Soul-Making Scholarship: A Process Manifesto
Let's warm up the engine
I was sitting at a conference table, awaiting judgement for what we'll call Baby's First Thesis Defense. This was the final step of my undergrad honors program, meant to help prepare us for grad school. One of the judges paged through my thesis print-out, and with a sigh he said "in parts of this, I felt like I was reading—" he scrunched his face, "a New Yorker article."
At which point my thesis advisor, a poet and MacArthur fellow with very little patience for academics, put her hand on his, looked him in the eyes and, god bless her, said "Oh I know, I felt that too! It was clear, fluid prose that respected the reader, not at all like the clunky jargon we usually see in these things."
That was a favorite moment of my college career, watching his face turn red and pinched while she smiled innocently.
By that point, my own future was clear — I was done with academics. I'd realized that after a lifetime of wanting to become a scholar, the realities of academia were nothing I wanted any part of, and I had no plans of going any further with it. But it was nice to have a trickster poet by my side in those last moments, for what otherwise would have been a dour endurance of the final step in the whole disillusioning charade.
That day was a climax; the issue of rigorous prose versus readable writing had been a constant source of friction while I wrote that thesis. One of my teachers kept telling me over and over again to make my writing more academic, so eventually I went to the library, picked up a couple of her books, and sat down to check out how she wrote. I still remember one of her sentences, or something close to it:
"This hegemonic colonial influence precipitated the cessation of endogenous cultural production."
I stared at the page, reading it over and over again, thinking surely she was saying something very deep. From what I could tell, she was taking the most convoluted possible route to say "when the colonizers forced their own culture on the natives, the locals eventually stopped making their own art and culture." But that idea was a simple one, and easy to say simply — so she must have meant something more by all these endless impenetrable sentences, right? Why else would she choose to write that way?
As long as I can remember, Knowledge and Beauty have felt like a natural pair. Every vision I had for What I Want To Be When I Grow Up came down to some version of "artist-scholar." No one told me that wasn't a real job description, so I just kept picturing life paths where I could have endless access to books and teachers and art studios and writing cabins.
My assumptions was that I'd be some mixture of an academic and a writer — but real world experience broke all of that for me. Academia was a circus, especially in the area I cared most about, the Humanities. And interning with a publisher disillusioned me about the paths available in that industry as well.
After college, I gave up. I essentially collapsed, disillusioned that none of the life paths I'd hoped to follow seemed to actually exist in any of the institutions where I'd hoped to find them.
From there, I took a break from my inner artist-scholar for most of a decade, instead dropping myself into a probably-generic "20-something guy finds himself" montage. I moved to Korea, took up meditation, hiked in Nepal, bought every text on tantra that Chiang Mai's secondhand book shops had in stock, watched bodies burn in Varanasi, learned dancing meditations and Vedic yoga back in Korea again, attended men's circles and bodywork in Vietnam... I checked a lot of the boxes.
Those are stories I've told elsewhere, and they don't really matter here except to say that they left me approaching 30 with a much stronger sense of who I was, what my soul wanted from me, and how to make that happen. But it also left me somewhat empty-headed, in both good and bad ways. I no longer had an incessant inner monologue or a compulsive need to read, but I was also emptied of a lot of the intellectual side that had been so formative for me. It was pleasant, and necessary, but after awhile, I started feeling a tickle. Intellect wanted to be re-included.
Eventually, that led me back to this very familiar impulse that I'd somehow mostly forgotten: my inner artist-scholar.
That call has been getting stronger and stronger the past year or so, and not just for me. I've been having conversations and striking up friendships with others who feel it too, some version of the drive for a new academy, a new vision of scholarship.
There's an endless amount to say here, and I have a feeling that me and a few of my friends are going to be saying it for years to come, in increasingly clear and direct ways, but for now, I just want to point at some of the broad possibilities that feel most alive to me, and then outline two ways I'm acting on them — two projects where I hope some of you will join me.
New Scholarship
The possibilities I see begin with a return to the belief that Knowledge matters, and that the pursuit and application of Knowledge can be good, true, and beautiful; that it can be soul-making and whole-making.
I see an academy where people can bring the whole of themselves into research and application, where they aren't asked to contort themselves into a disembodied brain on a stick, pretending to see a view from nowhere. Where they don't deny or diminish the role their hearts, guts, histories, relationships, and callings play in Knowledge work.
I like a model of indie scholars as craftsmen; of scholarship as a specific way of apprenticing yourself to Reality; a model of intellectual work as embodied artistry, as psycho-emotional exploration, as a labor you owe your ancestors, your descendants, your reincarnations. A view of Knowledge as a living thing to be nurtured and approached with a loving outstretched hand.
All of this is little more than a vibe and a prayer right now, with a handful of people dotting the landscape, feeling towards their own version of what could work.
But there are two things (or two parts of one thing) that I'm trying to give more shape soon — two experiments in the new soul-making scholarship that I want to run; two seeds that I hope will thrive in the coming forest. I call them Imago and Instar.
Instar
"Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far."
- Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
On the logistical ground level, the plan for Instar is to cohere a network of people interested in a new kind of scholarship, mostly through specific kinds of regular discussions. We'll have to find our way through it together, find what works, but some of the core anchors I'm starting from are:
Embodied, Intersubjective Intellect
Embodiment and intellect have become opposites so often, in large part due to the exact knots we're trying to undo here. The places in our culture where intellect is emphasized tend to encourage a narrow, blinkered, disembodied style of intellect, reminiscent of how McGilchrist describes left-hemisphere dominance. Intellect is cold, abstract, airy; it floats above the messiness of the real world, instead taking a view from above. None of this is conducive to embodied intellect, nor to a healthy immersion in intersubjective currents, given the abstract intellectual focus on objectivity.
I don't want to create another place for people to gather on zoom and dip into intellect-mode. I don't want everyone to become a talking head on a screen chatting with the other talking heads on a screen, trying to sound smart and have something to say.
What I'm looking for is a way of gathering bright, interested people, helping them anchor into the grounded presence of the body, guiding our awareness into the grounded presence between all of us — and then discussing what matters from that place of grounded intersubjective presence.
My elevator pitch might go something like "what if you did circling, but engaged with the real world from that space instead of navel-gazing?" But I've been advised that this pitch is mean to people who like circling, and that I shouldn't use it.
Practicing Pre-Requisites
Because of the culture and time we were all born into, it can take quite a bit of un-knotting before we can fruitfully re-approach intellect in a way that's grounded, embodied, and integrated into the wholeness of our human capacities. I'd like Instar to be an implicit practice ground for some of those un-knotting skills. Things like somatic resonance, imaginal literacy, and right-hemisphere engagement can be practiced and modeled in these spaces, in these discussions, taking them out of the land of abstract ideas and into the realm of simple, matter-of-fact possibilities that quite frankly aren't that big a deal.
Less Abstraction Please
One of the biggest problems in similar spaces I see in the, uh, let's say "post-meta-integral-ish" scene is their tendency to abstract constantly, always zooming away from where they actually are. From where we actually are. Layman Pascal captures one example (monetary support in the scene) in his article "The MetaModern Business Bureau,"
We spend a lot of time discussing Bitcoin, ecological economics, gift economies & Metamodern Monetary Theory. Good.
Some of us spend time exploring how to open our solar plexus power, process our “intergenerational stuff around money,” and generally get better at the art of being in the flow of abundance. Also good.
We just do not spend a lot of time collectively examining the present and future financing options for people we think are doing essential work.
There's a whole lot of thinking and talking and diagramming, swapping theories and practices and ideas, mapping and graphing anything that can be mapped or graphed — but there's not a lot of standing on the ground under their feet, looking at the people around them, and seeing what can be done here and now.
I am fundamentally uninterested in creating yet another space where I sign in and am greeted with a bunch of stuff like this:
These layers of abstraction and meta-analysis have their place — but they're everywhere at this point. Some places need to be protected against their encroachment. I'd like Instar to have a norm that feels like "if you're bringing some of that in here, it had better be very immediately relevant on the ground level."
Same goes for a whole suite of other abstraction moves. Whenever we start astrally projecting off into the realms of intellect, possible worlds, and maybe-ifs, we can challenge each other to ground back to where we are, where the discussion is, where reflex-intellect is trying to escape from.
Find The Others
My hope is that Instar can be a place for you to find the others, just like this article is a beacon for me to find the others who feel called towards something like this.
If this sounds like something you want to keep an eye on, you can subscribe to this newsletter, follow me on twitter, join the twitter community I set up, and/or watch for when I open registration on the first Instar meeting in a couple weeks. I hope I'll see some of you around.
Imago
I've given Imago an elevator pitch elsewhere: "what if grad school were good?"
Essentially, take everything I've said above, and apply it to a more intensive research container. That's the vision for Imago.
As you might gather from the names Instar and Imago, this whole endeavor is inherently developmental. The idea for Imago isn't to just cram your head full of knowledge about a particular subject — it's to apprentice yourself to Reality in a way that requires you and Knowledge to grow together, to twine together, to sense the next steps that want to be taken, and to grow into those steps.
An Imago project is a project that feels ambitious, even intimidating — a project that, in order to accomplish it, you'll have to become the person who can accomplish it. It's a project your soul begs you to do, it’s work your soma puts in front of you again and again until you can’t ignore it.
Imago, or at least my work in it, is fascinated with the Evolutionary Humanities, with the reaches of human potential that are coming into the edge of our grasp.
All of this takes a real foundation of grounding, sensitivity, and self-knowledge. I like the "apprenticeship" framing for rhetorical reasons, but really Imago matches up more with the journeyman stage.
So far, Imago is just me and my own personal project — and my relationships with a couple other people who have been taking on similarly-flavored projects.
Ideally, connecting with more people doing work like this will start to reveal patterns: approaches that work better than others, processes that keep us on track without losing track of the project's soul, connections that help shake things up and cross-pollinate more robust ideas. Those patterns revealed by early pioneers will help clarify containers we can make available to more people moving forward.
Right now, Imago is mostly a way for me to constellate my own impulses towards the artist-scholar archetype I was pulled to as a child. But I see possible futures where it can be a way to connect independent soul-making scholars with each other, with mentors, even with funding and shared resources. Or at the very least, we can help provide a blueprint for someone else who takes up that task. (Ideally someone better at administration and organization than I am.)
Imago is much less public-facing than Instar, but if you're working along similar lines, or are feeling inspired to do so, feel free to get in touch. I'd love to get a better sense of what's possible in this space with a little effort and human connection.
Conclusion
It might be fair to compress my entire arc here down to "academia was too fossilized, fragmented, and fraudulent for me, so I wanna make a new one."
Everything we do goes through a cycle of creative formation, followed by slow stiffening and ossification, and finally crumbling into the substrate for the creative formation of whatever comes next. Everything I know about the current state of things tells me that the old ways of approaching Knowledge are crumbling, and we need to start warming up the engine of creative formation. We have to start finding the shape of what comes next.
It's going to be a long, weird, messy process — I'm already remembering a half dozen things I forgot to say in this article and am going to have to say elsewhere — but I'm at least hoping it won't be a lonely process.
I hope some of you will be warming up the engine with me, whether you're interested in Instar and Imago or not.
"as a labor you owe your ancestors, your descendants, your reincarnations" yeah they all asked me to, in my dreams. The whole gang was there
Something, SOMETHING about this is very Pluto-in-Aquarius. Like the energy of the first YC batch of founders (hopefully). Best of luck with realizing your vision.