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This workshop is the third and final installment of the series ‘In Front of the Factory,’ which has focused on questions of work and the ways in which work/labour have been framed in past and contemporary forms of image-making. The workshop presents the research and conversations that accumulated through the series, including topics such as cinematic representations of women’s labour; the presence or absence of domestic and reproductive labour in visual media; the spatial and temporal dimensions of unemployment; the use of cinema for industrial knowledge production and nation-making; and the gendered and racial dimensions of labour in film and photography.
Programme
16:00 Introduction by Clio Nicastro
16:15-18:00 Workshop with Saima Akhtar
19:30 Keynote Silvia Federici: The Globalization of Women’s Work and New Forms of Violence Against Women
Introduction by Rosa Barotsi
As Workers Leave the Factory, What’s Left Behind?, workshop, ICI Berlin, 9 July 2018 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e180709>
Is the presentism of ‘digital cultures’ in itself a media-technological effect? To what extent are these cultures characterized by a fundamental restructuring of modern semantics and experiences of time? In particular, do they eliminate the ‘surplus and surprise potential’, that is, the eminent reference to an open future Koselleck found to be essential for modern historical thought? The aim is to discuss what this entails for the humanities as an eminently historical cluster of disciplines in terms of epistemology and science policy.
Marisa Galvez is Professor of French, Italian, and German Studies at Stanford University
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is Professor emeritus of Comparative Literature, German Studies, and Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University
Fred Turner is Professor of Communication at Stanford University
Sigrid Weigel is Professor emeritus of Literature and Cultural Science and former director of the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin
Wolfgang Hagen is Professor of Media Studies at Leuphana University and former programme director for culture and music at DeutschlandRadio Berlin
Against Presentism, discussion, ICI Berlin, 26 June 2019 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e190626>
‘Affective Ecologies’ presents imaginative methodological exercises in documenting the multi-species afterlives of militarized spaces in the present-day Middle East. The workshop explores the intersection of ethnography and the arts as it provides a haunting, sensual, and dissident document of the militarized, poisonous, and neglected rhythms of daily life in Middle Eastern ecologies. Giving an account of a rigorously affective relationship between the human and the non-human, giving equal aesthetic attention and ethnographic weight to the military and to the ecological, the workshop examines the possibilities of affective ecologies that turn post-human interpretations into situated political fragments.
The workshop researches the convergent and nomadic movement of works that document, but are not necessarily documentaries. It does not attempt to classify these works as genre-defining documents, but is interested instead in researching the anarchic possibilities offered by genre-crossing methods in describing the affective afterlives of life under militarism.
Programme
17:00 Welcome by Umut Yildirim
Part I
Introduction and Discussion of Texts
with Françoise Vergès
18.30 Coffee Break
19:00 Part II
Panel discussion followed by a Q&A
Derek Attridge is the author of books on South African literature, James Joyce, poetic form, and literary theory; his most recent publication is The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers (Oxford University Press, 2019). He has taught in the UK and the United States and held visiting professorships in South Africa, France, Italy, Egypt, and Australia. He is Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK, and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Derek Attridge, ‘Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature’, lecture presented at the symposium The Work of World Literature, ICI Berlin, 20 June 2019, video recording, mp4, 50:52 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e190620-1>
The work of Derek Attridge demonstrates the critical and theoretical potential of the encounter between world literature and literary theory. In The Singularity of Literature (2004), Attridge insists that the book is complemented by his work in literary criticism on to the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, published the same year, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. It is as if the theory of literature – of literature in general – emerges out of a particular literary encounter, in this instance with a postcolonial writer pre-occupied with geopolitical, historical, and ethical limits – not least the limits of literature itself. And it is no coincidence that, while Attridge is critical of an oversimplified mapping of politics onto literature, his theory of literature involves politically charged terms such as singularity, otherness, exclusion, response, responsibility, as well as justice and hospitality.
Responding to Attridge’s recent The Work of Literature (2015), a group of scholars will reflect on the correspondences between world literature, literary theory, and the world writ large. The symposium sets out to explore the limits but also the liminality of literary theory and the historical, geopolitical and theoretical frameworks that inform and perhaps also tacitly delimit world literature.
The Work of World Literature, symposium, ICI Berlin, 20–21 June 2019 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e190620>
This conference brings together scholarly work that addresses these two cultural-epistemological developments: first, the role of minutiae, as manifested in all kinds of diminutive units or categories (for instance: the animalcula, theinfinitesimal, the minor, the particular, the seemingly irrelevant, the typographic detail, the cellular, the clue); and, secondly, the interaction between these tiny phenomena and their surroundings. Milieus of Minutiae explores the ways in which what is subvisible or easily overlooked is situated in philosophy, cultural production, and scientific experimentation from early modernity through the twentieth century, with a view towardthe contemporary moment. Medieval thought granted discrete being to that which is otherwise considered negligible and only relational—a status later held by both the minor and the milieu—and this conference constellates approaches that restore ontological viability to both of these categories between premodern and contemporary thought. At the same time, it explores the historical dimensions of a micrology of knowledge and aesthetics, reflecting on the objectivity, supra-metonymy, and epistemological value of these units across a wide range of cultural, intellectual, environmental, social, and material milieus.
Natalia Cecire
Tita Chico
Anne Eusterschulte
Roger Maioli
Nikolai Preuschoff
Pauline Selbig
John H. Smith
Elisa Tamarkin
Cynthia Wall
et al
Keynotes by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Marianne SchullerElizabeth Brogden, Christiane Frey, and Ulla Haselstein, in cooperation with the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Freie Universität Berlin, generously supported by the Thyssen FoundationThe event, like all events at the ICI Berlin, is open to the public, free of charge. The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin. If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.10:00-10:30 Introduction
Elizabeth Brogden, Christiane Frey, Ulla Haselstein
10:30-12:45 Looking Closely
Chair: Ulla Haselstein
Tita Chico. Thinking Small: Or, a Literary History of Scrutiny
Elizabeth Brogden. Clew-less Fiction: Narrative Detail Beyond Realism
Elisa Tamarkin. Regarding Irrelevance
14:00-16:15 Diminutive Aesthetics
Chair: Mareike Schildmann
Pauline Selbig. Minor Milieus: Benjamin’s Mode of Writing
Nikolai Preuschoff. The Minute in Robert Walser’s Novel The Tanners
Marlon Miguel & Elena Vogman. Le Moindre Geste: Cinema and Milieu after Fernand Deligny
16:45-18:15 Trivia{l} Matter{s}
Chair: Christiane Frey
Cynthia Wall. ‘of a Parenthesis’
Roger Maioli. The Rise of the Novel and the Knowledge of Particulars
19:00 Keynote (In German)
Marianne Schuller. Nanoästhetik: Zur imaginativen Kraft des Kleinen10:30-12:15 Mere Milieus
Chair: Claudia Peppel
Amelia Groom. Partially Submerged Ruins
Malte Fabian Rauch. Counter Cartography: Agamben – Debord – On Kawara
13:45-16:00 Minimal Relation
Chair: Arnd Wedemeyer
John H. Smith. The Calculus of the Psycho-Physical Difference
Anne Eusterschulte. Interactions between Metaphysical, Physical and Literary Minutiae: From Giordano Bruno to James Joyce
Christiane Frey. Encapsulated Minima: Duns Scotus, Leibniz, Ruyer
16:30-18:00 Micro-Worlds Magnified
Chair: Elizabeth Brogden
Natalia Cecire. Shelled Life: Sexuality and Subjectivity at the Level of the Cell
Daniel Liu. Positivism vs. Molecular Imagination after the Abbe Diffraction Limit, 1874–1939
19:00 Keynote
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Experimental Environments: ‘Micrologies of Knowledge’
Published in October 2019 by the independent Brussels-based press Divided, Artificial Gut Feeling is Anna Zett’s first book. For this afternoon event at ICI Berlin, Zett will present readings from the book and appear in dialogue with ICI Fellow Amelia Groom.
There will also be a screening titled Zwischenarchiv (2019), with two recent videos by Anna Zett, which use and respond to archival material from the Robert-Havemann-Archiv, the Berlin archive of oppositional movements in the GDR. Both videos are part of Zett‘s current project Deponie (Dump), addressing disposal as a symbolic and material practice in need of borders and looking at language-based power from an environmental perspective.Anna Zett (b. 1983, Leipzig) is an artist, writer and maker of films and radio plays. Their work combines historical research and poetic form with a playful, dialogic practice. In recent years, their research into the cosmology of scientific modernism has focused on post-communist trouble, industrialism, and the German heritage of violence. Formally, their artistic emphasis moves towards rhythm, sound, and the human body’s capacity to improvise verbal and non-verbal communication. Zett has written and directed two experimental radio plays for German public radio and (co-)hosted participatory formats of storytelling, discourse, and choreography.
Artificial Gut Feeling, reading, screening, ICI Berlin, 1 November 2019 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e191101>
Experimentation is characterized by exploratory strategies as much as by clear aims and methodological rules, by openness to unprecedented events, contingency and surprise as much as by reproducibility and the stabilizing and control of materials and procedures. Researchers can be more or less certain as to what was actually manipulated or measured, or which factors interfered. Hence, laboratory practices generate uncertainty as to the status of potential novelty and afford means to reduce opacity, ambiguity and instability and achieve certainty. The workshop addresses this tension by examining how personnel, tools or materials enter or leave the lab; how physical, chemical, and biological, as well as social and psychological lab conditions go unnoticed or become targets of control; and how transfers between labs, field sites, and service facilities shape experimental possibilities.
Lab Environments: Spaces of Possibility and Certainty in Scientific Practice, workshop, ICI Berlin, 18 October 2019 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e191018>
Meyda Yeğenoğlu is visiting professor at Duke University’s Programme in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She is the author of Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (1998) and Islam, Migrancy, and Hospitality in Europe (2012). She is currently working on a book manuscript on the Armenian issue from a Derridean perspective, provisionally entitled Mourning for Armenians: Testimony, Secrecy, and Islamization. Her work crosses disciplinary boundaries and brings together different strands of thought, such as deconstruction, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory. She has published many articles on postcolonialism, orientalism, Islam, secularism and religion, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, Europe/European identity, globalization, and migrancy.
Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Affective Encounters and the Disruption of Silence, lecture, ICI Berlin, 15 October 2018, video recording, mp4, 42:50 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e181015>