INNOVATING FORMS
The 2009-10 John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar

Co-Convened by miriam cooke & Fred Moten

* Scroll down to see a list of seminar fellows

Project Description

1. The 2009-10 Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar will explore the role of form in the production of knowledge. What happens when knowledge takes form? Is thinking liberated, or constrained, or is the emergence of form, the process of informing (or en-forming) best understood as an interplay of flight and seizure, where taking form is inextricably bound with breaking (away from) form? In taking up the ontology of form we will also take up the history of form. We’ll consider the place or force of change in form as well as changing conceptions of form in the history of thought.

2. We expect that the seminar will take up a series of interrelated questions around the meanings and articulations of innovation. On the one hand, innovation can be seen to be acts of creativity—first it was clay then it was Man (not in God’s image but an unprecedented form)—the assumption of absolute novelty. How do we articulate/ give form to the unknown, the intuited, the unspeakable (slavery, Holocaust)? How do we choose, if we do consciously choose, between options that necessarily derive from the known? Is experience necessary for knowledge and how is the one translated into the other? How do we access and give shape to the unknown not in terms of the known? How to describe “then” not as a prescription based on describing “now”? What constitutes originality? Is form enough? Is form everything? What is at stake in claiming innovation? Does the form in which innovation is articulated highlight/ conceal/ erase mediation and the impossibility of novelty?

Does breaking with the formal constraints of a discipline entail working across and with other disciplines? Interdisciplinarity creates new forms of hybrid knowledge and focuses on form, on “how” to connect disciplinary knowledges; it is not additive, not the arraying of the content of different disciplinary languages and knowledges without regard for the form of its production.

While several disciplines may look at the same content (1960s, China, malaria), they are distinguished by the rules of evidence of the particular discipline and also constrained by expectations concerning the form given to content. How can the straitjacket of a discipline’s form be escaped? Possible answers include the use of a poem to critique a poem, or of fiction
to write a historical biography, or of literature for pathology; images as theory, cf. “the pictorial turn” (or the re-orientation of thought around visual paradigms). Does form hold open the gap between non-verbal and verbal representation without subordinating the one to the other (cf. Mallarmé’s poetry as the hesitation between sound and meaning)?

Can attendance to the question of the form of interdisciplinarity itself stem the headlong rush into a mode of eclecticism in which one discipline is simply added to another or in which one discipline simply displaces another? We will consider the forms that interdisciplinarity takes as well as those that it attempts to break. Is interdisciplinarity best understood as a mode of flight or a mode of regulation?

The interplay and antagonisms between the various forms that knowledge takes are highlighted and intensified in the managed university, where the value of that which can be considered new is constantly on the rise, resulting in closer ties between academic production and global markets. We will be concerned with how the ascription of innovation and creativity often elides the question of form, particularly when novelty and hybridity are taken to be synonymous. Interdisciplinarity reconfigures already given structures and protocols but in order to be understood as innovative or creative it must be understood as more than the sum of its parts. In order for hybridity to transcend the merely additive it must engage in a mode of theoretical practice that breaks form and takes form.

3. Are those zones of social life or modes of everyday material/sensual practice and organization that are denigrated as informal or formless possible models for new forms of theoretical practice in the humanities?

These questions are part of a more general consideration of the fate of creativity in the age of the creative industries: art galleries and theaters act as a wedge for regentrification alongside virtual industries and e-commerce. Do we now inhabit an age marked by the shift from the notion of creativity as a mode of aesthetic invention to creativity as facility with a certain technical apparatus?

Co-conveners

miriam cooke, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Fred Moten, Associate Professor of English

Duke Arts and Science Faculty Fellows

Caroline Bruzelius, Ann M. Cogan Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Mark Hansen, Professor of Literature
Frank Lentricchia, Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of Literature & Theater Studies
Jody McAuliffe, Professor of the Practice of Theater Studies & Slavic and Eurasian Studies
Julie Tetel Andresen, Associate Professor of English

Duke Professional School Fellow

Willie Jennings, Assistant Research Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies

UNC-Chapel Hill Institute for the Arts & Humanities (IAH) Exchange Fellow

Arturo Escobar, Distinguished Kenan Professor of Anthropology

Duke Library Fellow

Lee Sorensen, Art and Dance Librarian

Postdoctoral Fellows

Öykü Potuoğlu-Cook, PhD, Performance Studies, Northwestern University

Duke Graduate Fellows

Kathleen Bader, Music
Dwayne Dixon, Cultural Anthropology