February (Drunk Theory)

Drunk Theory

a rogue panel

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On Friday, February 7th, 2014 the MATCH Working Group held a special rogue panel on the night of the George Washington University English Graduate Student (GWU EGSA) "Post-ing: a Symposium on What Comes After," featuring the special guest speaker Roderick Ferguson.

Following a January discussion on Mixology and the role of alcohol in academic communities, MATCH sponsored a special Happy Hour at the Bayou bar and grill. Members prepared thoughts for a round of extemporaneous talks (or, rants) on topics including Manhattans, Vodka, Whisky, Wine, Beer, and Tonic.

Drinks in hand, the Reading Group discussed the pressures and reactions specific to race, gender, and sexuality. One speaker admitted that "Pink Drinks," such as Manhattans, open up men and butch women to comments by friends and co-workers. The pressure to perform specific roles at the bar and drink the right drinks can demand special behavior from academics that are looking to keep the conversation on their ideas and not on perceived incongruities in their gender or sexual identity.

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Whereas sugary cocktails undermine the reception of men, women & trans academics, drinking Whisky or dark liquor (especially for women) is perceived as serious business. 

For women that enjoy shots or Jack-n-Cokes, the consumption of whisky-based drinks can be seen as an attempt to imitate their male colleagues and appear tough. Even among intellectuals who would disclaim sexist division of liquors, comments such as "woah, is that scotch?" are far too common and can undermine the naturalization of women at bars and happy hours among their male and older colleagues.

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The demands on what drinks are appropriate for serious academics all work on the prior expectation that graduate students and junior faculty will need to be drinking and attending happy-hours, receptions, or after-hour events at bars if they are going to accomplish the necessary networking to be successful.

For many businesses, including the University, drinking can serve as an attractive Tonic that relaxes tensions and helps build community. This causes difficulty for people who cannot drink alcohol, including those who abstain because of health or religious reasons. 

Many serious discussions, plans and connections are made not on the conference or board-room floor but at the pub after the official event has concluded. Those who want to be included in these events are tacitly demanded to find ways to cope at bars or to insist on alternative meeting places, accommodations that often are met with personal or group resistance.

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Without even setting foot into a bar or putting a drink to our lips, alcohol still can direct how we act and how we are perceived. Alcohol ad campaigns such as the sexy cyborg that long promoted Svedka Vodka, continue to associate drinking with chauvinistic relations to women. 

The effect of this is to maintain environments of association in bars and conference wine-hours that place women in the position of sexual objects. After hour drinks at a conference can build up tensions that serve to objectify women that have worked all day to substantiate themselves as critical thinkers and formidable colleagues.

Granted that eroticism need not deflate a woman's power of being, but images like those from Svedka's cyborg ad campaigns set impossible standards of embodiment and performance. The curvy cyborg's stalk of a waist, broad hips and bare breasts train the eye of consumers to look for these features in the presence of vodka. This builds up desire for the drink by working on the promise of sex, but has the instrumental effect on the objectified women it uses to sell its product.

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The association between intellectual congress, sex & alcohol is hardly a recent development, whatever the futuristic cyborgs suggest. Wine in particular has fueled both the 4th century BC Symposium of Plato and its later Commentary by Marsilio Ficino in the 15th century.

Even without contemporary ad campaigns, treatises on eroticism and drunken stories about the lascivious Pan has perpetuated alcohol's association with sex for millennia. Often following in Dionysus's train, Pan leads his followers to other plains of thought and into the bedroom through the gifts of the vine.

The work of Pan's grape magic has helped form the school system that we have inherited, with its long tradition of sensual exchanges (of the mind and body). From the apprentices of Socrates to boys at boarding school, education's peculiar power games owe a lot to a system deeply invested in love and drink. 

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MATCH's critical engagement with Drunk Theory hardly diminishes our enjoyment of drink, although it does include a taste of its many bitter notes. Perhaps it is best to say that a glass of Beer has a great deal of power in the academy; and with that power flows many dangers as well as strengths.

Our work and our community would not be what it is without the tightening of bonds and relaxing of tongues that come at the pub house. As the jury glasses around the table testified, a theory working group convenes as the meeting of many full minds and full bodied drinks. However we may judge or liberate the spirits of the academy, we are all implicated in process and outcomes of Drunk Theory.

January Meeting (Queer Mixology)

"Pink"

by Robert McRuer

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Pink economies and pink ecologies flow through academia. Reading Robert McRuer's examination of this "unnatural" color, from the recently published Prismatic Ecologies (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed.), the MATCH Reading Group drank in how heady substances "sticks to" and "accelerates" minds and bodies (McRuer 64).

"Since the commingling of red and violent is a theoretical impossibility," writes McRuer "pink in a certain sense is about as real as the famous pink elephants Dumbo sees after he accidentally imbibes absinth" (64). 

This commingling of unnatural colors, unnatural bodies (flying elephants), and unnatural states of mind bring McRuer to examine how pink marks and mobilizes the gay community. Pink constructs gayness, as gay marketing and tourism reproduce pink drinks, pink scents, and pink mists around the world.

The libations & pink-dollars of gay production fuel academia. Whether directly, through the critical intervention of gay colleagues, or indirectly, through shared cultural reservoirs, the university is awash in pink.

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Contemplating the colors of unnaturally mixing, MATCH considered how absinth and its fellow spirits help theorists "stick" together and can propel the "acceleration" of ideas.

From wine hours to after-hour drinks, alcohol sponsors the official and unofficial meeting of minds across the academy. It was commented by one MATCH member that beyond what is spoken on conference panels and responded to during Q&A sessions, the real throw down of ideas usually happen at the bar once the schedules events of the day has died down. Tensions relaxed and elbows touching, challenges and collaborations in are often made over drinks.

Teetotaler and lust alike are conscious of the active material work that alcohol accomplishes for theory communities. Just as pink directs and chases gay bodies, whether or not they like it, the buzz that allows pink elephants to play around the academic community allow some bodies to feel unnaturally at home and others excluded from or trapped in a shared experience.

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No two people see colors the exact same way, scientists tell us (LiveScience.com). Between the differences in cones and rods in the eye, as well as variations in the brain, the sighted among us do not process light in any absolute fashion. Thus the pink that McRuer sees when he considers the Eau-Mo cologne bottle, may not be the same as the pink in my cotton candy cocktail (even if they measured at identical wave-lengths).

So too, no two people experience alcohol the exact same way. Whether drinks play across your tongue or around the room, alcohol produces an incalculable diversity of experiences for everyone it touches. Mixology reveals itself to be more like alchemy than an exact science. That is to say, it can be magical, demonic, transformative and explosive; making the stars spin widely across the sky at the same time as it brings us to gaze at them in new ways.

At this sticking point, the MATCH group began concocting a rogue session for the upcoming English Graduate Student Symposium, Post-ing, called Drunk Theory. Members will come together at a bar after the event has come to a close to share over drinks (of all sorts) the cultural and production of alcohol of various theoretical communities. Each person will speak on a drink of their choice and speak extemporaneously, flowing wherever the matter takes them and finding common sticking points.

For more on "Drunk Theory" please stay tuned!

November Meeting (Mad Science)

Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time

by Michel Serres with Bruno Latour

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Staging a Conversation

On November 26th, 2013, the MATCH Theory Group staged a reading of a conversation between Michel Serres and Bruno Latour on the possibility of Science Studies.  

The 10 minute scene, "For an Antropology of the Sciences" was pulled from the 1990 interview between the scholars, translated from French by Roxanne Lapidus. M.W. Bychowski played the role of Bruno Latour, questioning Patrick Henry who played Michel Serres.

Performed for a small audience and recorded with the help of a respondent, Shyama Rajendran, the praxis of the reading had a three-fold aim: (1) modeling a conversation on science studies, (2) questioning the very possibility of such a conversation, and (3) embodying the material needs and difficulties at stake in the conversation.

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Engaging in Conversation

In the dialog, Latour interrogated Serres's reading of the explosion of the Challenger rocket as an event caught in the middle of scientific and humanistic significance, emphasizing the technical failures between the rocket's systems during the launch. 

Serres responds that challenging, success, and failure never leave behind the social enactment of power. It is the "fire" in the rocket's detonation that fuels "the fire" of science and nationalism as collective engagement.

This conversation concludes with a serious debate over whether one mind can think of an object in a scientific and humanist mode at once. Latour challenges that the objects being considered are importantly distinct, that "the fire" that exploded the rocket and the "fire" that fuels a scientist are of two types. 

Serres responds that we can and must think both together, asking "isn't it more reasonable to use both hemispheres of the brain in unison?... To walk on two feet seems to trip everyone up. Is this proof, then, that we always limp?"

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Interrogating the Conversation

Following the staged conversation, the respondent helped the speakers explore their experience and reaction to the material they just performed. The responses were surprising.

While in the role of Serres, Henry found himself convinced by many of Latour's refutations. A dangerous conflation can occur, Henry argued, when we as humanists interpret a scientific conversation about the Challenger we take certain words such as fire to signify passion (which is one type of object) when the scientists mean to signify fire as an object of combustion. The result is not only confusion, but a re-instantiation of two separate conversations about two separate things.

Conversely, in the role of Latour, Bychowski found herself convinced by many of Serres's arguments. Fire can do and be many different things, so that an active attention to it would require an understanding of its burning presence in both discourses. Thus accepting the argument that two objects and conversations exist, to create an interdisciplinary Science Studies scientists have to learn Humanist language and Humanists will have to learn scientific methodology.

Coming together on this point, the respondent brought the speakers to imagine where and how this cross-training is already occurring, offering Disability Studies as one such instance. Indeed, noted Henry, we see universities such as Columbia, NYU, and GWU requiring or encouraging their med-students to take courses on "Literature and Medicine" to help them see their work as acting within a wider network of social relations.

Concluding, all present affirmed the value of the exercise of engaging in such a conversation but admitting a certain disciplinary bias. The Humanities has found reasons (especially relating to funding) to reach out into the sciences, but the Sciences appears less interested in pivoting to include the Humanities. There are notable exceptions, of course, such as Karen Barad which we read the month before, but there is much work left to be done and many people left to convince.

October Meeting (Quantum Intimacies)

Meeting the Universe Halfway

by Karen Barad

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And we're back! Returning for a 2nd yr of working to mobilize, theorize & build community we're doing so with a new bent & fervor.

Once again a word of thanks must be given to Patrick Henry who has signed on as the MATCH Working Group Co-Director (you will be hearing from him shortly), and Leigha McReynolds who continues to act as a point person for the KINDLING essay collection project.

This year we are kicking off an initiative called "A Season with the Sciences" where we will be exploring the intersections where the Humanities and other disciplines meet and where they branch off to find productive ways to think, work and live together.

As a way into Science Studies & the Humanities, we read the intro to Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by Karen Barad from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy and the History of Consciousness, Barad demonstrates that a doctorate in theoretical particle physics (or any other specialized degree) should not limit one's imagination on the job market. While there is reason and value in abundance to seeking out one's own discipline, our expertise may be in greater demand in other areas where the population is less saturated with like-minded thinkers.

The formal structure of the book also reflects skills useful in bringing communities together. Barad writes with excellent prose and a critical sense of the poetry of formulas, inventions and theorems. Even better, she boasts the abilities to understand them! 

Charts, statistics, and mathematical formulas populate the text and carry on the argument - in places reiterating what has been said in a language more familiar to scientists and in other places putting forth a new point in a fashion which requires readers to adopt and utilizer a more scientific way of thinking.

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A key feature of Barad's argument is a rethinking of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The quantum observation that one can either determine a subatomic particles position or its momentum, but not both, Barad claims has much wider implication for the way in which we think about the world and each other.

When we observe certain elements of the world, we inhibit our ability to observe other elements. To translate this in terms borrowed from Robert McRuer on difference and dis/ability: every way of knowing is also a way of not knowing something else.

We can consider a persons actions or watch their intentions, but not both simultaneously. Likewise with ourselves. We can act or think about acting, but doing both is often worse than trying to walk and chew gum at the same time. Thinking, thinking about thinking, and thinking about thinking becomes not only recursive but each replaces one another in the process. At a certain point, if we are to act, speak, or perform an experiment, we must be willing to take the risk that we cannot be also be fully on the watch. Momentum and position cannot be expressed simultaneously.

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This allows us to break from being frozen in a space of language, thought and impotent potentiality and draw back from the bridle of unconscious action, by embracing our own uncertainty. We must likewise be willing to acknowledge the same for others. "Uncertainty," writes Barad, "is not our undoing but our savior: it is the very unknowability of intentions, that is, our principled inability to truly judge one another, that saves our wear souls" (17).

Faith and good works, the social and the natural, subject and object, relativism and absolutism, the humanities and science, epistemology and ontology, becoming and being may all be aspects of every body that acts in the world but may not be considered in their totality by any of us. This puts limits and caution on what we do, but even better, it allows us to actually do something. It allows us to come together without biting each other's heads off. The discussion can start and something can happen.

"Matter and meaning are not separate elements ... Matter is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance, most evidently perhaps when it is the nature of matter that is in question, when the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities. Perhaps that is why contemporary physics makes the inescapable entanglement of matters of being, knowing, and doing, ontology, epistemology, and ethics, of fact and value, so tangible, so poignant." (3).

MATCH NOW: Theories of Detonation

"Wanna try? I'll be your detonator"

NaNaNa (NaNaNaNaNaNaNaNaNa), MCR

The 2012-2013 Academic Calendar has come to a close for many of us in MATCH and as we transition into our summer research and other projects, it is important to mark a year of significant accomplishments as we tend fires to carry us towards whatever the future holds.

While initial suggestions for a Theory Working Group was met with general support, there was an initial concern that similar ventures have often folded in relatively quick order. Nonetheless, come September (really late August) MATCH  was officially announced, an event was set and readings dispersed. The feeling going into the first meeting was this:

Rather than worry over perpetuity and goals, let's focus on the present and doing things --- even if MATCH blows out like a candle in the wind, it will nonetheless exist to give a little light and warmth here & now.

With a full set of 6 meetings (3 each term), including a discussion of Failure, Cyborgs, Bubbles, Affect, Hotels, and a Round-Table on the Personal Side of Academia we made something; not least of which was community. The second set of 3 meetings saw the launch of our website and podcast (which will both be expanded in the next year).

As we broke bread and shared a drink to discuss the future, the feeling we started with remains: to move ahead like the next project could be our last, finding what we need as a community here and now and doing that.

In that spirit, drawing on the interests of the members, MATCH has started the KINDLING Series to edit and publish a collection of essays under the title Mad Sciences. Leigha McReynolds will act as the Series Co-Editor along with MW Bychowski, and the Call for Papers has recently been released.

A second collection of papers from the Round-Table "Attitude, Affects & Alliances in Scholarship" is being published by PREFIX.

Finally, starting next year, Patrick Henry will become the acting Co-Director of MATCH.

Thanks to all who has made this possible, you keep my candle lit as we work to make the intellectual world (in & outside academia) a place for intellectuals & intellectual growth; especially for young minds. We are not just the future, we are the now, let's define it.

Be a MATCH: Burn on! Remain a mobile, active, theoretical, community seeking the best of what the "humanity" of the Humanities can be.

Sincerely,
MW Bychowski

March Meeting (Hotel Theory)

Hotel Theory

by Wayne Koestenbaum

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A Telecom Meeting

It's conference season! In accordance with the travel of many MATCH members, this month's meeting will be held via telecommute on "Hotel Theory" by Wayne Koestenbaum.

Readings have been sent out and available on the Facebook group, and a few key passages have been provided below for consideration. Attendants are invited to post replies to the thread for the next week, noting if or where they are/have/will be traveling.

The passages and questions below are meant primarily to provide a primer for discussion. As our talks often delve into personal experience and hover around the premise of the text as well as on the text itself, responses are welcome that share anecdotes from traveling as well as thoughts about the experience and theoretical position of hotels.

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Hotel as Movement to Nowhere

"'Hotel is a method of not staying'...

we enter the euphoric state of 'never-dwelling anywhere.'

Hotel existence, because socially unattached, 

is silent, even amid noise" (4)

A communication from a hotel comes from nowhere.
The letterhead deceives, masks a lack of location" (7)

Nothing gets accomplished in a hotel room
The hotel room is unthinkable though I am trying to think of it.
I ponder the problem of the hotel room 
because I want to escape a closed system (10)

Question for Discussion: 

1. What do we gain by imagining a hotel not as a static place but as a way of motion?
2. What experiences of anonymity or placelessness have you experienced?

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Hotel as Site of Exchange

The title of Frank O'Hara's poem 'Hotel Transylvanie'

suggests that transfusions and transfigurations occur in hotels:

Dracula, blood-mingling, identity swap.

In such hotels, guests share needles, bareback, and refuse 

all activities except for respiration and fornication" (6)

Hotel represents a failed relation to space.
In a hotel, we do not..."stay with things"
We depart from objects, they fall off us (17)

Anglophone writers take on frenchness 
when they post hotel as a locale of loss.
Hotel is where a french leaning poet can perform availability---
the provisional comfort a prostitute offers. (18)

Question for Discussion: 

1. How does the invitation to imagine hotel-being as a state of perpetual exchange open us up to new ways of thinking and what dangers might come from this?
2. What things have you given, taken, or changed while in a hotel-state?

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Hotel as Assembled Body

A hotel is an arbitrary collection of human beings.

Like other city structures (stores, arcades)

hotels throw strangers together in chance arrangements....

a hotel's cast changes, but slower and with greater ceremony.

A hotel is a temporary finite set-- hence, a laboratory." (9)

Clearly I am afraid to check into Hotel Theory

I am hovering, nervous, at its threshold (12)

Literary form is a hotel room

sometimes opulent, more often austere (15)

Question for Discussion: 

1. What might Hotel as a literary, social, or philosophical form help us to do or express differently than what the author opposes as "homeness?"
2. How does the experience of reading the book perform  Hotel Theory (i.e. the audience, the philosophers cited, the split in the text left/right, etc)?

Attitudes, Affects & Alliances in Scholarship (Part 4): Rust

RUST

Patrick Henry

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The below is a textual restoration and revision of thoughts first delivered during the “Attitudes, Affects, and Alliances in Scholarship” roundtable at the EGSA Symposium at the George Washington University on Friday, 15 February 2013.

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During eight years of my life—four years of undergrad, then two master’s degrees—I kept a rusted spike, meant to secure railroad ties to the earth, on my desk as a paperweight. Perhaps, it was an unconscious effort to subjugate my past, my private history, to my goal of becoming a writer and a literary critic. 

 Or, the spike was an artifact, sheathed in russet flakes that shed red-brown particles on papers and books, that functioned as a reliquary of experiences past: developmental years passed in Bellwood, a small borough tethered by railroads to the nearby city of Altoona, the city and its railyards and its engine workshops and the Altoona Rail Roaders Memorial Museum final testaments to Pennsylvania’s bygone stature as the keystone of American, industrialist infrastructure.

Forget Pennsylvania’s history, its myths of progress and the visionary lieutenants of such captains of industry as Andrew Carnegie; all these lines of iron and steel long ago became the Rust Belt. And the rail lines, its cinctures, extend from one buckling town to another, spreading economic free fall’s corroding touch. 

 In villages and boroughs and cities across Pennsylvania, houses shed their siding as decrepit cars hunker on blocks in front yards, roads are chocked with potholes, and communities are shrinking as the opportunities vanish.

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This is, we are told, the fate of this place: rust freezes gears in place, causes machines and progress to fail. When rust makes a cameo in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the “Man of Ideas” Joe Welling rants that rust is only an inevitable form of decay: “Decay you see is always going on. It doesn’t stop. Water and paint can’t stop it. If a thing is iron, then what? It rusts, you see.” 

This teleology of rust is not unlike a sinister mystery of faith: a thing’s newness fades; it corrodes, surrenders to rust; it crumbles into dust. But I refuse to accept the nihilistic, tarnished historicism of Anderson’s Joe Welling. 

 After all, rust also indicates a chance for restoration; through refurbishing anything literally or metaphorically rusted (even something as simple as the rusted railroad spike that once served as my desktop paperweight), we discover the possibility to recover past narratives and experiences that are lost in what Welling suggests is the telos of rust, the stagnant state of decay.

Instead, those rusted machines that lurk throughout a place like Pennsylvania should be sites that allow us to remodel our thoughts about every mode of history, from those private stories that we keep close to our hearts to the sweeping panoramas of documentary accounts. Our memories can render rust, then, as a complex metaphor for the multiple ties to our pasts and the histories of others, to the conditions of life today, and to potential futures. 

 After all, we carry those histories guised with so many flecks of rust with us as we propel toward the future or ruminate on the past; they are parts of our work whether we will it or not, like the railroad spike leaving its patina of dust on my old manuscripts. 

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 If we keep this perspective in mind—that rust represents how intricately entwined the past, present, and future are—we can, as Walter Benjamin writes in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “brush history against the grain.” 

So, memory and recollection are the tools we use to restore the rusted object and the multiple histories that it contains. This is at work in T.S. Eliot’s “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” when remembrances stir stillness into a frenzy:

The memory throws up high and dry 

A crowd of twisted things; 

A twisted branch upon the beach 

Eaten smooth, and polished 

As if the world gave up 

The secret of its skeleton, 

Stiff and white. 

A broken spring in a factory yard, 

Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left 

Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Here, the memory of Eliot’s poetic persona, akin to my essayist’s voice in this reflection, has set rigid rust into subtle movement. So, these are my thoughts, assembled from so many pieces of literary rust, made into a textual artifact for you. I’ll leave the restoration in your hands.

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Listen via Podcast to

the M.A.T.C.H. Round-Table 

"Attitudes, Affects & Alliances 

in Scholarship"

15 February 2013