Go Narrow, Go Wide

Ally (USA)

My writing experiment:

When I was in graduate school, I worked as a teaching assistant for Giuliana Bruno. This was shortly after she published Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Verso, 2002) and the students in the course were assigned several sections of the book. Students eagerly embraced Bruno’s singular way of tracing cinema’s spatial and temporal contours, daring invocations of the body and psyche, and her rich discussions drawn from playful experiments with language. Atlas’s evocative prose, affective voice, and associational literary style immediately seduced the eager students. Unlike the dry academic prose to which they were accustomed, Atlas licensed liberation. Written by their professor and therefore an implicit standard, Atlas offered a model of writing which students haplessly attempted to emulate in their papers. Yet, without the disciplinary foundation and theoretical frameworks for serious cultural history that underpin Atlas, the attempts to mirror its prose read hollow. However earnest, the results were so clumsy and abysmal that I gently teased Giuliana that the book should come with a disclaimer: Do Not Try This at Home!
I’m reminded of this episode from over twenty years ago as I’ve been working through a set of methodological questions around the writing of film and media history, archival absences, and the role of speculation in historiography. While I grappled with the possibilities and limitations of speculation in scholarship throughout the editorial process and publication of two issues of Feminist Media Histories devoted to speculative methods and projects (8.2 and 8.3), I was spurred to write this piece after a realization, not unlike the one incited by the student papers in Giuliana’s class, that there was a risk here and it wasn’t the one I anticipated.
The risk I anticipated was that speculation represents a possible intrusion onto historical silences better left unspoken, graves better left interred, ghosts better left unsummoned. The historical record reflects and asserts power and when we mine it, we risk repeating its violences. The risk I did not anticipate was that speculation might license scholars to completely eschew existing methods, disciplinary standards, and practices. Surely making stuff up violates the foundational premise of scholarship? If we had a Hippocratic oath for historians, the first line would be something like I shall not make stuff up! And yet, the apparent impasse between speculation and empiricism carries further, perhaps greater, risk. Casting these positions as an impasse reductively capitulates methods to their most egregious wielding. Speculation is not necessarily fiction and disciplinary standards are not necessarily reactionary agents of unyielding power.
Here, I discuss the risks surrounding speculation as method and the arguments for the speculative turn in cinema and media studies, offering what I hope to be an invitation to embrace forms of creative and experimental writing of history while at the same time producing scholarship that advances the disciplines in which we write. This is an invitation to do more with less, as feminist historian Ashley D. Farmer charges us to, while being responsible to the history, to the material, to scholarship, and to students. Do Try This at Home!