SoSe 2018: Emerging Topics in the Study of Culture
Frans Willem Korsten (Leiden University, Netherlands)
Empathy and Violence: The Chiasma of Politics and Law
17.04.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
My argument starts with two different readings of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda by two scholars who have a radically different idea on the force and goal of empathic reading: Martha Nussbaum and Sara Ahmed. The former bases her argument on a human subject that is coherent, stable and through an ethical mode of reading literature is able to place herself in the position of someone else. The latter takes willful, unstable, swerving subjects as her point of departure, who find themselves oppressed in such a way that the very idea of their having a will of their own is made impossible. Nussbaum is looking for an underpinning of justice on some sort of common human ground, while Ahmed accepts the irreconcilability of positions, or the principal impossibility of a common ground. Focusing on the ways in which both authors employ radically different strategies of empathy, I ask what the goals of empathic reading could be in a juridico-political context. Here, I trace a chiastic relation between politics and law that is of relevance at times in which politics is turning more and more into a power game propelled by emotions and the force of law is threatened by parties demanding that their emotions be served.
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Bärbel Küster (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
Dialogic Principles in Cultural and Visual Studies
24.04.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
After Cultural and Visual Studies long time analysed representation, hegemonial power relations and identity, the field of dialogic principles had turned into a main discussion area in the last years. But disciplinary focuses on dialogic principles differ significantly within the field of Cultural and Visual Studies. While questions of participartory practices in research techniques have been raised in ethnology and anthropology since the 1960s and then from the 1980s on in museum studies, art history has widened its perspective to global arts and transcultural perpectives but recently. Here, participatory methodologies and dialogic principles of spoken sources are rarely reflected. One of the most central tools of contemporary art history – the artist interview – has never been questioned in its transcultural implications. The lecture aims to question methodological differences between the disciplines. Dialogic knowledge production in academic research, indeed, is a relatively new topic, that still has to be discussed – especially on an institutional level.
Randall Halle (University of Pittsburgh, United States)
Framework for a Critical European Culture Studies
15.05.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
Over a long history, Europe and culture are interwoven as terms. And within the contemporary context of European Unionization, the complex connection of the two has taken on new forms. The EU project is a singular project because it strives for economic, political, and cultural union. The globe is crisscrossed by free market-oriented projects to foster economic union, as well as supranational organizations that strive to accomplish various forms of political agreement. Only in the space of Europe does the project include a cultural component and of the three aspirational dynamics that drive European unification, culture remains both the least studied and yet the most compelling of the three. Nevertheless, Europe is not the EU, nor is culture equivalent to the current EU culture industry policy. This presentation will propose a framework for critical studies of European culture through attention to each of the terms: critical, Europe, and culture. Such a framework helps us better answer a number of questions. How do we approach culture in this political and economic context? How do we assess the European commercialization of cultural heritage? How does the striving for transnational cultural union differ from that cultural union produced in the nation state? In what way does the contemporary understanding of Europe call forth new histories? Among others.
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Cornelius Borck (University of Lübeck, Germany)
How to Engage Critically and Responsibly with Cultural Neuroscience?
29.05.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
Since a couple of years, the new sub-discipline of cultural neuroscience announces the neurosciences to be ready to address and investigate the fabric of culture in its relation to its natural substrates. Especially the means of functional imaging are mobilized to show intricate differences and similarities among the neurophysiological basis of highly specific cultural tasks. Is cultural neuroscience a new and viable approach bridging between nature and culture – or rather a problematic example for the dominance of neuro-talk? And what can be a productive role of cultural studies in critiquing its more problematic aspects?
Tanvi Solanki (Cornell University, New York, United States)
Cultural Acoustics: Sound Studies and the Study of Culture
12.06.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
Without doubt, Sound Studies has become a burgeoning field for rich, eminently interdisciplinary initiatives in the humanities. One of the major contributions of the field has been to mark out the neglect in theories of medial modernity that focus entirely on various kinds of visual culture and their historicity. What I call "cultural acoustics," while under the broad rubric of sound studies, specifically draws attention to the potent role that acoustic practices could play in distinguishing, comparing, establishing, and dispersing cultures, whether scientific, musical, political, national, trans-national, or religiously bound. Examples include the work of Ana Maria Ochoa on listening and knowledge in nineteenth-century Colombia, Jonathan Sterne’s work on the centrality of sound, hearing, and listening to the “cultural life of modernity,” or Charles Hirschkind’s on the “ethical listening” of sermons and its role in the social and political transformations in Egypt. In my talk, I will use my own research on eighteenth-century Europe to discuss the key role played by listening practices and conceptions of sound in formative ideas of culture, nation, and anthropology and what these findings offer to the contemporary study of culture.
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Thomas Claviez (University of Bern, Switzerland)
The Road Not Taken: Ethics, Reciprocity, and Non-Negative Non-Agency
19.06.2018, 18-20, room 001, MFR
Abstract
The term “agency” has played – and still plays – a rather strange role in our moral philosophies in general, and in ecocriticism specifically, as it represents one term of one binary that has proven almost indeconstructable: that of activity and passivity. It is hardly possible to turn around – let alone overcome – the highly normatively charged connotations of these two terms, which would be a first step to deconstruct this binary. I will, in a first step, try to draw out the implications – both linguistically and ethically – of the fact that we are not able to formulate a non-negative concept of the contrary to "acting" or "agency", and relate this fact to two key terms in the moral philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas: that of passivity and that of irreciprocity. In a second one, I will try to gauge the implications this has for traditional moral philosophy, arguing that our incapability to disentangle agency from moral subjecthood has severe repercussions for our thinking of ethics. In a last part, I will reconnect these thoughts to one of the most influential theories in posthumanism: Bruno Latour's "Actors Network Theory."