Why I Enjoy Working for the Vorpel Foundation: A Reply to the Preceding Internal Paper
Submitted to the Fellows’ Circular by a second academic denizen, in response to the paper circulated last month, and in the spirit of CM-5’s preference for disagreement—though this paper agrees with its predecessor rather more than it disagrees, which the archivist may file under whichever heading seems least embarrassing.
The previous paper asked why we enjoy working here. It answered by describing what the Foundation permits: the adjacent pursuit, the inconclusive result, the document that does not know where it is going, the bent spoon taken seriously on its own terms. This was a good answer.
It was, however, an answer about method, and the question that sits behind the method—the question the Viscountess did not ask directly in her preface but which the preface nonetheless implies—is not a question about method at all. It is a question about purpose. What is knowledge for? Not what does the Foundation do with it, but why does the Foundation, or anyone, pursue it in the first place? The previous paper assumed the answer was obvious, or perhaps assumed the Foundation had already answered it by example. This paper thinks the answer is neither obvious nor assumed, and that spelling it out matters, because the position the Foundation occupies is a more radical one than the pleasantness of working here might suggest.
The assumption under which most knowledge-producing institutions currently operate—governments, funding bodies, universities, the apparatus of research evaluation in all its contemporary variety—is that knowledge must ultimately justify itself by reference to something outside itself. It must produce an application, or an improvement, or a solution, or at the very minimum a metric that gestures toward one of the above.
The Research Excellence Framework asks not merely whether the research is good but whether it has impact, by which it means: has it changed something outside the academy? Has it moved from the place of knowing into the world of doing? The grant application requires the applicant to specify, in advance, what the research will find and what will be done with the finding, which is another way of asking the research to justify its existence before it has conducted itself, which the previous paper noted was methodologically incoherent and which this paper now notes is also philosophically confused: it mistakes the potential consequences of knowledge for the reason one pursues knowledge, and it installs those consequences as the gatekeeper of the inquiry.
The Foundation’s position rejects this premise. Not the conclusion—the Foundation does not deny that knowledge sometimes produces useful things, and many of the most useful things ever produced began as someone following a question with no particular destination in mind—but the premise that usefulness has the right to sit in judgement over inquiry before inquiry has had a chance to discover what it is about.
This is a subtle distinction, and it sounds, when stated plainly, almost too obvious to need stating: of course one should be allowed to ask a question before knowing whether the answer will prove useful. And yet the institutional reality of contemporary scholarship is precisely that one is not, reliably, allowed to do this. One is required to make the case for the answer before one has it. The Foundation, by refusing this requirement, occupies a position that is philosophically distinguished, practically unusual, and—this is the part that took some of us time to fully absorb—genuinely radical.
Aristotle opens the Metaphysics with a sentence that has been cited so frequently that its force has worn somewhat smooth: all human beings by nature desire to know. The evidence he immediately adduces for this claim is the delight people take in the use of their senses, particularly sight, quite apart from any use they make of the information those senses provide. One wants to see. Not to see in order to do something, but to see because seeing, and by extension knowing, satisfies something in human nature that is prior to and independent of its consequences. Aristotle is not making an argument about the usefulness of knowledge here; he is making an argument about what kind of thing a human being is. Knowing is constitutive of human beings rather than instrumental to them. One does not know in order to be a human being; one knows because one is a human being, and the knowing is part of what being a human being means.
This is the philosophical position the Foundation holds, though it arrived at it through a Sussex trunk rather than through Athens. The Viscountess did not invoke Aristotle in her preface—she would have found the citation show-offish, one suspects, and unnecessary—but her insistence that the fragments, trifles, fables, and scraps were not obliged to cohere, not obliged to form a moral parabola, not obliged to justify their existence by what they produced: this is Aristotelian in its deepest structure. The archive exists because the family existed, and the family generated documents because human beings generate documents, and the documents repay examination because examination is what documents are for when they encounter human beings who desire to know. The chain of justification does not extend beyond that. It does not need to.
G.H. Hardy made a structurally similar argument from a very different position in A Mathematician’s Apologist (1940), a book written in the shadow of a war that was making the question of what knowledge was for feel urgently practical, and which answered by insisting on the value of knowledge that was not practical at all. Hardy celebrated what he called “useless” mathematics—the beautiful, the pure, the abstract—not despite its uselessness but because of it. Freedom from utility, he argued, was what allowed pure mathematics its integrity: the mathematician who worked without an application in mind was the mathematician who could follow the problem wherever it led, unconstrained by the requirement to arrive somewhere that the world had already decided it needed. The irony Hardy could not have anticipated—and which subsequent history delivered with the timing of a well-constructed essay—was that several of the branches of mathematics he cited as exemplarily useless later became foundational to computing, cryptography, and the information architecture that now underlies the entirety of modern civilisation. The useless had proved, in the fullness of time, to be among the most useful things human beings had ever done. Hardy’s point was not that it would; his point was that it did not need to in order to be worth doing. The subsequent usefulness is, from his perspective, a happy accident rather than a vindication, because what would have happened if the mathematics had stayed useless forever? Hardy’s answer was that it would still have been worth doing, and this is the position that most funding bodies, in 2024, find hardest to accept.
Professor Adeyemi-Clarke, who has spent decades thinking about what it means to keep a record for its own sake rather than for what the record produces, addressed this directly in her 2019 book Legacy Without Teleology. Her chapter on what she called “the epistemology of persistence” argued that certain kinds of knowing—the kind that accumulates rather than advances, that circles rather than progresses, that deepens without necessarily broadening—require an institutional context that does not demand direction of travel, because direction of travel is precisely what they do not have and do not need. “The family that keeps an archive,” she wrote, “is not advancing toward anything. It is maintaining a relationship with its own existence across time. That maintenance is itself the purpose, and the purpose is sufficient, and the demand for a further purpose beyond it misunderstands the nature of what is being done.” The Foundation does not advance toward anything. It maintains a relationship with a body of material across time, and this maintenance is itself the work.
This is the position that Harbord-Finch called “the serious pursuit of the adjacent” in her seminar: not the pursuit of what one expects to find but of what sits next to what one already knows, which turns out to be different every time. Szymański-Weil’s argument for opening the locked box is the serious pursuit of the adjacent to the question of what the archive is hiding and why. The bent spoon paper is the serious pursuit of the adjacent to the question of what objects retain and what they lose when they are separated from the context that gave them meaning. The linguistic papers—Thrufens on frame packages, Fawkes on the seventeen untranslatable words, the Archive Note on the word always followed by a full stop—are the serious pursuit of the adjacent to the question of what language does to what it tries to describe. None of these papers advances a field. All of them deepen a conversation. The conversation is between scholars who are following questions they find genuinely interesting, in a context that does not require the questions to produce anything before they have been properly asked.
What the Foundation adds to the Aristotelian and Hardyean position—and this is where the Viscountess’s particular contribution becomes clear—is the insistence on documentation. Aristotle valued knowing; the Foundation values the record of knowing, which is a different emphasis. Hardy worked in isolation to a considerable degree; the Foundation works in accumulation, each paper filing itself against the others, the associative indexing connecting what would otherwise stay separate. The Viscountess’s instruction to assemble fragments, trifles, diaries, fables, ditties, and sermons without tidying them is an instruction about the form that knowledge should take in a context where the purpose of the knowledge is the knowing itself: not a neat argument that moves from premise to conclusion, but an archive that grows laterally, accumulates adjacencies, and allows connection to emerge from proximity rather than intention.
Dr Renata Obasi-Mensah, in a paper not yet submitted to the journal but circulated to several Fellows in draft—and which this author has seen with permission, and which the archivist has already requested a copy of for the preliminary files—argues that the Foundation represents what she calls “an epistemology of alongside”: a way of knowing that proceeds not by advancing past what one has known before but by placing what one knows next to what one does not know and seeing what happens. “The scholar at a conventional institution,” she writes, “moves through knowledge like a traveller with a destination. The scholar at the Foundation moves through knowledge like a person who lives here. Both forms of movement generate knowledge. Only one generates the kind of knowledge that accumulates across generations without losing its curiosity.” She means this as a compliment to the Foundation and a mild reproach to the alternative, which is probably fair.
The previous paper ended with the filing: the care with which the Foundation documents its work, and the value of finding things filed with that care. This paper ends with what the filing is for. It is not for retrieval, exactly, or not only. It is for the demonstration, renewed with each Research Circular and Archive Note and ditty transcription, that the desire to know is a sufficient reason to know, that the record of knowing is a sufficient output, and that “sense within itself”—the Viscountess’s stipulation, simpler than it looks and more demanding than it sounds—is a rigorous criterion rather than a permissive one. The spoon makes sense within itself. So does the locked box. So does the seventeen untranslatable words, and the full stop after “mischief,” and Volume XII, whose existence the Foundation does not confirm or deny but whose possibility it continues to find interesting.
That is why I enjoy working here. The interest is allowed to be enough.
Notes:
The author also welcomes comments, disagreements, and responses from other Fellows. The author particularly welcomes any information about Volume XII but does not expect to receive any. Responses to be submitted to the Fellows’ Circular, or left in the box outside Room 14, which the archivist checks on Tuesdays.
The archivist has noted that Room 14’s box is not, in fact, locked. This is considered an important distinction.
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