Crisis consensus.
Last evening was our first reading group session. It was also our opening call or pitch for some of the directions we wish the Ends of Knowledge to move in. This core reading group series, initially to be curated by myself and Harriet Cooper but soon to expand into a set of member-led series, will explore emergent themes, figures, locations, and logics of health-related research in the contemporary university.
I invited attendees to read two texts in preparation for our first discussions: Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell’s ‘Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus’, Feminist Studies 44, no. 2 (2018): 432–63 < https://doi.org/10.15767/feministstudies.44.2.0432 > and Mel Chen and Tim Choy’s ‘Corresponding in Time’. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 4 (1 November 2020): 795–808, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa182. This short article is a loose collation of (mostly my) thoughts in relation to these pieces. At Ends of Knowledge reading groups, we value open conversation over reportage so I am not publishing any in-depth record of the fascinating conversations I was privilieged to chair.
To emphasize the importance of Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell’s work, it is perhaps worth beginning at the end of their paper. There, they make a compelling claim, one which I want to cement as a defamiliarizing strategy for future group-work in Ends of Knowledge. The work of scholars ‘who bring on-the-ground organizing experience — in anti-austerity, racial and gender justice, and labor struggles—to bear on their scholarship [about universities]’, Boggs and Mitchell write, illuminates and confronts an assumption that animates many others in the university sector: ‘that we know, already, what the university is’ (463).
To know what the university is, or to have faith in its purpose and mechanisms, requires a polyphonous but strikingly broad and far-reaching belief that the university is in crisis. What crisis, on this reading, allows is for it always to be sayable that “well, this right now is what the university isn’t”. Our universities, i.e., the ones we live in and through, always fall short of an ideal proposed for it, and always – in some retro-nostalgic mold – needs repairing or restoring to a prior state. The humanities are in crisis, the wrong values are permeating the system, and the social sciences and/or history and/or literary studies need saving. (For example, I suggest innocuously, they need saving by appeal to the use-value of medical intervention and education)
What would a system of humanities knowledge-production not in crisis be like? How would abundant research funding, job security for all, the removal of tuition fees and student debt, and the adequate and shared provision of resources for teaching and learning restructure what takes place in the university? It’s a question that can barely be thought (by me/by you?), because crisis is so central to the thinking of thoughts in the contemporary university.
This crisis consensus structures a fantasy of the university as a site that could be doing good work but is not. Bad faith actors or events, such as neoliberal managerialism or right-wing culture wars, are always holding it back. Within liberal imaginaries, this crisis consensus (regardless of whether the crisis is true, a discursive strategy, or a fabrication) means the university is rarely attended to as an imperial, colonial, or capitalist agent of those processes itself. But the crisis consensus also moves, almost by subterfuge, into left-wing and material analysis too. For example, it surreptitiously protects the university from critique – even and perhaps especially as it allows university disciplines to produce ‘critical turns’ which reassure those within it of some latent potential.
Incidentally, Mitchell and Boggs’ ideas had already begun to migrate into medical humanities spaces (there’s a particularly great interview with Felicity Callard published by The Polyphony in 2021 that you might want to check out), but it’s a linkage that I want to push on further. I have a hunch, if you like, that the medical humanities and health-related research is an especially instructive space from which to explore the consensus of crisis.
In last night’s reading group, for example, we discussed the medicalized language of Mitchell and Boggs’ essay (which, in turn, was drawn from the numerous works of scholarship their review essay draws upon): repair, metabolization, radiation, pathologizing, and – of course – crisis itself. What can the medical humanities bring to the analysis of these psychosomatic image-metaphors?
We also discussed how medicine gets positioned in relation to the humanities and social science in interesting, strange ways – as something salvific, for example, or positivist. This creates all sorts of tensions (interpersonal, institutional, intellectual!), as competing modes and legitimacies of knowledge-production come to hold or fray in the same room. How do we position the compromise of medical humanities knowledge-production as central rather circumspective of the systems in which we abide?
The second text I had selected for the evening’s discussion was Mel Chen and Tim Choy’s ‘Corresponding in Time’ which is a co-composed essay writing from the in-the-moment of the coronavirus pandemic. I had selected it, as I indicated in the advertising call for the session, because I was fascinated by how it was an example of knowledge-production from a mode of understanding crisis (and I thought it might help excavate some of the arguments being made my Mitchell and Boggs). Furthermore, I was interested in Mel Chen’s relationship to the critical medical humanities: they had participated in the events and special issues which led to the formation of a critical turn of medical humanities from 2015—and so I was interested in collectively exploring how crisis and critique came together in this piece.
On re-reading it, I had been struck anew by the relationship being drawn temporalities and crisis. In subheadings, the fragmented piece of scholarship is organised by various temporal modes of quickness, not yet-ness, and neverness—which in turn draws our attention to the queer, sick, and crip writings which structure chronicity as well as crisis (and their commingling). I loved the re-telling of Chen’s scholarship on brain fog, and Choy’s own reflections on reading and writing process, which resonated with me particularly as I labour myself under post-viral fatigue and distractedness.
[…]
Speaking of which, I’ll stop there. All for now.
As ever, more soon.
Jamie
Screengrab from a interview with Felicity Callard published by The Polyphony and conducted by Ruben Verwaal https://thepolyphony.org/2021/04/14/medical-humanities-in-a-time-of-broken-heartedness/
