How I come to love Proust

Virginia Woolf once said “My great adventure is really Proust.  Well — what remains to be written after that?” I am not going to pretend that I am an expert on Proust. French literature is never my strength. I had my first passing encounter with "In Search of Lost Time" in my all-time favorite movie "Love Letter" directed by Iwaii Shunji. It was a fleeting moment on the screen, but the book is the symbolic underpinning of the whole story (click here for a synopsis of the movie). 

I always want to get to know the nuts and bolts that make my favorite movie so divinely presented. I downloaded the first volume of ISLT–Swann's way–for free on kindle last month. I finished reading it and now I understand Woolf's compliment, as least insofar as the first volume is concerned. It is a quasi-autobiography of Proust's ill-stricken life where he spent most of the time in his uncle's residence in a fictional town called "Combray". It is not a novel with billowing plots and thrilling scenes and extraordinary characters. The majority of the body is about his perception of the world beholds him and description of natural landscapes. Proust's sensitivity and unparalleled textual mastery exudes from his captivating descriptive narratives. He captures the inner world of emotion for an introvert and a bibliophile. Reading him is reassuring, therapeutic and socially elevating because I feel that I am not alone. Some of the favorite excerpts from Swann's Way: 

"no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as he; to him, the anguish that comes from knowing that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow—to him that anguish came through love, to which it is in a sense predestined, by which it will be seized upon and exploited; but when, as had befallen me, it possesses one’s soul before love has yet entered into one’s life..."

“A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices. If we mean to try to understand this self it is only in our inmost depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the quest can be achieved.”

"These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds; it often happened that, in my brief spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscopy."

"even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people."

"And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die."

"it is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them."

"Whatever our subjects make of us and how they make use of us is continuously negotiated with what we make of them and how we make use of them" From Sharon Traweek's essay appeared in Choreographing History, 1995.

What have my research subjects make of me so far? Let's see. I got a passing acquaintance with barely anyone in the lab except the lab director and the only woman researcher in the group at the last meeting. I learned the news during the meeting that this woman was leaving the next day to Germany for a post-doc position. I caught her after the meeting and obtained some basic information. Her hometown, her current position and where she is heading to, in less than 5 minutes– perfectly understandable, as she is leaving this place the very next morning, which leaves her a lot of packing to do. As I asked her for her contact number, she said she's mainly focusing on theoretical physics and her affiliation with this team is just peripheral. Interestingly, her engagement with the core research activity of this team is what she thought of my primary concern. She assumed that my role in this lab is tangential to my engagement with this team doing certain kinds of science that does not fit squarely with her professional profiles. Another reading is that she just wants to get ride of me as soon as possible. I wouldn't know anyway.

It seems that what the subjects make of the ethnographers are socially enacted and materially reinforced simultaneously. Socially, the dynamics of my non-participation in the boardroom and the seat I picked actively (re-) construct my role in the research process. Whether I chose to "hide in the back" (quote from the lab director) or took the exit seat near the entrance in case of exigency say something about my personality; whether I was the first one or the last one arriving at the meeting also tell something about my public persona. My sense is that many, if not all team members are constantly bewildered about my role and the proper etiquette in interacting with me. Due to the previous uneasy experience as the last one to walk into the door, I deliberately came 10 min. early, didn't quite expect I would be the first one walking into that door this time. After around 5 picoseconds, another senior researcher came in. He smiled at me and asked me politely what kind of work I did as a "political scientist". I don't think the underlying motive is so much about getting acquaintance with me than performing a social ritual. This is confirmed as he swiftly turned his attention away from me soon after a bunch of team members let themselves into the room. I can see how awkward this senior researcher felt in conversing with me as compared to fellow team members. My use of "jargons" in clarifying my research interests both confound him (such as ethnographic account, participant-observation, even anthropology) and bored him in less than 1 picosecond. He found solace as he mentioned the efficacy of the latest computer imaging technology in simulating the molecular conductance of base pairs, something both he and his partners are comfortable and knowledgeable to discuss. My point is that it is not a problem between the dichotomy of subject/object and male/female. It is a co-constructed role play of inter-subjectivity, which bracketed with Traweek's quote.

The inter-subjectivity is not only negotiated verbally, also materially. Everyone knows the sequencial procedure of getting access to the BioD-I: paper work, safety test, iris fingerprinting all boil down to a badge, with your photo ID and the name of your sponsor printed nicely on the laminated plastic case. The inscription on the badge is part of the process of constructing what we are and who we are. It does not reveal a lot of information, but enough to distinguish visitors (with a nondescript visitor badge) from non-visiotors; employees working under the same sponsor from those working for other sponsors. My presence slightly broke the norm as I am not employed by the BioD-I. I am just an ordinary ASU citizen claiming regular access to this gargantuan building. I don't quite have a "sponsor" inside this PanOpticon. A core informant, yes; maybe future collaborator; but definitely not a sponsor. I don't think I am the first one who violated this inscription of "sponsorship", yet the material inscription of "sponsorship" forms an important part of the negotiation process of inter-subjectivity with the research subjects. For now the badge publicly announced my research affinity and sponsorship in the BioD-I, unless I hide the badge intentionally (everyone wears the badge in front of the chest with a prideful look)

I wonder how long the bewilderment and negotiation process will last. Do not take my point otherwise: I do not want it to end. I hope that same researcher will be puzzled by some other features of me in a different way the next time he talks to me; I hope the lab director will interpret my engagement in his lab from sources other than my choice of seat; and I hope the Korean woman researcher will characterize our relationship from more diverse grounds if she ever comes back to ASU.

Yaron Ezrahi

"Any stabilities are temporary and local. It is in these highly situated encounters that we all are producing knowledges, we are both subjects and objects to each other, neither subjective nor objective. " Excerpts from Traweek's essay in Choreographing History, a book nobody is going to read except you are a fan of one of the contributors.

Same with Yaron Ezrahi and Sheila Jasanoff. They are good writers and prominent scholars, but who is going to read their 400-page rambling on the instrumental functions of science in justifying political purposes in liberal-democratic states? Let alone the differences between the history of republicanism and the history of instrumentalism in Machiavelli's writings. I understand the differences between 1) spontaneous equilibrium, 2) educating free educated citizen in decentralized democratic state, and 3) generating science knowledge hat constrains and defends public action in centralized democratic state. But what is the point? I mean, who cares? When Cyndy asked Clark whom is/are Ezrahi writing for, Clark's first question is "his tenure committee". Then he noticed the negativity he just projected so he qualified the answer a bit. But the immediate answer is usually the most candid, revealing one. Yes, nobody cares about these stuff ok? Ezrahi and Jasanoff have years of experience and firm academic positions to afford writing in highly theoretical, esoteric terms, but it's not going to work for us, the young grad students who are building up the careers.

So gimme a break from deep-level theorizing, gimme a break from Knorr-Cetina's style of writing. Jasanoff's style is more of a middle ground. You can skip the body part and always manage to get by. This is a lesson for me. Read a book a day. Skim as fast as you can, and if you cannot get the points, don't worry. It's not your fault. Because noone else is gonna spend more time than I do on these lit. either (other than fellow grad students). It might reflect the shallowness of the material culture, it is true nonetheless.