Categories of Knowing
We rely on categories of knowing to name, speak, and think ourselves and the world, to “tame the wild profusion of existing things,” in Foucault’s words. Whether invented or discovered, words or mental acts, categories are epistemic, producing not only the identity of the known, of “what is,” but also the difference between the unknown and the unknowable. Not one sentence or thought can be formed without depending on categories. Indeed, the whole point of education is to learn new categories and correspondingly new ways of thinking and understanding, of analysis and interpretation. This seminar invites participants 1) to identify and investigate categories of knowing in their own work; 2) to interrogate the relation of categories of knowing to power; and 3) to reflect on how the relations of categories are structured in thought, past and present.
Categories of knowing can vary widely, depending on the discipline or field. Some knowers think in terms of storytelling or aesthetic modes, genres, cycles, formulas, or periods; others in terms of schemata or permutations of group identity such as political parties, tribes, peoples, or nations; still others in terms of topologies, sets, taxonomies or classifications. What categories are central to knowing in specific disciplines or fields? To specific theories and practices? What is the relation of the knower(s) to the known? Are categories defined primarily by form or content? Stable or evolving in time? Accepted or contested? Homogeneous or heterogeneous? Inclusive or exclusive of membership? How are individual identities as well as communities organized around categories of knowing?
Categories are never neutral; they are enactments of social power. Human beings in every era engage categories for their own purposes. What categories are we engaging in our own work, for what purposes, and how do these categories relate to social power? There are long histories of cultural asymmetries, of privileging some categories over others: logos over mythos, mind over body, knowing over understanding, culture over nature, owners over workers, masculinity over femininity, light skin over dark skin, heterosexuals over queers, human over nonhuman, and so on. Often the dominant category is naturalized as “what is,” assumed present to itself—born, not made. Who has the power of defining categories, of naming what is known, and what are the implications of this for how we know in our own work?
2023-24 Seminar Director:
Professor of English and American Studies Adriana Estill’s current research asks how the Latin American genre of the telenovela becomes visible and legible in U.S. spaces (i.e., what are the characteristics that make a narrative a “telenovela”) and how are those definitional discourses dependent on the particular media space, the language, the soundscape, the producers, and the audience? For the seminar, Adriana will be studying how Latinx YouTube creators invoke the telenovela as a route to establish and “remember” family, Latin American origins, and a larger imagined community of U.S. Latinxs.
Faculty Fellows:
Antony Adler, Lecturer in History, will be exploring what encounters with giant squid reveal about the ways scientists and the public came to understand the ocean during the 19th century. Compared to other marine creatures that were easier to study, discussions surrounding the giant squid were more often centered around the question: is it real or simply a myth? He suggests that investigating the process by which giant squid went from being creatures of legend to an accepted part of scientific and public knowledge is key to understanding changing perceptions of the ocean and can serve as a case study to help us examine the mechanisms of creation, acceptance, and dissemination of scientific knowledge.
Victoria Austen, Robert A. Oden, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow for Innovation in the Humanities and Classics, will explore the intersection between ancient Roman spaces that have previously been categorized as ‘sacral-idyllic’ and those that have been categorized as ‘gardens’. In her previous work, she has proposed Derrida’s concept of supplementation as a means of understanding the relationships between Roman gardens and their surrounding networks; and, building on this, she now seeks to investigate whether garden space should be categorized as a supplement to the sacral-idyllic, or vice-versa.
Carol Donelan, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, proposes to write the final chapter and conclusion for a book-in-progress, The Untimely Imagination: Aesthetic Experience in Popular American Screen Narratives. As an academic knower and shameless binge-watcher, her goal is to synthesize a holistic understanding of popular screen narratives and her engagement with them. This entails not only accounting for categories of conscious and unconscious knowing but also nonconscious sensing.
Professor of History Andrew Fisher’s project concerns Caxcan history and identity. Inhabitants of the northern fringe of Mesoamerica, the Caxcan people coordinated a major intertribal rebellion against Spanish rule (the Mixtón War of 1540-42) that serves today as a symbol of native resistance. Scholars have long considered the Caxcan a vanished people, but contemporary assertions of that identity cast doubt on such clear-cut interpretations. Andrew’s project will explore the discourses of difference that have shaped these competing historical narratives.
Through somatic and scholarly inquiry in conversations, Somatic Salons, Judith Howard, Professor of Dance, seeks to articulate the reality and the implications of the body as a category of knowing. Groups of invited artists will gather to discuss and embody practices of physical research, and choreographic thinking. An informal journal or zine, and the beginning of a new performance work will emerge from this series.
Susan Jaret McKinstry, Helen F. Lewis Professor of English, will write a paper and a series of poems exploring metaphor as a generative form of thinking designed to resist familiar categories of knowing. In “The Affective Fallacy” (1949), William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley call metaphor an “obstruction to practical knowledge (–like a torn coat sleeve to the act of dressing).” As a theorist and poet, she hopes to deepen her understanding of categorical knowledge across disciplines and the power of disruptive, productive metaphors.