The present time is one of general disruption, in which crisis is the normal state of affairs. In a situation characterized by climate catastrophe, pandemic, war, interruptions to supply chains, and contestations of democracy, the modern Western categories of ‘progress’ and ‘History’ implode. Disruption describes contemporary socio-historical experience, in which break, interruption, discontinuity take on a very different sense than in modernity: They become hegemonic and begin to entirely dominate the onto-epistemological condition and socio-historical reality. But does the present attest solely to such immense collapse? Or is this disruptive un-worlding simultaneously a transformation, an opening to a plurality of worlds in the ruins of a formerly hegemonic world? There is, on the one hand, the very real ends of the world and the increasing threat to the possibility of any world; and, on the other hand, there is the undeniable multiplicity of worlds that reveal themselves at present, their coming to presence disrupting the unity of the one World. One is confronted by this difference between the technical homogenization of all into a worldless planet and a proliferation of techniques of world-making. It is at this tension that one encounters the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. At times, he would see only the impossibility of any world due to techno-capitalist disruption and homogenization of sense. At others, he would attest to a transformation of sense, the flipside of techno-economic hegemony, presenting a multiplicity of worlds. Does one presently find oneself at the precipice of such a transformation of the sense of the world? Or is it instead that one is outside any world, in a techno-economic disruption that is no longer existence, but which nevertheless determines it? With Nancy’s companionship, this conference proposes to take up these questions, focusing on the conceptual triad of disruption, technique, and world. Through two days of presentations and discussions, the hope will be to re-think the present, between the techno-economic disruption of world and the techniques of (re)composing worlds.

With Jean-Luc Nancy’s work as the point of departure, the hope of this conference is to re-think the present and the present status of world: between the techno-economic disruption of world and the techniques of (re)composing worlds. The aim is to take up the aforementioned questions through two days of presentations and discussions, focusing especially on the conceptual triad of disruption, technique, and world.

A model can be an object of admiration, a miniature or prototype, an abstracted phenomenon or applied theory, a literary text — practically anything from a human body on a catwalk to a mathematical description of a system. It can elicit desire, provide understanding, guide action or thought. Despite the polysemy of the term, models across disciplines and fields share a fundamental characteristic: their effect depends on a specific relational quality. A model is always a model of or for something else, and the relation is reductive insofar as it is selective and considers only certain aspects of both object and model. The literary examples of maps made to the scale of a territory described by Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges humorously point to the absurdity of thinking that models keep improving by becoming less reductive until they eventually coincide with their target.

Improvisatorische Praktiken bewegen sich spielerisch zwischen Normativität und Freiheit, setzen Impulse und bieten sie anderen Akteur*innen zur Weiterarbeit an. Eigensinn als künstlerische Haltung schafft sich innerhalb festgefügter Machtverhältnisse kreative Räume der Unterbrechung, um sich den vorgegebenen Rhythmen zu entziehen. Schließlich beziehen manche Praktiken der bildenden oder performativen Künste ihre Wirkung aus einem objektlosen Vollzug.

Auch wenn diese Interventionen nicht auf ein Ziel gerichtet sind, irritieren, stören, unterbrechen sie. Ihre Verfahren sind die der Wiederholung, der Brechung und der Verschiebung. Es sind Praktiken im Vollzug, deren Beginn und Ende sich oft erst retrospektiv zeigt, die prekär bleiben und immer wieder ‘ins Rutschen‘ geraten können. Sie halten sich offen für andere und anderes – ihre intervenierende Kraft gewinnen sie aus ihrer (Dis)Kontinuität mit dem Alltäglichen und Etablierten.

Die Jahrestagung eröffnet den Dialog zwischen Kunstschaffenden, Wissenschaftler*innen und der Öffentlichkeit, durch Performances, Vorträge und Diskussionen und in geteilten Erfahrungsräumen.

10:00 – 11:15
Judith Siegmund: Intervenieren versus Herstellen?
Alte und neue Konzepte künstlerischer Praxis
Moderation: Susanne Hauser

11:15 – 11:45 Kaffeepause

11:45 – 13:00
Bertram Lomfeld: Intransitive Institutionalisierung: Rechte der Natur Moderation: Matthias Warstat

13:00 – 14:00
Mittagessen im ICI Berlin

14:00 – 16:00
fem_arc: F_WALKS – emanzipatorische Stadtspaziergänge und Diskussion
Vorstellung: Eva-Maria Ciesla

Für die Stadtspaziergänge mit fem_arc stehen schon vormittags Audioguides zum Download auf das eigene Smartphone in den Versionen Deutsch/Englisch und Englisch zur Verfügung. Bitte eigene Kopfhörer mitbringen.

16:00 – 16:30
Kaffeepause

16:30 – 17:45
Sue Spaid: The Wilfull Artist: Getting it Built (EN)
Moderation: Eva Backhaus

17:45 – 19:00
Empfang im ICI Berlin

Workshop culture expanded globally within a short period of time, and whereas many workshops are still given for free, for instance in political activism or social and community work, the service economy has been quick to exploit the workshop’s commercial potential. A workshop industry promises all sorts of ‘valuable’ personal experience and the feeling of togetherness as a return for investment – plus socio-economic benefit, if the workshop leaders are renowned, influential players in their professional fields. Education and training in theatre, dance and performance rely extensively on the workshop today, but it has also become the instrument of choice for skills transfer, motivational coaching, and teambuilding in the business world. A considerable number of artists who cannot live from selling their work offer workshops for companies, advocating techniques like musical improvisation as means for optimizing the workflow. However interesting it may be to observe the consequences of such transfers between the artistic and the economic sphere, a problematic point is also obvious here: Where pressure for self-improvement drives people to participate in one workshop after the other for fear of missing out on the latest trend, the freedom to experiment easily becomes hijacked by the coercive forces of a neoliberal regime. Perhaps this already happened during the first big wave of workshopping during the 1970s. In any case, an analysis of the workshop format must address issues of valorization and commercialization, of openness and its ideological simulacra, of ‘process vs. product’ and ‘process as product’.

Im interdisziplinären Austausch und mit internationalen Gästen fokussiert die zweisprachige Tagung den Skandal unter Berücksichtigung von literaturwissenschaftlichen, affekttheoretischen, politischen und kunsthistorischen Perspektiven: Während das Verhältnis von Literatur und Wirklichkeit immer schon skandalös zu sein scheint, können politische und historische Anspielungen instrumentalisiert werden, um Skandale zu provozieren oder reale Skandale zu vertuschen. Affekttheoretische Ansätze zeigen Kunstwerk und künstlerisches Schaffen als affektpolitische Momente, in denen Intentionen bei der Entstehung eines Skandals sichtbar werden.

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

Despite never having claimed to be a materialist himself, Spinoza early on became associated with materialism, and the highly controversial, even condemned and censored central tenets of his philosophy came to be seen as evidence of a clandestinely held materialism, making Spinoza an emblem of the subversive alliance between materialism and democracy.

The revolutionary effects of eighteenth-century French materialism have been widely discussed since the French Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century. The works of Marx and Engels further aligned materialism with progressive politics, anchoring political liberation in concrete social practices. As materialist politics rejects the concept of the subject as a point of departure for social analysis, it draws onthe very materiality of social relationsin order to reflect on collective reality. If humankind is the product of socio-historical circumstances, the political task, for Marx, became one of inquiring into and transforming its environment.

Wednesday, 13 June 2018

17:30 Welcome and Introduction

Sektion 1
Globale Räume der Gegenwart

18:00
Boris Groys (New York): Internet and Presenting of the Present

19:00 Break

19:30 Panel Discussion (auf Deutsch):
Boris Groys, Gabriele Genge, and Ludger Schwarte

Thursday, 14 June 2018

Sektion 2
Die Gegenwart der Kunst –
kunstwissenschaftliche Perspektiven

10:00
Christine Ross (Montreal): Temporalizing the Aesthetics of Coexistence:
The Belatedness of the Present and the Becoming-Environment of 21st-Century Art

11:00
Johannes Paul Raether (Berlin): Chronostrophy

12:00 Coffee break

12:15
Mieke Bal (Amsterdam): An Aesthetic of Interruption

13:30 Lunch break

Sektion 3
Gegenwärtigung und Vergegenwärtigung als ästhetische Probleme

15:00
Iris Därmann (Berlin): Zur Geschichte der Nummerntätowierung in Auschwitz

16:00
Maria Muhle (München): Vergegenwärtigung als Anachronisierung

17:00 Coffee break

17:30
Christiane Frey (New York/Berlin): The Politics of the Present Tense: On Migratory Prose

18:30
Johannes Lehmann (Bonn): Sichtbare/unsichtbare ‚Gegenwart‘Friday, 15 June 2018

Präsentationen aus dem Schwerpunktprogramm

9:30 Panel 1
Boris Roman Gibhardt (Bielefeld): Rhythmische Gegenwärtigkeit

Angela Stercken (Essen): Die Gegenwart des Black Arts Movement? Ästhetische Praktiken im Black Atlantic der 1960/70er Jahre

Francesca Raimondi (Düsseldorf): Die gespenstische Präsenz der Kontrolle. Kunst in einer durch Permanenz, Rekursion und Prävention bestimmten Zeit

11:00 Coffee break

11:30 Panel 2
Nicola Glaubitz (Frankfurt/Main): Literatur vergegenwärtigen: Affordanzen, Praktiken, Institutionen

Sebastian Giacovelli, Andreas Langenohl (Gießen): Die Zukünfte der Neoklassik

Uta Böhme (Berlin): Die Gegenwart der Zeitreise

13:00 Lunch break

15:00 Panel 3
Lena Kugler, Mira Shah (Frankfurt/Main): Gegenwärtige Vergangenheit. Inseln als Medien des Erzählens von Zeit

Maximilian Bergengruen (Karlsruhe): „Fortrollende Gegenwart“. Georg Heyms „Der Irre“ und „Der Dieb“

Patrick Stoffel, Christina Wessely (Lüneburg): Die Urzeit in ‚Bildern aus der Gegenwart‘: Philipp Leopold Martins Museum der Urwelt in Berlin

Benjamin Prinz, Henning Schmidgen (Weimar): Produziertes Präsens. Gegenwärtigkeit in der Biomedizin

17:00 Coffee break

17:30 Panel 4
Stefan Kramer, Martin Müller, Tim Trausch (Köln): Eigenzeiten-Konzepte in der chinesischen Republikzeit

Stefan Binder, Patrick Eisenlohr (Göttingen): Zeit-Film-Emotion: Feldnotizen zur soziopolitischen Temporalität religiöser Reform in Hyderabad

Samuel Strehle (Jena): Jetztzeit-Explosion: Zur Zeiterfahrung in revolutionären Epochen

19:00 Break

Venues Thursday, 3 May 2018 ICI Berlin
Christinenstr. 18-19, Haus 8, 10119 Berlin

The conference continues in English
on Friday and Saturday, 4-5 May 2018
at Freie Universität Berlin Seminarzentrum

The interdisciplinary conference aims at examining Pre-, Re-, as well as En-actments that are not just based on artistic practices, but include social, medial, political, and activist phenomena. To what extent can artistic (P)reenactments influence – especially in terms of anticipation – political relationships and vice versa? To what extent is the theory of (P)reenactment capable of redefining the relationship between art and politics? Which role do cultural-historic preconditions play in particular courses of action and habits of perception?

Moreover, the conference aims at conceptualizing (P)reenactments beyond their definition as live performances by drawing on the discourses of media studies.  (P)reenactments are to be understood as phenomena not only within artistic frameworks but are encountered in other social contexts as well.

Along with the temporal and spatial dynamics of (P)reenactments, their different affective potential has to be addressed also: In (P)reenactments, the capacity to move and be moved takes place between the poles of memory/history and vision(s) of the future. Comprehending (P)reenactments as affective events allows for a focus on aspects that have until now been overlooked by the research into reenactment, but which have acquired great significance within the field of affect studies.

This conference will explore the ways in which medieval literary, artistic, musical, philosophical, and theological texts perform, interrogate, and generate value from the complexities of return, with particular reference to its formal and temporal qualities. Reconsidering the practical and theoretical implications of return — a movement in time and space that seems to shape medieval culture in a fundamental sense — we will investigate the following questions: What shapes does return take, and how does it shape cultural artifacts of the Middle Ages? How does return (as fact or possibility) regulate the flow of time and the experience of human life? How can return as a final goal and return as a problematic repetition coexist? Is repetition simply identified with a state of sin, or can it lead somewhere? Reiteration, after all, can disrupt linear and teleological progress, but also empower it.

The aim of the conference is to celebrate the launch of the Center for Intersectional Justice, recall the story behind this initiative, and to provide an opportunity for social justice advocates and activists across Europe to connect. Opportunities, challenges, and steps ahead will be discussed.

Around what issues shall advocacy efforts be centered? How can the political obstacles be overcome? How can synergies, cooperation, and common goal setting be promoted with other organizations active in the field of anti-discrimination?

This sequence of ICI core projects has inspired an extraordinary spread of individual and collaborative ventures, many of which have turned into ICI events and publications but are quite impossible to represent or recall in a three-day conference. The anniversary celebration will instead present a unique and necessarily limited constellation of diverse topics characteristic of the Institute’s interventions: Each of these themes, questions, and obsessions can be said to have played a decisive role at several junctures of the Institute’s history and represent a new point of departure.

The programme is parsed into nine different panels of varying formats, from lecture sequence to panel discussion. Each panel stages an encounter between ICI members, alumni, and friends who have not yet had the chance to engage with one another directly. These ‘fresh’ configurations are designed to prompt discussions that will create multiple trajectories for the three conference days and the ongoing work of the ICI Berlin.

In the attempt to win viewers’ hearts and minds, various new film forms and practices are emerging in the networked spaces of the Web 2.0. These new types of videos actively engage their audience by inviting participation, and thus contribute to the formation of counterpublics and social movements.

However, the power of web videos remains a contentious issue, as it is often associated with problems such as misuse, deception, ‘clicktivism‘ or surveillance.

The conference assumes that the insistence of such equally negative and positive, absent and excessive objects is constitutive for the aesthetics of comedy. In the world of comedy, things, bodies, and words develop a stubborn obstinacy: Inanimate things come to life, individual limbs turn against the organic whole of the body, words have quite literal effects. Especially film comedy – from the ‘quasi-bodies’ (Rancière) of slapstick to the odd semantics of screwball comedy, up to the new mutations of comical audio vision in digital media – is an inexhaustible laboratory of such a strange surplus negativity – a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ (Deleuze) of plus and minus, excess and lack. Film comedy adheres to a logic of nonsense in which coffee without cream is precisely non-identical to coffee without milk: the positive negative.

The conference aims to address these paradoxes of film comedy’s positive negativity from a variety of theoretical angles.Programme

Friday 5 May 2017
(Moderation: Drehli Robnik)

10:00 Sulgi Lie
Introduction

10:30 Paul Flaig
Bergson’s Boffo Laugh

11:45 Coffee Break

12:00 Garrett Stewart
Syntactic Short Circuits, Comic Disjunctures:
Dickens, Bergson, Keaton – and Beyond

13:15 Lunch Break

15:00 Sulgi Lie
The Joys of Alienation. Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights

16.15 Coffee Break

16:30 Alexander García Düttmann
Melodrama and Laughter. On Visconti

17:45 Coffee Break

18:15 Gertrud Koch
The Comical Condition: Visual Strategies in Chris Marker

19:30 Reception

Saturday 6 May 2017
(Moderation: Daniel Eschkötter)

11:00 Christiane Voss
Pre-Cinematographic Objectivity or:
Dioramatic Oddity

12:15 Coffee Break

12:30 Ute Holl
What’s so Funny About Doors? Towards a Theory of Structural Jokes

13:45 Lunch Break

15:30 Lisa Åkervall
The Humor of Auto-Tune: Voice Modulations in Digital Media Ecologies

16:45 Coffee Break

17:00 Damon Young
Zany, Sexy, Funny? Ironic Indeterminacy in Contemporary Media Aesthetics

While acknowledging the inevitable implication and interminable contest between truth and politics, Arendt attempts to make the case for a rigorous separation of truth-telling from political praxis, which is nonetheless supposed to operate within the framework afforded by factual and scientific truth. Today, given the intensifying political, and especially bio-political, consequence of the sciences, it is no longer clear that such a distinction is tenable. Since Arendt wrote, the involvement of politics and epistemology, of power and knowledge, has undergone an intensive interdisciplinary investigation that has transformed the university, in particular the humanities. Interrogating this entanglement of truth and politics, the conference will ask whether academic discourse ought to be held responsible for the current ‘post-truth’ on account of the relativism it is alleged to propagate. Or is this placing of blame itself symptomatic of the problem inasmuch as it fuels the widespread disaffection with established institutions – especially those traditionally expected to speak the truth?

As alarm is raised about the attrition of factual truth and the preponderance of ‘lying in politics’, to cite another essay of Arendt’s, the theoretical and historical precedents for such tendencies as well as the significance of the cultural and technical changes in the dissemination of news brought about by social media needs to be considered. And beyond the university and the media, rational-scientific and factual truth, it is important not to neglect the implications for truth and politics of the peculiar kind of truth-telling Arendt attributed to poetry.

This is not a self-evident conjecture because most affect theories suggest to conceive of the social not primarily in terms of language, discourse and conceptual thought, but instead as an assemblage of bodies and their capacities to affect and be affected. Although this is a fruitful correction of existing bias towards overreliance on linguistic categories in the humanities and social sciences, it often oversteps the mark in its disregard for language. Language, in particular in a pragmatic sense and much like affect, is a genuinely relational category in its capacity to convey meaning. However, meaning is not restricted to propositions and denotations but critically involves connotative, associative, and bodily sources.

The conference Public Spheres of Resonance: Constellations of Affect and Language therefore assumes that language not only conveys, represents, and attributes emotions, but also has the capacity to affect and to establish affective resonance, in both consonant and dissonant ways. The conference will investigate this power not only for spoken language, but also for different types of texts as the constituencies of different public spheres (including counterpublics) in which the terms and conditions of social coexistence are reflected and negotiated, for instance politics, media, and the arts. The conference focuses on issues of belonging, the recognition and accommodation of difference, equality, and solidarity and investigates how affect and emotion interfere with, undermine, or fortify established and esteemed rules of political engagement.Programme
Thursday, April 27, 2017

Venue: ICI Berlin
Christinenstr. 18-19, Haus 8, 10119 Berlin

18.15 Welcome and Introduction
Anne Fleig & Christian von Scheve