D. Graham Burnett

HM

Do you have a primal scene of learning?

DGB

That’s a great question. In fact, when Jeff Dolven and I taught our experimental graduate seminar “New Schools” a few years ago, this was the icebreaker with which we got the conversation going at our first meeting. I still remember several of the replies, because it was such an intimate and affecting way to get to know everyone.

I recently co-edited a book entitled Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses. We asked each of the contributors to begin their essays with a “scene of attention.” The scene I used in my introduction was indeed a scene from my schooling. I don’t think I would choose it as my “primal scene” for teaching and learning, for pedagogy, really—but it is definitely lodged in my heart as a key school-moment. A moment of emerging self-awareness, and world-awareness, too, for me.

HM

Let’s hear it.

DGB

I went to elementary school in Indiana back in the 1970s, and in third grade I had a science teacher who was interested in remote sensing and some other kinda “woo” stuff. It was very much of the time. One day, he had the class do an “experiment” in which we were supposed to transmit our thoughts to a student in a distant room. We all moved our desks to face the room down the hall where the student was sitting, and then we were supposed to meditate and try to force a thought-transmission to the faraway kid.

Mr. Sanders was an uncanny character. He would sometimes teach with his boa constrictor around his neck. He also kept a large switchblade in his desk drawer and used it to remove staples from papers and stuff like that. And then there was the corporal punishment. He had a thing called the “Golden Rule,” which was a huge ruler made of bronze, and if you did the wrong thing, you were placed spread-eagle against the wall in front of the whole class and given the option to be struck on the buttocks a certain number of times with the “Golden Rule”—or, if you preferred, you could write that you would not again do whatever you did many hundreds of times on the blackboard. He also had a trick where he could rip an actual telephone book in half—which still seems to me like an authentic feat. I have no idea how he did it. I have avoided Googling it, I guess to preserve the mystery? He could actually rip through all the pages in one of those thick volumes—by jumping in the air, barking, and giving it a kind of torquing wrench. It took him a while. We loved it. It was something he would do once a year.

Anyway, the experiment: he told us all to close our eyes, and focus, and to begin, together, to convey the form of a SQUARE to the student sitting in the distant room.

As I describe in some detail in the published essay, I personally did not believe, at eight or whatever I was, that such a thought-conveyance was possible—although I’m not entirely sure, now, why I was quite so assured that this could not happen. But immaterial thought-radiance was just a “no” for me at that time. That said, it is not easy to explain why I then decided, as an act of contempt and defiance, to try to fuck up the experiment by attempting to send the kid CIRCLES rather than a square. It’s an odd gesture of “resistance,” given the way it participates in the logic of the system. But that is what I did.

And so I was sitting there focusing on CIRCLES, and trying to transmit them—though I suppose this was a little like showing that you didn’t believe in Santa by staying up all night on Christmas eve shooting anti-aircraft rounds into the sky.

Then, after four or five minutes of silence, Mr. Sanders stood up and told us, angrily, that someone in the room was thinking circles.

It made my prepubescent short hairs stand on end. I stayed perfectly still, eyes closed, head on the desk, sorta trying to work it out. Got to be a plain old weird-random-luck thing. That is what I told myself. And that is what I continued to believe to be “true.” But my eight-year-old mind was definitely wobbled.

I’ll say it again: I am not convinced that this lives in me as a primal scene of pedagogy, but it is a primal scene of the classroom, for sure. It opened up—it opens up, for me, still—the distinctive crossing of dramaturgy, solitude, authority, and inquiry that characterizes the classroom as a space. And it is a primal scene for that powerful feature of teaching and learning: being tipped into the open; being tipped into freefall concerning the power of thought, and the limits/limitlessness of its action.

HM

Do you see the classroom and pedagogy as necessarily separate?

DGB

Classrooms are spaces. Teaching and learning are processes. So yes, they are different. Although there are obviously connections. The creation of spaces that are “carved out” from the rest of the world, spaces where teaching and learning, STUDY, is pursued—this is super important. At the Strother School of Radical Attention, a non-profit movement-school I helped create, we use the language of sanctuary, for such spaces. And we think of the creation and maintenance of “sanctuaries” as an essential pillar of what we call “Attention Activism”—resistance against the relentless patterns of “human fracking” that characterize the capitalism of our era. Classrooms are an important reference here. Libraries too. Museums. All of these have the potential to serve as attentional sanctuaries. And we need those.

HM

What about an actual scene of teaching—of pedagogy?

DGB

I think for that I would invoke a powerful memory from my undergraduate years at Princeton. John Gager, now emeritus, was a distinguished professor of religion who worked on the Greek and Roman world, and early Christianity. I took a lecture class with him when I was a sophomore—a course on magic, which focused on Greek “binding spells.” It was a large class because he was a popular professor, and the topic was cool and interesting.

One night, pretty early in the semester, a popular and handsome young man in my class, a rower, climbed up on top of the town’s small train and got electrocuted. He almost died. In the end, he lost his legs and an arm. That next morning, we woke up on campus and learned what had happened. But it was still a regular day, so we went to class. And I remember Gager, at the podium, pausing at the start of the lecture—hesitating. And then he folded up his notes, and simply said: “You know, I can’t go ahead with what we were going to do today, because of what has happened. What we need to do is have a conversation.”

He then proceeded to open the class, and to turn it, deftly, into a remarkable opportunity for collective soul-searching, and grief, and for a discussion about the way the community was working on campus, and about the forms of care we were taking of each other.

I have never forgotten his grace and poise and good judgement as he effected that moment of improvisational and authentic collective reflection. It truly set an example for me. That was great teaching: seriousness of purpose, absence of self-regard, the integrity of opening the space outward while also preserving its powerful inwardness. It was a moment in which the porosity of the classroom’s borders was used in ways that had ethical as well as intellectual implications.

HM

That’s interesting. But it raises so many questions. After all, this has been a very tough time on campus for that kind of outward opening, no? I remember several moments from the past year where classroom environments got genuinely tense. The Gaza solidarity encampment and the walkouts that preceded it forced professors and students alike to reckon with the intense and incommensurable investments that often lie latent within a classroom. I’m wondering about how you conceptualize the classroom as a “sanctuary” when the subjects of a classroom inquiry—or, indeed, urgent calls from outside the classroom—become disruptive, conflictual? I imagine it’s pretty hard to make the classroom a “sanctuary”—after all, a sort of “impenetrable space”—under those conditions. No?

DGB

I don’t think of sanctuaries as “impenetrable” at all. On the contrary. They are spaces to which those in need of protection and shelter and otherness can come. This is the argument at the heart of Herman Bianchi’s Justice as Sanctuary, which has been, for a number of us, a key inspiration in this area. Sanctuary is a way of thinking about reconciliation and transformation. At the Strother School we always emphasize this: we don’t want sanctuaries that are like “caves” or prison cells. A true sanctuary is always, fundamentally, a portal, it is a special kind of space or time that provides access to forms of freedom and transcendence.

But I certainly recognize the way that the image of an “ivory tower” can haunt the idea of sequestration, and that a sanctimoniousness can corrupt the authentic vision of true sanctuary. And I am also, of course, aware of all the work that has been done by generations of activists and innovators to break down the “walls” of the classroom—and to push back against the cultures of academic complacency, withdrawal, and self-satisfaction. Sure. Many of these folks are my heroes. I think of the great prophet of “de-schooling,” Ivan Illich.

That said, our task, always, is to remain alive to the historical specificity of our conditions. And we currently confront, we are currently confronting, a fearsome and novel adversary. The rise of the integrated structures of human fracking represents an unprecedented challenge to non-inhuman flourishing. These massive, heedless, largely unregulated, and technologically sophisticated systems of extractive exploitation are scorching the earth. Scorching the spaces of thought and care. This industry is demonstrably compromising our ability to be with ourselves, others, and much of what we might want to hold or accompany on the planet. So, under those conditions, justice does indeed become “sanctuary.” The problems change. And we have problems that are very different from those who hoped to pry open the locked doors of universities fifty years ago.

HM

So are you saying that this new situation, the “attention economy,” demands a rethinking of teaching itself?

DGB

Yes. One of the reasons we are at a historical inflection point in educational spaces is that, until quite recently, it has been possible, as a teacher, to expect that students would come to school with attentional capacities already formed. Or, let me be more precise. Attentional capacities coordinated to dominant forms of cultural transmission were a bona fide qualification for being “taught.” In other words, teachers have long complained that their students “weren’t paying attention,” but it’s a premise of that complaint that a teacher ought to have students who are, indeed, able to pay attention.

The pivot we presently confront (and I have written about this elsewhere, with a number of collaborators—folks from the Friends of Attention coalition) is that this is simply no longer the case. The rise of human fracking has authentically disrupted these conditions. The attentional forms and habits inculcated by these extractive systems are authentically at odds with what have been, for quite some time, normative processes of cultural transmission across much of the world. While it is possible to welcome this development (and there are those who do), my own view is that this represents a significant challenge to our actual wellbeing. The full argument for this assertion lies at the heart of the new book we have coming out with Crown and Penguin early next year: Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement.

HM

Is it a book about teaching?

DGB

You could say that. But it is a call for a new kind of solidarity in teaching and learning. It is a core claim of the book that an actual movement of genuine collective action is the only way we can hope to defend ourselves from this societal-scale big tech bio-hack. One of the most powerful tools we have available in this struggle is study—that very special form of autotelic teaching. We can think of study as the horizon where the distinction between teaching and learning breaks down. It is itself an attentional form. We advocate the study of attention, but we also advocate for study as attention. I think this is a move of broad importance. The extraordinary emphasis on “research” within modern colleges and universities can be seen as a kind of trojan horse for commercial interests—it is, largely, a function of the way that, across the middle decades of the twentieth century, the military-industrial complex effectively suborned much of the culture of inquiry on campuses, redirecting the idea of study to a narrow set of operational/instrumental enterprises. Stuff like “killing the largest number of people with the smallest amount of material” or the obverse operation: making new pharmaceutical products. However you feel about all that, such activities stand at some distance from the formation of persons equal to the conditions of human freedom. That’s “education.” It requires study—the activity of giving one’s attention to the stuff of which we wish to be made, the work of forming oneself in relation to what obtains, what we receive, what we are thrown amidst.

HM

So does education, on this view, become the formation of attentional capacities?

DGB

I think that’s fair. We do make a claim like that concerning the need for a rethink concerning what teachers are supposed to be doing—what we need them to be doing now. Indeed, one could go so far as to claim that we are all only now coming to understand that this is what the “liberal arts” tradition has been all along: a set of attentional practices, accompanied by a shifting suite of recommended attentional objects/subjects/situations. This dawns as the true nature of the project just as our attention is restructured in such a way as to sever us from most of that tradition. The owl of Minerva flaps past, and we are like… “Oh, shit! That was an owl! Who knew?” Or, say, where the issue of literacy is concerned, the image I cannot get out of my head is Orpheus and Euridice: it is as if, looking over our shoulder, we can actually see what reading really has been, just as it vanishes behind us. The recognition and the loss are one. Long-form immersive textual experience was, literally, an attentional practice. We can see that, now, just as it vanishes in our rear-view mirror.

HM

That seems like a bleak view…

DGB

I don’t think so. I am actually immensely hopeful. A crisis at this scale offers incredible opportunities. My diagnosis may sound a lot like Bernard Stiegler’s or whatever, but I have no patience for the depressive condescension or reactionary bullshit that often trails in the wake of dirge-critique. Bring on the new world.

HM

Meaning what, exactly?

DGB

I think that we are living in a thrilling watershed moment. The hellscape of human fracking has brought us to a powerful new discovery concerning the existential and socio-political valences of a true and free and shared attentional life. Reoriented by this insight, new forms of life become possible. That is the rallying cry of Attensity! It is literally what we mean by the title. As the AI-driven “attention economy” increasingly reduced us to pawns whose eyeballs feed the algorithms, this new condition, “Homo attentus,” is positioned to claim a new kind of political power. We are on the cusp of a dialectic. This is Attensity—the new and imminent and emancipatory politics of human attention, in its humanity, which is rising in counter-formation out of the extractive machine logics of the network.

HM

And how does that relate to teaching?

DGB

I think it points to the power of reshaping teaching and learning around shared practices of joint attention. Actually doing things. Together. This is a huge part of what we do at the Strother School. And it has been really important to my Princeton teaching over the last two decades. When Jeff Dolven and I started teaching the grad seminar “Critique and Its Discontents” back in 2008, we made a commitment to incorporating a series of “exercises” into the class—these were theatrical and kinetic and somatic activities that drew on enacted forms of embodiment, sociality, and sensory commitment. Where did we get that orientation, within the framework of a relatively traditional humanistic graduate pedagogy? I think each of us came to it in our own way. Jeff had been one of the “interpreters” of Tino Sehgal’s great “This Progress” piece at the Guggenheim in 2006. I only worked with Tino later, but that piece affected me very deeply. The idea of physically embodied conceptual work was rooted for me in contemporary dance and experimental theater. I had a studio practice already at that time, and Jeff and I shared a studio in Trenton. There was also the world around Cabinet magazine in those years. I started as an editor in 2007, and Jeff came aboard shortly thereafter. Together we would eventually run a series of “Poetry Labs” in the Gowanus space. We had evenings where people read James Merrill together by means of a Ouija board, or worked with fragments of Sappho by shattering clay tablets inscribed with her poetry and reassembling the shards into other poems. These were intensely social and playful forms of textual experience. Counter-critical, participatory, carnivalesque, yes—but also often affecting, and charged with interpretive insight.

We began experimenting with these kinds of activities in our co-taught grad seminars. For instance, one year, in the week on “observation and description” in “Critique and Its Discontents,” Jeff and I spent an hour in the woods before class, gathering two dozen insects and spiders and other critters small enough to fit in a set of vials we had ordered for the purpose. We had all read some of Lorraine Daston’s work on observation as an epistemic genre, as well as Philippe Hamon on the “rhetorical status of the descriptive”—along with Lessing’s Laocoon. So Jeff and I showed up for seminar with the bugs, and handed them out, together with a set of “protocols” for durational observation, and a set of “exercises” in description. After about half an hour of doing those on the bugs, we collected the vials, and handed out an Emily Dickenson poem, and we all set to the same protocols and exercises but on the poem, rather than the critter.

That might sound stupid. But it wasn’t. It was revelatory.

HM

We did some of this sort of thing in your “Historical Consciousness” undergrad class, so I have a sense of what you mean.

DGB

Yes. Remember in the second week, where we began by all closing our eyes, and trying to remember, together, the last image we had looked at in the first week? Trying to repaint it, in our mind’s eye. We were all there, like some kind of séance, in silence, with now and again someone saying something like “she held the cornucopia in her left hand” or “the fruit under her feet wasn’t marble”… And then that new student arrived late, shopping the seminar. And stood at the door for a while, and we could feel her there…

HM

And she was wondering whether she had stumbled upon a cult meeting.

DGB

Yes. But it wasn’t just some kind of goofball schtick. We were working on the problem of collective memory in a very concrete and enacted way. I did a whole grad seminar some years back entitled “The Enacted Thought,” which looked directly at the relationship between performance practices and what we called the “theaters of learning.” In one sense, the course was a kind of genealogy of the emergence of the genre of the “performance lecture” in contemporary art; in another sense, it was a class that centered on the phenomenological and somatic dimensions of humanistic inquiry. We didn’t just read Stanislavsky, we did the exercises of An Actor Prepares, and we worked together across the term to develop a performative version of Michael Fried’s iconic 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood.”

HM

You have said before that Tino Sehgal was an important influence on some of that work.

DGB

For sure. Transformative. My first encounter with his stuff was the Guggenheim show, “This Progress” and “The Kiss.” I felt an immediate and powerful connection to both those works. And he came out of contemporary dance, which was the art form to which I felt the closest immediate connection. I took a year off between high school and college, and did a bunch of dance—ending up getting a chance to work with David Denby in a second company role (we performed “Beat,” a work I loved, and that picked up on both the athleticism and the jackass relentlessness of my high school life as a mid-level jock). I ended up married to a woman I met in a choreography workshop, and who was a professional dancer—originally in classical ballet, later in modern. Tino’s way of performing art history through dance, in “The Kiss,” blew my world. I actually hated the work at first—because of the unsettling way that the pacing and durational tableau of “passion” seemed to function as a mannered anaphrodisiac. But I could not shake it. And “This Progress” changed my life.

HM

How?

DGB

It is hard to explain. To read a book is to follow a movement of thought. To move through “This Progress” was to walk the structure of a book. The power of the “scripting” of experience — as a form of actual inquiry, as a dramaturgy of concept formation—came through to me in Tino’s work as I had never previously encountered. This was a choreography of ideas, rather than their exposition. It went right to what I most wanted. When, a few years later, we brought “This Situation” to Princeton, I got a chance to be “in” it—to be one of the people who enacted its form and content, an “interpreter.” And this deepened my appreciation for his practice.

HM

But Tino Sehgal doesn’t really think of his work as “pedagogical,” does he?

DGB

I don’t know. But I myself was much less interested in the art world discourse around his work. For me, what landed were the implications for humanistic inquiry and the rituals of text-centered life, such as it is practiced in the universities. Walid Raad, too, shook me up in a similar way—and at about the same time. He deployed the conventions of research, but bent them into expressive and critical interventions. And his stagings “wagered” participants in ways that I wanted to emulate. I wanted classes where everyone was staked. He offered strategies for creating these effects—strategies that were novel for me.

HM

Like what?

DGB

Well, for instance, the games and tricks and destabilizations that Carrie Lambert-Beatty would later call “Parafictional.” One is “caught up” and/or “caught out” by this kind of work, which at its best can generate a kind of vertigo—a disorientation that is an index of one’s actual entanglement with the work, with the encounter. Raad created a sensuous cognition of negative capability. This was at least an analogue of something I wanted from the classroom. And I explored that theme in another of those experimental grad seminars in that period, “The Art of Deception: Aesthetics at the Perimeter of Truth”—a class that had a hall-of-mirrors quality. We each experimented with works of “false” scholarship in our respective fields—“metafictional” works, one might call them. And we ended the course with a mini-conference in which everyone presented academic papers that followed all the disciplinary conventions, but that wove red threads of critical invention through the sturdy cloth of traditional academic research (the common theme, perhaps predictably, was Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man).

HM

Sounds like the kind of thing one isn’t supposed to do.

DGB

Fair enough. I am grateful to Princeton for the space to explore this stuff. I am sure there were some raised eyebrows. But I was on something of a bender at the time, and wild-eyed enough not to care, or maybe even not to notice. Although I eventually did write about this class at some length, exactly because I suffered a kind of queasy hangover when it was all over. Alexander Nehamas sat in on the first few sessions, which was both unexpected and thoroughly terrifying. (Imagine being a young faculty member getting ready to teach Plato’s Republic in a course on art and truth, and realizing Alexander Nehamas is sitting in your seminar room.) He dropped out as things got weird. Or maybe he just lost interest. Maybe both! The best thing to come out of all of it was my lasting friendship with the remarkable artist Lex Brown. She was a precocious undergrad in the course, and her final project popped with all the brilliance and talent she has shown in her subsequent career.

HM

There is a preoccupation in all of this with a certain kind of “heightening” or “intensification.” Do you have some account of the way your teaching seems drawn in that direction?

DGB

That is a really good question. It may be that I have an addictive or slightly manic personality. That there is something wrong with me. I do think that this is possible. But if it comes out of something other than an idiosyncrasy (or a pathology), it is presumably tangled up with my longstanding and ongoing sense that the main reason one might give all, or even a portion, of one’s life to reading old books and thinking and talking in a sustained way about history, philosophy, knowledge, nature, and the work of understanding is because one is trying to figure out how to live and what to do. Or, to put it another way, I have never been able to connect with the world of scholarship as such. The “production of knowledge” in the arena of the humanities has only ever seemed to me like a kind of MacGuffin. It keeps the plot moving, but it obscures, even diverts from, the real game. And what it hides is the existential stakes. The point is being.

HM

That seems pretty dramatic.

DGB

Yes. I accept that. In the pejorative sense, and also in the narrow sense: “of or related to theater.” But that’s where I landed. So the kind of scholarship that brackets being—that “forgets” it, to use the Heideggerian phrase—is hard for me to understand. What matters is what it is like to be here, and what we do with that. And these questions are the questions that stand at the center of education—of teaching and learning, of “study.” We give shape to ourselves. This is an experience—it is work that is rooted in experience. Gadamer spells this out in such a compelling way in chapter four of Truth and Method. His analysis still feels trenchant—and really important to the history and philosophy of science, my actual field. What Gadamer claims is that, across the early modern period, the rise of the “experimental” method in the emerging sciences amounted to a new way of putting “experience” into harness. A new structure by which the phenomenological-experiential was obliged to do epistemic work. Properly structured “experiments” turned “experience” into knowledge. Which is very cool! However, this development left the aspects of experience that could not be rendered into positive knowledge as an odd kind of residue. A sweet-smelling residue, perhaps. Little lumps of ambergris that washed up on the beach—with which the Romantics could play, idly, and feel woozy and inflamed. But this parsing of experience is not faithful to the reality of human being, which requires understanding, not mere “knowledge.” And understanding is experiential. Understanding is an event, which happens to a person, and it takes the form of the experience of coming to a new awareness—it is historical. We come into understanding. From where we were.

HM

I have heard you on some of this stuff before, in our class. Where we actually read that chapter, of course. And I know you taught a whole graduate seminar on “experience” several years ago.

DGB

Yes. That class, simply entitled “Experience,” which Jeff and I taught together in 2015, was a crucial one for both of us, I think. We built the whole course around an unusual assignment structure. Every student (and we, too) chose a “work” at the start of the semester—a poem, painting, piece of music, even an unremarkable, vernacular “object.” Then, over the course of the term, each week, each of us had to draft the instructions by which a person could have an “experience” of that work—an experience that was, at least in principle, in the “key” or “register” of the theorist we read for that week. So if it was the week on Schleiermacher, say, and we were thinking about “Religious Experience,” we each tried to draft a protocol that would give a person some kind of “intuition of the infinite” in relation to our selected work. When we were on Bataille, and thinking about the kinds of “limit-case” extremes of inner experience, we each tried to create a kind of “recipe” by which one could be driven to the edge with/by/through/in our selected work. We actually exchanged these protocols each week. And we all actually tried to perform them, and report back on the results…

HM

Did you guys have to put the class through an IRB approval, to clear it as actual human experimentation?

DGB

Yeah. No. But in retrospect, it might have been a good idea. I remember that one student sent another student to sleep in the cemetery, on top of a grave, while listening to his work on headphones—a Chopin nocturne, as I recall. The class got kind of intense. But in a way the assignment architecture in the course picked up on, and extended, the practice that Jeff and I had installed at the heart of “Critique and Its Discontents” over the years: in that class, too, everyone picked a single work, and then each week, each student made a “sally” at the work under the auspices of the critical or counter-critical theorist we were reading. This meant that, over the term, students effectively build out a portfolio of engagements with a single object—again, generally, a poem or painting or other work of “art” (though, I recall one student who selected a snapshot she found in the gutter in Chinatown, in NYC—and her final construction, in the week on eros, when we read Fourier’s Théorie des quatre mouvements, was this mind-bending box that fitted over your keyboard, and the protocol required that you navigate a look at the photo on your screen by reaching into this strange, soft, sensuous prosthetic…to feel around in the image. Amazing!).

HM

Lygia Clark meets teledildonics.

DGB

It was an experience, I will say that. That student, like so many others, was a kind of genius. The work was relentlessly brilliant and affecting. Almost all of it, really. As if, by giving permission, there was nothing that could not happen. It was truly exhilarating. She, too, went on to become a remarkable artist.

HM

So, again, that back-and-forth between humanistic inquiry and the world of contemporary art.

DGB

Yes, very much so. I have again and again contended that the future of the universitarian “humanities” lies with the visual and performing and creative arts. This is an argument about our historical moment. It is my view that, in effect, all of the “humanities” have effectively become “scientistic” across the last seventy-five years. Which is to say, fields like “English” and “Philosophy” have bent themselves to the epistemic armature of the post-war sciences. The aim is to produce new knowledge, by means of the social technology of peer review, on a model of knowledge that is, broadly, positive, incremental, paradigm-based, and iteratively obsolescing. You can do this, of course. But the results are often pretty dull. And not that relevant to life. Neither beautiful, nor important, nor interesting (either to make or to encounter). But there is plenty of it. There is lots of bad art, too. But the arts remain the space of the open. And the work stands or falls based on what happens to the humans who stand in relation to it. It has no truck with the notion that it has standing without us. Whereas that is the core assertion of the sciences. This is what positive knowledge means. And it translates to alienation, in a basic way. As part of the endless and intricate dialectics of being, that’s fine. As a privileged program gradually displacing all other enterprises (while endlessly extending an unholy alliance with finance capital and its adjacent programs of instrumentalization, maximization, and agonistic operational efficiency), it just won’t do at all. Hence, we need more art-thinking on campuses, and less fetishizing of positive knowledge. To be clear, this is a matter of balance. We are currently hugely over-represented, in my view, in the latter projects (which are nonetheless perfectly worthy). As AI shows us that positive knowledge (seeking it, expressing it) can be largely automated, it is my hope that we will be re-drawn to the other stuff. Without which we are not what we are.

HM

And is the “other stuff” art?

DGB

“Art” is a way of holding space for the other stuff. Yes. Was that “Experience” class a graduate course on interpretation in the humanities council at Princeton? Yes. But it fit rather awkwardly into anybody’s pursuit of a PhD within any given “department.” Such activities can easily be construed as quite at odds with completing a dissertation within any given field. And yet, when Jeff and I got an invitation to bring the class to the 31st Ljubljana Biennial, and, with our friend the artist Asad Raza, to install it there in the pavilion, as “Schema for a School” (riffing on the work of Dan Graham), it made a lot of sense in that space. We revisited the whole thing in 2018, at the “Prelude to the Shed” in NYC, and that kind of work has informed a lot of the teaching that Jeff and I have done in other courses both together (“The Poetics of History,” in 2019, say) and separately (my “What is? / What was?” in 2016; his “Poetry and Belief” in 2023).

HM

All of this is also an element of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton, no?

DGB

Very much so. That program came, originally, out of that circa 2010 moment, and was informed by the first two iterations of “Critique and Its Discontents.” The collaborative teaching, the nexus of making and knowing, the experimental commitment to creative practices—all of that was very much the foundational vision of IHUM. And Jeff, of course, was the first director. The first IHUM event was the “Curiosity and Method” conference in 2011, which was closely linked to Cabinet, and which gave rise to the eponymous volume celebrating the tenth anniversary of that publication. Together, Jeff and I launched, and then developed across years, the core course for the program, “Interdisciplinarity and Antidisciplinarity,” which centers on collaborative creative projects, and has resulted in some pretty interesting and durable work.

HM

Teaching and friendship is on my mind. Friends have come up several times as we’ve been talking. And you mentioned the “Friends of Attention.” What is the place of friendship in your teaching life?

DGB

That is a moving question for me. Because it is true. One of the very greatest gifts of my life has been, now, the twenty-five years of friendship with Jeff. Teaching with him over these years, and writing together, and making stuff together—there really are no words for what this has meant to me. What it continues to mean. I remember that back many years ago Alexander Nehamas and Thomas Laqueur, who had been friends since college, taught a grad course together at Princeton on friendship. Maybe someday Jeff and I will be able to do the same! And it is also the case that many of my closest friends are former students: Peter Schmidt, who is the program director at the Strother School of Radical Attention, for instance. And Matthew Strother himself, after whom the school is named (he passed away, tragically, from cancer, at the age of 35). The image of the “Society of Friends,” the Quakers, is indeed a very real inspiration for the Friends of Attention, who themselves emerged out of another quite wonderful community of friends—the so-called Avis Tertia or “Order of the Third Bird.”

HM

From what I have been able to make out, that collective is very much centered on, again, “protocols” for collective actions—in this case around “attention.”

DGB

Yes. Very much so. And my experiences with that group and with its front-facing “trojan horse”—the Esthetical Society for Transcendental and Applied Realization (now incorporating the Society of Esthetic Realizers), or ESTAR(SER)—have deeply informed the way I think about human attention, the topic of much of my work these days. At the heart of everything for me is a focus on the real-time, enacted, choreographies of joint attention. These are “protocols” or “scores.” They have a rich lineage in twentieth century art (as Natilee Harren and others have explored), but they also trace roots back into prayer-formulas and spiritual exercises and the architecture of games and sport. These kinds of collective protocols have been the core of the work of the “Birds” over decades now. In a very different way, they are at the absolute heart of the authentically revolutionary program of teaching and learning at the School of Radical Attention. As long-form immersive textual experience gradually withdraws from prominence in our culture, as AI-driven, superintelligent algorithms that know nearly everything about us are intensively applied to the problem of relentlessly commodifying every aspect of the human spirit, only the self-conscious sequestration of bracketed experiences of conceptual and sensory synchrony with other humans can preserve, in my view, the conditions of possibility for non-inhuman being. This essential act—the free act of being in free relation to others, ourselves, and the world—must be protected and cultivated in new ways. The “attentional protocol”—a proliferation of actual and enacted attentional protocols—may literally be our only hope. This is what my own experience, and my experiences in relation to my friends, suggest to me.

HM

You have been writing and speaking a lot these days on AI, and on its relationship to human attention and education. You have been explicit that you think literacy is, in some sense, “ending” as we have known it. What are the implications of all this for teaching? For learning? For…education?

DGB

The Chronicle of Higher Education asked me for a short piece earlier this year. They wanted my “big idea” to improve colleges and universities. My position can be summed up in the title of what they ran: “Say No to Mammon!” Another way to put it would be something like this: at this point, the political economy of higher education has basically made it pretty difficult for modern colleges and universities to assert, with a straight face, that they are centrally concerned with the “formation of human persons equal to the conditions of freedom.” The whole business is too expensive, and the exigencies of the ever-more-brutal labor markets require that any sane player in the system has to think, relentlessly, of an ROI calculation concerning self-optimization as “human capital.” This is monstrous, of course. But we are where we are. And colleges and universities can try to help (and we must try to help them keep helping), but in practice, they are, at this point, mostly so interpellated with respect to the dominant ideologies of lightly regulated, hypercompetitive, neoliberal individualism that there just isn’t much they can do. In one sense, this sucks. In another sense, however, it is an incredible opportunity—and my interests lie there, in the extraordinary ferment of what can emerge from this moment. In my view, what is needed—what is desperately needed, and also already beginning to happen—is a transformative proliferation. What we need are thousands of new schools opening across the country and beyond. Our School of Radical Attention is just one of these. But there will be thousands. These will be spaces that take up, and explore in new ways, the aspects of real “education”—the formation of persons, the project of being, the true work of understanding and enacting our freedom. These schools will be funded in many different ways, and they will take many different approaches—focusing on the environment, or on attention, or on AI. Some may be accredited, many not. Some will be for young people, and some will be for old people. But I foresee a kind of Cambrian Explosion of new educational forms, which will, I believe take up the good work—the work, as Spivak puts it, of the non-coercive rearranging of desire, the work of holding space where we can encounter the diversity and complexity of our inheritance, and thereby come into ourselves and our relations with others and the world. The human hunger for this will not abate, and the machines cannot do it for us.