Doris Sommer, Ira Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies, tells us of an unusual collaboration with Pope Francis and of her new projects, including the Renaissance Project, which aims to make cultural initiatives a priority in cities around the world.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Hello, here's another episode of Faculty Voices. We'll be listening today to Doris Sommer, who's the Ira Jewell Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, at Harvard University. Welcome Doris.
Doris Sommer:
Thank you so much June, for this lovely invitation. I would like to add that I'm also a Professor of African and African American studies, because my area, as you know, is Caribbean study, which means Afro-descendant.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Thank you for reminding me about that. I was very surprised to have the privilege of listening to a talk that you gave with a group of experts convened by the current Pope. I was wondering, first of all, if you could tell us about how that came about?
Doris Sommer:
Years ago, with Gonzalo Aguilar, who was a fellow at Doctor Class. And was a colleague in literary studies, he's in Buenos Aires, his specialty is Brazilian literature. I worked with him on a mission with the housing authority in Buenos Aires, the Instituto de Vivienda de Ciudad, the IVC. Because the director at that time, Juan Maquieyra, who graduated from the Kennedy School here, Juan Maquieyra understood that if one wanted to move people from unsafe housing, in the so-called Villas Miseria, to new barrios, he needed to provide educational and creative cultural practices, to make them turn the corner, see a new moment in their lives, and want to move.
Doris Sommer:
Sometimes, people think that infrastructure is the answer to everything. I think that you and Habitat have that habit of thinking. Juan is very clever, and he engaged a group of cultural workers, including Gonzalo, who then recruited me to do educational and cultural programs in the Villa. We initiated programs in pretextos, in Pre-texts, in several Villas, and they're still going on. I can share with you work that we've done. In the Villa, they do know in MOCA in, so with kids who did not want to read were not all interested in school and now take outings to the national library and take over spaces and know how to use those spaces. So one is now heading up the school for politics in Fratelli Tuti. Fratelli Tuti has a very impressive educational program. It's a general educational program, and the Pope saw that there was a need to have a particular educational program for new world leaders, because very few people have confidence in the effectiveness, the creativity, the democratic practices of current world leaders.
Doris Sommer:
So he instructed his team and Juan among them, to collect 50, right, good, ambitious and generous young people from the age of 25 to 35; 50 from every corner of the earth and every religious background, including atheists, to form the first cohort of the political school of Fratelli Tutti. Now, since Juan knows me and knows the cultural work that we've done and knows that I'm professor of literature and teach something about aesthetics. He recommended my name to a series of seminars that the Pope is hosting, or at least the inspiration behind these seminars. And the Pope has three main issues that he wants us to discuss in public. This is astounding to me. The three main issues are economics. Of course, that makes sense. Politics, makes even more sense given his school for new political leaders. And the third thing is uselessness.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Uselessness?
Doris Sommer:
He's so clever that he did not say aesthetics. He did not say beauty, but people who have read aesthetics know that's the name for issues that attract us in disinterested ways, because they're not useful for us. They will not make us rich or famous or moral or anything that we attribute value to. Uselessness is a code word for aesthetic value, because we care about things, even though they don't give us those interested results, they just give us disinterested pleasure. And so rather than named love, as I say, or even beauty, he nailed the theme of uselessness. So I was invited along with a theologian and a banker who understands a new role for economics as social contribution, rather than a science that knows better than others; what people need or want. I was invited with two distinguished colleagues to talk about uselessness. That's how it happened.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Could you talk to us a bit about uselessness?
Doris Sommer:
Yes, of course. As I say, this is the theme of aesthetics and it became politically very useful when Immanuel Kant had already finished his first two critiques, one on pure reason, which is his book on natural science. These are sciences in which we discover laws. We don't make them up. We have to learn about what things are a priori. That's what he called pure science. Now his friends told him that wasn't enough because people live in society. And so he added a second critique on practical reason, not pure reason, but practical reason. This is the kind of reason that allows us to legislate, to make laws for ourselves, which allow us to live with freedom and morality. Okay. That's his book on social science. We have natural sciences. We have social sciences. And as an old man, he said to himself, I'm not done. I'm reading him, I should confess through Hannah Arendt.
Doris Sommer:
I'm not so clever that I can say simple things about Kant and feel confident, but having read Hannah Arendt, I dare to do so.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Remind the listeners who Hannah Arendt is.
Doris Sommer:
Hannah Arendt was a very distinguished political thinker. She doesn't call herself a philosopher during the 20th century, mid 20th century German born German Jewish studied with Heidegger and then obviously distanced herself from a self-declared Nazi. And that's one reason she'd never considered herself a philosopher, but a political theorist. She taught in many universities and her longest stint was at the New School. At the New School, she taught a course called Kant's Political Philosophy and her first lecture, which is part of the collection published as Kant's Political Philosophy. Anyone can pick it up or find it online. She says, okay, I understand the joke. Kant never wrote a political philosophy.
Doris Sommer:
Had he written one, he would've ended up in jail and he was too smart to do that, and also too old to be heroic. So he never wrote a political philosophy. He wrote his aesthetics instead. His aesthetics works as his political philosophy because aesthetics allows you, or in fact, prompts you to exercise a human faculty that had gone dead that had atrophied. And that faculty is reflexive judgment. It's not determinant judgment, which you can use if you have rules, you have concepts. You want to know if something boiled at a certain temperature, what you need for this law or that law, the concepts guide you. What happens though in the modern world and he's facing modernity, when you are confronted by things you did not expect, you did not look for. The concepts don't exist yet. What do you do? You rely on your reflexive judgment.
Doris Sommer:
You say, what is this, because you're not sure. You have to consult other people. Reflexive judgment is the pathway to sociability and to collaboration. And what is the kind of trigger to exercise this reflexive judgment, he said. It can't be economics or morality or even intellectual fact finding because all of those things have preexisting concepts. The only trigger for that kind of reflexivity, where you know you're floating, you're in a modern world and you have to count on other people; is aesthetic experience. When you see something that grabs you and you don't know why that surprises you and makes you focus, and you don't know why, that's the moment you ask yourself, is this beautiful? Or do I just like it?
June Carolyn Erlick:
So how does this have, for lack of a better word, practical implications in a Latin America, that sometimes seems pretty awful, where people are being put in prison in some countries, where economies are collapsing in other countries. And you're talking about aesthetics?
Doris Sommer:
I'm only following the Pope's lead. He's talking about aesthetics. And the reason he's talking about aesthetics is because if we don't distance ourselves, from what we already know, if we don't distance ourselves from those economic and political positions that are making all of the trouble, there's no way to talk to one another. But, if we find ourselves in front of a sunset or in a museum, an art museum, or listening to a concert, and we're not sure if something that we saw was really or heard really beautiful, but we want to talk to the person next to us, it doesn't matter who, then we've lifted. And we've gotten out of the mire. And once you look at someone and really listened to them, and here I'm thinking through, Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher of ethics who says that face to face is what keeps you from killing people. Once you really listen and talk to someone in a disinterested way, you have a chance to create that human bonding, which will allow you to confirm the difficult phone.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So you gave this really wonderful talk to us. Are you going to have any further collaboration with this program?
Doris Sommer:
I certainly hope so. The host of that program, you remember Rob Johnson, is an economist. He has a very interesting program called the New Economics. And there he collaborates with very distinguished economists, including Stiglitz and Rob was invited by the Pope to give a keynote address intro in September on education. And he wants me to co-author the paper, for example. The other follow up that I'm hoping to nail down is with Juan Maquieyra, in the School of Politics. Because at this point, the school is very successful in teaching modesty, humility; what is popular called empathy, which is a word I don't favor and also kind of strong leadership skills, how to win an election, how to be the center of attention.
Doris Sommer:
I'm hoping that he will adopt Pre-texts, which is a program that you know, which is a program also in adaptive leadership, in humble leadership, in a way to share talent contributions, form a collaboration among various members of groups to come up with better solutions than any brilliant single person can come up with. So I'm hoping to work with Juan. I know I will be working with Rob and I'm such an enthusiast for Fransisco's program, that I will be happy for them to use me in any way that I can serve.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That's fabulous. And you mentioned pretext, of course, I'm very familiar with pretext, but I think many of our listeners may not be. So could you just catch them up a bit?
Doris Sommer:
With pleasure and everyone can find whatever I know about Pre-texts on the website, pre-texts.org; you can now read in English, Spanish, Portuguese, also Chinese, German; we work in many parts of the world and lately in India. So the website will be available in Indian Marathi.
Doris Sommer:
Pre-texts is a very simple protocol with very rigorous and profound results. And it is a combination of popular Latin American teaching techniques. That's the magic of it. When you see Chinese children, African children hang up a clothes line and publish their stories, questions, drawings; you recognize [foreign language 00:14:56]. When you see cardboard books, beautifully decorated and carved with material that might not have interested students before, you know that the [foreign language 00:15:07] is a portable treasure. We begin teaching any difficult texts by reading out loud while people make things at their table, for example, cardboard books. But the reader comes from the tobacco factory, the Lector all over the Spanish, Caribbean, which of course includes New York city and Seville; the Lector was the most distinguished member of any community.
Doris Sommer:
You know, that the lector would be hired by the workers to read all morning, a book that they had chosen. So if you have ever asked yourself and you already know this, why Romeo and Juliet is still popular brand of cigars and Montecristo is another one. And Hemingway, for the real smokers. It's because workers had very good taste. They were very proud of their skill level and did not want to be bored. Many of those workers, if not most were illiterate. They were all intellectual because they heard important work in the morning and they talked about it in the afternoon. So this is the space where labor unions developed. Samuel Campos, who is the grandfather of labor unions in the United States was a tobacco role. And he learned this technique of organizing from his Caribbean buddies. The first union in the United States is the United Sabbath Conference Union in 1886.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Did not know that.
Doris Sommer:
Yeah. So we can revive these important intellectual and civic dynamics with such a simple technique as reading out loud while people make things. We know now from neuroscience, that manipulating materials, while you listen, actually helps to concentrate. Teachers who tell you not to doodle are not doing us a favor. So we hear a text and then we ask the text questions in Pre-text. Teachers don't make students objects in school. Nobody called calls a student, the students, all of them ask questions at a time. That's where we develop critical thinking. We don't give sermons about the importance of critical thinking. And when everyone asks a different question, it's clear that everyone comes in with different filters. That the difference is interesting. It's not an obstacle to learning. We don't have to cure difference. We can admire it. And admiration is the basis of citizenship.
Doris Sommer:
I learned that from [inaudible 00:17:47], former mayor [inaudible 00:17:48]. That's Pre-text and after we make art from texts, we ask, what did we do to reflect on a process? And if you look at the protocol from listening to making, to interpreting, admiring and reflecting, it really is the heart of democracy. We develop real democratic citizenship through learning anything, making sure everyone speaks and addresses each other with curiosity and not just with approbation or disapprobation.
June Carolyn Erlick:
When we were chatting just before this program began, you mentioned Renaissance Now, what is that?
Doris Sommer:
Okay, thank you. That Pre-text is part of an initiative, that's now almost 25 years old called Cultural Agents. We started that because humanities and social science sometimes tends towards pessimism, right? The world is terrible and there's nothing to be done about it. That's why we stay in the protected tower to maintain a level of freedom and disinterest.
Doris Sommer:
But if we think about what the Italian Renaissance were, it was a moment of coming out of a plate, right? Much longer than COVID. Coming out of a play, when intellectuals and artists came out of the cloisters to develop human centered projects. That's what the humanities started there. Human centered projects no longer got centered, but human centered. And when the intellectuals and artists came out of the cloisters, what did they do? They collaborated with bankers and politicians. Everyone got their hands dirty. Everyone took risks on their own. The poster child for the Italian Renaissance is the Duomo in Florence because a young architect said, "I can do the tallest cathedral in Europe with no flying buttresses, no external supports." And everyone thought he was crazy, but the Medici's took a risk. And because that risk worked, that's when they got their great economic and political turn.
Doris Sommer:
So it's that spirit of coming out of the play and generating collaborations and recognizing many collaborations that are already underway, that inspired us to put together Renaissance Now so that we learn what's already on the way and also cultivate new projects. Among the new projects are writing more cases for culture. We know cases, for example, about El Sistema. It started in Venezuela, right? What are the arts projects that have actually changed social behavior? And there are many, but we haven't written them up. Artists are allergic to statistics. Nobody wants to say anything practical about the arts because they should remain useless. Well, uselessness is the entry point, but not the ending point. And so cases for culture is one thing that we generate with Renaissance Now, and they help to develop our real ambitious project, which is a certificate for cities called Arts and Policy. We learn in that certificate from cases for culture.
June Carolyn Erlick:
But what do you mean a certificate for cities?
Doris Sommer:
It means that city mayors, managers who identify a need for more participatory arts because they understand that participatory arts are low budget, high impact improvements in city. As leaders of those cities, they convene members of a cabinet from public health, from education, from violence prevention, from transportation, from every responsibility of public life. They convene together and we impart a program; first of seminars, which can be online. And then we land in a city to do something like a SWAT analysis. What are your problems? What are your resources? Can we think of prototypes to ignite change? The game changer in this analysis and in the prototypes, is participatory art because you can imagine that many leaders of public health and of violence prevention and of transportation don't include public and participatory arts as resource, but there are many cases and you know many of them, where this is precisely what allowed a city to unclog itself.
Doris Sommer:
And so we're going to launch our very first certificate program in Monheim, Germany, the end of July. And we hope to anticipate another certificate in the municipality of my pool in Santiago, Chile. We'll do some investigation and alteration in my pool. I will be going there with Professor Faraz Habel, who you know from the engineering school. Humanists and engineers have much more in common than they often recognize. Engineers are ingenious. That's the name of their profession, [foreign language 00:23:32] ? So that's a significant, I think adventure that cultural agents has embarked on is to share the effects of participatory arts in public life.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Why might who?
Doris Sommer:
Well, simply because one of the members of a working committee there who was in the leadership program at the Kennedy school, met Faraz, thought that he would be an important contributor to my pool and this is Claudia Wadia and Faraz and Marcel [inaudible 00:24:05] thought that I should get into the conversation, but my pool currently has an energetic and creative mayor. So this looks like an important opportunity, both for them and for me.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Do you have your eyes on any other Latin American or Caribbean cities?
Doris Sommer:
All of them, all of them, the most obvious one that comes into focus is Asuncion, Paraguay, because the idea for the certificate program comes from the former Minister of Development, social and economic development. This is Jose Molinas. Jose Molinas met me four years ago and started to think about what cultural agents are. Started to think about what arts do in public life and realized that he has those friends where artists were making enormous changes in the economics and politics of this country. And he said, had I put that together while I was minister? I would've made very different decision. That was very powerful to hear. So, the result of that, is that he wants to share that perception with other decision makers and it's around his inspiration, along with him that we are launching this certificate program.
Doris Sommer:
He will be in Monheim as well, at the end of June.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You mentioned that you were going to be doing case studies on best practices. Who actually will be carrying out these case studies?
Doris Sommer:
Well, I invite you June and everyone else who's listening to a conference that we're putting together, thanks to the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American studies. This is December 2nd and 3rd. And the title of the conference is Cases for Culture.
June Carolyn Erlick:
I'm interested in, who's actually putting together cases, given that both Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School have such a strong background in doing case studies.
Doris Sommer:
Yes. When you go to the website of Renaissance Now; Renaissance Now dash c-a-i, cultural agents initiative. You will see the left hand side of the page is called Cases for Culture. When you open it, you'll see the collection. We've curated a collection of cases and many of the people in the Harvard Business School are authors of already existing cases. Tarun Khanna has an important case on El Sistema. Rob Austin, who was professor at the Harvard Business School at the time wrote an important case on Miles Davis, as a model of leadership. It's a long list of cases. They already exist. But again, we don't recognize the category of Cases for Culture as an important mover of social and economic development. So the conference is designed to stimulate more cases to make us responsible, both from the humanities and from business and economics and policy to write more cases.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That is absolutely astoundingly fascinating. Do you have anything else you would like to add?
Doris Sommer:
I've said a lot. June, thank you so much for this invitation. I've said so much, but you're talking to someone who's been stewing about these problems for quite a long time with cultural agents as an initiative for almost 25 years, as I say so to allow me to share this almost nonstop has been liberating, almost therapeutic. I hope that your invitation and my monologue here may win us more allies and collaborators because that's what Renaissance Now needs. Yeah.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You've been listening to Doris Sommer, Director of the cultural agents initiative at Harvard University. She is the Ira and Jewell Williams, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and of African and African-American studies. Thank you, Doris.
Doris Sommer:
Thank you so much June. Thanks to everyone.