LearningQuest Manifesto: Mark I

Now, as many of you know, Old Ken has recently received a promotion and has now become Dean of The School of Serious Studies. As befits such an occasion, I was asked to make a few remarks on the work with which the name of Ken Digby has become most widely known. Of course, I can mean none other than that frequently misunderstood project called “LearningQuest.” Since its delivery just over a week ago, I have heard from a few colleagues that there might some broader interest in this speech. Thus, I have posted my address, with a few minor emendations, below. As to these editorial interventions, Old Ken should remark that I found some of my more pithy extemporaneous quips to fall a bit flat in the chilled aspic of written prose. Therefore, where appropriate I have sought to sublimate this turgid matter in my customary percolating alembic of images—an approach I trust you will not find entirely disagreeable. Without further ado, then, I offer my speech more or less as it was presented this past Saturday evening before an august assembly at The School of Serious Studies:

“Esteemed colleagues, friends, President Butter and the now-retired Dean Martin—it is a pleasure and a privilege to see you all here tonight, to accept the great honor and responsibility of the deanship of The School of Serious Studies.

“With the gravity attendant upon such a position, I feel it is only right that I try to share with you the work that occupied my time explicitly for the last five years and, more generally, for the bulk of my adult life. This work, as many of you know, has come to be called ‘LearningQuest’—a title at which I have at times balked but one with which I feel like I have come to cordial understanding. As such, I offer to you tonight an overview of this controversial and much-disputed project in a talk that I’d like to call ‘ “LearningQuest”: What it is and What it is Not.’



“But, as any telling is better if prefixed with a bit of showing, I’d like to ask you to direct you eyes forward, toward the screen above my head where you’ll see a projected photograph I took recently at Avebury. A sheep grazes in the foreground on a verdant blanket, from which rise the massive monoliths installed in the chalky ground thousands of years ago. Although the quality of our photograph is not terrific, signs of more recent human presence are certainly perceptible within it—namely, in the shallow, scooped pathway of yellowed grass which cuts diagonally upward across the picture-plane from the image's lower right hand corner. Whether we might want to imagine this as an Iron Age rill, trod by the rough clogs of our ancient forebears, this path has certainly been traced and retraced by legions of modern-day camera-toting tourists, much like the ivory-clad gent who appears here near the left-hand horizon.



"Yet, as I made my tourist rounds at this fascinating site, I felt myself becoming increasingly cognizant of how we might think of Avebury being experience by its more permanent inhabitants—sheep. Consider here the massive, arrowhead-shaped monolith depicted above and especially the curious dirt path, which encircles its base. What might have made this path? At first, Old Ken envisioned that this path might have been worn down by human feet—hiking boots, 'wellies,' and the like, much as we saw jaundicing the grass in the image above. But, if we consider that the vertical height of the monolith's most extreme projection at right is little more than four feet off the ground, it becomes hard to imagine how human feet could have worn the earth in such a manner. Are we to believe that crowds of tourists have felt compelled to duck down, performing a kind of limbo dance, to make a circular way around these standing stones?



"Upon this exposed earth, we might find some evidence to corroborate our suspicions. As the photograph above suggests, the ring paths around the monoliths are clotted with tufts of wool and sheep droppings.

"Further, as the image below may (faintly) hint, the bases of many of these stones appear slightly russet—as if burnished or given a patina by years (if not centuries) of physical contact. Thus, the more Old Ken looked at the Avebury stones, the more it felt like a human site that had been co-opted or reclaimed by sheep.



"Now, earlier generations found a melancholy beauty in those locations where Nature overtook human works—where ruins of ancient monasteries had been engulfed in weeds or a proud forest had grown up from within the crumbling walls of an abandoned castle. In our own day, we seem fascinated by the ways in which man-made spaces get reclaimed by subsequent generations, disassembled and made into new things. But what of the use of what seem to us as great monuments of human achievement by our animal brethren? Certainly, we are all familiar with the unfortunate ways in which public places—Trafalgar Square in London or the Piazza San Marco in Venice—have been colonized by pigeons, or the cases where outdoor bronze statues have been transformed into polychromatic works by the loose bowls of seagulls. Old Ken would almost want to describe such cases as something like ‘natural vandalism.’ Yet, with the case of the sheep at Avebury, it seems like we are witness to an occasion where animals have not only performed a utilitarian function (presumably, that is, they are scratching themselves and dislodging loose or tangled wool), while making subtle transformations of the human built environment (the burnishing of the stones and the baring of the earth).

“On the one hand, ideas of ‘natural vandalism’ or the ‘visual production of sheep’ might seem a bit silly. Surely, it might be argued, we misunderstand the meaning of the concepts of vandalism or production if we allow beings like sheep to partake of it. And do we not risk a kind of category mistake if we allow sheep or other animals the capacity to produce not only traces on the landscape but to make semiotically-invested marks? Though we no doubt risk sounding a ridiculous, the question of the animal interface with the human built environment is certainly an intriguing one—a question that might not only speak to environmentalists and anthropologists, but art historians, veterinarians, and conservation experts. Curious, playful, open-ended and potentially ridiculous: this is the pathway and the character of the approach I want to discuss with you tonight—an approach we know as LearningQuest.

“Quest—the word conjures notions of the adventurous and the mythic, from the quest for the Holy Grail of medieval European legend to Native American traditions of the ‘vision quest,’ wherein a seeker undergoes a ritualized ordeal in search for spiritual or other direction. Heterogeneous as these quests are, I want to suggest, they share a sense of the quest as being for something, as having a purpose or, more explicitly, an object (being it a grail or a vision).

“Along such lines, one might reasonably suppose that LearningQuest designates a quest whose purpose or object is learning. Yet, if we consult the Oxford English Dictionary, we find that our word ‘quest’ derives from the Latin verb ‘quærre,’ meaning to seek, to inquire, and to question. I want to offer to you tonight that, in its most fundamental gesture, what LearningQuest attempts to do is to reconceptualize our familiar, heroic notions of the quest for learning as the seeking of objects of knowledge. Instead it endeavors to recover a primordial, questioning comportment to the world—a comportment which is both essential to learning, but itself has to be learned and re-learned.

“In this way, it is perhaps useful to think of LearningQuest as a way of being-in-the-world. And here, I will make no secret of my indebtedness to the work of Martin Heidegger, an important figure in my youthful reading. No doubt, the vestiges (if not large portions) of Heidegger’s thinking might be said to inflect what I have to say to you tonight. But, taking up his terms for a moment, Heidegger (especially in the key works of the late 1920s) describes the human as a being thrown or projected into existence—a fallen creature to be sure, yet one that is always embodied and among other bodies in the world. Various factors—ranging from the concerted efforts of modern architecture or science and technology to the seemingly more innocuous gossip and idle talk found in everyday life (what Heidegger calls ‘the they’)—have the effect of flattening out our relations to this environing world. As Heidegger suggests, these forces hollow out the richness and diversity of the beings surrounding us until it appears that they simply stand opposite to or over and against us. Rather than enjoying their fullness and particularity, in other words, beings are so flattened and reduced in our everyday existence that they as so many objects.

“As suggested above, LearningQuest is a way of being-in-the-world; that is, it provides us with means through which we can step back from the flattening of the world into graspable and useful objects, so as to find a playful and experimental way toward things, which may then appear to us in their fullness and joyous plenitude. Now, perhaps joy, play and even the controversial doctrine of pointlessness seem far away from the traditions and values of The School of Serious Studies. Yet, as I hope to briefly elucidate, such approaches and their attendant values are not only fundamental to our ability to study seriously, but—in so doing—create space for the kinds of critical reflection so deeply needed in our dark, violent times.

“Nice as all this sounds, Old Ken hears you asking: what is LearningQuest? Although incidentally a great way to think about the artistic capacities of sheep, LearningQuest goes much deeper; the most satisfying answer I can offer you is that LearningQuest is the strongest adversary we have to fear. It seems hard to overstate the significance of the coercive force of fear in organizing the geo-political map, in shaping the everyday lives of the world’s populations, and molding the very lineaments of our imaginations. But, whether these fears are global or utterly personal or local, LearningQuest seeks to identify from whence these anxieties spring and thereby provide us with means to think ourselves out of them. Rather than fearing (and, subsequently, hating) people we think may hurt us, for example, we can learn about them and realize that our own interests are much closer to theirs than to those of our supposed leaders, who encouraged our animosity. Rather than resenting a professional acquaintance who we fear may receive a promotion or honor ahead of us, we can learn from and with them. Thereby, not only do we develop skills recognized within our professions; but we also gain critical insight into the imbecilic and fear-based mechanisms used within those professions to enact discipline and constraint thought. LearningQuest shows us the boxes in which we have entrapped ourselves and the doorways out; it allows us to understand our fears and can thereby free us from them.

“These reflections lead us naturally enough to the vexed question of LearningQuest and money—and to the familiar charge that you can’t make a career from a life committed to LearningQuest. Indeed, although serious work is certainly done within the confines of careers or the professionalized academy, careerism often appears at loggerheads with the basic impulse of LearningQuest, which is rooted in the Socratic admission of knowing nothing but always seeking to question what might be known. For, as you will know only too well, many constructs of the contemporary academy—wherein the conduct of one’s work is contingent upon the preliminary formulation of a research plan and funding applications that are then to be (more or less) corroborated by the actual research; where admiration still accrues to scholars who produce a ‘systematic’ body of work, which exposits a coherent point of view across a range of topics of problems—encourage the ‘branding’ of scholarship, often to the point of self-parody.

“While taking nothing away from those who choose to work in this way, those of us committed to LearningQuest are compelled by the need to keep themselves open not only to the world in a broad sense but, necessarily, the possibility that we may be wrong in our understandings of it. Thus, just as its name doubles as a satire of corporate branding jargon, LearningQuest must remain vigilant to the lures of intellectual systematization, coherent professional identity, and ultimately the desire for a career as conventionally conceived. The question, I would submit to you, is not how to make a career, but how to live—a question that should and must bring us to think of the academy (or any career) in more porous, flexible terms—as resources to be moved into and out of, and not holding sole imprimatur over meaning or value. We need to free ourselves from the fear that our path may lead to the poor house, and instead be open to devising an ongoing series of creative solutions to the questions (personal, intellectual, financial and otherwise) that arise in and are required to sustain the project of living.

“Above, I suggested that LearningQuest itself is something that has to be learned and re-learned. Indeed, all of our research indicates that this is true; practitioners report constantly having to recalibrate and reassess their LearningQuest pathways as demands of life change. No one is saying this is easy. But, through these turbulent passages, I want to suggest that certain LearningQuest values remain constant: openness; experimentation; playfulness; and taking risks. And if we had to come up with a motto or slogan (as we have often been asked to do) with which to summarize the general ethos of LearningQuest, I think we could do little better than with a phrase at once connected to the regenerative and therefore divine and with the fallen language of the human condition: ‘Fuck it!’ Now, this is not to be taken as a nihilist’s or a slacker’s reply, thereby implying that decisions should be made rashly without concern for their consequences. Far from it. Rather, I would suggest that we read this ‘Fuck it!’ as an affirmative utterance—a recognition that the world is neither so small that all choices can be reduced to a strategic calculation of cost and benefit nor so big that our actions make no registration at all. Instead, LearningQuest clings to a belief that fallen and misguided though our actions may be, they can be redeemed within the ongoing unfolding of LearningQuest itself. Thus, crucially, for an action or idea to be redeemed, it must first be enacted. Knowing requires doing, even though doing will inevitably be done imperfectly. Hence, ‘Fuck it!’

“Therefore, I say to you all assembled here within this glorious hall of The School for Serious Studies: LearningQuest is no easy road, nor is it the only road, nor is it the road that can or should be traveled by all. But, for those who are inclined to take the long way, to take chances, to do things just for the hell of it, to experiment for its own sake, to be playful—I say to you: please join me in smiling at the world around you and, in deep reverence, repeat our solemnly ridiculous motto: ‘Fuck it!’ Thank you.”