Rock on

Beautiful day for a trip to the seaside, so we went (for the first time since coming to New York, I'm embarrassed to say) to the Rockaways.

Above the fold

Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen headlines the Thanksgiving New York Times!

Never a dull day in the City!

Weberian

Romanesco

For dinner with three of my favorite people in the world tonight, I cooked a whole head of romanesco - my first experience with the fractal food. It looks more mineral than vegetable but tastes just fine...

In the pink

Amazing wrap-around sunset, as seen from my roof when the glow in the east (right of the photo) suddenly bathed my kitchen in plum colors... and this was just the start of it. Before we were done we'd gone through more colors than a big bowl of jelly beans.

My new westward view.

Long autumn

If you thought the Fall colors were over, you'd be wrong. Prospect Park!

Wide angle

It really is rather a fetching city at night, this one. Here's the view down toward Lower Manhattan over Washington Square Park from a colleague's apartment. The skew in the photo comes partly from my leaning out over the balcony edge, partly from the camera phone's wide angling...

3D

My friend H is visiting from Japan, so it's going to be a week of culture! Today we saw two things which you really need to experience first hand. The first was the enormous show of sculptures by Picasso at MoMA, the second was a long play at H's favorite New York theater, Barrow Street.

That you have to be in a space with sculpture goes without saying. That theater works because you're sharing a space (and time) with the actors is less obvious but no less true. "The Flick" is over three hours in the same unchanging set - a rundown art house movie theater, whose staff are the characters. Nothing much happens, and much of that is silence. But the experience is almost unbearably powerful... I was reminded of Grotowski's understanding of the essence of live theater: the audience is transformed because the actors sacrifice their bodies.

Archival

Took two of my first year students to the New School Archives after class today, to help them find materials for their final research projects. Learned some interesting things there.
1) There is a file in my name (since I've given the Archives all sorts of things I get my hands on, like a YOU NEVER LEAVE PARSONS teeshirt, still in its wrapper, or this mug)! 2) There is some benefit to our school's having renamed and rebranded itself so often (unlike the eponymous intellectual tabloid evoked by this New School publication of 1969): it's easier to guess when undated documents were produced! Not sure how

the new (Neue) regime will fare. Judging from the ugly new "Be a force of the new" advertising campaign, it seems already to be exploding.

Golden autumn

This Fall just won't end...



















not that I'm complaining!

How should we think if we wish to think together?

Although unplanned there was something satisfyingly right about my having to use my fingers and the dust, all that's left of our chalk, for the final session of "Seminar in the City" which I'm leading. (The remainder of the class is about student projects, ushered in by a guest presentation on Sekou Sundiata's "Research to Performance" pedagogy Wednesday.) 

The names of Richard Bernstein and Hannah Arendt (at last!) appeared on my board because our final reading was by Elizabeth Minnich, who did her PhD with these two advisers, on John Dewey, at The New School. Even if she hadn't been an importnat part of the New School College, even if she hadn't gone on to do work in interdisciplinary and integral studies consonant with the ethos of The New School, her bringing together feminism (and the European tradition) and pragmatism would have been a sweet way of wrapping up The New School story.

But, of course, Minnich was here for the first stab at a liberal arts college. And her subsequent work, including Transforming Knowledge, the introduction to whose second edition we read, heralds the birth of a "New Academy" very like Lang today. The book's chronicle of the multi-faceted struggle to establish women's studies in an academy devoted to understanding "Man" offers many resources for freeing ourselves from knowledges that  ... derive from and legitimate systems of domination (25) and helping us more fully address crucial questions such as these:

What has it meant to be human? How have these meanings changed across time and across cultures? How can and should we live together not despite but with all our differences? Who are “we”? How should we think if we wish to think together? How, by whom, and to what effects is knowledge legitimated? How do thinking and knowledge relate to “the real world”? Why do such questions matter; why should we care? (6)

Minnich offers tools for seeing and engaging these questions, from using plurals and verbs rather than singulars and nouns to rethinking the Man/Nature contrast, evolutionary narratives, the very idea that there are "kinds" of humans - and religion's baneful tendency to absolutize particulars.

Arendt was no fan of Dewey's, but it was fun to show how Minnich's understanding of knowledge as made in a constant shared process (of which we can become aware, and which we can bend toward greater inclusion) brings together Deweyan pedagogy and Arendtian imperatives on the importance of "thinking." The terrifying example of Eichman's not-thinking provides a strong rationale for developing the kinds of open and participatory thinking Dewey's philosophy of education seeks to foster. I offered Minnich's view as a sort of summa of what The New School has been about - a summa not of knowledge but of understanding the processes by which we make knowledge together, and need to keep at it, lest "knowledge" become the legitimator of domination rather than the way to a more just, more human future.

Then I made a mistake (perhaps). Since it was the last session of class I'm leading, I invited the students to pair up and look back over the syllabus of readings we had just made our way through and tell me how (if) it communicated this ethos: I wanted and needed to know if what I was trying to get across was coming across, and how I might do it better. I left the room to let them discuss freely. 

Their critiques were fine but ordinary: a better course title? shorter and perhaps fewer readings? reading prompts? field trips? a fuller integration of the Parsons story? They didn't say that my readings encompassed a wide range of voices and disciplines, men and women, insiders and outsiders, scholars and practitioners, faculty and students. They didn't say that these voices conveyed the spirit of a place ever on the make, in which there was no settled view of what counted as "knowledge," and in which new knowledges and new pedagogies were regularly being tried out. Perhaps I expected too much. (It is rather meta for students in their first semester of college!) Perhaps I didn't explain it well. Perhaps it's all they know... 

But of course the class isn't finished, though my selection of shared readings is. Let's see how these ideas and issues appear in the class presentations ("model seminars," we're calling them) to which we now devote our efforts.

Storytracks

In "Theorizing Religion" today a lot of things came together in a quite lovely way. The readings were two responses to Eliade on sacred space, and on Aboriginal Australia: Sam Gill's "Territory" (from Critical Terms for Religious Studies) and Tomoko Masuzawa's "Dreams Adrift" (from In Search of Dreamtime). I started the class by saying "from here on, it's all dialogue - dialogue between the various theorists we read, and between theorists and the worlds of religious practice." Gill's and Masuzawa's pieces each construct dialogues of their own - Gill rehearsing Jonathan Z. Smith's critique of Eliade, Masuzawa placing alongside Eliade's Australian Religions a contemporary study of Walbiri women's iconography by Nancy Munn - and/but the way they do demonstrate different dialogisms of their own.

The discussion build on our reading of Eliade last week, but also drew in Ritual and its Consequences, which we read before that, and Durkheim, who came before that. Later many of our other authors came in, from Saba Mahmood to William James, to Ludwig Feuerbach to Meredith McGuire. Delightful!

The spine of the discussion I offered, with four words on the board, linked and divided by a wavy line:

CENTERS

BOUNDARIES

JOURNEYS

DJUGURBA

CENTERS refers to Eliade's idea that human beings cannot live in the "chaos of relativity and homogeneity," requiring breaks in the horizontal continuity of life in order to have orientation and find meaning. BOUNDARIES names Smith's response, that spaces are important in religion but the vertical imperative is a cryptotheological assumption foreign to traditions such as the Aboriginal; meaning is made by humans setting and resetting boundaries. JOURNEYS refers to Gill's critique of Smith's view of religion as mapping as still wedded to too static a conception of space, containers as if seen from above (the god's eye view still a holdover from monotheism): what if we understood space (and religion, and meaning) in terms of the multiple overlapping trajectories of bodies and the stories told around them? DJUGURBA, finally, refers to Munn's discovery that Walbiri women's stories are accessed not in "sacred" spaces but in the midst of the everyday; the "dreamtime" is the stories is the stories' telling. Lots to discuss here, from the role and responsibility of the scholar of religion to the drama of finding meaning in a pluralistic world.

Gill and Masuzawa's ways of bringing the figures they discuss together are interesting to consider, too. Gill weaves a number of threads together in his text, like the trajectories of different Aboriginal peoples sharing land they traverse in different ways. It's a little utopian to suggest that this sharing involves no conflics, but for him it's enough to demonstrate that sharing generates no real cognitive dissonance in the reader. Masuzawa commends the way Munn, while observing on the coexistence of Walbiri women's and men's stories (both say the women's aren't as sacred as the men's), doesn't claim to offer a unified view of their symbiosis. Masuzawa's naming it seems a little more contrived.

Balagangadhara, a different kind of journey-theorist, is next!

Kugels all the way down

We had the annual faculty dinner of my little program tonight. "Welcome to Kugelfest 2015!" our host K wrote. She also furnishes the noodle kugel which gives the occasion its name, and serves it each Fall, after the same delicious Moroccan lentil soup. Many people who've taught in the program as adjuncts have joined our core group over the years, and it's always been lots of fun.

As we sat down to our commensal feast tonight, the Kugelfest tradition was explained to a first time participant, an Islamist. But what was this tradition? I remembered that K had made kugel one year, and that the next year it was kugel - of course! I recall thinking that this happened rather quickly; were we really at of course already? But it stuck, and Kugelfest it has been ever since. The power of ritual!

In recent years, the emergence of the Kugelfest ritual has been duly mentioned but not questioned, the name making it clear that kugel had always been the symbol of our shared life. This time one of our emeritus members was there after a period of years, however, and she wondered: had there not been a pre-kugel gathering? The historian of early Christianity speaks, I thought! Further religious studies questions arose, too. People remembered an unbroken annual tradition interrupted only last year (when my colleague M and I were abroad) but I was pretty sure there had been another missed year. The power of ritual! Have I mentioned that K is a specialist in liturgy?

Kugelfest it is and was meant to be, and it's kugels all the way down!

Checking my diary on returning home I find that my emeritus colleague is, of course, right. Indeed, the tradition took some time to come together. In Fall of 2002, when I had just arrived at Lang, I had people over to my place for wine and cheese. The first thing I recorded as a Religious Studies Faculty Dinner happened in the Spring of 2004, at K's place, and at it a kugel was indeed prepared. (It was my first kugel.) We met next a year and a half later, with no mention of kugel. Then in February 2008 there's record of the "kugel dinner," and in November of that same year, a first mention of a Kugelfest. Kugelfests follow in late Fall of 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013.

There may be other records, and more reliable, but six out of the last eight years we met in the Fall around the kugel and under its banner. That seems adequate to me. (I only wish I liked kugel better...!)

Vaut le voyage

Perfect perfect trip on the Staten Island Ferry - not that it isn't always a little more breath- taking than I recalled. (And did Lady Liberty always look like she was trying to herd giraffes?) The sometimes steely colors of this blustery cloud-spotted afternoon were heated to incandescence by a setting sun.

Roundtable

The Lang Religious Studies Fall Roundtable ("Literary Studies in Religion I") was a blast! Deliberately blurring the lines between teachers and students as is our wont, our panel included an undergraduate, and two graduate students working on their PhDs - one happens to be teaching for us this semester, the other happens to be an alum! Who cares where people are in the pecking order right now when they have interesting ideas to share? And what a pleasure to feel the continuum, the community of growth and flowering and joy in shared discovery!

City nightscape

I don't often go up to the shiny skyscrapers of Midtown.

They are quite a sight though!

The fallen

The last of the leaves in the Lang courtyard copse are handing on just a little longer - despite the rain! It's been a splendid show, as always. (Still a skeptic from my season-deprived childhood in sunny Southern California I half-expected it wouldn't be.) I post a few photos below, with the rueful privilege of retrospect...

November 6

November 5

November 3

November 2

October 30

October 29

This is the window from which I mostly watched, 5 November

As simple as two plus two

As the narrative part of "Seminar in the City" comes to a close (the final section of the course is devoted to "model seminars" which the students will lead on topics they choose), we had our Tristram Shandy moment. A course which students might reasonably have expected to tell the story that starts with Lang's birth in 1985 instead ends with this birth. But therein lies the tale - and another instance of 18th century English literary wit.

Not a simple tale, as my attempt to diagram it shows - the vertical axis represents the conventional sequence of four years of high school followed by four of an undergraduate degree and, perhaps, two more in a master's program. What I was trying to show was that it took the New School a good long time to treat the four years of a BA as a single unit.

• The square represents the BA program introduced during WW2, known as the Senior College since it was only for students who began their studies elsewhere. (Contrast with "Junior College.") It's alive and well as BPATS, the Bachelors Program for Adults and Transfer Students.
• The crossed-out circle next to it is the experiment of the New School College, which was a sort of honors program within the Senior College - full-time but still, like the rest of the New School, not residential. It began in 1966 and petered out five years later.
• Next to it is what came to be known as the Seminar College in 1976, a seminar-based curriculum but still only for juniors and seniors. Is it the renamed New School College? Occam's razor suggests so but I have yet to see or hear anyone confirm this.

• Above it was the Accelerated BA-MA Programs, introduced to entice students to stay more than two years, and take advantage of the university's graduate programs (in the social sciences, "management and urban professions," and media studies).
• Below these two was the kernel, as the story is conventionally told, of Lang - the Freshman Year Program at The New School for Social Research, which, starting in 1972, offered a specially designed one-year program for precocious high school students - many came after their junior year of high school, some even after their sophomore year. After the year at The New School, they transferred to universities with conventional 4-year undergraduate curricula.

By the 1980s (the advertisement above is from 1981), all these programs existed together in a sort of symbiosis. The Freshman Year Program was housed in the Seminar College, but each still had its own catalog. Indeed, just a few months after the advertisement above writes The Undergraduate Division consists of two colleges - the Senior College and the Seminar College... The New School ran another ad, describing four different programs, each of which seemed to cater to different students, most of whom came from and went to other universities.
All of this was in keeping with what The New School was - a long-standing alternative (and challenge) to conventional, credit- and degree-focused institutions. This piecemeal array represents a lifelong education approach to undergraduate education - and was par for the course in an institution which experimented with unconventional new forms all the time, seeking to accommodate learners at all different stages of their lives.

It took a presidential initiative, and an endowment, to gather together these pieces into a four-year liberal arts college. It made formal what had been emerging - students entering the Freshman Year Program and staying, making do with three years of the curriculum of a Seminar College originally planned as a two-year (or one-year) experience. Closure, a telos? It's tempting to see it this way, to see these parts as components of a four-year college destined to converge. We're just quirky here at The New School, one is tempted to observe; we've long done things back-to-front - like offering graduate before undergraduate programs, and "extension" even before that!

Not so fast. It wasn't through absent-mindedness or lack of vision that we didn't start with a liberal arts college - the default for American higher education. Perhaps it was through absent-mindedness or lack of vision that we ended up with one. While administratively shaggy (and doubtless frustrating for revenue), the gaggle of undergraduate programs of The New School's 1970s weren't feeling their way to the traditional-aged four-year college student, but seeking out other student bodies, and giving them more possible trajectories.

I think an ambivalence about convergence into a four-year program is to be seen in the first catalog of the still two-year Seminar College in 1977.
The inside front cover, sharing a spread with the grand words "THE IDEA" (but there's nothing about an idea on the following page!), is a line from Alexander Pope's satire of literary pretension, The Dunciad:

Ah! Why, ye Gods, should two and two make four?

Why, indeed? Why not two and two, or two and two and one and three?

Waitan

A red barge from the Brooklyn Promenade recalled another cityscape..

On Target

China at First Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Lego donated to Ai Weiwei in a white BMW parked conspicuously next to the entrance

(the Lego company declined to sell him pieces at bulk rate because they don't support political art, and he's managed to turn it into an

international cause) and calligrapher Wang Dongling takes a bow after writing the Heart Sutra on a giant piece of paper in watery ink...

Threadbare trees

And out front, buildings peeking out through thinning leaves

A new city rises

 The new building is calling forth kin (in milky morning light)

They sell ideas

I did not expect to find this work, part of Parsons students' "My God, we're losing a great country!" exhibit (last page here), used in an advertisement for the school two years later - but here it is.

Individualist Durkheim

I've been describing "Seminar in the City" here more than my other course, "Theorizing Religion." That's partly because "Seminar" is the new course, partly because I'm teaching the two courses to back and I don't really have the time to digest what happened in the first course's discussions as I race from 66 West 12th Street up to 6 East 16th Street. I'm able to linger over today's "Theorizing Religion" discussion because the first year seminar is having its library workshop!

I'm really glad that happened today, because in "Theorizing Religion" we just had an awesome discussion. I wasn't sure we would; in fact I didn't dare hope we would. It was the second of our two sessions devoted to Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life and the first, on Monday, wasn't great. Students took offense at passages in which Durkheim asserted that some societies were more complex than others, and I sounded shrill and defensive pointing out that he was less judgmental than most in his time, that his point was precisely that differences of complexity, etc., were irrelevant to understanding the nature of religion. Also unpopular my insistence that his claiming there are no religions which are false is saying both more and less than the "everybody has a right to their own truth" line: religion really changes people, but not for the reasons religious people think it does. "Religion does not know itself" is no way of winning friends and influencing students in a Lang religious studies class!

To tell the truth, discussions of Durkheim usually flop in my class; I'm not sure why. (I can admit that because I think I finally cracked it.) So what was different today? I put the book aside and gave a mini-lecture. Students were sullen until I stopped, at which point a most surprising thing happened. Not just a vigorous and serious discussion, but one in which several students who rarely speak spoke a lot! It was easier to build a discussion around things I had said than the long reading. But I suppose I was able also to couch it in language familiar from our past discussions.

Instead of dwelling long on the claim that religious people are mistaken in their interpretations of their experiences, I emphasized that Durkheim is all about the cultivation of individuals with the moral courage to resist injustice and hypocrisy. (It may be a Princeton Religion Department thing to suppose "Individualism and the Intellectuals" to be the key to Durkheim's opus.) He agrees with William James that religion is "dynamogenic" - transfers energy to people to help them live - and that the origins of this effect are obscured by religious people's accounts of them: beliefs supervene on actual transformations. But James is mistaken to think that the story of religion is one of lone geniuses having transformative experiences, which derivatively spawn dogmatic, institutional and ritual systems. Those individual experiences are themselves possible only because the people having them had been equipped and empowered to "transcend themselves" by the support of society performing itself through ritual. The story of religion is of key communal practices, figured in myriad ways, which make possible powerful individual experiences.

Somehow this way of couching things jibed with the spiritual but not quite not religious ethos of this year's class. Durkheim isn't quite, or isn't necessarily, "negating" individual experience or its significance after all. Though most thought I was out on a limb to claim that hermits, forest monks and walkabouts are clearly participating in the rites of their society, they see religion as shared and social and worry about those who would truly leave society behind. We'll see if the ideas stuck when we continue our discussion of ritual Monday with "Ritual and its Consequences," and then continue discussion of the "sacred and profane" (and of Western scholars' speculations about Aboriginal Australia) with Mircea Eliade.

Railroaded

I've now walked the whole High Line - this is the view as the loop around the railyards at its north end prepares to turn southward. (See the Empire State Building in the middle?) The overgrown rails are lovely, but it seems the High Line is now mainly about watching construction. Once a kind of magic carpet ride flying above the West Side it's now densely hemmed in, feeling more like a walk along the bottom of a canyon of buildings. The plants, too, have grown, so there are few uninterrupted vistas left - catch this one while you can!

Donning the mask of the upholsterer

In "Seminar in the City" today, our theme was Parsons. I'd had students read the history narrated on the Parsons website, skim the catalog to an exhibition put on by the archive a few years ago on a representative change in Parsons' signature Interior Design program in the late 1960s, and read one of the documents quoted there, J. Allen Tate's Notes toward a philosophy of design education (1969).

The new approach was called "environmental design," taking into account psychology and sociology in crafting spaces for human use. Tate quotes Frank Alvah Parsons in advocating a reorientation of design away from questions of taste and service to the rich and powerful toward something more like public service. Shouldn't everyone be able to live in a well-designed environment? Parsons students now worked on hospitals, community centers, correctional facilities. Post-shift Parsons was interested in helping add a sense of dignity to the human condition. Tate cannily quoted Louis Brandeis in arguing that design should be understood as a profession:

 

I'm not sure if my students bought it. The second stipulation in particular sounded out of synch with their sense of a field full of people seeking to become famous. As for public spiritedness, that sounded to them a lot like, well, us, at the progressive liberal arts college overshadowed by Parsons! (They've complained before that nobody's heard of us, but everyone's heard of Parsons.) Surely the ones foregoing "financial return" out of concern for "others" are the utopian liberal arts students, not the practical careerists at the design school, or?

Their skepticism about the compatibility, let alone convergence, of design and progressive liberal arts/social research is interesting at this stage in our history. As I told them, the 1970 merger between Parsons and the New School for Social Research came out of the blue, making sense to neither party. It took a good forty years for the component schools to get over mutually resenting or ignoring each other. But we're an ever more thoroughly integrated "design-led university" now. The web history of Parsons writes from this new synergy, making the merger make a kind of teleological sense - as if the two institutions were already speaking the same language before they found their way together. 

Perhaps we tell the story of Tate's "environmental design" revolution because it fits this narrative need. But I have to confess to enjoying learning about the history and philosophy of interior design. 

Our interior spaces are the interstitial zone between our physical bodies and the built environment. At times the interior designer continues where the architect left off, moments later he wears the mask of the upholsterer, frequently he may complete the thought of the fashion designer, and occasionally he responds to the urban planner. Interior design is where the built environment meets the user most directly and where many surrounding fields converge.

Danielle Epstein, "Interdisciplinary Shifts," Radical Shifts:

Reshaping the Interior at Parsons 1955-1985 (Parsons School of Design, 2011), 24-34, 24

This inspired me to rhapsodize on the interdisciplinary kudos of interior designers, juggling a dozen approaches and skills, including hearing their clients while still offering them more than they could have come up with on their own. (My ears were still abuzz from hearing a Dutch designer tell me recently that fabrics are philosophical articulations of time - or something like that: I didn't understand what she was talking about, at all, but found I wanted to.) And I really like the ideal of adding a sense of dignity to the human condition. This seems more human-scaled, if perhaps less ambitious, than our current commitment to churn out graduates who'll make for a "more just, more beautiful and better-designed world."

It's happening again!!

For all the saints...

Good to be back ushering at Holy Apostles, on its 171th anniversary.