Culler Lecture in Critical Theory, Cornell University

Jane Bennett 
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities
Department of Comparative Thought and Literature
Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

On Behalf of the Anexact:
along the lines of Franz Kafka, Paul Klee, Len Lye

Abstract:
This lecture is prompted by a recent announcement by the president of my university that “data science” was to become a signature research focus, for faculty in the sciences and engineering but also the humanities. It is in the context of this boosterism that I explore the extent to which the social, ethical, and lyrical value of the humanities is linked to its engagement with sources that are non-metrical, not isolable and essentially anexact, and thus are not well-described as “data.” The larger project seeks, ultimately, to conceptualize the subtle efficacy of the vague or cloudy and to articulate defend modes of research practice appropriate to it.

Is not one of the special talents of the humanities -- and an important contribution to a democracy worth having, which requires a demos able to affirm or at least tolerate complexity – a careful attentiveness to what is subtle and anexact about cultural forms and their experiential effects? What happens once sites of underdetermined meanings are re-framed as “data,” as, that is, aggregates of clearly demarcated entities rather than as processes whose fuzzy nodes resist an additive logic? My lecture makes a start at a response by exploring some (literary, philosophical, visual-artistic) efforts to express and conceptualize the “anexact.”
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Jane Bennett is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, with appointments in the Departments of Political Science & Comparative Thought and Literature. Bennett holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst Her books include Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (Duke University Press, 2020); Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010); The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2001), Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and The Wild (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), and Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment: Nature and the State in a Post-Hegelian Era (NYU Press, 1987). She is co-editor of several book collections.

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In addition to this lecture, Jane Bennett will offer a workshop for graduate students on Thursday, March 20. Space limited; registration required. Lunch provided. Interested graduate students should reach out to Chloe Wray (clw252@cornell.edu) to register.