Site of tradition:

“The Master’s House”

 

How to take this class

  1. Read the assigned materials

  2. Watch and read the abridged lectures

  3. Write a response

Please note that although the audio of the course was professionally transcribed, there are errors in the transcripts.

  1. Read the assigned materials

Tactics of disruption

Contemporary Praxis

Ancient Past

2. Watch the abridged lectures

 

“Faced with the demand to capitulate before the false binary of scholar and activist, I could content myself with realization that, to the extent that my scholarship has taken shape around activist practice, I was engaged in a deep defiant flight of my own. But in the context of this course, the appetite for defiant flight is also a hunger for a disciplinarity that is honest with itself, of the legacies and inheritances of its unnamed or deliberately veiled activisms.”

— Dan-el Padilla Peralta

“Classics needs activism. It needs a self-reflection as a discipline on the way that it's been used and abused for political ends. And classics needs the ability to reflect on how to change. There are better and worse ways, more and less effective tactics and directions.”

— Chiara Ricciardone

“It's not that disciplines are useless. Disciplines represent, in many cases, histories of human attention and care and individual expertise that are transmitted down and can be extremely productive in the present. But they have a habit of constituting problems that their methods are good at solving and mistaking those for accurate accounts of reality, rather than epistemic perspectives.”

— Brooke Holmes

“I encourage you to think about what scale of change is sufficient and whether we might be strategic in ostensibly accepting a narrow parameter of change in the confidence that, once the rupture gets started, it'll go further and deeper than tradition could have ever imagined.”

— Micah White

 
 

Brooke Holmes

 

Hi. My name is Brooke Holmes, and I teach in the Department of Classics at Princeton. I was trained in comparative literature, so as a comparatist as well as a classicist. And up until June, I directed the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton. And this course Rupturing Tradition is a collaboration between the Activist Graduate School and IHUM. It’s housed in IHUM. So, I thought I'd say a couple words about IHUM and then think a little bit about the course itself. And my aspirations and thoughts about the course. 

When it was first conceived, I would say that IHUM was imagining knowledge or expertise within the university still from a disciplinary lens. So, the thought would be, you have an interdisciplinary project, you have a project that you can only get so far with with the tools of discipline A. And what you can't do with discipline A, you could take on discipline B, and now you have A and B, and then produces interdisciplinary knowledge.

And it became relatively clear quickly that the most generative and exciting projects being pursued under the auspices of IHUM were not working with this model of interdisciplinarity, but was one that inverts the relationship, we might say, between the problem and the discipline. So, instead of imagining what sort of falls out of the boundaries of the discipline is neatly recuperated by another discipline, we might imagine that, instead, all of that material that falls out of the discipline itself, acquires.... reacquires a kind of cohesion or a sense of... I'm not going to say wholeness, but a sense of agency as a problem that itself starts to respond to certain techniques of knowledge, or certain bodies of knowledge, so that the fidelity is not necessarily to the discipline as the end game, but to the problem itself. And disciplines become techniques of knowledge and bodies of knowledge and methods for getting at a problem, getting around a problem, doing things with a problem, and thinking about the production of knowledge that way. 

So, in imagining this approach, we would say It's not that disciplines are useless. Disciplines represent, in many cases, histories of human attention and care and individual expertise that are transmitted down and can be extremely productive in the present. But they have a habit of constituting problems that their methods are good at solving and mistaking those for accurate accounts of reality, rather than epistemic perspectives. And because of that, they have a tendency to throw walls around or within boundaries, as opposed to thinking about those boundaries as porous and as opportunities for forming collaborations and relations across the boundaries between different epistemic techniques, whether that's between two individuals, or whether those are between two techniques that a single thinker is working with in working on a problem. 

So, a couple things we might imagine in approaching this way of thinking about disciplinarity, one becomes a question of bricolage, of thinking about the tools at hand, not only as Audrey Lorde in the Master’s Tools, but also as tools that can be taken up and put to new uses or put together in ways that were unexpected. And to think about the millions of bricolage to pull techniques from places that weren't thought to supply tools we might say, and to put them together with what exists, and to try to imagine that work as not only critique in taking the Master’s House down, but of trying to perform another form of world building with what's given. And what's given of course is not only the legitimated forms of academic knowledge, it's multiple forms of knowing. But it's also academic forms of knowledge. And to try to repurpose those techniques in order to form new collaborations and new communities of knowledge.

So, I would emphasize that IHUM is not just about this form of bricolage in order to be responsive to new problems or to problems that have not been seen within the Academy, but also about creating communities of knowers. And this, I think, is something I would stress as important to the history of interdisciplinarity. More broadly, interdisciplinary work emerges from feminism, gender studies, critical race theory, disability studies. So, “newer” forms of disciplinary within at least the academic world that themselves respond to blind spots within disciplines, or the limitations of disciplinary techniques to only reproduce the perspective of the source, or not to be able to read absences in the archive, or to be mobile within the archive to look at different perspectives, including those of the marginalized or the enslaved or people whose voices have been written out.

So, the history of interdisciplinarity really has been about, not just putting A and B together, but a politics of knowledge and the formation of new communities of knowledge. And it's also, in the case of IHUM, been about working beyond the boundaries of the academic institutions and collaborations with artists, with practitioners, with clinicians like, well, analysts, and also the activists.  

I want to turn to the specific question of the course and classics as a problem, and the discipline classics as a problem to take up and what to do with this discipline, how to rebuild it, how to reimagine its techniques, its historically accumulating techniques, and to redeploy them with in the present to be responsive to the problems we're facing in a crisis, and also to be much more inclusive to imagine a much broader community of knowers.

We are living through an extremely tumultuous time. Classicists have a tendency to try to diminish the specificity of the present and say things like, “Classics has always been in crisis.” It has indeed been in crisis multiple times, but that cannot be a strategy for denying the demands being placed on us in the present to restructure and reimagine the discipline—to reimagine what it means to form a community of knowers around this shared object, which I'll call antiquity.  

It's a crisis we're living through that's prompted, I think, by a fundamental challenge to classics, and more broadly to the academic communities and to our politics, which is a problem which is laid out really clearly in The Combahee River Collective statement:

We reject pedestals, queen hood, and walking 10 paces behind to be recognized as human, lovely human is enough. To be recognized as human, lovely human is enough.

And we're not there in classics.  

And so, in thinking about this particular question in terms of relationship to the knowledge of the past, let me put out two ideas for conceptualizing together in the course.

One is to think about how the discipline of classics has historically predicated itself on the mastery of the body of knowledge, whether it's a canon or a set of techniques of papyrology or epigraphy techniques to know the past as an object of epistemic capture, to become an expert in knowing this thing, the past, this text, this object. And I want to introduce the idea of imagining a relation with the past. Again, Greco-Roman past, or maybe an ancestral past more broadly conceived, an ancient past. Imagine that relation as an object of knowledge, both at the epistemic practice and technique within the Academy, but also, what is an aesthetics of the relation? What is an ethics of that relation? What is the politics of that relation?

The other part of it that I want to emphasize is that the relation with the past is often the site for constituting relationship with one another.

And so, the excitement, I think, of this course is to really put those questions together and to imagine: “How can we reconstitute this community of knowers also as a community within a present that demands new forms of relationality and new forms of community building and new forms of world thinking?”

That's where thinking about what activism and Academy and disciplinary knowledge, and each of you bring to the table is extremely important and exciting. 

Chiara Ricciardone

 

Who are you? Which character pulls you the most in Sophocles’ Antigone? Is it the heroine, Antigone, who is in love with the impossible? Is it her sister, Ismene, who sensible and silent thinks that she can keep safe? Is it Creon whose worst fault is not even his arrogance, but the obstinate way that he clings to it? Are you somewhere in the crowd of Thebes? Are you the blind seer, Tiresias, with his angry truth? It's Sophocles his gift and his curse that we can find parts of ourselves in all of these characters.

For me, it is Haemon who draws me the most strongly. He is the offspring of power. He's in love with the rebel, Antigone. And that means that he has to make the case for justice the most inclusive way possible. His father accuses him of arguing with him to free Antigone only for her sake. And he says, “Yes, for her, and also for you, and also for me, and also for the gods below.” His signature virtue is insisting that there might be something right in what other people have to say.

It's a weird moment to be filming this. it's a weird moment because there are shootings happening in Chicago in Portland, and COVID is turning the world inside out. So, we're having a class on rupture at a moment that is a rupture. You already know what a rupture is. We're going to see paradigm shifts in virology and higher education and social rituals, political rituals, and yes, in classics as well.

On the one hand, the idea of rupturing tradition is very modern. Modern capitalism is characterized above all by the stress on innovation, breakthroughs, ruptures, cutting ties with the past. So, to set out to rupture tradition is very much within the modern tradition. And so, in that sense both is and is not revolutionary.  

On the other hand, what is the way in which we are trying to rupture tradition? This class is trying to create a break in the tradition of classics, which is actually a connection in the way that doctors will sometimes re-break a bone so that it can grow straighter and stronger. In rupturing the classical tradition, we are at the same time maintaining a connection to that tradition. in fact, we're trying to strengthen our connection to that tradition by including more people in it, by shattering a border between the classical tradition and other traditions with which it's been an invisible dialogue, and try to make that dialogue apparent.

I want to talk about what I think this course is about in terms of three key words that I drew from our texts this week. And the first one is interdependence.

This is something that Audre Lorde brings up in, “Can the master’s tool dismantle the master’s house?” And for Lorde, interdependence between different kinds of groups of women is the path to freedom. It's also a kind of security, particularly as we delve into what she calls the chaos of knowledge, the realm of the unknown.

Another way of thinking about interdependence is from ecology. This is the shell of a horseshoe crab. Sometimes called the living fossil, 450 million years old. And the population of horseshoe crabs — which, by the way, are not really crabs and far more related to spiders — is declining. But we only found this out because of a showier species, the red knot, kind of Sandpiper which depends on eating the eggs of the horseshoe crabs. And when they saw that the numbers of the red knot were declining and they tried to figure out why, the scientists realized the numbers of the horseshoe crab were declining, and that all of this had to do with the poor water quality.

This class wants to propose an interdependence between classics and activism. Classics needs activism. It needs a self-reflection as a discipline on the way that it's been used and abused for political ends. And classics need the ability to reflect on how to change. There are better and worse ways, more and less effective tactics and directions. Though reflecting especially on the history of academic and intellectual activism is a useful thing, as classics finds itself (for real this time) in a crisis.

But it's also true that activism needs the classics. Classical texts are powerful.

I want activists today to be able to harness that power. So, maybe in this metaphor, the classics are the horseshoe crab, this living fossil, and activists feed on its eggs. But it turns out that the classicists need the species that seems to be feeding on it. It's the showier red knots that first alerted scientists to the declining population of the horseshoe crabs.

Second key word that I want to think about for this class is difference. And I almost have too much to say on this word. So maybe I'll confine myself to what Audre Lorde says about it. And I think she lays out two different strategies of difference. The one is the way the master uses difference to divide and conquer. And the other is like magic. It’s the generative power of difference by including difference, by making difference a strength, new ways of being in the world are able to be created.

In this class, I think the sites that we've defined, university, discipline, culture should be understood as places for staging an encounter with difference. And our challenge is going to be reading across those differences, finding ways to put them into conversation. Lorde says, “In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.”

The third key word that I want to use is possibility. When differences between us, between classics and activism, between theory and practice are cast as interdependence, new possibilities emerge. And that's what I want for this class. I want you to feel like it unfolds new possibilities for you, and for your disciplines, and for activism.

I'm really looking forward to being surprised by what emerges from this unlikely conjunction. And so, I'll just say with the Combahee River Collective that “we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle ahead of us.”

Micah White

 

For this first lecture, I want to accomplish two things. First, contextualize Activist Graduate School, and say a little bit about how to approach this untraditional class on activism. And I want to look at the Audre Lorde speech that we read for today and begin to weave the thread of inquiry that I'd like to bring to this seminar. 

First, let's begin with the history of Activist Graduate School. Chiara Ricciardone and I founded Activist Graduate School in 2018. The original impetus for this school came from my experience co-creating Occupy Wall Street, and feeling that the theories available to contemporary activists were insufficient for understanding both what happened in the movement and why the movement didn't reach its objectives.

So, we wanted to create an activist school that applied the liberal arts tradition to activism by focusing on history, strategy and theory. We are not a vocational school. We don't teach skills. Instead, we teach ways of thinking about social change through activism, protests, and the creation of social movements.

Now, a few words about how to learn activism, which is really a question of how to read for activism. What is it that we're trying to read for when we read with the intention of applying the reading to activism? Well, number one, we're not reading for ideology, or to join a particular clique, or a certain political interpretation. We need to be generous readers. And that means doing our best to grasp the author's theory of change, even if we disagree with the direction of that change. We're not reading to find a recipe. And if we do find a recipe for social change, then it'll be one that needs to be heavily modified to work in our particular historical moment.

So, what should our intention be when reading these texts? First, I think it's important to know that every tactic has a history. We ought to know the history of each tactic that we identify so that we may be in a position to evolve that tactic.

Second, social organism theory. And by this, I mean, there are patterns to the ways that collective organizations act. And sometimes, not always, organizations react to stimuli in predictable ways. I think this might be true of academia, just as it is true of local governments, federal governments, bureaucracies, corporations, etc. And so, if we can identify those patterns and exploit them to create change, then we will be better activists. That is one of the goals of how we read for activism: to identify those patterns.

Next, we want to create a taxonomy of tactics and a roster of strategies for rupturing tradition, and also for protecting tradition. There may be traditions that ought to be protected, after all.

I want to share a short parable that I call the parable of the rat. Now, this is based on behavioral science that has been done with rats. But the basic concept is that scientists train a rat to claw through a wall in order to get food. After the rat has learned to claw through the wall to get food, they then construct a wall out of food. And what does the rat do? The rat will claw through the wall of food in order to get a smaller morsel of food.

The point here is that we need to be self-aware about the tactics that we're using, and not fall into a kind of reactive critique mode that has us destroy what would be a source of sustenance.

Now, in this first week, we read a few different strategies for rupturing tradition. And I want to focus on Audre Lorde and ask a question.

Audre Lorde’s speech has one of the most famous 1-liners to come out of academic activism. She says, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I think almost every activist has probably heard this phrase.

And I want to focus specifically on two sentences from her speech:

“What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.”

I want to challenge you to ask: Is this narrow parameter enough? Is accepting this narrow parameter an effective way of —and I'm going to quote an inverted Audre Lord — Is it an effective way of “keeping the master occupied with the oppressed concerns?”

I encourage you to think about what scale of change is sufficient and whether we might be strategic in ostensibly accepting a narrow parameter of change in the confidence that, once the rupture gets started, it'll go further and deeper than tradition could have ever imagined.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

 

Hi folks, I'm Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Associate Professor of Classics of Princeton. What I'd like to do in this introductory video is lay out some of my motivations for participating in this project, with a specific emphasis on scholar-activism and what it has meant to me in my practice of classics.

My point of departure will be an email that I received in early January 2019 as I was preparing to return to the east coast from an annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in San Diego, at which I presented a paper on the representation of scholars and historically minoritized groups within the field’s top journals for a panel on the future of classics.

The email, which was submitted pseudo anonymously through my open scholar website, reads (and content warning for racism):

You know you're a third-rate thinker and a racial narcissist. If classics is so horrible that, as you bemoan it, we need "reparative intellectual justice — including the demolition of the discipline itself ," why don't YOU leave the discipline and go back to the rabble-rousing and muckraking you apparently love so much?

Face it: you were always a curiosity, and your only accomplishment has been the philological equivalent of being an organ-grinder's monkey.

Have some character for once in your life and admit that YOU ARE NOT A SCHOLAR. YOU ARE AN ACTIVIST. GO BE AN ACTIVIST.

And last, but certainly not least, go fuck yourself.

Now, there's nothing much on offer in this email. It's a textbook example of raging White fragility and Academy that manifests all the tendencies with the genre, reflexive denigration of scholars of color, the insistence that because they brought up race, they are the racial narcissists, an insistence that not infrequently goes hand in hand with the form of pretend naive special pleading that attempts to turn the tables by accusing scholars that level critiques of structural and systemic racism, of being racist themselves, or of using the charge of racism to tar and feather fellow knowledge workers was only sin, again, according to this pretend naive special naive pleading, is being politically incorrect.

We could say a great deal about the email author’s deviousness in not putting his own name to the email and the calculation of his choice of pseudonym. The signature and response email address that were submitted to the portal belongs to a liberal progressive academic activist at Berkeley who has been hounded by far-righters after being placed on Turning Point USA’s Professor Watch List. Forensic data attached to the portal submission made clear that the email had nothing to do this Berkley scholar.

Elsewhere, I've written about how this and other forms of racist harassment substantiate the claim that for classicists and classics adjacent knowledge practitioners of color, the mere fact of exist in the study of Greco-Roman antiquities is a form of political labor. That's an idea I owe to Sarah Mett.

What I propose to do now though is reflect on the emails artificial distinction between scholar and activist, and its imputation to me of the label of activist as a way of denying credibility and legibility to me as a scholar. On first looking at this email, I was reminded of a passage from the opening pages of Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship.

“If the Imperial project and its recourse to the exclusionary structures of instrumental binary reason,” she writes, “demanded from its votary’s strict observance of the ideological threshold separating insiders from outsiders, us from them, similar from foreigners, masters from slaves, precise energies of the individuals and subcultures that I examine, accrued in the main innovative bordering, visible and small, to find flights when the fetters of belonging toward unknown destinations of radical alterity.”

Faced with the demand to capitulate before the false binary of scholar and activist, I could content myself with realization that, to the extent that my scholarship has taken shape around activist practice, I was engaged in a deep defiant flight of my own. But in the context of this course, the appetite for defiant flight is also a hunger for a disciplinarity that is honest with itself, of the legacies and inheritances of its unnamed or deliberately veiled activisms.

There are, for sure, classicists who, one might claim as ancestors. I think often about Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s cross joints of scholar activism in work such as Assassins of Memory, for example. In the task of responding to and moving aggressively toward the rupturing of tradition, this and a sort of other genealogical enterprises will move to the forefront, sometimes. But what differentiates this course from say the history of intellectual thought, or history of scholarship in classics is that there will be plenty of attention to the praxis of world building together, and that praxis is indispensable to the pursuit of the reparative and epistemic and hermeneutic justice that in the final analysis necessarily follows, at least in my view, on the determination to forge a more humane Humanities.

 

3. Write a response.

This is an open invitation to reflect on this week's readings, lectures, and discussion. You might choose to highlight a neglected point or perspective, reframe a debate, extend a line of inquiry, pose a lurking question, identify an important pattern, raise a challenge, or something else.

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