Marginalia, or the knowledge of excess

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Notes

^1. The ‘we’ here extends well beyond the authors, who owe an enormous debt to Manissa McCleave Maharawal and David Spataro, peers at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Over the course of several years, they organized numerous ‘Marginalia’ events at Blue Stockings bookstore. These events featured readings of poetry, creative writing, excerpts from field notes, and other texts by numerous authors including Christian Anderson, Cindi Katz, and Vinay Gidwani, who also contributed to the collection assembled here. In the announcement for the inaugural event, they framed the idea as[A]n effort to bring forward the creative and unheard elements of our social scientific and activist lives. These are our moments of expression outside of and yet integral to our day to day: the literary flourishes that compete with annotations in the margins of a text being read on a subway platform, the narrative elements of our field notes that provide drama, tenderness, and vitality, or simply the jokes and parentheticals that make typing up a meeting's minutes tolerable.Manissa and David declined to participate in this collection, preferring not to enclose these particular aspects of their creative output in a journal. Very graciously, however, they insisted that we take the idea and run with it. It is not without irony that as a result of their generosity of intellect, the true progenitors of our curiosity have been marginalized to a footnote!

^2. See ‘Afterword’ at the end of the collection.

^3. The quotes here are from the original exhibition literature. See http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/en/exhibitions/robert-rauschenberg-gluts-2/ (last accessed May 2013) for a condensed overview of the exhibition.

^4. For example, in the abiding concern with surplus that pulses from early Marx through, for example, Benjamin's (1968, 1999) ‘flash,’ Bataille's (1991) ‘accursed share,’ and much of Negri's (1984) work from Marx Beyond Marx forward; in Fanon's (1963) violent rejection of Europe, Chakrabarty's (2000) plurality of history, or Spivak's (1999) displacement of history's subject; in Hartsock's (1983) standpoint epistemology and Haraway's (1988) situated knowledge; and in Berger and Luckmann's (1966) socially habituated meaning or Kuhn's (1962) scientific ‘progress’ via episodic interruption.