A fresh annotation has appeared in the margin beside the chapter entitled "The Institutions of Uncertainty."
It reads simply:
"Surely not."
The handwriting remains unidentified.
Blottisham: I think the author has finally overreached.
Quillibrace: That is always encouraging.
Proceed.
Blottisham: The manuscript claims that sufficiently important unanswered questions produce institutions.
That's absurd.
People create institutions.
Questions don't.
Quillibrace: They do if one permits a modest degree of metaphor.
Blottisham: I never permit metaphor.
It encourages ambiguity.
Quillibrace: How fortunate that language has learned to cope without your approval.
Stray: I don't think the point is causal in a literal sense.
The suggestion is that some questions are so persistent they reorganise social life around themselves.
Blottisham: Such as?
Stray: Disease.
Justice.
Education.
Security.
Energy.
How children learn.
How societies govern themselves.
Those questions never quite disappear.
So neither do the institutions devoted to them.
Quillibrace: Quite.
The institution is less an answer than a commitment to remain occupied by the question.
(Blottisham frowns.)
Blottisham: Universities don't exist because knowledge is incomplete.
They exist to complete it.
Quillibrace: An admirable ambition.
How long do you imagine that will take?
(A pause.)
Blottisham: Longer than anticipated.
Quillibrace: Indeed.
Which is why universities have proved surprisingly durable.
Stray: That's rather a beautiful inversion.
A university isn't a warehouse of answers.
It's an organisation built around questions that refuse to go away.
Quillibrace: Yes.
Libraries contain answers.
Universities contain unanswered questions.
The books are simply where they sleep.
(A long silence.)
Blottisham: That's annoyingly good.
Quillibrace: It occurred to me only this moment.
I shall probably claim to have believed it for years.
Stray: The manuscript also says something curious.
It suggests that disciplines are distinguished less by what they know than by which uncertainties they agree are worth preserving.
Blottisham: Preserving uncertainty?
Surely that's the opposite of scholarship.
Quillibrace: Is it?
A discipline that solved every important question would immediately lose its reason for existing.
Blottisham: You make academia sound almost self-interested.
Quillibrace: I make it sound perennial.
There is a difference.
Stray: Perhaps disciplines don't simply eliminate uncertainty.
Perhaps they cultivate particular forms of it.
Blottisham: Cultivate uncertainty?
Stray: They teach students which questions remain alive.
Which distinctions matter.
Which disagreements deserve another generation.
Quillibrace: Quite so.
Every discipline has its own carefully tended garden of unresolved problems.
The flowers change.
The gardening rarely does.
Blottisham: That's a rather peaceful image.
Quillibrace: It was not intended to be.
(A brief silence.)
Blottisham: If that's true...
then conferences begin to look rather different.
Quillibrace: Yes.
Blottisham: They aren't gatherings at which uncertainty is eliminated.
Stray: They're gatherings at which uncertainty is redistributed.
Quillibrace: Or, if one is feeling particularly charitable...
maintained collectively.
Blottisham: That would explain something I've never understood.
Quillibrace: Only one?
Blottisham: Why conferences conclude by identifying even more questions than they began with.
Quillibrace: Ah.
That is often regarded as a successful conference.
Stray: Because everyone leaves knowing more precisely what they still don't know.
Quillibrace: Exactly.
Precision is frequently mistaken for closure.
The two have almost nothing in common.
(The room falls quiet.)
Blottisham: I must admit...
if the manuscript is right...
civilisation seems rather less like a monument.
Stray: More like a conversation.
Quillibrace: Better still.
A conversation that has become sufficiently organised to survive the departure of its participants.
(Silence.)
Blottisham: That's almost comforting.
Quillibrace: Don't worry.
Someone will eventually form a committee to improve it.
The discussion concluded after an unsuccessful attempt to determine whether the Senior Common Room itself constituted an interdisciplinary research environment or merely an unusually persistent conversation.
The distinction remained unresolved.
No comments:
Post a Comment