In Defense of Error and Spectacle: New Genealogies for Experimental Humanities, a Lecture by Mitsos Bilalis & Penelope Papailias – Experimental Humanities. When the humanities emerge as a field in early modernity, experimentation is a core practice.
Could we possibly not describe Galileo as a ‘humanist’? Spinoza as a ‘scientist’? Disciplinary specialization and the ascendance of the historicist paradigm as a regime of truth, however, cut the humanities off from the tradition of experimentation and, by extension, from the predominance — and productivity — of error in research and teaching.
In our late/digital modernity, as we are faced not only with the collapse of the “market’ for humanities research within neoliberal universities, but also with a public culture of ‘fake’ news, ‘conjectural’ histories and ‘derivative’ fanfic across a media ecology in which ‘truth’ has been gamified, the retreat to empiricism (“Truth. Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities - 2018. PSL poster 2018. RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms.