Pemberi pidato: Prof. Mike Hill

Tanggal: 26, November, 2019 – Selasa

Waktu: 13:30-15:00

Tempat: Kamar 504, Gedung 6, Kampus Hongkou

Bahasa: Inggris

Summary: The first part of this talk will establish the connection in Smith’s work between knowledge, absence, and the quantitative nature of the real, using several key-words from his vast and varied corpus (e.g. “multitude,” “substance,” “work,” “corporeality,” “invisibility,” and “ideas”).

Part two homes in on how Smith proposes to solve the knowledge-numbers-absence enigma, specifically, his reliance on what Althusser calls “the omnipotence genus.” Smith’s knowledge system is above all a genre system. He proposes that we use the imagination to divide objects from each other, as well as put them together, which as has a political-economic analogue in the way he conceived of commercially-based social relations in his most famous book, The Wealth of Nations. Thus, both class and classification are significant here. In the case of the former, the “invisible hand” of the market points to the “majority of laboring men [and women]” whose collective power is erased by individualism and the commodity form; in the latter case, what remains absent to philosophical consideration is another form of “multitude,” this one defined as a similarly paradoxical kind of absent presence, reality with too much variability and at too large a scale to fit within a given genre system.

In part three of the talk I want to propose that we think of genre-making in the same way we think about the history of disciplines: both are ways of organizing our knowledge of the real world according to divisions of kind. Since the most important of the modern disciplines where imagination is concerned is the discipline of “English Literature,” my focus shifts here to its historical origins. Why English, and not—as Franco Moretti proposes—World Literature instead? And why Literature, instead of writing, media, technology, or even “data,” as suggested by the latest disciplinary disruption of the Digital Humanities (and long held within communication studies)? Could we say, again following Moretti, that the origins of literary studies are computational, rather than deeply subjective, individualistic, or other-worldly, as is traditionally assumed in the West? I propose that we think about the discipline of English Literary Studies in both a quantitative and materialist way. With its popularity among the lower orders, the ordinariness of its subject matter, its sheer massiveness both as an object and a generator of multiple kinds of experience, the realist novel is the classic location for explaining how the imagination, absence, and the computational origins of English are intertwined.

Speaker Biography: Adam Smith (1723-1790) is widely known for his economic writing and is regarded the world over as the first theorist, and most ardent proponent, of the modern capitalist system. But Smith did not obey the conventions of disciplinary specialization. His non-economic writing and lectures—indeed, the vast majority of his work—focuses on ethics and morality, astronomy, law, history, linguistics, patriotism, the fine arts, and other topics. This talk focuses on Smith’s epistemology, specifically, how it helps explain the historical origins of Literary Studies.

A fundamental aspect of Smith’s theory of knowledge concerns the imagination. According to Smith, our knowledge of the world is riddled with what he calls “gaps.” The philosopher must think creatively in order to make bridges between what appear to be disparate kinds of objects. However, Smith is not making the idealist claim that empirical knowledge is impossible, or that—according to the forms of scholasticism that so bothered the Enlightenment figures of Bacon and Newton—reality is whatever way we merely say or believe that it is. Rather, Smith is making a more complicated claim: we can know the world in ways that are better than what Johnson (contra Berkeley) called “ingenious sophism,” but what is “real” is precisely that which retains “a tendency to absence.” There is always more-than-meets-the-eye in Smith’s theory of knowledge, and it is precisely this empirical vastness—often disruptive and even painful—that solicits new ways of knowing things and acting better.