“Utopias of Research—Outline and Update”
AbstractIn this Work-in-Progress talk Miller offers a status update on Utopias of Research following the course launch this past Fall. He will offer a brief overview of the exhibition’s argument and its proposed physical disposition. A central component of the presentation will be a discussion of some of its key questions: what is the difference between knowing and researching? what is the value of talking in terms of “utopias”? what, if any, are the specific forms of research associated with the specific places emphasized in the exhibition? The big question, of course, is how to materialize an idea.
Where did your interest in this subject come from?
I got interested in
the subject of “research,” as I did in the history of studying
material culture, from my long project on Peiresc and early modern
antiquarianism. For my last book on him I wanted to present his work as it was,
i.e. not put into narrative form. He left us his research, but how to present
it now? This became my problem. At some point late in the project I got the idea
of OCR’ing my digital copies of the seven printed volumes of his
French-language correspondence, probably about 40-45% of his entire epistolary
oeuvre. Just checking in a kind of blunt way on his terminology of choice. To
my surprise he used research a lot (recherches, chercheur, chercher) and
antiquarianism and its cognate terms very, very little. Curiosity (curiosité,
curieux) he used most of all. To me it seemed that it was all right there.
How does this research question intersect with your other intellectual interests?
Well, I think I like
the unfinished aspect of research. Studying someone else’s research means
always being in process—theirs and yours. There’s a potentiality to research
because it is open, with always the possibility of finding out something
desired. That is exciting. For most scholars, it’s the fun part of
scholarship. The bringing of a project to a conclusion always means
stopping, but not just stopping. It means foreclosing on some possibilities.
Leaving threads hanging. Time, life, everything, forces us to make choices. Are
they the right ones? The wrong ones? We try to make the right ones. But
research is a multi-generational, multi-player game and the future gets to
decide who wins. (And, of course, keeps changing its mind).
Why is this question important to you?
So, I originally
turned to this question as soon as I became Chair of Academic Programs at BGC in
2006. I thought of us as a graduate research institute, and thought of our peer
institutions as not the graduate centers or academic departments, but the
institutes—places that may have students (turns out, almost none do), but which
run many projects. And so, as a historian, I wanted to know our world. To do
research on research institutes. That led me, in turn, to research as a
question. Where did it come from? Why does it exist? What did people before us
think it was? And that’s when I realized no one had done this work. As I said
in my answer to the first question, I was then working on the paired projects
of Peiresc’s Mediterranean World and History and Its
Objects. By contrast, it was my administrative work that kept me
in touch with this question, and as the years went by and I thought in
different ways about what we were doing here—and could do, here—the topic of
research and its forms was an instrument for thinking the institutional
question.
Related Readings
What is Research? (BGCX, 2020).
