“REvisions” is the ongoing series launched with the Research Forum in which faculty and invited contributors are invited to rummage through Bard Graduate Center’s archive of video lectures, published chapters, and print articles and discover new themes and hitherto unexplored connections. The premise is that while all these varied research “outputs” are published with a coherence evident to their conveners and editors in the moment of organization that further connections may become apparent in time. Moreover, institutional intellectual commitments mean that continuities of this sort cannot be dismissed as merely adventitious. “REvisions” therefore offers, also, an opportunity to see the “hive mind” in action: an institution as a thinking, living, collective organism.
REvisions 4: What is Distance?
What is Distance? To the child, it might be the
vast expanse of time between morning and night, or between one summer holiday
and the next. To the old person, it might be the shimmering curtain separating
them from their youth—at once seeming so close and recent, and then again
irretrievably and vaguely far. For the professional student of the past,
whether she accesses it through words or images or things, distance is both
friend and enemy. On the one hand, distance winnows out much of everyday life’s
chaff. On the other, it is an indiscriminate destroyer, leaving us with an
almost random pattern of survivals. Distance clarifies. Distance misleads.
Understanding this is what we aim at in our training of students and in our
mature research-driven reflections. Students of the past have been living,
eating, and breathing “distance” ever since the Renaissance discovery of
anachronism—which is but another word for “distance-as-action.”
But distance is not something
we only encounter as past-lovers. Distance also functions vernacularly, as a
metaphor for personal problem-solving. Keeping one’s distance becomes a way of
channeling Plato’s Sophrosyne, or balance. Distance, as we might say, gives
us perspective. Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the University of Berlin,
wrote in his essay “The Task of the Historical Writer” (1821) that “historical
truth is, as it were, rather like the clouds which take shape for the eye only
at a distance.” But in desiring to attack the conventional moral order
Nietzsche chose to turn distance into a weapon. In The Genealogy of Morality (1887)
he attributed the origins of morally-structured language to a “pathos of
distance” between nobles who ruled and the ignobles who obeyed—not to any
ethical code of “good” or “evil.
Because
of the priority of distance it is with this question that we inaugurate our new
practice of giving a theme to the research year at Bard Graduate Center. The
theme will link together our gallery exhibitions, seminar series, and
fellowship applications. Formulated as a question, these research themes will,
over time, add up to a library of fundamental questions for students of the
cultural sciences. In the back of our mind, at the origin of this project, is
Aby Warburg’s description of his Hamburg-based library as a
“Problem-Bibliothek,” or problem-focused collection. As BGC enters its next
quarter century, this collection of questions will offer another perspective on
the institution’s intellectual agenda.
