less sharply defined and less exclusive than we commonly conceive of it, as being so to speak ‘open behind’: open to the resources of myth which are to be understood as existing for the individual not just as a grid of categories, but as a set of possibilities which can become subjective, which can be lived consciously. In this archaising attitude the life of the individual is consciously lived as a ‘sacred repetition’, as the explicit reanimation of prototypes.”

The “explicit reanimation of prototypes” is how Tom understood Roman self-construction: the invocation of ancient exemplars; the continuous citation and reinscription of Roman ancestral memory; rituals which resubstantiated the dead in the bodies of the living. Roman literary and political history demonstrates clearly that the Romans were interested in how their culture generated and regenerated itself; how the present day related to the past and preserved a tensile balance between new iterations of Roman youth, and their ancestral blueprints. All we need think of is the late Republican Brutus contemplating his ancestor, the expeller of kings; or perhaps Cicero in the Pro Caelio raising the ancient, blind Appius Claudius from the dead to speak with Cicero’s own lips and chastize Cicero’s own enemies.

In his latest work Tom approached the question of Roman generativity from some new perspectives. In his search for an understanding of Roman personhood, he figured the Roman persona as an active process, not a passive state; I think that for Tom persona was not a noun, but a verb. “Personifying” is a practice — it is an action, it is alive. Starting from this position, Tom was able to see different kinds of ancient evidence not as discrete, disconnected elements of Roman intellectual systems, but rather mutually supportive organs of an organic, synthetic whole. Tom’s work instantiates a theorization of human culture which does not merely render literature, or law, or art objects into cynical, insensate records of elites and auteurs. His organic approach reveals that the ancient artefact is an expression and mirror of biological as well as cultural forms. To put it another way, without really knowing that they are doing so, humans make things which reflect their insides. Tom’s work makes you realize that when you read a Latin text, that text is actively trying to constitute you into a Roman reader — like a 3D printer with instructions to produce a piece of plastic in a specific way, the scientific, ethical, political scripts of the Roman text tries to make us.

With this, or something like this, in his mind, Tom in this latest work proceeded to examine generativity in a number of different types of ancient evidence, ranging from the practices of Roman bride dowries to the emergence of birthday celebration as a theme in Latin love elegy. Underneath each artefact, Tom found a consistent preoccupation in the Roman attitude to cultural and biological reproduction which expressed a profound anxiety, one which can be conveyed in the form of a simple question. Will we continue to survive?

Romans expressing this anxiety in different ways figured reproduction, with its insistence upon a continuity of resources, as relating to survival in the long term. The fact that Roman bride dowries are reabsorbed into the natal family to allow women to marry again and to have children is, Tom suggests, an intentional defense mechanism against the failure to reproduce. As a result, generativity in Roman thought relates not only to explicit, biological reproduction (i.e. producing children), but making provision for a self-sustaining reabsorption of assets as part of a framework which allows such reproduction to take place. At its core, this legal provision expresses a care to conserve not just culture or biology but energy; like keeping a little something left in the storeroom in case of an unexpected hunger. Cast in this light, Roman conservatism, which is so frustratingly obvious and, frankly, obtuse sometimes (just think of Cato the Elder) seems to be not simply fanatical traditionalism, but indeed a form of conservationism.

It is an impulse to conserve that Tom saw in the Roman discourse around luxuria. The chastizing of luxuria is not simply, Tom suggests, a knee-jerk political reaction against perceived excesses and hedonism, but rather a criticism of “pointless growth” — i.e. the expenditure of energy which will not return, will not be reabsorbed and thereby conserved for future use. Tom notes that criticism of luxuria in Roman texts so often employ agricultural and botanical metaphors because luxuria was an metaphysical outgrowth which defied the boundaries of the carefully proportioned Catonian fields, designed and tended to produce year after year. Incidentally, Tom made a point to note that luxuriant excess — a squandering of resources, the refusal to regenerate, to conserve, to recycle — expressed itself in many different ways: the fact that furniture, fine art, construction, urban development, and non-reproductive sex were each as bad as each other speaks to the intersection of conservatism with conservationism in the Roman attitude; i.e. having fancy pedestal tables and sideboards (Livy 39.6) is just as bad as fucking your boyfriend because you should, good Roman, be conserving your attention and energies for generative activities. Here, Tom seems to have revealed a kind of biological essentialism in Roman thought which is not usually, I think, made explicit. Tom notes that while the elegists and other figures from the Roman counter-culture were “ambivalent” about such a formulation of luxuria, they nonetheless accepted its definition; that is, while they did not play by these rules, they accepted that these indeed were the rules. Even if you are walking away from Rome rather than towards it, you are still on the road to Rome.*

Tom translates the Latin luxuria as “pointless growth”, “withering growth”, “wild growth.” An agricultural, biological symptom of “bad” growth is itself a helpful tool to reveal the nature of “good” growth, and Tom realized that, in Roman thought, “good” growth often related to an inseparable dualism: life and death. An insistence that growth (that is “good” growth, not luxuria) is actually related to death appears, Tom says, in the Pro Marcello (23): Cicero’s exhortation of Caesar to propagate new growth includes the impossible wish that Caesar could bring the dead back to life, if only that were possible. Indeed, the relationship between the living and the dead at Rome was one of Tom’s deepest preoccupations; in the book proposal for the project, Tom had focused in on a passage from Rudolph Sohm which I believe was, for him, programmatic: “the heir is treated as though he were deceased…the deceased continues to live in the person of the heir” (1907, p504). Indeed, the idea that the dead live in the face, the name, and the actions of the living is one of the vital aspects of Roman generation, regeneration, generativity. Tom’s discussion of generativity in this manuscript reveals a living organism, a beating heart underneath the details of textuality. According to his understanding, the Romans formulated their generative function as a life pulse which conserved itself, returned to itself, and, being limited, precious, did not waste itself.

*Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969/1999, p151): “To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here ‘all roads lead to Mishnory.’ To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road.'”