The New Between Past and Future: The Question of Method in the Humanities

<strong>Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study (JNIAS) &amp; MargHumanities</strong> a discussion on <strong>The New Between Past and Future: The Question of Method in the Humanities</strong> <strong>On April 13, 2015</strong> Speakers: <strong>Milind Wakankar</strong> (HSS department, IIT Delhi) <strong>Asad Zaidi </strong>(Poet, and Editor, Three Essays Collective) <strong>Rakesh Pande</strong>y (CSDS, Delhi) <strong>Achia Anzi</strong> (Artist and Faculty, School of Languages, JNU) The idea of the new in the first half of the last century was ideologically related to a hope of rupturing the march of time, so that it could be used to assign a direction. There was a name to this idea: progress. One was supposed to produce novelty. But by the last few decades of the 20th century artists and philosophers realized that access to a pure or hidden reality might be a chimera. With the realization that the quest for newness, especially in art and literature, might be an utterly meaningless exercise, they looked for other possibilities---play, repetition, discourse, the cosmic—leading to a profound sense of mourning and relativity. Boris Groys has recently asserted that to ask for the new essentially means asking for value: a desire for truth, authenticity and a revaluation of values through notions of the vulgar, profane, neurotic or alien. One negatively adapts high cultural traditional models and by dissociating the new from the valuable past, successful innovation happens. The new demands from us a recognition of counter-values. A genuinely new work of art or a new theory is able to generate "a tension between highest cultural value and most profane of objects." Which returns us to a number of vexations.Why does the new want to contrast itself with the past but hope for a future as a domain of unlimited expansion? Does newness arrive from something extra-cultural, some other form of conviction that is impossible to quantify? Are all authentic works original? How can one avoid the traps of romantic utopia and pragmatism of the market at the same time? Is 'the new' essentially a product of human freedom? Expanding on these concerns, the panel will set up a discussion for methodologically understanding the possibilities and challenges of humanities studies at the contemporary moment, looking in particular at literary and artistic practices and criticism.