CLS Graduate Student Conference 2006: Arresting the Flow
Paper Abstracts and Biographies of Speakers
FRIDAY, April 14
12:15
Dissolving the Subject: History and Philosophy of Flow
1) Flux and Becoming: Deleuze's Return to Heraclitus
--Ella Brians, Philosophy, New School University
The question of flow takes us to the origins of western philosophy: Plato’s rejection of
Heraclitean flux. In the central books of the Republic, Plato mocks and rejects Heraclitus in order
to argue that if we accept flux as a first principle, then there can be no logos, no truth, and no
legitimate identity claims. It is here, that Plato definitively sets being against becoming, the ideal
against the material, and the eternal against temporal flux. There is no question that Plato’s
rejection of Heraclitus set the standard for western philosophy, a standard that very few have
dared to question.
Gilles Deleuze, champion of flux and becoming, is one of the few. In this paper, I argue
that we can best understand Deleuze’s championing of flux as a return to the originary debate
between Heraclitus and Plato. Deleuze’s rejection of Platonic being in favor of Heraclitean flux
takes us to the limits of the conditions of both sense and identity. Strikingly, many contemporary
commentators have made the same arguments against Deleuze that Plato makes against
Heraclitus: the embrace of flux leads to nonsensical contradictions and the impossibility of
discourse. Against these critics, I argue that Deleuze’s work provides resources not only for
accepting flux as a first principle, but also for accounting for the ways in which flux is arrested.
Against many of Deleuze’s own readers, I claim that he considered moderations, partial arrest,
and pause of the flow to be integral to the creative process. The result is a rich philosophy that
acknowledges flux as the basic reality, in which sense and meaning are emergent, rather than
pre-given and eternal, and identities—formed of a complex network of relations—are contingent,
rather than essential. What is at stake is no less than our conception of what it means to be a
subject in the world, and consequently, the boundaries between subject and object, self and
world.
Ella Brians is a M.A. candidate in Philosophy at the New School University. Ms. Brians’ focus is
on 18th-20th century continental philosophy, with a specialization in 20th century French thought.
She is currently completing her M.A. thesis, which examines the aesthetic dimensions of Gilles
Deleuze’s ethical concepts.
2) Rationalism's Containment of the Mesmeric Fluid: Kant, Fichte, and Scholarly Discourse
--Sean Franzel, Germanic Studies, Cornell University
In this paper, I examine attempts by Kant and Fichte to challenge non-rationalist accounts of
interpersonal interaction based on the fundamentality of the medium of electrified or magnetized
universal fluid, as proposed by Franz Anton Mesmer. Kant and Fichte both perceive their
cognitivist accounts of intersubjectivity to be under threat by varying breeds of vitalism that
draw on increasingly prevalent scientific and pseudo-scientific experimentation with electricity
and magnetism. Furthermore, both thinkers react in and from the institution of the university as
they try to combat materialism by re-inscribing the rational foundation of scholarly
communication. In this way, the mesmerist ‘fluidic’ foundation of interpersonal interaction
becomes for Kant and Fichte an anxiety-ridden symbol of communication outside of and
unrestricted by the institutional practices of the university scholar.
Kant’s and Fichte’s reactions to models of ‘fluidic’ intersubjectivity illuminate their
substantially different notions of paradigmatic scholarly communication. Kant sees the
propagation of trendy accounts of magnetic healing and paranormal phenomena as a result of a
“reading mania” that cannot differentiate scientific from non-scientific reading matter.
Consequently, his observations on Sömmering’s “Organ of the Soul” call for the reassertion of
the division between the physiological medicinal faculty and the rationalist philosophical faculty.
In other words, the Kantian philosopher/writer needs to renew his publication of treatises critical
of this mistaken encroachment upon philosophical reason, in order to “magnetize and
disorganize the animal magnetiseur.” Fichte, in contrast, approaches Mesmerism as a university
lecturer. An experience of the heteronymous control of the magnetiseur over the magnetized
patient occasions the comparison of this control to his own control of his student’s attention in
the lecture hall: “The phenomenon that my listeners understand me in my presences, but no
longer outside of the auditorium, is of the same variety.” Fichte understands the curious and
threatening phenomenon of the magnetiseur’s manipulation of the universal fluid as a direct
counter-model to his rationally grounded pedagogy of oral presentation.
Sean Franzel is a fourth year graduate student in German Studies at Cornell University, focusing
on 18th and 19th Century intellectual history, aesthetics, and literature, with particular interest in
Rousseau, German Idealism, Classicism, and Romanticism. His dissertation tracks the shifting
function and status of the lecture as a form of public communication in German literary and
scholarly culture around 1800. He illustrates how this model of public speech runs into
problems not faced by traditional conceptions of rhetoric: this conference paper adapts a
chapter that argues that communicative model of awakening autonomy by a heteronymous force
(put forth most forcefully by Fichte in his lecture practice) does not encounter Mesmerist nonrationalist accounts of intersubjectivity and emerge unscathed.
3) Surface in Flow: The Cutaneous and the Canvas in Francis Bacon's Work
--Marcel Finke, Art History, University of Leipzig
As Freud and others have stressed, the conscious Ego should be regarded as a mental pro-jection
of the surface of the body. In painting this surface coincides with the picture plane, and thus,
problematizes the relation between representational modes and the construction of identity.
Therefore, the disintegration of bodily forms and the melting away of a stable visual referent is
usually associated with a loss of self. The works of Francis Bacon have traditionally been
interpreted from this perspective, particularly after Gilles Deleuze’s “The Logic of Sensation”
was published. In this essay Deleuze reads Bacon’s paintings through his own concept of the
body without organs. This approach claims that the distorted bodies articulate a radical reduction
of the Ego and thereby neglects that there is not “less” represented. On the contrary, Bacon’s
bodies are always charged with something “more” because they interfere in different ways with
the attempts to arrest the flow.
In my presentation I argue that the search for artistic means to fix fluidity without
stopping the flux is one of Bacons main concerns. The canvas and the surface of the body
become the locus of the painter’s various contemplations on the fluidity of meaning, sexual
desire, and identity. Just as the blurred borders between the figures question the notion of a
selfsame self, so does the unbounded surface of the painted body pronounce the fluidity of bodily
parameters in general. Furthermore, this undoing of the topography of the body’s surface leads to
questions about the medium and the representational modes applied in those self-referential
visual statements. I will examine how the skin as a metaphor for the self and the canvas as a
metaphor for the pictorial practice are in a permanent exchange. An understanding of this
exchange as a fluid process itself helps further developing ideas of the performativity of the self
and the picture. In the case of Francis Bacon Arresting the Flow then means to thematize the
materiality of the paint and the body on a surface that virtually starts to flow.
Marcel Finke—1998-2005 Art History, Cultural Studies and German Literature at Leipzig
University (Germany) and University College Dublin (Ireland) –– since 2004 Assistant to the
project “Diversity-Gender-Power” at the Intitute of Art History at Leipzig University –– since
2005 working on doctoral thesis: “Die komplexe Organisiertheit des Bildes. Körperkonzeptionen
und Identitätskon-struktionen in der Malerei Francis Bacons” (The Organization’s Complexity
of the Image: Concepts of the Body and Constructions of Identity in the Work of Francis Bacon)
–– Main fields of research: Picture and Art Theory, Scientific Photography, Painting and
Performance in the 20th Century, Gender Studies and Psychoanalysis –– Publications on: the
body in the work of Eadweard Muybridge and Francis Bacon; performativity in Muybridge and
Butler; Muybridge, gender and productive crisis etc.
4) The Earth and the Human Subject: Environmental Fluidity in Kingsolver and Irigaray
--Christine Battista, English, Binghamton University
By her failure to be defined or predicated, [woman] serves as an in(de)finite basis for the
ontological promotion of each living thing -- Luce Irigaray
In this paper, I explore the relationship between Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and Irigaray’s
Speculum of the Other Woman in order to argue that human beings yield a unique, singular
access to the earth — an access that allows for unlimited possibilities for existence. For Irigaray,
human subjectivity is thought from its indissoluble relation to the land. The extent to which the
land is treated, then, has a significant impact upon the development and construction of those
subject-constituents that occupy the land. Developing Irigaray’s argument in conjunction with
Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Prodigal Summer, I argue that the present ontology of imperial
environmental domination violently constricts not only the inherently fluid process of identityformation (the human), but the earth (the non-human) and human re-presentations of the earth as
well (re-presentations designed to support metaphysical imperialism, capitalism, disinterested
scientific ecological inquiry, etc.). Irigaray illustrates that the ontology in place reduces the
potential for growth and deprives the body of expansion and possibility. Developing this insight
in terms of the imperial representations mentioned above, I show how Kingsolver’s novel reveals
the violence of this ontology and the restrictions it places upon the human subject and its
connection to the earth.
In Prodigal Summer, Kingsolver reveals the narratives of three women who each locate
an enabling means through which to reconstruct their beings. The ground plan (in Heidegger’s
sense of the term) into which each is born, though it furnishes a deceptively constrictive criterion
for the possibilities of being, is nevertheless disintegrated as each woman counteracts the
conditions that have been put into place by the existing ontology. I argue that Kingsolver, in
focalizing her narrative on the magnanimous possibilities that are consistently unveiled between
woman’s relation to the earth, reveals that woman need not be a subjected subject but rather she
can have legitimate critical agency in and through her unique access to the natural planet.
This paper — taken from a research project that explores an ontological critique of the
American capitalist machine and its repressively parasitic effects on the environment — explores
the potential for a deconstructive analysis of the current age of violent environmental
degradation. What I hope to illuminate through my investigation of Kingsolver’s eco-critical
novel is that the present ontology of land politics can be rethought. As she reveals in her novel,
in order to locate an active means through which to counteract the repressive forces of the
corporate-industrial imperial machine, one must rethink the way in which the land is treated. I
argue that the earth, in this sense, is not to be thought of as a space to be mastered or
instrumentally pinned down for the sake of man’s dominating endeavors. Rather, it should be
thought of as an enabling space that consistently opens up multiple ways of being and flows
through an indissoluble connection between the non-human and the human. Though woman’s
space is, according to Irigaray, systematically mapped out from the onset, Kingsolver reveals that
this imperial process nevertheless can be actively counteracted.
Christine Battista is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Binghamton University.
She is currently working on the present global ontology of environmental onslaught in relation to
the development of the human subject. Using Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture” as a
lens through which to illustrate her research, the purpose of her investigation is to unveil the
extent to which the present age of imperial environmental degradation yields a violently
oppressive influence on the multitudinous possibilities for being. In this respect, her interests
currently combine an eco-critical approach to literature with a postcolonial perspective that
intersects the ontology of colonial domination with imperial land development.
2:30
Containers: Spatial Restraint, Tension, Vibration
5) verwahrs: verse-vase
--Ena Jung, German, Princeton University
My paper focuses on tropes of containment and overflowing in Rainer Maria Rilke’s
Duineser Elegien, a series of ten elegies composed in sporadic spurts of writing
interspersed with long tormenting dry-spells over a period of ten years. These poems, I
argue, are about the process of their own writing.
Concentrating on the experiences of the lover and the angel, both of whom Rilke
identifies as ideal figures for the poet himself, the paper traces the use of the word Strom
and its related variants (e.g., entströmte, Strömung) in order to delineate what kind of
overflowing experience is necessary to the process of writing poetry. Throughout these
elegies, poetic inspiration is figured as an experience of the overflowing of temporal and
spatial borders and the overflooding of distinctions among and between beings in a fluid
economy (tears, blood, and alcohol) of pain (Schmerz) and suffering (Leid). Against this
streaming, the poet, who in this role is also figured as a hero (Held), must hold (hält),
however fluidly, this experience in writing. Through a close reading of the topography of
the streams and related scrapes of land (riverbed, Flußbett, and source, Ursprung)
occupying the scene of writing in these Elegies, I discuss how the poet must capture this
movement of restraint within the flow that is becoming writing. Searching for a “strip of
fruit-bearing land between stream and stone” (“Streifen Fruchtlands zwischen Strom und
Gestein,” II. Elegie), Rilke’s poet struggles to contain his fluid experiences that exceed
the boundaries between self and beloved, man and God, the living and the dead, by
shaping the verse-vase that preserves (verwahrs, V. Elegie) their otherwise inherent
flowing formlessness.
Ena Jung received her M.A. in Comparative Literature from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Universität (Frankfurt/M.) and her B.A. in English from Williams College. Currently a
Ph.D. student at Princeton, she is writing a book entitled “Dashing Gaps—Edgar Allan
Poe’s Dupin Mysteries” on their dashing use of the dash as both punctuation and word—
in all its various senses—which is representative of the modus operandi of the telling and
“D—cipher[ing]” of these detective stories, but moreover of the way in which all
linguistic markers function. She is writing a dissertation on love, desire, death and their
relation to inspiration in poetry and film.
6) The Slow Object of Contemporary Art: Matthew Barney's Filmic Installation
--Jessica Santone, Art History, McGill University
Matthew Barney’s “The Order,” part of his five-film Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002)
brings together four artistic media that merge into one another. The artist is engaged in
an endurance-testing body performance. His performance occurs on a series of stages,
each comprising a unique installation. On the final stage, minimalist artist Richard Serra
constructs a Vaseline sculpture that sets the clock for the sequence. Each of these parts
of the work is related in the documentation of Barney’s performance – the 30 minute
sequence, “The Order,” part of the film Cremaster 3.
My paper will address how installation, performance, sculpture, and film relate in
this contemporary artwork. Specifically, I will look at the figure of the Vaseline
sculpture as exemplary of how the moment of these media merging produces a stasis,
drawing attention to their intersections. This sculpture is created by heating Vaseline,
throwing it against a metal prop, and allowing the hot jelly to drip and ooze slowly along
the base of the Guggenheim Museum ramp until we can imagine that it both reaches the
bottom of the ramp and hardens again to form a solid. In a similar way, the film becomes
a complex time-based sculptural object. As the events in the film, the performative
actions of the protagonist, and the endlessly-present installations slow down almost
completely, they nearly freeze into a single, long, slow moment.
At stake in this discussion is the relationship between differently mediated
elements of a single contemporary artwork. Consequently, I argue that time-based and
spatial media combine to form a temporal knot – one that fixes the work of art as a slow
object. And I will draw conclusions about the effects of the contemporary slow object on
art viewers – its demands for enduring concentration and contemplation, and its passive
resistance to objecthood.
Jessica Santone is a Ph.D. student in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill
University. Her research focuses on the history and documentation of performance art
(especially Fluxus and Happenings), but she is also interested in the relationship between
art and technology in twentieth century art (especially in projects concerning the body),
relations between artistic media in contemporary art, and theories of archiving and
documentation. She earned a B.A. in History from the University of Maryland in 2002
and an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago in 2003.
7) A Cinema Without Organs: Musical Values and Fields of Vibrations in Horror Film
--Kelly Kirshtner, Visual Studies, University of California (Irvine)
In the cinematic context, sound is a nomadic presence that “belongs” to neither screen
nor theater; it is rather a deterritorializing force amplified through its effects on bodies
within these spaces. Its flow easily exceeds the lines of projected and architectural space
just as it does the line described by the ear, its presence enacting a series of disturbing
intimacies within the already rhythmic system of the body.
One might think of film sound not only in terms of ‘occurrences’, but of multiple
fields of vibration – ‘becomings’ – events of exchange within and between porous
assemblages. However, one might also speak of musical values, which are distinct from
the music or soundtrack of the film: as I am conceiving of it here, musical values are
those sonic or visual elements which focus the fields of vibration towards specific bodies
or parts of bodies within and outside of the film. This takes an even more literal
connotation in context with the horror film; the horrified body’s breathing, shivering,
gasping, thrashing, squelching, screaming, and even silence constitute a sonic machine
for producing another level of resonance – corresponding to the vibrations of the
cinematic flow as well as extending its effect outward into the world.
With these ideas in mind, this essay explores both of these components—the
fields and the values—the auditory forces of articulation and deterritorialization as they
are manifested in horror cinema, especially in relation to their effects on bodies within
the apparently separate spaces of screen and theater. More specifically, it takes into
consideration various cinematic acts of sonic and stratic transmission—the becomings
inspired by oscillating vectors of force and sensation (vibration) that threaten to violate
the limits of the body on-screen, as much as they already do the extradiegetic viewer,
inviting both to give themselves up to pure sensation.
Through a close analysis of a brief series of events in Gore Verbinski’s film The
Ring (2002), the paper attempts to illustrate the tensions between established patterns and
their destratification – between noise and music, between silence and the body, between
death and escape. By following these flows, one might temporarily map the vibration that
signifies the disorderly manifestation (or dismantling) of the body in relation to horror.
Kelly Kirshtner is a doctoral candidate in the Visual Studies Program at the University of
California, Irvine, where she is co-editor of Octopus: A Visual Studies Journal. Her work
focuses on sound, music, video, experimental and surrealist cinema, and intersections of
film, science, and critical theory. She received a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
4:00
Keynote address
Bernhard Siegert
“Floating Signifiers on the Mississippi: Herman Melville’s Confidence Man.”
Response
Peter Fenves
SATURDAY, April 15
10:00
Bodies and Circulation: The Economy of Flow
8) From Goethe's 'Pflanze' to Ford's 'Plant': The Comparison of Two Cultural Symbols
--Christian Weber, German and History & Philosophy of Science, Indiana University
In my paper I present a contrastive reading of two texts that might seem incomparable at
first sight: Goethe’s essay “Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären” (in
connection with his later poem “Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen”) and Henry Ford’s
autobiography “My Life and Work”, in which he recapitulates the construction of the
assembly line at his plant in Dearborn. I consider both ‘models’ – i.e. the discovery of
metamorphosis and the invention of the assembly line – eminent cultural symbols:
whereas Goethe’s primal principle of nature belongs to an essentially organic conception
of culture, Ford’s technological revolution has shaped the mechanistically operating mass
and consumer culture of post-modernity.
Both models, however, share some common features, and their promoters, it
seems, agree in particular about one crucial and fundamental aspect – they are both
proponents of a philosophy of flux. Goethe’s version of it is encapsulated in a verse of
the “Metamorphose der Pflanzen”, which also comprises a poetic (pre)-conception of the
Bildungsroman: “Bildsam ändre der Mensch selbst die bestimmte Gestalt”. In Ford’s
autobiography this sounds similar but a bit less poetic: “Life, as I see it, is not a location,
but a journey. […] Everything is in flux, and was meant to be. Life flows.” However, it is
also a matter of agency, and herein – as well as in other aspects – Goethe and Ford
depart. In fact, the Fließband of Ford’s plant is ultimately an inversion and revision of
Goethe’s concept of the metamorphosis of plants.
I conclude my presentation with a flighty glance at some texts from the vast
amount of German travel literature of the 1920s, in which both conservative and socialist
authors of diametrically different political stances agree on their rejection of the Ford
plant and thus confirm their own cultural bias.
Christian Weber is a PhD candidate in Germanic Studies and the History and Philosophy
of Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is writing his dissertation on
“Goethe’s Critique of Imagination” (working title). Other interests include: Literature
and Philosophy of the Enlightenment (esp. Lessing, Herder, and Kant), Romanticism &
Early Modernism (esp. Kleist, Kafka), ‘Realism’ in Literature (Johnson), Fordism,
‘Americanism’ and ‘Anti-Americanism’ in Europe, Philosophy of Biology.
9) Liquid Agencies in Thomas Heywood's 'Fair Maid of the West'
--Hillary Eklund, English, Duke University
“Liquid Agencies” reads the first part of Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West to
show how circulatory systems of the early modern Atlantic – from the alimentary canal to
transnational trade networks – are modeled on Renaissance ideas of flow. According to
early modern medical (Galenic) understanding, the body’s entrances and exits must be
carefully monitored to achieve balance between, on the one hand, optimal conversion and
circulation of nutrients into blood, and on the other hand, the ideal stasis of a healthy
body. In Heywood’s play an English barmaid, Bess Bridges, demonstrates acuity in beer
drawing, moneymaking, and seafaring in pursuit of her lover, Spencer. Bess’s fluid
manipulation of signs of gender, race and class enables her to play multiple roles and
secure the service of would-be antagonists, while her business acumen keeps her in a
state of productive financial liquidity. This model of flow – echoed in the play’s
relentlessly aqueous metaphors – both riffs and critiques the agency demonstrated by that
other “English Bess,” Elizabeth I. That Bess’s ship and her virtue are both “tight,”
despite the norms she violates and her protracted displacement from her home, suggests a
post-Elizabethan response to the geographical and economic containment of the queen’s
reign. Furthermore, by blending land-based business ventures with privateering
(ad)ventures, Bess makes available a model of flow that is consistent both with England’s
moral claims and its colonial aims. I suggest that this play not only draws England out of
its insular economy (so much so that the play ends in the court of the king of Fez) into an
emergent mercantile state, but also sets up a model of transnational flow that interrupts
the dangerous overflow of Indian gold into Spain, reorganizing the Atlantic as a
“stomach” capable of nourishing its constitutive members.
Hillary Eklund is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Duke
University. She is beginning a dissertation called “The Atlantic Kitchen,” which posits
the early modern Atlantic literally and metaphorically as the alimentary center of the
Western humoral world. The project considers texts primarily in English and Spanish
that use food – including its manufacture, circulation, and consumption – as a language
to express ideas about what it means to live in and around the Atlantic in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
10) The Life Aquatic in the Bourgeois Interior
--Isabel Kranz, Media of History-History of Media Graduiertenkolleg, Bauhaus
University Weimar
One of the main goals of this paper is to investigate the role of the aquarium in the
bourgeois interior. The world’s first public aquarium opened in London in 1853, one year
after the Crystal Pallace Exhibition. Most of the following, increasingly fashionable
universal exhibitions presented a new aquarium in which a hitherto unknown world was
unveiled to the public eye, and interest in the mysteries of marine life heightened.
Whereas the development of such public aquariums is well documented, the history of
private aquariums remains to be written.
This history is intimately related to the retreat into private space that took place in
the 19th century: While life in the metropolis became an endless flux of people and
commodities, the home promised a safe haven from the bewildering mosaic of the street.
Here, the bourgeois citizen could relax from the strains of keeping up his public persona.
At home, stability was cherished, whereas commercial life required continuous progress.
How does the aquarium in the bourgeois drawing room fit into this picture of
neatly separated spheres? What dreams were attached to these installations? What visions
were manifested in confining the movement of living creatures for the purpose of
display? Should we consider these aquariums merely as decorative artworks or as
precursors to cinema and television screens? What concepts of nature and culture are
rendered by domesticating sea life?
Analyzing mostly popular French magazines of the time, the purpose of this paper
is to provide some theses on the relationship between the bourgeois fascination with
marine life and the desire to control exotic worlds by incorporating them into the private
home. By doing so, I hope to come to a better understanding of the concept of the
bourgeois interior as hinted at in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.
Isabel Kranz studied Comparative Literature, North American Studies and Teaching
German as a Foreign Language at Augsburg University, Université Charles–de–Gaulle
Lille III (France) and the Free University of Berlin. After earning her M.A. degree in
August 2003, she spent an academic year as a visiting scholar at Yale University. Since
January 2005, Ms. Kranz has been a member of the interdisciplinary research group
»Media of History — History of Media« at the Bauhaus University in Weimar
(Germany). Awarded a doctoral scholarship by the German Research Foundation
(Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), she is currently writing her dissertation on Walter
Benjamin’s Arcades Project at Erfurt University (Germany).
11) Counter-Flow: Censorship and Digital Media Appropriations
--Abigail Derecho, Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University
In 1973, British media studies scholar Raymond Williams characterized the television
viewing experience as “flow”: the witnessing of constant transitions between texts (TV
shows or televised movies) or from texts to paratexts (commercials, station
identifications, previews of other programs, etc.). The digital age has dramatically
expanded the types of paratexts that contribute to media flows. Today, in addition to
watching “traditional” paratexts such as ads and previews on TV or in movie theaters, or
listening to them during radio broadcasts, many media consumers go online and seek out
digitally created and distributed paratexts, such as remixes of pop songs, fan fiction or fan
films that revise or expand upon film and television narratives, and even forms of high art
(such as hypertext works) that incorporate elements of mass media.
These new paratexts are appropriations of existing media works. They are
consumer productions, made possible by increasingly affordable and accessible digital
media. However, these recent additions to the flows of media have not gone unchecked
by corporate media producers. Rather, consumers who appropriate media texts have
operated for the last two decades in a climate of censorship. In this paper, I will trace the
history of legislative and legal battles, beginning in the mid-1980s, surrounding the
question of whether and how media audiences should be allowed to transform existing
texts. I will discuss how a discourse of “theft vs. art” has informed these debates, and
will investigate the philosophical underpinnings and assumptions of the theft vs. art
opposition, drawing upon Derrida’s idea of the “archontic” as both a drive to archive
(gather together) and limit (determine what gets to be in the archive, and what must be
kept out of the archive).
Abigail Derecho is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies, with a
home department in Radio/Television/Film. She compares texts across media rather than
across national traditions, with a focus on digital media appropriations, or how artists
(amateur or professional) transform media texts (fan films and video game “mods” are
examples of this type of art) using digital production and distribution technologies.
1:30
Keynote address
Jules Law
Title [TBA]
Roundtable discussion
With Bernhard Siegert and Peter Fenves
3:00
The Rhythm and Regulation of Flow
12) The Flow of Traffic: Adorno on Poetic Language in Late Capitalism
--Heather Fielding, English, Brown University
For Adorno, “flow” is a useful metaphor for the poetic dimension of language, which
resists the reifying logic of instrumental reason. In this respect, flow implies constant
movement, as opposed to the discrete teleological motion of an instrument, or static
homogeneous invariability. This paper examines Adorno’s essay “Punctuation Marks,”
which complicates this concept of poetic flow by describing it with a technological
metaphor.
Adorno usually relies on inorganic but non-technological metaphors to describe
poetic language. Rustling leaves and constellations are his prominent figures for
describing language that cannot be reduced either to a technological tool or to an aspect
of a human subject who uses it. Adorno argues that punctuation marks function
poetically, because they cannot be fully assimilated to the semantic and open up a single
written text to a multiplicity of oral readings. But instead of choosing a figure of a river,
or a planet’s orbit, to describe this function, Adorno figures the punctuation mark as a
traffic light regulating the flow of language in a text. The poetic dimension of language
turns out to be precisely technological.
In this metaphor, the poetic traffic signal makes a text heterogeneous, since it
transforms immobile written signs into a moving flow of traffic. But this kind of
heterogeneity is not opposed to the instrumental mode of thought Adorno associates with
late capitalism, since traffic lights are instruments that calm, contain, and regulate an
overflow of cars. Traffic lights, that is, seem to replace an uncontrolled heterogeneity
with a totally reified, efficient homogeneity. However, Adorno theorizes that
instrumental technology as a kind of poetic heterogeneity, a flow that must necessarily be
arrested, managed, and controlled. In late capitalism, Adorno suggests, the flow of the
poetic must always already be instrumental; the poetic’s ability to resist reification comes
from the interior of reification itself.
Heather Fielding is a PhD candidate in the English department at Brown University. She
is at work on a dissertation entitled "The Noise of Modernism: Literature, Technology,
and Reification." Using critical approaches from media theory and Marxist theory, she
argues that as a contradictory response to the objectifying imperatives of reification,
modernism models literature on technology and imagines the literary text as a device
with automatically moving parts. She is the organizer of a Mellon Workshop and lecture
series, "Critical Approaches to Modernity," and has presented papers at the Society for
Literature, Science, and the Arts and at the Technisierung/Ästhetisierung conference
sponsored by the Technical University, Darmstadt, Germany.
13) Time/Frame: Flows of Duration in Hiroshi Sugimoto's 'Theaters' Series
--Tina Gregory, Art History, The Graduate Center (CUNY)
Self-avowed “nineteenth century photographer” Hiroshi Sugimoto has been
photographing the quiet, empty interiors of ornate cinema palaces around America since
1978. Exposed using only the flickering light from the running film itself, the resulting
images reveal extraordinary detail, and seem to glow from within. Commercially
successful due to their subtle, formal beauty, the photographs themselves (as well as the
contemporary, yet historic and archetypal process involved in their creation) have yet to
be critically analyzed in terms of their attempt to frame and encode multiple passages of
time.
This discussion touches on historical attempts to “frame and encode” the temporal
in artistic theory and practice, including Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura and its
reliance on concepts of flow, and Etienne Jules-Marey’s nineteenth-century attempts to
interrupt and examine the flow of bodily movement through photography. Primarily, it
argues for a reading of Sugimoto’s contemporary practice in light of Gilles Deleuze’s
second volume on cinema, The Time Image. Focusing on Deleuze’s reworking of
Bergson’s concept of durée, it positions the formal and conceptual practice of timing and
framing present in Sugimoto’s photographs as conversant with Deleuzian spatio-temporal
demarcations, and analyses their relationship to (and reliance on) the concept of temporal
flow as a continuous, indivisible entity. For this particular moment in Deleuze’s analysis,
and for Sugimoto’s meticulous photographic practice, temporal flow is not interrupted,
but analysed; not arrested, but harnessed. Overall, this paper seeks to provide a critical
model for discussing cinematic concepts of spatio-temporal flow into the ongoing debates
on photographic representation.
Tina Gregory is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the department of Art History at the
Graduate Center. Her specialization is in modern and contemporary photography and
new media, and her work to date has focused on issues of documentary history and postdocumentary theory, with a recent interest in historical concepts of temporality, duration,
and the photographic index. As a Curatorial Fellow with the Whitney Museum’s
Independent Study Program, She is currently organizing an exhibition on strategies of
media appropriation in recent art. Based primarily on reproduced and remixed images of
political conflict, it also investigates imagery emulative of, and isolated from, the media’s
incessant flow.
14) The Melody and Rhythm of Flow: Husserl and Benveniste
--Robert G. Ryder, Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University
In his fifth Logical Investigation, Husserl accounts for the temporality of consciousness
by turning to the idea of temporal objects. A melody, he claims, is the perfect temporal
object, since every moment of a melody involves remembering every other moment that
occurred before it. This is not the same as memory recall, but rather becomes the basis of
what Husserl calls primary retention, a kind of memory wholly founded in perception
wherein the Now retains an originary association with the “just now passed.” Bernard
Stiegler writes that the “phenomenon of this temporal object is a flow [un écoulement].”
But if a melody is one kind of flow, rhythm is another: while also using the
metaphor of music, Émile Benveniste writes that “one can be lead to understand that
rhythmos, significantly, [is] literally ‘a particular manner of flow’ [manière particulière
de fluer].” By looking closely at the musical examples in these two contexts, this paper is
concerned with the difference between Husserl’s melodic flow and Benveniste’s
rhythmic one. Why, for instance, would Husserl’s use of the melody to exemplify a
specific temporal object preclude a discussion of the melody’s rhythm? Is it even possible
to separate melody from rhythm? In Stiegler’s final chapter of La désorientation, where
he also discusses Husserl’s primary retention as a melodic flow, there is no mention of
rhythm. This paper argues that rhythm, as its own “particular manner of flow,” is an
essential element when considering Husserl’s notions of the temporal object (and
therefore of the temporality of consciousness in general), and offers possibilities for how
rhythm is to be implemented.
Robert G. Ryder is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and German at
Northwestern University. His research interests include music and literature, German
critical thought and early German film. Presently he is working on the spatial and
temporal ramifications of Walter Benjamin’s notion of Schwelle, and the extent to which
it might affect or reflect theoretical problems of acoustics and sound theory from
Deleuze’s refrain to Michel Chion‚s acousmetre. His dissertation will focus on acoustics
and the uncanny in early twentieth-century German literature and film.
4:30
The Pandemic: Fluid Communities
15) The Pen and the Syringe: Autoimmunity and the (Un)readability of Flowing Blood
--Neal DeRoo, Philosophy, Boston College
This paper will examine Derrida’s critique of the “autoimmunity” of Western “teletechnoscientific” culture. It is by way of this “autoimmunity” that Western culture (with
its fetishes for telecommunication, technology, and science) attempts to purify itself from
all that would pollute what it considers “sacred.” To illustrate this “autoimmunity,” I will
examine language in this “tele-technoscientific” culture, and show how it seeks to
“purify” itself from the living body by abstracting, universalizing, and symbolizing the
body in discourse. By so doing, it purifies itself of the flowing blood of the living body,
and sanitizes the body into little more than symbols.
Next, I will show how Derrida challenges this conception of language. In
“Circumfession,” Derrida attempts to re-introduce the living body into Western language
by equating writing with flowing blood (that of his own circumcision and of his mother’s
bed sores). By so doing, he shows the dual inadequacy of Western language to
systematize the body: first, by attempting to systematize it in a form that excludes the
flowing of blood in the actual living body (i.e. a phallocentric, or a phallogocentric
systematization); second, by making writing/flowing blood, that is, writing as a flowing
of blood and the flow of writing as/in one’s own blood, “unreadable.” Indeed, it is
precisely because the (male) body is abstracted, universalized, and symbolized in
discourse that the actual, living, bleeding body cannot be read there. This “unreadability”
of flowing blood emphasizes the exclusion of the living body from Western discourse.
This exclusion, in turn, is emblematic of a deeper exclusion that lies at the heart of
Western “tele-technoscientific” culture and necessitates a search for community (from the
Latin com-munitio, “common defense”) that lies at the heart of Western autoimmunity.
Neal DeRoo is currently in the Philosophy PhD program at Boston College. Previously,
he received a Master’s of Arts degree from the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto,
Ontario, Canada. His Master’s thesis, entitled “Confluent Confessions: The Flowing
Together of Deconstruction and/as Religious Confession,” examined Derrida’s critique
of religious confessions, situating it within a larger Derridean critique of a particular
type of exclusion that was connected to patriarchy and, in Derrida’s words, to the “teletechnoscientific” culture of the “globo-latinzed” world. He has participated in
conferences on topics ranging from Augustine to Merleau-Ponty to the recent theological
movement known as “Radical Orthodoxy.” His undergraduate work was done at Calvin
College, in Grand Rapids, MI.
16) How the Bird Flew: Analyzing Discourses of National Accountability and Global
Responsibility in Response to the Threat of a Global Avian Flu Pandemic
--Nick Muntean, Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas-Austin
Over the past year, American media outlets have devoted ever-increasing attention to the
"bird flu" (aka "avian flu", "H5N1 virus") and its potential ability to mutate from a an
isolated Eurasian environmental issue into a global health crisis. While much of this
discourse has centered around the possibility of the virus' ability to mutate from an avian
strain into one that can be passed amongst humans, considerable focus has also been paid
to the ways in which various countries have (or haven't) applied energy and resources to
preventing and/or containing flu outbreaks within their respective national boundaries.
The manner in which these national responses to a fluid, migratory, trans-national
problem have been portrayed in American media outlets allows for several points of
analysis, particularly, the processes through which the potentially global nature of this
health problem have been localized to the accountability (and, in some cases, culpability)
of individual nations. Furthermore, by examining the ways in which these discourses are
constructed and presented in the national American press, it is possible to analyze how
notions of "first-world" and "third-world" nations are contemporaneously constructed in
binary opposition to one another while serving to re-entrench conceptions of
globalization and the "global village" as a foregone conclusion.
The primary sources of analysis for this project are American print media outlets,
such as Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times. Much of the theory informing this
analysis comes from Arjun Appadurai's work on globalization, particularly his notions of
ideoscapes, mediascapes, and technoscapes. By analyzing the ways this fluid threat is
conceptualized in national and international terms, it is possible to come to a greater
understanding of the processes through which we construct notions of national and
international responsibility in light of pre-existing notions of the developmental status of
particular nations.
Nick Muntean completed his Bachelor's degree at Johns Hopkins University, earning a
double degree in Philosophy and Film & Media Studies. He is now pursuing his Master's
degree in the Media Studies Program of the Radio-Television-Film department at
University of Texas - Austin. Primary fields of interest are the ways in which new
technologies remediate society and cultural practices, the consolidation of media
ownership and its effects on popular conceptions of the idea of "authority", and the
notion of a "final draft" in news stories on corporate media websites.
17) Clouds at Speed: Swarm Dynamics and Flexible Topologies
--Sebastian Vehlken, Media of History-History of Media Graduiertenkolleg, Bauhaus
University Weimar
The term swarm seems to have become a paradigmatic mode of representing
collectivities whose complexity and internal dynamics exceed the conceptual framework
of what might be called network science. In contrast to the basically static topology of
networks which highlight the spatial organization of a network over its dynamic
development in time, swarms challenge this notion of space and time, and thus undermine
the ideas of the Cartesian geometry. Since communication and movement amalgamate,
the swarm additionally evokes an information theory without channels – a concept of
networks without nodes and edges.
Not unlike clouds, swarms are fuzzy phenomenons. They paradoxically put
themselves in a concrete form by an ‘indifferencialization’ of single elements into a
dynamic, heterogenous multiplicity. Swarms therefore represent a constant flow,
fluctuation, and morphology that is not representable in logics of cause and effect or by
other rational measures.
I would like to examine two approaches that nevertheless made an effort to arrest
the dynamics of swarms, and in the same instant indicate an epistemological
transformation in the know-ledge of swarm behavior. On the one hand an early biological
and ethologic approach (around 1900), that tried to understand the superorganisms of
social animals such as bees or fish. On the other hand a later cybernetic knowledge of
those swarms, which modelled animal group behavior in terms of mathematical
information theory (as early as in the Macy Conferences around 1950) and, as an
outcome, prepared the field for a later biologically inspired computer science. But while
the earlier approach quickly began to serve as an (ideological) blueprint for a ‘State of
nature’ (Eugene Thacker), the latter neutralized these political metaphors, replacing them
with technological notions. This liberation seems, from my point of view, to be the initial
condition for today’s euphorical and interdisciplinary use of the dispositive (Michel
Foucault) of the swarm – from anti-hegemonial smart mobs to a swarming in military
affairs.
Sebastian Vehlken is a scholarship holder of the Graduate School Mediale
Historiographien (Media of History - History of Media) of Bauhaus-University Weimar,
University of Erfurt and Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. He works on a PhD project
entitled Swarms. Medialities and Policies of Fuzziness. He studied Film- and Television
Studies, Publicity and Communication Studies, and Economics at Ruhr-University
Bochum and Media Studies at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. In 2004, Mr
Vehlken graduated with a M.A. thesis on Stafford Beer's Cybersyn network and
Operations Room in Chile during the era of Salvador Allende. He is especially interested
in the (techno-) history of the computer, cybernetics, and recently in mobile networks,
processes of self-coordination, emergent behavior in complex systems, and animate
architecture.