Week 12: What this course left out

The closing lecture, turning eleven weeks of praising subtraction back on itself --- what does the thesis conveniently fail to explain?

10 May 2027

Eleven weeks of finding the same move in theology, painting, music, fiction, film, architecture, design, statistics, mathematics and politics is itself a suspicious pattern: a course that argues restraint is good practice should notice when it’s cherry-picking its own examples. This lecture is co-taught specifically so the two of us can disagree about it on the record.

Counter-cases on the table: maximalist art that succeeds by refusing to leave anything out (a Kehinde Wiley portrait, a Bollywood musical number), and the plain fact that most bad, lazy work is also missing things — an unfinished essay, an underdeveloped argument, a rushed edit. If leaving something out were sufficient for quality, both of those would be good work. They’re not, which means the whole semester’s thesis has always needed a second clause it mostly left implicit: not every cut earns its keep, and this course has been better at showing you successful cuts than at teaching you to tell the difference in advance. That second clause is the final assessment’s real subject.

Outline#

• maximalism as the semester’s most direct counter-example
• why “it left something out” can’t be sufficient on its own — bad work does too
• the second, mostly-unstated clause the whole course has been assuming