Interesting idea for a new seminar series. Productive tension or needless aggro?
we'll see... Jon
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My Best Fiend. On the Productivity of Intellectual Enmities.
A lecture Series organised by Michael Guggenheim at CSISP/Department of
Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London.
All Lectures Tuesdays, 4.30-6pm, Richard Hoggart Building RHB 137
1st Nov.: Liz Moore (Goldsmiths)
Reflections on the Genesis of Intellectual Fiends
8th Nov.: Harry Collins (Cardiff)
Good and Bad Arguments. With Friends, Idiots and People Without Integrity
6th Dec.: David Oswell (Goldsmiths)
Dances with Wolves: Latour, Machiavelli and Us
13th Dec.: Steve Fuller (Warwick)
Bruno Latour: and Some Notes on Some Also Rans.
"My best fiend" is a lecture series, which invites scholars to reflect on
their academic enemies (from movements: Marxism, to persons: Talcott
Parsons, to disciplines: anthropology, to concepts: "the other"). The goal
of the series is to investigate the productivity of intellectual enmities.
Science and Technology Studies has highlighted the productive role of
controversies to produce epistemic objects and sort the world.
Controversies align scholars with methods, theories and schools of thought,
they produce orientation in otherwise confusing seas of research. But
controversies also pigeonhole people into camps. They undeservedly identify
complex research identities with schools and theories and create
guilt-by-association. The lecture series is calling for an analysis of such
constellations by the protagonists themselves.
Enemies are productive. They spark interest, they draw energy, people care
about them and they care about us. Why else would people spend time
denouncing this badly formulated concept of an esteemed colleague, decrying
the neighbouring discipline that keeps misunderstanding the world, or keep
on writing bad tempered footnotes about this mistaken theory - and thereby
become complicit in this very unproductivity? Why do scholars choose this
enemy and not another?
Enemies also often involuntarily direct ones thinking, researching and
theorising. If an enemy posits a, people feel compelled to posit b. If she
writes approvingly of c, we need to denounce it. An enemy can have more
power over people's thinking than they would probably like to have it. It
is as if people are guided in their thinking not only from their research
object, but by an unknown field of do's and don't's, accumulated since the
time of their studies, of where to go and look and where not to look.
The lecture series calls for analysis of the productivity of intellectual
enemies. The speakers choose an enemy of their choice, and analyse the
enemy's productivity for their own thinking, their research and their
career. Doing so, they contribute to a new sociology of sociology. They
revisit controversies and analyze them from within and beyond to engage in
a sociological celebration of what they usually denounce.
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