1994 research outputs found
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Inactivity:Between Aesthetic Practice and Sociopolitical Challenge
Full text linkAt least since the Enlightenment, Western culture has been in the echo chambers of autonomy and its ethos of a rational, active, and ultimately self-creating and self-serving individual subject. Unlike in antiquity, when the fragile relation between otium and negotium was thought fundamental for the well-being of the (free) individual and society, today inactivity has become an increasingly problematic and, to a certain extent, morally and politically destabilizing category. Not too surprisingly, the French socialist Paul Lafargue’s claim that, next to the right to work, there should be a ‘right to be lazy’ (1883) was harshly criticized. His position, inspired by ancient philosophy, was reproached by socialist and capitalist perspectives. Significantly, in today’s age of hyperactivity, 24/7 accessibility, and accelerationism, one hears of the need to slow down, to do less (or indeed nothing at all), and to contemplate. The interest in (in)action — slow cinema, and even slow food and other so-called practices of ‘self-care’ — becomes steadily more important to artistic practices and in academic discourses. But what are the narratives behind this development? Are there different forms of inaction, some perceived as ‘productive’, and others as ‘destructive’? Can inaction be a progressive gesture ‘of doing’ at a moment when classical ‘actions’ have exhausted themselves? Would that also apply to a hypercapitalized and accelerated art market and exhibition system? This workshop aims to critically examine artistic, literary, philosophical, and political strategies and practices of inaction. It looks at how these practices, on one hand, work against dominant cultural and political narratives and, on the other, are absorbed by capitalism and ultimately become neoliberal adjuncts to prevailing economic and political systems. The focus of the workshop will be on artistic and aesthetic practices from the early twentieth century until today, since they offer a particularly fertile testing ground for thinking through strategies of action and inaction. One example might be found with so-called unofficial artists, writers, and intellectuals in totalitarian or post-totalitarian systems. They could not afford to protest in plain sight and thus often chose non-assuming and perhaps counter-intuitive strategies like leisure, ambivalence, and irony for staging their resistance. Also, Eastern European performance art, for example, has long demonstrated that inaction can structure the artist’s presence as much as (if not more eloquently than) action. Here, the typical action, which with its Western connotations is often imagined to lead to a romanticized version of revolution, is subverted. At the same time, conceptualizing inaction as an agent of change — also in the sense of contemplation as basis of creativity — comes with its pitfalls. When does inaction simply become a willful act of ignorance? As Hannah Arendt has elucidated, we have been witnesses to mass atrocities that we have refused to acknowledge, which alerts us to exercise caution when it comes to doing nothing. In this light, individual positions like ‘opting out’ and departing from sociopolitical life (e.g., abstaining from voting) become highly problematic. After all, who is free to ‘opt out’ and who remains helplessly stuck? Also of interest are cultural and artistic practices that thematize inactivity as forms of resistance, resilience, or counter-movement in the broader field of heritage discourses, conservation, and art history, as well as within the museum context. The aim is to discuss, on the one hand, whether decay is understood as a kind of inactivity that causes a revaluation of objects, sites, and practices in terms of negation or negotiation. On the other hand, the aim is to interrogate how to interpret inactivity regarding questioned monuments, events, and places without sticking to the binarity of ‘productive’ or ‘destructive’ discourses. Does decay as process — and/or doing nothing as practice in the above-mentioned fields — also become an agent of change or, referring to the Aristotelian philosophy, counter-energeia in times of political and ecological crises? The historical longue durée — starting with vita contemplativa and its contemporary relevance and adaptability — and the conceptual complexity of ‘inactivity’ require further analysis. Many of inactivity’s manifestations in artistic and aesthetic practices, in political actions, and in everyday life forms remain undertheorized. The interest of the workshop is therefore in concrete, historically-grounded case studies and broader systematic-methodological approaches that help us conceptualize and re-vise well-known narratives of inactivity, mostly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but also in accounts that tackle the longue durée.Abstracts (pdf
Rabindranath Tagore’s সমাজ/Samaj/Communities of Song
Full text linkWhat happens when songs or lyric poems, composed at particular moments, become state anthems, performed again and again across generations? This essay addresses this question through the extraordinary figure of Rabindranath Tagore, who, despite his radically anti-statist vision of community, composed songs that became the celebrated national anthems of India and Bangladesh
Casual Planetarities:Force-Fields and Movement as Terms of Engagement
No full textReplacing questions of scale with concerns about distance, Ballestero’s talk asks how people make sense of their planetary condition by thinking geologically. She explores the role that movement — movement of an aquifer and movement as analytic — plays as people navigate the force-fields of their daily lives an already changed planet. Bringing together the work of geologists, local residents, and artists, Ballestero proposes choreographic thinking as a way of changing the terms of engagement in the midst of an increasingly authoritarian and populist planetary climate. Andrea Ballestero is an anthropologist interested in political and legal anthropology, STS, and social studies of finance and economics. She is a faculty member in the Anthropology Department at USC. Her work looks at the unexpected ethical and technical entanglements through which experts understand water in Latin America. She is particularly interested in spaces where the law, economics and techno-science are so fused that they appear as one another. Her first book, A Future History of Water (2019) asks how the difference between a human right and a commodity is produced in regulatory and governance spaces that purport to be open to different forms of knowledge and promote flexibility and experimentation. She has worked with regulators, policy-makers, and NGOs in Costa Rica and Brazil where she traces how techno-legal devices embody moral distinctions, pose questions about the foundations of liberal capitalist societies, and help people inhabit non-linear and generative futures
Negotiating Scientific Cooperation in an Unequal World
Full text linkThe view that international cooperation is critical to achieving progress in research has become commonplace in science policy discourse. There is a growing consensus — rightly so — that cross-border cooperation should not be limited to a narrow circle of nations in the Global North, but that more scientists and stakeholders from underrepresented regions should also be included in these collaborations. This raises the question of how participation can be improved without simply reproducing global inequalities. The global academic landscape is still characterized by deep rifts, with the financial resources for research in the Global North incomparably more robust than those available to the Global South. In addition, there is still a prevalent imbalance in the division of labour in collaborative research projects: prestigious, reputation-enhancing activities such as theory-building frequently take place in the Global North, while the Global South is assigned tacitly ‘simple’ tasks such as data collection. Furthermore, in times of rising authoritarianism and increasing geopolitical tension, politics often stands in the way of international cooperation. Global challenges such as climate change, pandemics, and migration clearly show that global research cooperation is required now more than ever. But how should this be organized? The conference ‘Negotiating Scientific Cooperation in an Unequal World’ will consider important dimensions of this question, with experts drawn from around the world. The conference will end with the Berlin University Alliance officially signing the Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations. The event will be accompanied by a photography exhibition from Adenike A. Akinsemolu (2024 Alexander von Humboldt Residency Programme Fellow) The Women of Aiyetoro: Resilience in the Face of Climate Change A visual exploration of the gendered dimensions of climate change and the historical marginalization of indigenous knowledge systems, contributing to a more equitable and inclusive global discourse
Mutation, Interruption, Suspension:Nancy’s Politics of Sense under the Disruptive Condition
No full textModel Organisms:Materiality, History and Politics
Full text linkModel organisms are life forms used to test biological theories of various kinds in laboratory settings. Research with model organisms muddies the line between models as material objects and models as abstract entities. Model organisms are not fully constructed, since they are evolved beings, but the longer they reside in a laboratory the less they resemble their kin in the wild. At the same time the construction of biological generalities from the research results from one model organism involves an extrapolation beyond species constraints. The aim of this symposium is to investigate how research practices and theories of life are differently deployed according to different organisms and their affordances. This is particularly evident in the choice of organism and how it produces not only bio-medical results but also generates historical, cultural, and artistic relations. For example, the genetics of fruit flies slowly begins to stand in for genetics in general, the deep homologies discovered through cephalopod eyes surprises in part due to their supposed alienness, epigenetic effects in agouti mice give hope for human dietary diseases, the regenerative capacities of the axolotl become bound up with fantasies of immortality, and the horizontal gene transfer among archaea and bacteria undermine our notions of organismal or even philosophical individuality
Laboured Changes:Work’s Futures and Political Imaginaries
Full text linkRecent scholarly and political debates revolve around the claim that the world of labour is close to a tipping point, at which work will cease to function both as the economic foundation of capitalist accumulation and as the condition of possibility for livelihood and meaning. Speculations about the outcome of this radical transformation abound. Some evoke dystopias of endlessly produced surplus populations, excesses of a world where automation, artificial intelligence, and digitalization make human work irrelevant while labour power remains commodified. Driven by accelerationist hopes, others predict that in the chase for ad infinitum self-reproduceable objects, profits will become impossible, thus driving capitalism to self-cannibalize. Meanwhile, calls from leftist corners emphasize the historical potential of this turning point for the articulation of a post-capitalist imaginary. This symposium aims to move beyond the predominantly speculative and hypothetical nature of these conversations by placing in dialogue forward-looking but empirically-grounded insights into the concrete processes that are unfolding in the present, and could lead to the materialization of particular futures of work and the foreclosure of others. It brings together four scholars whose work has contributed to debates on laboured changes, in the dual sense of anticipated changes to structures and experiences of labour and the work of bringing about such changes. They will discuss recent transformations in Chinese labour regimes, refugees and surplus populations, the death of career and the elusiveness of adulthood, and post-work visions and global political alternatives, to understand how different futures of work can be imagined starting from this uneven and contested present