This excellent piece of scholarly sleuthing by Michael John Gorman tracks down the “elusive origins” of Bruno Latour’s influential idea of the immutable mobile, and offers a very lucid account of the critical debate now surrounding the term. Latour’s work on inscriptions (chapter 6 of Science in Action) should be required reading for anyone interested in the material history of textuality.
Reading Gorman’s essay (and having also read the principals: Latour, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Adrian Johns) makes me wonder about the current state of empircal knowledge in the humanities. What counts as a fact? The nature of “knowledge” is, of course, highly contested territory in the humanities, and indeed, Latour’s own work stands as a major contribution to these very questions. But I’m interested in self-reflexively reshaping the debate along the lines of a graduate research methods course: when can a scholar be said to “know” something, and how is that knowledge constructed? The course would take a case study approach, investigating a range of controversies in the secondary literature: Latour and immutable mobiles, as documented by Gorman above; the recent exchange in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly on Blake’s color-printing methods, overtly and unapologetically technical but also a fascinating instance of analytical thrust and parry that reveals much about the current state of Blake studies and scholarly method in general (Kari and I have discussed that point at length between ourselves); the Ulysses wars is another obvious candidate; the Alan Sokal/Social Text meltdown; plus maybe some of my own work on the shadowy lives of first-generation electronic objects.
Additional suggestions for case studies of scholarly controversies in the secondary literature of the humanities? Ideally I’d like around ten exemplars, spanning a range of different historical periods, national literatures, and critical methodologies.
Posted by mgk at July 2, 2003 02:51 PMgraduate methods course - are you teaching 601 next semester?
Posted by: Jason at July 2, 2003 03:37 PM | Link to CommentOh. Hypotheticals I only do over coffee... Mayorga soon?
In terms of examples, I think that's a really tough question, since we have such a hard time even figuring out *what* someone should know - from what *should* be in the canon, to whether or not we should *have* a canon, to discussions like the recent "should artists program" question over at GrandTextAuto.
As to the broader question of how we construct "what we know," I suppose I would break it down (in an admittedly crude fashion) to _factual_ (less subjective: "Holden was the main character's name in Catcher in the Rye"), _conceptual_ (more subjective: "the development of Marxist theory is as follows ... "), and _argumentative_ (perhaps the most subjective, since we measure the quality of work by standards including informed arguments supplemented by conceptual frameworks, with the added flourish of personal rhetorical style and argumentative prowess). A possible example might be the narratologist/ludology debate including the articles, but also the (often very articulate) conversations on blogs, listservs, and message boards.
There are, of course, factors of race, gender, social position, familiarity, and so on to consider when evaluating argumentative merit (which is to say, these factors can come into play during the evaluative process, either consciously or subconsciously). Ultimately, I think I just ended up talking more about cultural capital, which is probably not the issue you were looking to address.
But I still want to get coffee ;)
How about Freud and the shift from the seduction theory (suggesting that one of the causes of female neurosis was sexual abuse at the hands of a male relative) to the insistence that such claims were just fantasy on the part of the patient?
Posted by: KF at July 2, 2003 07:35 PM | Link to CommentKF, does the controversy over seduction theory play out in a fairly concentrated and self-contained way in secondary literature? Basically, what I mean by "case study" are instances where I could give students a set of articles (or whatever), and let them follow the scholarly thrust and parry from one publication to the next.
Posted by: MGK at July 3, 2003 10:16 AM | Link to CommentMmm. Good question. I know that a number of feminist responses to Freud took clear issue with the shift, but I don't remember whether there were counter-arguments that supported him or not. I'll do a little poking back through the literature and get back to you.
Posted by: KF at July 3, 2003 12:18 PM | Link to CommentActually, now that I've had a chance to think about it ... there's this fascinating back and forth between Frederic Jameson and Aijaz Ahmed about the concept of 'national allegories'. I think the 'argument' lasts only 3 essays - Jameson's first, followed by Ahmed's critique, followed by Jameson's rebuttal. A really amazing exchange, if I recall correctly, and certainly do-able for one (hypothetical) seminar session.
I believe the reference that started it off: Frederic Jameson, 'Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism' Social Text 15 (1986) 65-88
followed by:
Aijaz Ahmad, "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory," from In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York: Verso, 1992).
and then there's Jameson' rebuttal... but I don't remember what it's called/where it is offhand. I can dig it up from my files at home if you are interested.
Posted by: Jason at July 3, 2003 01:30 PM | Link to CommentI'm thinking of the debate (which raged, relatively speaking, in the 70s) over the staging of the York Corpus Christi play... the mansuscript is 12 hours long, and the plays were each performed 12 times over a span of about 20 hours. Here's more: York Staging Controversy. http://jerz.setonhill.edu/resources/PSim/staging1.html
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at July 3, 2003 06:52 PM | Link to CommentHow about debates over authorship attribution? A prime (and high-profile) example would be Donald Foster attributing "A Funerall Elegye" to Shakespeare and then later retracting that attribution.
Posted by: George at July 4, 2003 09:55 AM | Link to Comment