A few weeks ago, I was invited to visit the University of Negative Capability (UNC) based three hundred kilometers east of Somewhere. It is a gleaming campus planted in the middle of a very inhospitable lava desert. Change of scenery — geographical and cognitive — guaranteed. Like the poet John Keats, who urged us to live “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, everything is designed to nurture students and researchers with the acceptance of fragility, impotency and indeterminacy. I, who am never sure that I will be able to reach the end of my day, have found there a haven of epistemic tranquility, a bubble of gnoseological wisdom where small drops of “I-don’t-know” are happily diffused. Let me be clear, UNC does not promote the idea that there are no certitudes, nor that anything goes, as social networks (that splendid and terrifying henhouse of the present time) function today. Rather they put at the heart of the processes of learning and experimentation the way in which truths have been and are elaborated with patience and anxiety, scrupulously kneaded in the dough of uncertainty.
In the main Hall, under the photos of the founders of the institution, one can read: “She tried to understand the others’ points of view, but never succeeded,” “Thirty years spent struggling to solve an equation. Without success,” or “Distracted by so many fields of knowledge that he was passionate about, he didn’t manage to finish his article. Bravo for his effort.” The University’s authorities make it straightforward: here, there are no academic rankings and citation indexes that turn science into a war scene, no hyper-competitive scholarships that often lead to neurasthenia, rather it is all about hard experimental work on a human scale, honesty (about one’s own abilities and those of others) and care (for others and for oneself). Here, we “keep trying”, Madame the Rector tells me with a laugh.
These same perspectives inform the pedagogy. The courses, in all disciplines, consist of bringing uncertainty and vulnerability back into thinking. To make the fiasco, the debacle, the flop, the unexpected, serendipity, cardinal values discussed together. To be “angst-gether”, to be lost collectively in this unpredictable mess that is science. Such a researcher could not do anything emerge from her assiduous experiments. Another suffered so much on the writing of her text. What teachers track down with students are the snags, the hiccups, the glitches of the intelligence. That’s where it got stuck. What they note and cherish are the improbable deployments, the aborted attempts, the impasses, the obstacles encountered. And the failures are celebrated as so many achievements. “You didn’t make it? Well done!” “You produced incredible efforts and it didn’t work out the way you planned? Mazel Tov!”
Anecdotally, there is a padded room on campus, dotted with soft cushions, where researchers and students yell, vent, bang their heads against the walls (if necessary), where they can express their negative emotions in the face of hesitation and mystery.
On the plane back home, after having swallowed a whole box of Xanax, I fell asleep lulled by the sound of the jet engines. Stunned, I dreamed of I-don’t-know-what.
[The reader will have understood that this text is speculative fiction, an exercise dear to Donna Haraway].