Sensuous Scholarship

Introduction: Embodying the Grammar

Introduction: Embodying the Grammar Someone divides mankind into buyers and sellers and forgets that buyers are sellers too. If I remind one of this is his grammar changed? - Wittgenstein It has long been a curious habit in the academy to divide the world into buyers and sellers. This absolutist tendency has created all sorts of cross-cutting distinctions that reinforce the illusion of a classically ordered universe. Realists distinguish themselves from idealists and vice versa. Hard scientists distinguish themselves from soft humanists and vice versa. And if someone, like Wittgenstein, reminds the realists and scientists that they are also idealists and humanists, is that enough to alter their grammar? Usually not, for academic grammars tend to be rather entrenched , so entrenched, in fact, that the goal of many scholars -scientists and humanists alike-is to aspire to competence practiced with a dead hand. All of which leads to a fine-tuned intellectual stagnation. And yet, as Kirsten Hastrup has noted: "The desire for fixed standards in science is challenged by the frightening indeterminacy of experience."! A few scholars have suggested that a re-invigorated Romanticism might be one solution to a stagnant academicism. Richard Shweder has argued that the project of Romanticism has been "to dignify subjective experience, not to deny reality; to appreciate imagination, not to disregard reason; to honor our differences, not to underestimate our common humanity." 2 Given this approach to the human sciences "there are no facts without value, no reason without emotion, and no knowledge without experience." 3 In this book I am attempting to move one step beyond Shweder's reconstituted Romanticism into a fully sensuous scholarship in which experience and reality, imagination and reason, difference and commonality are fused and celebrated in both rigorous and imaginative practices as well as in expository and evocative expression. So far, we have seen how ever-changing local epistemologies affect the search for understanding and the production of knowledge. We have also seen how the body is more than a surface for social inscription: it is a repository of "conscious," of existential memory that fleshes 92 Embodied Representations out that which has been forgotten or erased from the past. In this final section of Sensuous Scholarship, the chapters have been shaped to demonstrate the kind of flexible representation that . underscores the linkages of experience and reality, imagination and reason, difference and commonality. In Chapter 5, "Spaces, Places, and Fields," West African street vendors construct a local epistemology in the hybrid spaces of New York City. The chapter describes the sensuous circumstances of the vendors, but also includes an analysis of cross-cultural conflicts in local politics as well as a theoretical rumination on how cultural hybridity challenges the very foundation of the human sciences. In Chapter 6, "Artaud, Rouch, and the Cinema of Cruelty," I craft an analysis of the philosophical foundations that structured the work of two of this. century's most notable image-makers, Antonin Artaud and Jean Rouch-sensuous scholars both. The chapters in Part Three point to the desirability of the epistemological flexibility of an embodied grammar. Flexibility of approach is not at all a call for a naive epistemological relativism , but rather an argument for imagination and creativity as well as rigor and mastery. ...