Aphorisms on Academic Action

Aristotle says that there are three kinds of activities in this life – there’s knowing (science), there’s doing (politics), and there’s making (poetry). The greatest question an academic asks him- or herself is, “What do I do with what I know?”

The problem is that individuals feel an ethical impulse to do something with what we know, while institutions feel the political impulse to have things done by those who know what needs to be done. If those in possession of truth ignore these ethical and political impulses, they might be good academics but bad human beings.

There are two potential ways in which academic knowledge could translate to a wider public outside the walls of the ivory tower. On the one hand, from the perspective of the scholastics, who value social institutions, a nation might create a branch of government or a ministry designed to ensure that academic knowledge translates from the campus to the government. On the other hand, following the humanists, academic knowledge could appeal, not to the institutions, but to individuals, attempting to change not an entire society at once but each citizen one at a time.

In both models of academic excellence, the humanist and the scholastic possess what could be called truth, but maintaining a knowledge of truth incapacitates both the humanist and the scholastic from doing anything with what they know.

Because knowledge is constantly revised to account for new facts and better ideas, knowing consumes 100 percent of one’s energy. If so, then the problem is that as soon as someone takes the energy devoted to knowing and redirects it to doing, that person no longer knows what needs to be done.

On the one hand, the scientist knows what needs to be done but cannot do anything. On the other hand, the politician can do anything but does not know what needs to be done. What is needed is a way to overcome the impasse that those who do don’t know and those who know don’t do. I believe it is to be found in Aristotle’s third term, making.

Poetry is distinct from science and politics in that it exerts no claim to truth nor to virtue. Things made just are, and are left after they have been made to have something made of them by someone else – i.e. to be interpreted.

Unlike the politician, the poet has no responsibility to be virtuous. Unlike the scientist, the poet has the ability to interact with society.

Instead of trying to do something with what they know, academics should make something of it. Academics might truth but cannot act on it because trying to do something with what one knows is to claim an intellectual priority for one’s self that disappears once one makes the turn from knowing to doing. On the other hand, the politician is encumbered because he or she can get things done is an expert in effieient action but has no intellectual guidance upon which action needs to be done.

The poet produces not action but objects, which then go out into the world and incapacitate both the knower and the doer, who become obsessed with the interpretation of the made thing. In other words, we must approach the question negatively, not as in how do we do the right thing, but as in how do we not do the wrong thing. The way to not do the wrong thing is not necessarily to do the right thing, for one could avoid doing the wrong thing by avoiding action altogether, and one way to aavoid action is for the doer to become the knower, to become obsessed with the interpretation of poetry, such that action is no longer as demanding.

The ideal form of academic behavior, of knowing, is the search for truth, and when one stops searching for truth in order to effect political change, one becomes deformed, crippled by the attempt to do something that one is not trained to do and has no authority to do. However, there is the other option, that from the ideal form of the search for truth one can become deformed, not in the negative sense of the doer but in a positive sense as a maker. One is successful in this deformity because this deformity at once makes no claim for the absolute knowledge of truth and exerts no force upon a public group.

To know things is to be didactic; to do things is to be violent; but to make things is to be ironic. The maker is deformed in the sense that he or she is no longer the searcher for truth but is now the facilitator of someone else’s search for truth.

If knowledge disables one from action, then the appropriate response is to embrace deformity and turn from action to poetry.

According to the academic formalism of Stanley Fish and the scholastics, the political action of Edward Said and the humanists is a deformity, in oter words a violation of the disciplinary form that ought to be upheld. Fish says that one ought to stick to the form of the academic discipline, which is to know things and not to defeat the pursuit of knowledge in the attempt to effect social justice.

From the academic form of life, one can deform one’s self to the poetic form of like, making, while knowing, but not doing. To direct energy away from knowing to making will have the same effect as to direct energy away from knowing to doing, but making does not have the violent effect that doing has, in which case, if something is done without proper knowledge then it can have calamitous consequences, but if something is made without proper knowledge it is simply inconsequential.

I would like to see our terms reformed to their proper designation, so that what we now call poetry – lines of language in regular meter – we start calling again “verse,” and we use the term “poetry” for that kind of making which uses delight for the sake of teaching.