I will not be in studio on Wednesday, January 30. Every team needs to begin experimenting with the visual language–tactics, tactics, tactics–of their research. We will review the book template on Friday.
—
Work Time, in Asymmetric Labors by The Architecture Lobby (in our Box folder).
Mark Jarzombek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In a conversation with some architecture students the
subject of research came up, as it now tends to do.
I asked them how long they think it took for me to
research an article I had written that they had read.
“A few weeks.” “A few months.” When I told them I
had worked on it for seven years they were stunned.
Now it might be that I am a slow writer; I had to
write the article while writing two books and three
other articles and teach and travel; I have a family
and like to play basketball with my sons and go to the
theater with my wife. But it was all those distractions
that gave me the time to reflect on the subject of
the article and that allowed the argument to jell and
mature. For the students, research is merely a phase
that is separated from creativity. When I explained
that the work of research is not collecting material to
some fixed end, but thinking about the subject, and
by the word thinking I include activities like read
–
ing, hunting down sources, talking to other scholars,
and even taking walks. They had no idea what I was
talking about. It reminds me of a news article I read
some twenty years ago now. A student took an IQ test
that showed a drawing of two men, one sitting on a
chair reading a book and the other chopping wood.
“Which of these is doing work?” The student put
the check mark beside the man in the chair, since his
father was a literature professor who chops wood for
relaxation. Needless to say that was not the norma
–
tive answer. I am not complaining. After all, I for one
follow the motto, “Never let them see you sweat.”
The problem came to a head, however, in a
recent discussion about tenure requirements. There
was a suggestion by my non-history colleagues that historians should publish a book every three years
or so. Needless to say that is nonsense. Every his-
torian knows that books take on the order of seven
years. The publishing process alone can take two
years. If the tenure clock is set for seven years, one
cannot expect two books. All of this goes to show
a general disconnect between the life of the histo-
rian (and I include in that term all the hyphenated
entities like historian-theorist, historian-intellectual
etc.) and the “lay” public. One of the advantages of
tenure, of course, is that one can work at one’s own
pace, for better or worse, faster or slower. When
a local museum called and asked for me to give a
public lecture for no compensation, the answer was
sure. Preparing, rehearsing (since I do not read
from notes) was all background work, like prepar-
ing for a theater performance.
Which brings me to a different type of work,
not the work of writing and editing, but the work of
crafting, a type of work that is not taught and can only
be refined over time. I am not here talking about the
requirements of intellectual labor that are supported
by a set of academic institutions whose members
are engaged in specialized professional activities
that identify their work as part of some discipline
or another. Instead I am talking about the effort that
takes place outside the evaluations of disciplinary
behavior. Think perhaps of the iceberg metaphor.
The visible labor is built on a vast reservoir of effort
disproportionate to the apparent result. But that
model is inadequate since the reservoir is not frozen
in time and hopefully not melting away as one
gets older. On the contrary, it has to be continually
refreshed, reshaped and even challenged and rebuilt
for it to be of any enduring value. It is an entity that
can be hard and inflexible just as it can be mallea-
ble and transformable, all dependent on the DNA
of our personality. Perhaps one can see this space of
work—assuming we are talking about a type of pro-
ductive work—as enmeshed in a tension that Walter
Benjamin points to between Erfahrung and Erlebnis,
both of which translated rather lamely into the
English word “experience.” Erfahrung is acquired
over a long period of time and tends to congeal into
something one might call wisdom. When Husserl
discussed what he called the research program of life,
he used the word Erfahrung. Husserlian phenome-
nology was most certainly not for young people. But
let’s face it. Much that passes as wisdom can easily
degenerate into hand-me down clichés. Erlebnis, on
the other hand, is a word that has at its core Leben,
or life. The word points to the quick pulse of events.
Whereas Erlebnis said “Take the roller-coaster ride,”
Erfahrung said “I have already done that—a long time
ago—and once was enough.” The natural tendency
the older we get is to fail to realize how pernicious
that latter sentiment can indeed be. We have to work
against our sub-conscious satisfaction in our effort.
We must fight the very specter of History itself as
dialectically distinct from the Now. But the point is
not to seek the fool’s gold of relevancy. The work
for the historian (intellectual/critic etc.) asks us to
test and experiment as much as it hopes to provide at
least some useable platform of knowledge. It might
be useful to see the work of research less about a sub-
stance called History than about the substance called Time (that includes the Time it takes to think and
write). Even if in our efforts time is compressed into
frighteningly imponderable abstractions, and even
if connections that were once invisible in the present
become visible retroactively within the substance
and subject of the text that floats in its own tempo-
ral warps, there is at least some hope that it all—at
some time or another—provides a platform for
meditation on our earthly positioning.
Forensics Studio 2019 