Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles

Reflections on Dissipation It would be dishonest to claim that my interest in this research originated in my discussions with Dr. Hugh Raffles of the New School for Social Research. Even before leaving my job in 2008, the idea of belief v. knowledge had intrigued me. The crux of the matter lies in a very basic question that continues to resonate in this specific researcher’s reflexive arsenal of questions: "What if it's wrong?" On deciding to return to school, my premise held that returning to school without receiving a well-rounded education would be a poor use of my abilities. Having spent nearly eight years in the work force, I was confident in my ability to perform the tasks required of entry-level or even mid-level positions. Though I did not possess the specialized training of others on the market, I had experience, youth, and was eager to work. This being the case, it seemed to me that it should have been relatively easy to find some form of legitimate employment with which I could reenter the workforce and see my plans through to fruition. It did not occur to me to ask myself, in so many words, "what if I'm wrong?" In the fall of 2006, Dr. Dennis Hendrickson, of City College of San Francisco, discussed Ovid's Metamorphoses. Reflecting on the nature of Jupiter- Roman king of Gods, the sky, and lightning according to the official state religion- he explained that the gods of Ovid's work were not viewed with the same sobriety as the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Ovid's Jupiter, he posited, was a reflection of Ovid's regard for the Roman people. Ovid blessed the people of the Roman Empire, suggested Dr. Hendrickson, with the God that suited them best. Reveling in the idea, he suggested that Jupiter was a scoundrel of sorts, albeit one with the unquestioned power of will. Jupiter resorted to disguise, deceit, and destruction in order to cleanse the world of the taint of his nemesis Lycaon. Coming during the first period of extended open warfare since the Vietnam War, Dr. Hendrickson's message resonated. In a term paper written for the class, I vaguely outlined a comparison of Ovid's Jupiter and the office of the President of the United States. The final suggestion was that Jupiter was the god of will, or action, but of that alone. My intent was to suggest that the President of the United States was also that: nothing more than the chief executive of the government of the United States, but nothing less. Upon returning to school Dr. Hendrickson’s suggestion reemerged. Having witnessed the election of current president Barack Hussein Obama, I saw a rejuvenated American public celebrate the ascent of a leader capable of steering the country through troubled times. The new president seemed to represent the reemerging hopes of a country reborn; one holding to its creed of infinite potential and diverse in its peoples and experiences. With the election so fresh a memory, politics was deeply embedded into my thinking processes. Thus, my thoughts settled on a question that seemed answerable enough: do societies' cultural idiosyncrasies result in governments that reflect their cultural identities? Political theorists, such as Barrington Moore Jr., came to conclusions that may have lent support to such an idea. I wondered about the role individual psychologies played in the constitution of a society, constituted of individuals. I wondered at idea of government's influence on the individual, and the converse, while working through a broad base of different disciplines, intended to provide me with a diverse array of approaches and methods. Each approached the question of “how do I know?” in a different way. Very broadly speaking, anthropology observed; sociology

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles surveyed; psychology experimented, and so on, each discipline providing it’s own view of the nature of humanity, human behavior, and human relations. As the old proverb says, "A place for everything and everything in its place." The question of "how?" began to take on a more philosophical bend as I began developing a plan for the remainder of my undergraduate work. Having decided that I would reserve philosophical studies to a much later point in time, I'd avoided questions of epistemology. Previous classes on informal logic informed how I might parse the communication of knowledge. An emphasis on a detailed study of methods by which knowledge was created provided some insight into each field. My aversion to the philosophical approaches to understanding knowledge, however, seemed to do me no favors. An idea being impressed upon me, seemingly from all sides, was that of the inextricability of the underlying philosophy of any given discipline and its methodological decisions. That which informed it, formed it. The disciplinary body of knowledge, in some manner of speaking, created itself in its own image. The circularity of this logic seemed an möbius strip-like explanation that did nothing to inform me of the potential for, and of, the cross-disciplinary and cross-methodological study of the individual and its place in society. A bias toward the natural sciences that carried over from my youth led to a healthy respect for the field of psychology, which seemed to utilize methods of research that most closely resembled those of the natural sciences. Even still, the self-report nature of certain studies seemed to be a shortcoming in the field that I was uncomfortable with. The inherently subjective nature of anthropology seemed the least reliably "scientific" in the most objective sense of the term. Each being what they were, it seemed apparent that a comparative study of the epistemic process of each discipline, that is, how members of each field collect, measure, process, and create and attach meaning to information would provide a comprehensive understanding of the "how do I know" of knowledge, distinct from philosophical meandering. "If coding is biased then its shit. There's nothing there, right? Because you're not getting unbiased knowledge at that point, you might as well just be making shit up" - Katherine Sorensen The project entailed interviews with three members of the discipline: Katherine Sorensen, doctoral candidate at the University of California, Davis, who studies emotion and social identity; Travis Cyr, a 2nd year MA candidate at the New School for Social Research, studying social and cognitive aspects of memory; and David Kidd is an instructor for the Eugene Lang Psychology department. As one of his students, I have had the benefit of observing him throughout the semester and will attend most of this paper’s attention to this interview. A Caucasian man of small build, he is often as well dressed as he is prepared for the day's lecture- Mr. Kidd's PowerPoint slides often provide in-depth coverage of the weeks readings, in addition to utilizing further literature in the field of psychology. His short brown hair is often well kempt and the table onto which he places his documents and roll sheet is often organized, with different colored folders separating documents of one type from another. His eyes can sometimes give the appearance of a fierceness that contrasts with his normally light and sociable demeanor. He often sprinkles his lectures

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles with discussions of cats and, one time, wrote a question regarding one's ideal pet into the bonus section of a quiz. A Ph. D. candidate at the New School for Social Research, he is currently in his fifth year of training. His focus has shifted from applied school psychology, which he'd studied along with Russian Literature at NYU, to Social Psychology. Says Mr. Kidd, when asked about his decision to focus on psychology rather than literature, "The thing that I really like about psychology was...[the] attempt at objectivity and the idea of boiling down really broad questions into testable hypotheses." "…It wasn't that I thought, 'oh psychology will reveal the truth' it was 'well maybe it can help me avoid being completely wrong'" - David Kidd Mr. Kidd's office is on the 7th floor of the New School's 80 5th St. building. The floor is dedicated to experimental and research psychology and from the office lobby's lone window one can see the New School University Center, which occupies all of the eastern side of 5th avenue between 14th and 13th street. Arriving about five minutes ahead of the scheduled interview, I took a seat before being joined by Mr. Kidd, who then walked me to the office he shares with a number of other members of the NSSR faculty. Taking a seat opposite Mr. Kidd, I began setting up my recording equipment and we briefly chatted about music and our personal experiences with it. Seated across from me, Mr. Kidd's chair positioned him between two large bookshelves filled to near-overflow with literature review periodicals. Over his left shoulder I saw a table at which a visiting professor, whose name I do not recall, sat prior to our beginning. Over his right shoulder was an empty table at which he sat before taking a seat for the interview. To my right was a white sliding door that opened into another office, into which the visiting professor entered midway through the interview. Much of the interview, contrasting with those with Ms. Sorensen and Mr. Cyr, consisted of Mr. Kidd speaking extemporaneously about his thoughts on psychology. The eagerness with which he discussed his thoughts echoed the energetic nature of his teaching style. At no point in the interview did I get the sense that he was speaking down to me or speaking with any sense of condescension; it was like speaking with a friend about our favorite football team, movie, or video game. Having previously spoken with him about the project, he was aware of the direction the interview was likely to take. Thus, with minimal prodding, he was able to quickly transition from a general discussion of psychology to a discussion that unexpectedly began to pry apart the notions of reality and representation in the sciences. The psychological data on which psychological knowledge is constructed usually takes the form of statistics. Annemarie Mol, in her book The Body Multiple, discusses the idea that knowledge is created through the enactment of certain realities and that such knowledge is inextricable from the methods that create it. While I do not fully accept Mol's idea of multiple realities created by various enactments, I do hold that statistics constitutes a form of knowledge that is created by the enactment of what might be better understood as a representation of reality: the construct. This might easily be dismissed as a semantic divergence, but this divergence is real and it is important. John Law, in his book After Method, discusses the notion of allegory as an equally valid manner by which to understand reality. Allegory is defined, by Encyclopedia Brittanica Online, as "a symbolic fictional narrative that conveys a meaning not explicitly

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles set forth in the narrative". Law argues that allegory a lost art form and is so for two distinct reasons. The second "has to do with the dominance of literal representation. Descriptions describe directly... On the one hand, indeed it is the case that direct representation offers no overt space for allegory. But on the other hand direct representation is built in allegory... This is what representation is: allegory that denies its character as allegory." (Law, 89) Law's second reason brings to mind Roland Barthes' argument regarding the nature of photography as a form of representation. Says Barthes, in Camera Lucida, "a specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents)... a photograph is always invisible: it is not what we see" (Barthes, 6). Barthes' argument continues, distinguishing the photograph itself from the subject on which the camera lens focuses while simultaneously noting the conceptual collapse of that distinction. According to Law, both allegory and photography are method assemblages through which reality is understood, as meritorious as the natural and social sciences. In considering Law's argument, the question arises of whether a similar conceptual collapse occurs in the psychological sciences and it's constructs. The notion of psychological construct, as defined by C. James Goodwin, is a "hypothetical factor (e.g. hunger) that cannot be observed directly but is inferred from certain behaviors (e.g., eating) and assumed to follow from certain circumstances (e.g. 24 hours without food)" (Goodwin, 562). That a psychological construct is representation of a mental process studied, rather than an objective reality was understood by each of the individuals interviewed. Says Ms. Sorensen, "you're always studying something that's abstract... people's emotions... prejudices... that manifest in certain behaviors and you have to capture those behaviors in order to study the construct because you can't study the construct. You can't get into people's minds." Mr. Kidd’s response was similar "It's one of my favorite... questions about psychology... especially psychology as a science... I think a lot of these questions about the epistemology of how we decide what we know, how we know what we know, I think applies to, basically, all science. But I think in psychology it is even trickier because most of the things we study are things that... we cannot see directly." "For most of psychology we don't know things as facts. We have working theories that seem to hold up to repeated testing, which means that we've failed to disprove them many many times." - David Kidd Mr. Cyr and Ms. Sorensen discuss the importance of statistical correlation with previous research in the process of determining operational definitions. Sorensen explains that, during the process of creating a measure for her own research, she and her team made sure that the questionnaire items, which formed the measure associated with the construct of dispositional contempt, closely correlated with one another and, as a group, closely associated with constructs determined to be conceptually similar to, or associated with, the measured construct, "It's not like we were just like, 'Hey I think this. Ok cheers lets drink.' No, it was like, a lot of research points to this connection." When pressed on whether there is any guarantee that the construct might be measuring something other than what the researchers intended, Sorensen responded, saying, "they might measure something in the realm… but they don't measure bunny rabbits".

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles Cyr corroborated Sorensen's explanation when asked about the composition of constructs and how any given construct is verified and distinguished from others. He noted, "You want correlation, but not too much and not to little." When pressed in a similar fashion, regarding guarantees on the relevance of measures, Cyr smiled, "It's an issue that I was thinking about as I was talking about it. You validate your scale based on these previous scales which validated their scales on previous scales and so on and so forth, so how did they come to thees [this] original idea of, say, emotional intelligence... and... I don't have a good answer to that. They do it and they find that consistently they're measuring something and, maybe run a factor analysis on it and say, ok all these questions are clustering here. Let's call it something." Echoing the sentiments of both Mr. Cyr and Ms. Sorensen, Mr. Kidd says, "I do feel responsible to the data; to the numbers...As a human being I don't have to believe what the data is showing me but as a psychologist, I think that I have to pay attention to the numbers on the page and... if the numbers consistently do not fit that theory I have to revise the theory. I do feel that responsibility... It's not that we're just blindly guided by the data, but I do think we're bound by the data to some extent. That we have to fit our theories to the data." When pressed on whether or not there is any guarantee that a measure accurately represents some construct, Kidd notes, "We can speak about facts about our samples. So if... I give a survey to 20 people... asking them to report self esteem on a certain scale and I find that the mean score of that group was six, well that's a fact... whether or not that means that their self esteem is actually 6, I wouldn't say... but I can certainly say that the mean scores that I observed in this particular case is six. I would say that's a fact but when we start trying to interpret facts like that... to answer theoretical questions, then you're in the world of interpretation... you're outside of the realm of fact and your in the realm of interpretation and some interpretations can make more sense than others. We try to make sensible interpretations" Sensible is defined as: having or showing good sense or judgment. Alternatively, it is defined as: chosen in accordance with wisdom or prudence. As the purpose of this project was to discover the process by which members of the New School psychology department came to decisions regarding operational definitions, sensibility is of prime relevance. Sensibility, in the field of psychology, might be most accurately related to the various forms of validity. Validity was a theme that resonated throughout each of the three interviews, and is defined as: the quality or faculty of being logically or factually sound. In formal logic, validity represents a form of soundness, that of the equation, which in itself bears no requirement for value-non-neutrality, i.e. a logical equation can be structurally valid with no regard for truth-value. In the field of psychology, validity holds a number of different meanings: Construct validity refers to the accuracy with which measurements assess a construct. Ms. Sorensen notes that operationalizing a measure, assigning some measurable behavior or response to a construct, can be theory driven or simply face valid from the perspective of the researcher. As Sorensen explains it, validity is a matter of both consensus and "what makes sense" for the researcher. Said Sorensen, "I definitely take into account my own experience, then I look for, I look towards the research to see if there’s any support for these hunches and things that I have... my gut leads me to the

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles research…I'm studying other humans, so of course I can use myself as a reference point, but I don't use myself as, like, the reference point. I use myself as the starting point... I'm gonna see what's out there on social identity, and what people have theorized about... what we've talking about. I'm gonna develop my own research on this." Mr. Cyr notes, "I think that the way that we operationally define things often in some way echoes of underlying assumptions." When asked about his own process, he replied, "I'm actually weary of operationally defining anything. When I do it, I will read copious amounts of literature on the topic and I think that's a better way of operationally defining something than, say, intuition." “It’s the one that gives you a vaccine for polio and a robotic surgeon that can remove a tumor. Those aren't the only things in the world. Those aren't even necessarily the most important things in the world but our world would be unrecognizable without them.” – Dr. Lawrence Hirschfeld On Thursday, August 22, 2013, I walked into Arnhold Hall, up two flights of stairs and into the Theresa Lang Community and Student Center. Two walls of tables were arranged in the southwest corner of the room at a 90-degree angle from one another, behind which sat chairs of various academic departments. After some quick words from a speaker regarding the day’s purpose, I began searching for the academic chairs most relevant to the course of study I'd intended on pursuing. One of the faculty members I spoke with that day was Dr. Larry Hirschfeld, who spoke on behalf of the New School anthropology department. After a brief introduction we discussed the nature of my academic interests and the potential for pursuing such goals before I thanked him and continued on to the next conversations. At one point I noticed, on a wall visible from one of the large south-facing windows, a symbol spray painted onto a building across the street that looked similar to, but I recognized not to be, the circumscribed “A” associated with anarchy-movements. Returning to Law’s After Method for a moment, he proclaims, on page 152, "Truth is no longer the only arbiter and reality is no longer destiny". The quote comes at the end of a treatise that attempts to convey the sense that there are many ways by which the individual can come to understand the world. The natural and social sciences are, according to Law, nothing more than what he refers to as method assemblages: collections of knowledge that cohere with one another based on some arbitrary designation. It should be noted that Law does nothing to diminish the significance of the natural and social sciences as method assemblages, but rather argues that they are two, of many, method assemblages through which an individual might come to understand the world. The idea of a multitude of ways by which one might understand the world echoes a thought spoken by Dr. Hirschfeld, whose name had come up repeatedly over the course of preliminary discussions conducted for this project. After class one day, while seated in the Anthropology wing of the Albert and Vera List Academic Center, I noticed his door was open for office hours. I'd written him about a potential interview to no avail but, seeing his door open, decided to take it upon myself to speak with him. On the date of the meeting, I approached Dr. Hirschfeld's door and noticed a sticky note explaining that office hours had been cancelled for the day. After a brief email correspondence we

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles rescheduled and, on April 16th, I entered his office and we began our discussion. Dr. Larry Hirschfeld is a Professor of Anthropology and Psychology for the New School for Social Research, specializing in cognitive development and, more specifically, the development of children's high order thinking. After completing his doctoral work in anthropology at Columbia University, he traveled to Sumatra to study kinship systems before moving to Paris for to begin work on crafting a new form of anthropology more closely related to current developments in the field of cognitive psychology. His expertise in the fields of anthropology and psychology made him an excellent resource from which to draw insight into the nature of epistemic determination and while the conversation began as an exploration of such, it soon ventured-off into a number of different directions. Dr. Hirschfeld's opening thoughts, delivered with the air of a disinterested elder imparting wisdom on a younger member of his community, provided an extremely rich substrate for the remainder of the conversation: "I do science. I'm pleased and proud to do science. I think that it is not the only means by which insight can be... developed about things that we care about but it is the most systematic of the ways that we have of creating knowledge and increasing our understanding." The notion piqued my interest and I decided to push against the idea of there being other ways by which we can understand the world. When asked whether this is simply a methodological question, he began- before being interrupted by a phone call, "... about every aspect of knowledge plays a role... it's not just a little difference." Returning from the phone call, he began recalling a story about his time in Sumatra. In his story about the frightening nature of riding a motorcycle through Sumatran rural regions, Dr. Hirschfeld packaged the concept that the internal validity of the psychological sciences is distinct from an objective reality. I found this portion of the conversation to be quite difficult to navigate, so to speak. “If you ask me what it's like to drive in Indonesia. I could say, 'Well Indonesians aren't afraid to die.' and from that you could get a sense that it’s chaotic and dangerous and sorts of things but... from that you don't believe that I actually believe that Indonesians aren't afraid to die. I believe that Indonesians are just as much afraid to die as anybody else... you don't believe that I'm actually trying to make you believe that… their minds are so different that they're not afraid to die." Ideas of claim, truth and falsity that do not necessarily relate to truth, falsity, and reality began to leave my mind clouded and I felt slightly out of my depth. Looking back on the conversation, and with a recording to refer back to, it's slightly easier to understand his point. The anecdotal explanation of the nature of scientific validity, that claims made within the context scientific research are faithful to the context of their research but are outside of any external claims of true-value, was able to demonstrate the nature of the distinction between construct and reality in a way I’d never confronted. In the moment, he tried explaining, "I'm using language to convey something that... I either don't have time or the words or whatever, that I can convey in the claim that you know and I know isn't true. There's no truth constraint on conveying faithful things about the world, or faithful things about the truth of the world." Again, having a difficult time finding solid ground during this part of the conversation, I tried to suss out his meaning and began talking through what he'd just explained in a comically inaccurate way before he leaned forward, cutting me off mid-

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles sentence, "What I'm trying to do with that is not convince you that that’s true. That would be a... that would be bound by truth, right, or what each of us knew was to be true. I don't expect you to believe it. If you believed it, that would be a problem for me. That would be a deeply, kind of, racist claim which... would not be my intent. What I wanted to tell you was it's just scary as hell." In writing this, I'm struck by the cleverness and ingenuity of the method by which he was able to convey the notions of scientific validity and the recognition of validity as distinct from reality. As touched on by Mr. Cyr, the structure of science is such that the creation of new knowledge is always predicated on the integration of previous findings. There are exceptions to this rule, and the means by which exceptions are justified are codified into the very methods of scientific knowledge creation. While science may be viewed as a democratic process whereby research is made available for all to consider, it nonetheless possesses an inherently hierarchal knowledge structure wherein new information, new knowledge, is acceptable only in the event that it remains valid within the confines of that which has previously been accepted as valid. However, in this part of the conversation arose the troubling notion, one that I'd confronted in vitriolic manner in my personal life, that science, while capable of being used enlighten, is capable of being used to deceive, through the intentional collapsing of the conceptual divide. In a discussion with the dean of Eugene Lang College, I explained that my interest in psychology stems from the belief in the power of a science that focuses squarely on the human mind. Considering this, it seems apparent to me that a powerful science, such as psychology, would be subject to the machinations of power as well, machinations including the manipulation of beliefs. In fact, a fair number of psychological studies justify the use of belief manipulation, or deception, in order to obtain results outside the influence of the subject’s mental faculty. This use of deception is made possible by a form of power possessed by the researcher not possessed by the subject, or participant: knowledge. Dr. Hirschfeld hints at the relations between power and science early in the interview "[that something is bound in science does not] disentangle it from the web of power, of authority, and... contravening arguments about what's the nature of society and what's the nature of people's responsibility... you can't take them apart... There's nothing in doing something like science that removes you from the concerns... [with the] politics of whatever you're doing." In his closing thoughts, Dr. Hirschfeld expands on the relationship between science and power. Continuing from a brief explanation of the theory of mind he explains, "... one of the things that has become clear is that peoples minds are made up of many theories. They're much like scientific theories in some respects…[cognitive science is] as much about the meanings that people bring to the world as any anthropological approach… [Members of social groups] have to have images of the world and beliefs that make [group action] possible… the only kind of power that doesn't depend on belief is coercive power, where you would have physical threat,"

At this point he shifts in his chair and leans forward, "and that that never works... its just well past the sell by date for coercion. Coercion doesn't work that well. Its hugely expensive and its hugely vicious... it has absolutely no nuance or value. So the ways that people usually exert power is by manipulating people's expectations about the world. They get people to participate in systems of power that disadvantage them. They don't do

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles it by making them think that they're happy in that system but they're entrapped by their beliefs about their participation... one of the most important things to keep in mind is that some beliefs are easier to believe than others and they're easier to believe for lots of reasons. Certainly one of which is those beliefs that we don't have to spend a lot of time recalibrating, we don't have trouble believing and we don't have trouble getting other people to believe... We have minds that will entertain certain kinds of beliefs much more readily than other kinds of beliefs and it’s those beliefs, generally, which become the grist from which power relations can be exercised. In order to exercise power, you gotta exercise it over what people think and it’s easier to manipulate those if people are spending… 8 years in school learning that belief. Learning to believe, to have a sentiment and… a commitment of fears of a class positioning is really easy to learn. Learning to do a class analysis of that takes someone with a Ph. D. because those aren't easy beliefs. There’s a difference between the understanding of the belief and the beliefs themselves...and its… not trivial. These constraints are not trivial at all." “It can be done,” said Achilles; ‘it has been done!’” – Lewis Carroll’s Achilles and the Tortoise Near the midpoint of my current educational journey I sat with Ms. Robin Ramsdell, academic counselor at Santa Monica College. On first enrolling in the school, I'd been told that Ms. Ramsdell would be an excellent choice for councilor due to her knowledge of the ins and outs of the Santa Monica College music department’s requirements and faculty. A blond-haired woman in her 30s/40s, she was personable and encouraging. Often ready with a smile at my self-deferential jokes, she put significant time into assuring me of the feasibility of a dual-study academic plan, entailing SMC's general music and their social sciences program. Early on in our discussion, she seemed puzzled by my insistence on obtaining a proper education rather than simply completing a music degree. Having completed a substantial number of music credits when I'd first entered college in the fall semester 2000, I'd been well on my way to the completion of the degree. Seated in a chair in her office, which was tucked into the back corner of the SMC counseling office, I explained my intentions. Glancing through the windows on the opposite side of the room, at the bark of some coniferous tree growing just outside her office, I talked about my desire for a proper and broad-based education. While listening to my explanation she glanced at something on her desk, which was covered with photographs and stapled documents, in the way a person might when thinking about something, acknowledging my wishes before proceeding with a deeper assessment of what my plan required. In the numerous meetings regarding my academic plans, her attitude rarely shifted from the same, generally friendly, demeanor. I'd always sensed a hint of the puzzlement that I'd read on her face, during the first meeting, but the working relationship remained productive and our communication never faltered throughout the process. During one meeting she placed a set of sheets, stapled together in the top corner, on which was a list of my completed credits and the remaining requirements for the two concurrent academic plans I'd been working toward, on her desk. The desk faced the wall. Her computer screen sat on the far side of her desk so that I'd catch her profile against the backdrop of the tree outside the window any time she'd take a look at it. Picking up one of the stapled

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles bundles of sheets and leaning in, toward me, she gestured toward a section in the list of requirements: Mathematics. I knew that the degree carried with it a mathematics requirement and I was not entirely excited by the notion. She explained to me that, of the options available to me, two classes would be appropriate: Elementary Statistics and Functions and Modeling for Business and Social Science. She explained that statistics might be a better option for me. I expect she did so, having taken into account the educational philosophy and plan I'd outlined in previous discussions. I decided to enroll in Functions and Modeling for Business and Social Science. The class was held in one of the buildings on SMC's Pico boulevard campus. Taking a seat in the classroom, housed in a wing into which I'd never stepped foot prior to the first day of class, I kept my headphones on and opened up a three-ring binder. While seated, a man walked into the classroom and handed me a sheet of paper. He was an older than me, maybe in his late 40s-50s. He explained to me that he was offering tutoring services for math students. I listened and explained to the man that I might be interested and he told me to call the number or email him in order to discuss prices and options. I thanked him and he walked out of the classroom. Later in the week I called the man and discussed the options for pricing, which I found far too expensive, but I thanked him again and told him I'd call him after some consideration. I recognized very early on that I would not last the semester. The instructor, a woman whose name I no longer recall, explained that much of the mathematics was basic, but would require significant effort for those without a mathematics background. Much of the work entailed discussions and problem solving in the area of mathematics that I recognized to be related to the field of economics. At some point in the discussion, the topic turned to geometric sequences. Being unfamiliar with much of mathematics, I was intrigued but very confused until she brought up the notion of Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox. She went on to explain that the paradox was based on a mathematical fallacy, looking at me at one point and, as if responding to some idea in her head, saying in a dismissive manner, "Well, that's just..." before trailing off in a bemused manner. I'd been made familiar with the general idea of Zeno's dichotomy paradox through the use of the basketball example. The basketball example arises from the question of whether, when dribbled, a basketball ever truly touches the ground or not. In short, the paradox reduces to an impossibility. According to wikipedia.org, the example can be understood in such a manner: “Suppose Homer wants to catch a stationary bus. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on.” Based on Zeno's analysis, it would be impossible to ever truly reach the bus; the basketball never actually touches the ground. The continuous subdivision of the distance between the subject and the object would render contact, or arrival, impossible because in order to make contact, or to get there, would require an infinite number of subdivisions of distance, each smaller and smaller but never reducing to zero; Homer would never reach the bus because he will always be just short of the door; The basketball will never touch the ground because it will always be just above the ground. Lewis Carroll wrote a short story, based on a similar notion entitled "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles". Achilles' writings amounts to a standard conditional statement.

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles Upon convincing Achilles to write down his argument, the tortoise then proposes that he refuses to accept one of the arguments premises, prompting Achilles to propose another premise whereby his conclusion is achieved. At this point, the narrator leaves, only to return sometime later seeing Achilles still seated on the tortoise's back. Achilles' notebook is, at that point, nearly full and Achilles, responding to a request made by the tortoise, responds in "the hollow tones of despair, as he buried his face in his hands." In reality, such notions sound ridiculous. Of course Homer will eventually reach the bus. I had, on repeated occasions, walked toward Santa Monica's Blue line and, while reducing my distance from the bus by half repeatedly, never found myself caught in an infinite cycle of ever-shrinking distance while never quite reaching the bus, with the bus driver eventually growing tired of waiting and driving away; never once did this occur. Likewise, I have seen basketballs repeatedly bounce off the ground and have never once seen a basketball, thrown at the ground, become caught a similar infinite cycle. Achilles, for his part, closed his distance, in spite of his inability to logically prove it. In this instance, Achilles had been deceived into an infinitely long spiral of argument despite the fact that the conclusion of his argument and the proof of his argument was given immediately by the narrator, Achilles was lured into arguing a point that he'd proven with his presence: "Achilles had overtaken the Tortoise, and had seated himself comfortably on its back." "You're leaving out the question of intentionality right?" – Amanda Zadorian Amanda Zadorian wears many hats. She is a Ph. D candidate at the New School for Social Research. She is the undergraduate student advisor for students majoring and minoring in politics at Eugene Lang, the New School for Liberal Arts. She is the research assistant for Dr. Jessica Pisano, professor of political science at the New School for Social Research, and the teaching assistant for the graduate course "Rethinking Capitalism" at the New School for Social Research. Finally, she is the instructor for a class at Eugene Lang entitled: "The Nation-State and Its Discontents". Prior embarking on her current educational path, she'd completed a BFA in theatre management and stage management. I met Ms. Zadorian on Wednesday, August 21st, of 2013. Having sat through the second academic workshop of the week, I then worked my way toward the departmental presentations. After a presentation and discussion about the Liberal Arts program, I found my way toward the departmental presentation for the Eugene Lang Politics program. The classroom contained two rows of chairs arranged in parallel semi-circles. Dr. Woodly, smiling her big smile, sat at a desk around which the semi-circles were formed. Ms. Zadorian, sat at the desk directly to the left of the Desk. Dr. Woodly's presentation included a number of questions for myself and the other students present, which allowed us to explain our interest in the politics program. Ms. Zadorian became my primary contact in the politics department and one of my main points of contact during the process of devising an academic plan suited to both my needs and Eugene Lang's offerings. Seated in her office, I remember being slightly awed by the view from the two ceiling-high windows in front of me and the nearly ceiling high wall of books to my right, as I sat facing her. Seated at her desk, our bodies positioned in a nearly identical manner as when I sat speaking with Ms. Ramsdell of the

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles SMC counseling department, we talked at length about my academic plan and the proposal draft I'd written up. She was not shy about demonstrating her knowledge and I was not in the least bit reticent about absorbing all I could. Having obtained a position as a federal work-study assistant to the NSSR politics secretary put me in close proximity to Ms. Zadorian and I took full advantage of this, picking her brain quite often. Being privy to my thoughts, she immediately came to mind when deciding upon interview subjects. On April 15th, the scheduled day of our interview, I arrived in the politics office as I normally do on Tuesday afternoons. Ms. Zadorian was seated in one of the Politics department’s two conference rooms, in conversation with a student. I expect the two were discussing the student's academic plans, but there is no way for me to know that. I then walked toward a room in the office generally used by NSSR students- many of whom I recognized from my time in the office. I proceeded to the second conference room, a corner office overlooking 16th street and 5th Avenue, and peered over the opaque portion of the room's interior window, which is often covered in sticky-notes with dates and times indicating when the room would be in use. Seeing someone in the room, I turned back around and returned to the area near the study room. Next to the oddly placed coatrack stood a set of drawers, just outside the student study lounge, to which I pulled an office chair. After a moment, I returned to the conference room to check and see if she was ready for the interview. She explained that she had some things to take care of but that she would let me know when she was ready. After a few minutes she came over to let me know that she was ready and we both proceeded to the second conference room. Expecting the interview to proceed as many of the others had, I was pleasantly surprised at its conversational tone. It began with an explanation that, despite the philosophical implications of my question, I was more interested in the methodological processes whereby individuals decided on knowledge. She noted, "I'm mostly in the process of currently hashing out a lot of the things that I think you're asking about." In an effort to try to explain the concept further, I provided the example of the decisions made in the drum up to the Iraq war. As with much of the interview, what followed was a process of binary-exploration, in which Ms. Zadorian pried just as much information regarding my own thoughts as I was did from her.

TT: The example that came into my head… was the… drum up to the Iraq war… They built a case which was, then, used to justify a war... and this case was based on information that was later found to be inaccurate... it is not as though George Bush made the decision on his own. The decision was made based on information that he received from someone else, who received this information from someone else, who received this information from someone else, and on and on and on down the line, and at every point in this decision making process… someone had to decide whether this was valid or not. At every point in that process they decided that it was valid…you're saying that you are just [mimicking Ms. Zadorian: I'm just a lowly graduate student and I'm just seeing these problems now]. But…you're one of the people that makes decisions based on information… we all do it every day. So you… in your capacity as a student, specifically a doctoral student in a political science program at the New School…your opinion is relevant... Don't feel any need to- um - you don't have to justify not being the President of the United States. AZ: It's more that at this phase of the dissertation process, um, these kinds of questions are a source of anxiety and, like, a lot of insecurity.

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles We continue discussing the relevance of her opinion for a moment before I begin to ask her for some background information. She interrupts me

AZ: Can I stop you for one second with that George Bush example? So, you're leaving out the question of intentionality right?… it sounds like you're positing a model in which at some point along the way everybody decided that that information was valid. Is there room in your model for the possibility that they knew the information was invalid or didn't care whether or not the information was valid because it supported the outcome they were looking for? TT: Currently I am not at all looking at intentionality… I'm sort of leaving out… any intention, whether its to defend something and to say no this isn't right or this is wrong or this is... whatever... whatever normative judgment is made on data… is not particularly my concern at this point, um as much as… AZ: Well, it's actual truthfulness?

The conversation strays, for a short amount of time, into notions of the novelty of information before returning to the notion of intentionality

AZ: It's just that… your model therefore requires you to assume that if a decision was made to act on particular information that means the information is true. TT: mm hmm. That is the assumption that I am making in this instance… yeah I'm not attributing any motives to any of the people involved at this point. AZ: I know, but what I'm saying that… you don't have an outside position… from which to validate that information for yourself, right? TT: Which information? AZ: The information that the Bush information acted on TT: mm hmm AZ: Each person in that chain, right, decided this information was valid or invalid. Right? TT: Right, right AZ: Right? And so you're saying that if they passed that information on they had decided that it was valid. Right? So their act of passing that on indicates their belief that the information was valid. TT: Yeah. Regardless of whether or not they had any misgivings themselves, they passed it along as valid. AZ: Right, but what if they knew it wasn't valid. So, the truth was it wasn't valid and they knew it wasn't valid but they still passed it along for political reasons: Totally outside your model? TT: Not at all considering that. AZ: Ok… your model is such that you, because you assume that information is true if they passed it on… if they passed it on [then] that information is true. Period. That's, like,

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles

all that your model can contain. You see what I'm saying? TT: No, not necessarily. I wouldn't even use the word true because true and false are kind of a- those can be iffy. And I do know, sort of, what you're getting at... but that is not what I am measuring at this point… AZ: Lets do the questions

We then begin to discuss her background before returning, for a moment, to the idea of what constitutes knowledge. Discussing her transition from theatrical arts to the social sciences she explained that, at 22, being influenced by her perception of The Economist's "technocratic", rationally efficient, model of political decision making, she thought that making a difference, making the world a better place, entailed the possession of a body of technical knowledge, convincing the right people, then deploying it. "So I approached social science, in general, from a position of… thinking that there were correct answers which I was, more or less, quickly disabused of when I started the MA program." Ms. Zadorian then proceeded to give me an in-depth lecture regarding the history of the process of creating knowledge and knowledge-oriented validity as it has proceeded and evolved in the political sciences. At a certain point, she began to discuss a set of ideas regarding knowledge that began to hint at the subjective nature of knowledge. The ideas sound, to me, a lot like schema models of the psychological sciences. "You can look at a situation, right, put it into the analytical categories that already exist in your head, and like sort of see your way through. That would be more or less the model of public policy making that I thought was the way to do things when I started." She continues, beginning to touch on the distinction between knowledge and reality, "When you look at something, you see that its an A and not a B. I see that this is a cup and this is a bottle… But there's also a level on which… this cu p and this bottle are both part of some larger category of things but I treat them differently…To somebody else this is not a bottle it's a weapon, right? Given certain circumstances, if somebody came in and tried to rob us, this would then become a weapon right? ... Everything fits into categories and goes together, sort of rationally, based on the model that preexists. So the model, sort of, takes precedence over the reality in a lot of ways when that happens, as opposed to the practical knowledge that we do... that we work with every day." Listening to her words again, I'm reminded of a quote from a passage near the very beginning of Hannah Arendt's book "The Origins of Totalitarianism" which touches on some of the major themes of this project, mainly that of a concern over, and interest in, the potential conceptual collapse of the distinction between reality and representation. Arendt, discussing the historical development of anti-Semitism and its discussion and recording by historians, draws a parallel to the conflicts between Plato and the Sophists. "[Plato] discovered the very insecure position of truth in the world, for from ‘opinions comes persuasion and not from truth’ (Phaedrus 260). The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality" (Arendt, 9). The Arendt quotes touches on notions of representation, deception, and power discussed by Dr. Hirschman as well as the underlying them of the Zadorian conversation: the relationship between knowledge and

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles power. The social production of knowledge is a topic I'd visited on numerous occasions. John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality, Annemarie Mol's The Body Multiple, and John Law's After Method all discuss ideas of the conceptual collapse of the distinction between what is known and what is. Ms. Zadorian, in her work, approaches the topic of the social production in the anthropological sense of subject-oriented knowledge. Researching national oil companies, she discusses her need to distinguish between professional and bureaucratic behavior. As discussed in Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw's Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Ms. Zadorian's task required not discovering and measuring behaviors she, as the researcher, deemed professional but those that the fossil fuel industry understood to be thus. "If I'm trying to avoid... reproducing that set of normative judgments about state ownership then I have to <inaudible> historicize it." Dividing behavior, however, between professional and bureaucratic practices, whatever those may be, requires looking into the behaviors of both from their own respective perspectives. "It gets a little bit reflexive in that way, right?... And so, I'm trying to understand what's professional in the oil industry on the basis of what the oil industry thinks professional is." Zadorian continues to outline the specificities of her research, specifically the data streams from which she is culling information regarding the industry's understanding of the best business practices. However, she swiftly steers the conversation away from the specificities of her work to the idea of the social production of knowledge, once again.

AZ: [In reference to practices considered efficient by the fossil fuel industry] That's, like, production of knowledge par excellence. Like, when you talk about, like, how is knowledge defined, this is the kind of social process that goes into the production of knowledge that I'm trying to tell you… knowledge is socially produced, right? So the right way to run an oil company… the correct way to extract oil from the ground or the best way, the most efficient way, et cetera right? This kind of knowledge is socially produced… as opposed to being there to be discovered, its actually created in the process...

The conversation continues and I begin to discuss the notions of such social construction of knowledge. I touch on the nature of a process, understood by the psychological sciences, as converging operations. As defined by Research in Psychology: Methods and Design, a text written by C. James Goodwin, it is a process that "occurs when the results of several studies, each defining its terms with slightly different operational definitions, nonetheless converge on the same general conclusion" (Goodwin, 563). Such a process seems to parallel the development and production of the knowledge about which Ms. Zadorian is discussing, and the conversation winds its way back to the process by which Ms. Zadorian makes her decisions on the operational definition of professionalism in the oil industry.

AZ: Unprofessional practices tend to appear in the literature as bad things that happen when there's oil present. So…its possible to… based on the extant scholarship, make a list of things that would qualify as unprofessional practices… but what I've made the decision to do is to define professional practices not by looking at them and making a… designation, like, oh that's a good thing to do and that's a bad thing to do, that's a professional thing to do, that's an unprofessional thing to do but to base it on… what the

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles

industry thinks… Why did I make that decision? ... I'm not independently knowledgeable about oil so I would have to have- I would have to rely on other sources to say… this is a professional versus nonprofessional practice. I'm gonna end up doing that anyway when it comes to production practices, right? … I don't know if anyone makes independent decisions or designations like this… in the social sciences, actually. But's easier, maybe, with things like legitimacy which are more, like, we own them.

I press her on this concept of operationally defining legitimacy, in the way that Weber did. I ask her about the reasons for which concepts like legitimacy might have been more easily defined by political scientists and why certain ideas take hold, or become dominant schools of thought in the field.

TT: … based on your experience… how is it and what is it about these specific works, these specific definitions of these things [that] made them more... more relevant than… the cab driver down the street who…[mimicking the cab driver: This is fucking nonsense, this is bullshit. We're in New York City. We all make money. We're all anarchists anyway. It's all about money] … the last example I used is not a good one, but how is it that certain [definitions]… became any more or less relevant than the cab driver. AZ: So, Barrington Moore’s argument in four words: No bourgeoisie, no democracy… I think that's not irrelevant. I think that if your argument can be distilled into something like four words… if it can be reproduced in a conversation in a short-handish way that's able to facilitate a discussion such as you and I are having, I think that's a huge reason why certain pieces of knowledge survive and become influential… why is Barrington Moore's opinion over the cab driver's opinion… [Why is it that] one's knowledge and one's not? Has a lot to do with the construction of- it has to do with the social institutions of knowledge, right? So Barrington Moore was a Harvard professor, and the cabdriver's a cabdriver and so there's [a] status- question and… a relative wealth question as well as access to… means of disseminating one's opinions i.e. can you get published in an op-ed in the New York Times or not... This is why people talk about the Internet democratizing knowledge right? Because a lot more people can be heard… now that peer review's not required to be published and widely disseminated. TT: I wanna push on that for a second. I don't wanna get too into some of this stuff 'cuz it sounds like we're starting to border on- in that philosophical realm, which I sort of don't wanna bother with 'cuz its hella fuckin meh...um AZ: I know, but you're gonna have to but ok. TT: I can do that at a such a later- I'm - I'm 30 years old- 31 years old, I'll- I literally have until I die to deal with that stuff. Um. I'll let all the deepy thought stuffy, deepys thoughtsy stuffs (speaking over one another) AZ: Yeah but I think this- but I think this deep thoughts stuff TT: get further AZ: is a lot more relevant to you- what you're trying to do than you're willing to TT: Oh I know it's extremely relevant AZ: ok

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles

TT: I'm going to shy as far away from that theory stuff, um, until I have something on which to place the theory and some way AZ: but that's not how it works this is TT: some way of bringing the theory AZ: I know exactly what you're trying to say TT: Cuz I want to be able to build the house AZ: but it doesn't work that way TT: before I put a person in the house (No longer speaking over one another) AZ: Right, but first you need to have the land to put the house on TT: Is the theory the land in this example? AZ: Yes, and the thing is… you're operating with a particular theor- with a particular world-view… because you're refusing to examine it or make it explicit it's just remaining implicit and that's how we reproduce (Speaking over one another) TT: Well uuoo-k AZ: common ideology and knowledge (No longer speaking over one another) TT: that sort of... mean I have a world-view... Like, I'm inherently biased toward statistics and the natural sciences techniques AZ: But the natural sciences and the social sciences were the same thing when they started. TT: Yeah, I expect they will eventually start to converge on the same thing based on, generally using psychology as like a... bridge… AZ: But that makes you a methodological individualist TT: I don't know what that means AZ: Right, that means what you think it means… It means that you think that the individual psychology is the unit of analysis that can explain all things. TT: Uuuuuhhhhh AZ: If you get deep enough into it. TT: No. Not necessarily, because I think two people together can do crazy-ass shit that

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles

they don't intend to do that neither of their individual psychologies could explain. AZ: ok TT: Um, but yes. I mean, I think the individual brain is there but, I mean, I'm not, I'm not in a position to be making these types of decisions. That's why I'm in school, that's why I'm an undergraduate AZ: mmhmm TT: and not a doctor, for instance... AZ: But… what do you think you lack that I have, for example? TT: Education AZ: We're the same age so, like TT: Right, right. AZ: What TT: Education AZ: Education TT: I mean I think that's a fairly straightforward …

AZ: A: This is power. What about education gives me that power to decide whether something is valid? TT: The power to decide whether something is valid? AZ: or not TT: … a knowledge of history. What is, what has been, what has been decided upon before… When it comes to knowledge, and this is based on my understanding of the physical and natural sciences, uh everything is based on everything else. Um, everything everyone knows now, everything everyone's learning now is based on all the stuff that's been learned before…. me being uneducated, I only know so much. … AZ: but knowledge is always… imbued with power relationships though… my knowledge may be more extensive than the cab driver's about the history… the discipline of political science right? But my knowledge of how to drive a car in New York City is considerably less. The fact that my knowledge is valued over his knowledge, status wise, not in terms of monetary compensation, right, has everything to do with the power relationships and the social institutions at work and nothing to do with the inherent value of the knowledge itself. Right? … he has a kind of practical knowledge that I lack and the only reason we think of… political science is better than that is because of, like, the sort of ass-backward way our society is organized, in a sense…

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles

TT: … when you touched on Barrington Moore being a Harvard Professor as opposed to a cabdriver being a cabdriver… that was the initial thought that came to mind. Power doesn't necessarily AZ: Change the truth of something? TT: buuuhh... I was gonna say that- (talking over one another) AZ: I think it does. I think it absolutely does. TT: but then I started (not speaking over another) TT: thinking might makes right which is not the way knowledge works, but it will be if someone says that it is and they're mightier than me, I suppose. AZ: If somebody... … I'm trying to think of a good example of this. Barrington Moore's not the best but if he weren't a Harvard professor but were just… some dude... standing on a soap box on the street corner- (speaking over another) AZ: yelling out like, no bourgeois - no democracy TT: Or a community college professor, for instance (not speaking over one another) AZ: Yeah, it's not guaranteed that anyone would pay attention or that any of it would be taken seriously… the legitimacy of the knowledge… is based…partly on the status of the speaker. TT: mhmm AZ: Right? Um,

Ms. Zadorian takes a long pause and her voice trails off at the end of the first sentence.

AZ: that's... really true... which is ironic that I used that (inaudible) but TT: I mean are we getting into an element- I'm- I wanna be- I understand its- We're, again we're sort of getting into those debates that don't have ends AZ: mhmm TT: um, we're sort of getting in to that area where we're talking about knowledge being an element of power and fact or- well not fact but AZ: or knowledge being a product of power

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles

TT: product of? element of? Um AZ: The causality is reversed in those two statements. Knowledge feeds into power or power comes out of knowledge. No, sorry, knowledge feeds into power or knowledge comes out of power those are the two TT: or power determines knowledge, right? AZ: Right. Which is what I meant by knowledge comes out of power.

Sirens began wailing, as they often did during the course of the conversation, which begins to wind down with a short question that seemed to sum up some of the major distinguishing features of the political sciences

TT: Baseline, initial, gut reaction to that question AZ: mhmm TT: Does power determine knowledge or does knowledge determine power? AZ: Power determines knowledge... I don't also believe in a categorical answer but I think... I think the things that we take to be true and the things we think to be worth studying, the things we think to be relevant to knowledge, that we give the status of knowledge, for example... is determined by power relationships much more so than the other way around. TT: Yeah, sounds good, thank you AZ: you're welcome TT: um, you have been a forthcoming guest AZ: (laughing) When's - when's the show air?

As she stood up and began putting her notebook into her bag, we continued to chat. She asked me a question regarding my own process of determining operational definitions. Specifically, she asked if it was possible to do this type of research without first determining operational definitions or hypothesis for what I am attempting to explore. I explained that I am entirely unaware of the rubric by which each individual determines knowledge and, owing to this lack of knowledge of the internal motivations and thoughts of others, I base my definitions on their own. She then walked from the room. I stood up and began dissembling the microphone fixture and coiling wires while looking out onto the corner of 5th Avenue and 16th street from the windows of a room in the corner of the 7th floor of the New School for Social Research, an academic institution- reputed for its alternative views on global capitalism and the political status quo, located in the financial center of the United States of America, New York City. "I do believe that human beings like to learn, can't help but learn. That's what we do, we learn. We're always learning." - Dr. Stephanie Browner

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles When first applying for four-year colleges, nearly a decade ago, Eugene Lang College came highly recommended to me by the mother of an old high school friend. This time around, having spent nearly two+ years attending California community colleges, I was used to being quite older than other members of the classrooms. Thus, when looking into Eugene Lang, it's status as the New School's lone "traditional-aged" college was not a huge concern to me. Having lived in New York City before, I had a reasonably reliant support system of individuals of my census bracket and was of the opinion that the education a school provided was more important than any social or networking opportunities such a school might provide. Thus, on receiving my acceptance letter, I quickly set myself to determining a path of study that would suit me. Soon afterward I received a letter from the academic counseling office, which instructed me toward the office on W. 11th. On arriving at W. 11th street, I found myself staring at a building that looked like a home, perplexed. Not entirely comfortable with the idea of walking up to someone's home on the chance that it might be a school office, I proceeded to the 11th Street entrance of the Eugene Lang College campus. Standing at the security desk was a dark-skinned man, of either African-American or Latin racial descent. Without a student ID card I was just another person off the street, but on hearing my predicament he notified me that I was in the right place. On instructing me toward the building, I questioned the directions he'd given me and explained my reasoning. After some back and forth, a woman entering the building interrupted us. The woman did not particularly stand out: she wasn’t particularly sharply, or sloppily, dressed. She wasn't particularly kind, nor unkind, with the delicacy with which she handled the conversation. She was simply firm. Upon asking what the problem was, the gentleman explained our conversation and she confirmed what he had previously told me. At some point in the conversation the question of identity came up and she introduced herself as the dean. I introduced myself by name, explaining that I would be an incoming student. I offered my hand and she took it. I was a little troubled by the way this transpired: my first experience with the dean of the college at which I would be spending my next two years, a person I’d been told I’d be hard-pressed to meet, revealed me, whether inaccurately or not, as someone that doubted and questioned a man whose sole role was ensuring my safety. "There’s a big difference between knowledge and learning" - Dr. Stephanie Browner A difficult first semester passed eventfully. Among the numerous disastrous occurrences that set the tone for what has proven to be the most difficult and demoralizing academic year since returning to school was one that compelled me to take Dr. Browner up on an offer she made during her opening comments to the incoming class during her speech on the first day of school. After being lambasted by a fellow student, unfairly in my opinion, I made my way to the dean's office. Walking directly to the desk of her assistant, Heather O'Brien, I requested the opportunity to speak with the Dr. Browner about some of my personal concerns. Ms. O'Brien seemed slightly taken aback by the request, but assured me that there was room in the dean's schedule and asked me to have a seat. A short time later Dr. Browner welcomed me into her office and we began chatting. We remained standing for a short time as I explained what occurred before addressing my main concerns: mostly, my own lack of concern over the sensitivities of

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles the others in the classroom owing to a difference in life-experience. My concern was based mostly on perceived reactions to my behavior, but was grounded in a concern for the vision I'd been sold on and, ironically, a desire to keep from becoming a demoralizing presence. Dr. Browner, in her way, assured me that my concerns were unfounded and that I shouldn't concern myself with the need to restrain myself as every student was coming into the classroom on equal ground. In truth, I wasn't particularly comforted by her assurances. During a particularly frustrating day, I got it in my head to speak with the dean. Thinking it unlikely that she would have the time, at this point in the semester, I nonetheless set down what the project entailed into an email. I was surprised when she responded directly to my request. Expressing some concern with the relevance of her thoughts to the purpose of the project, she nonetheless expressed a willingness to speak with me and I assured her that I was of the opinion that her thoughts would be of deep relevance. Thus, Ms. O’Brien set a meeting time and, on the day of the meeting, I walked into the dean's office and informed a young woman seated at a central desk, one I recognized from one of my psychology classes, of my meeting. She explained that I could take a seat or to knock on the dean's door. I decided on both, sitting for a minute before knocking on the door and returning to my seat. As is generally the case before such meetings, I could feel the slight twinge of anxiety creeping up from my spine the base of my skull. While sitting on a chair just outside the dean's office, I noticed a man walk from an office to my right, pass in front of me, then return to the office after a few moments. Some minutes afterward, the dean appeared before me and, again, welcomed me into her office.

"Knowledge doesn't always get nailed down that easily. It’s always constructed in a particular moment and with particular contingencies and so that what we teach is the

skills and capacity to research [and] evaluate credibility of knowledge claims. That said, we're busily putting out knowledge all the time and it'd be an interesting question

how much of the knowledge we teach will turn out to be false" - Dr. Stephanie Browner

Dr. Stephanie Browner, Dean of Eugene Lang College, the New School for Liberal Arts, achieved her position three years ago. After having studied classics and dance, she spent some 7-8 years as a professional dancer before returning to school to achieve her doctorate. In addition to her role as dean, she is also a professor of literary studies and her personal expertise is the field of American and African-American literature. In her response to my email, she showed a keen eye toward the aim of this project, but was nonetheless unsure of how useful she might be. Explaining that the role of a dean was "to develop a vision that is right for the institution and lead initiatives", she expressed a lack of knowledge, with regard to the psychology department's criteria for determining operational definitions. Paradoxically, her letter seemed to express that her role in the development of a vision for the college, involving a process of research and the operationalization of a definitive vision for the school, is what made her unqualified to discuss the process of research and operationalization. I found it humorous. Seated in her office, we began discussing the nature of knowledge and learning before turning the conversation to the Lang's curriculum and canon. Explaining that the

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles current trend, in higher education, is leaning toward teaching critical thinking skills, "but rather habits of mind and skills, you still put into that... process of learning those skills particular pieces of what you think are knowledge... I don't know. We're not monolithic. There are a lot of disagreements but... If you look at who's taught at Harvard, in all the undergraduate courses the social sciences, the humanities, focus on those two areas versus what authors and texts are taught at Harvard, I think you'll see. They'll overlap plenty. There'll be tons of overlapping. Thinkers: Kant, Aristotle, Plato… but there will be more tics next to the name of Paulo Freire and bell hooks at the New School than there will be at Harvard..." When asked whether she felt as though she was more influential on the process of settling on a vision for Eugene Lang than she was influenced by it, she answered, "I think I've been shaped by what I've found. I came here three years ago... I sort of studied the school... I studied the students, who are they? I read the course descriptions, the syllabi; I did a lot of analysis... I was curious, what are the habits of thought and pedagogy here at Lang. And from that... the faculty wrote a strategic plan... I asked the faculty to come up with the language for it... what is our DNA... if you put all those voices together there's some commonality and so, I thought my job was to find that commonality... hold it up and also make [sure] that it resonates with why students are coming here." The DNA Dr. Browner came to discover was grounded in freedom of choice, in the form of an open curriculum. Speaking for myself, it was this open curriculum that drew me to the school. As far back as those first meetings with Ms. Ramsdell at Santa Monica College, I'd expressed my belief that a well-rounded education, rather than specialization, would be my best option. Holding fast to this belief, I expected that despite my experience, competing on the open market with fellow specialists nearly a decade younger than I would be futile, at best, and much less beneficial in the long run, both for myself and for any potential future employer that might benefit from the mental agility that a broad-based education would provide. With that in mind, Eugene Lang became one of the two schools in New York City, the other being New York University- with it's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, that received my attention. Eugene Lang has become the nexus at which the ideas I've come to explore have converged. A bias toward the natural sciences as more scientific led me to believe that, should I approach the social sciences through a multitude of methods, I could come understand my chosen topic in a more comprehensive and, ultimately, cohesive way. This being the case, I began with a broad base of the social sciences, covering introductory courses in four of the major social science fields dealing with humanity and governance: anthropology, sociology, political science, and psychology. Arriving at Eugene Lang, with its open curriculum, and in spite of the need to resist calls for specialization and doubt at the legitimacy of my academic philosophy, I have been selecting classes that have been familiarizing me with the tools utilized by the myriad specialists I will likely encounter. Additionally, the reading material has been providing me with a theoretical framework that has stressed equivalence amongst the myriad forms of analysis and representation through which reality is understood while reminding me of the difference, thereby arming me with the tools to sift through the debris of any such conceptual collapses. Accepting the suggestion by political scientist Amanda Zadorian, that power determines knowledge, it currently seems to be the case that the power by which knowledge is determined is much more dispersed amongst disciplines and academics,

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles with exceptions, resembling a clustered diaspora rather than dictatorial totalitarian state, so to speak. A theme echoed by a majority of those interviewed points to validity as the most important determinant of information's classification as knowledge. As stated above, from a purely logical perspective the validity of information is inherently self-confirming- that is to say, validity will not necessarily confirm the truth-value of any given piece of information, but it will confirm that which it claims to confirm. This being the case, the faithfulness to that which one is attempting to convey, as noted by anthropologist and psychologist Dr. Larry Hirschfeld, may provide one with what it is they may be looking for without providing sound, objective knowledge and such inherently untethered knowledge, echoing a sentiment of Dr. Hirschfeld’s, may be used to mask the intentional collapse of the distinction between reality v. representation All forms of specialized knowledge intend to describe reality through their chosen methods. Each of the approaches I've encountered, regardless of what aspect of reality it is that one is trying to describe, place a heavy emphasis on the previous literature. While the theories of the past may prove to be incorrect, the information, or data, by which these theories are conceived, so long as it is faithful to the aspect of reality studied, may continue to serve as valid material upon which one may build more accurate, comprehensive and coherent theory of the facet of reality one is attempting to explain. In beginning this project, it was my aim to avoid the philosophical arguments that tend to accompany any discussion of how one knows what one knows, and how one might be sure that what one knows is an accurate description of what one is attempting to describe. I have been able to do so, to a certain degree, by focusing on the methods by which individuals determine what it is they are attempting to study. However, the intent of the social sciences is the study of the human being and with the decision to study the human being, the scientist, in Mol’s words- which I find appropriate in this case, enacts a very specific reality that is well beyond the scope of this project: the duality of the one and the other. The scientific study of the human being is inherently reflexive and, thus, it might be said that the realities of the human mind and human behaviors, operationalized for empirical study, are a reflection of the collective human mind's perceptions of itself. Indeed, extrapolating from Travis Cyr's words, one might come to wonder if the act of operationalizing constructs to describe the realities of the human mind creates a duality to which the human mind might then adapt, creating the need for the enactment of another duality, required for the study of the now adapted human mind which has rendered the previous theory irrelevant and incorrect. I will close with an image: I once had a discussion with a friend about how a snake would go about eating its own face. Mind you, I do not mean a snake eating its tail like the ouroboros, but its face. It's a silly image, a snake trying to wrap its mouth around its own face, but considering the subject matter it seems appropriate: The collective body of knowledge about the human being suggests that we are a remarkably adaptable species. Human beings have created this body of knowledge; human beings will advance this body of knowledge; human beings will study this body of knowledge. With the human being occupying every position in the process of knowledge- forever being studied, forever learning, forever adapting- equal parts optimism and dread inform the question which sounding from the mouth of the ugly head of philosophy, with its endless questions and chin-scratchery: Will this basketball ever touch the ground, and if it does

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles what then? "That's what Lang is... what I feel I need to do now is hold that up for the faculty so that they realize this is who we are..." - Dr. Stephanie Browner

Thomas Trono Workshop in Ethnography Eugene Lang College, Spring 2014 Dr. Hugh Raffles

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Print. A Harvest Book HB244. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Pbk. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Print. Goodwin, C. James. Research in Psychology: Methods and Design. 6th ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010. Print. Law, John. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London  ; New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. International Library of Sociology. Mol, Annemarie. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Print. Science and Cultural Theory. Ovid. The Metamorphoses. New York: Signet Classic, 2001. Print. Searle, John. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press, 1995. Print. “Zeno’s Paradoxes.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 11 May 2014. Wikipedia. Web. 11 May 2014.