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Apophatic Activism:Science, Politics, and Silence in the 1960s
No full textThe laboratory study of ‘attention’ across the first half of the twentieth century established a powerful framework for understanding the human subject. Experiments centering on patterns of stimulus and response tested the ways that human sensory and cognitive capacities could be elicited, assessed, predicted, and ultimately integrated into powerful new military-industrial technologies. This ‘cybernetic’ subject was triggerable and could pull triggers. In this lecture, Burnett will sketch the contours of this important psychological research programme, in order to establish the background for a pair of significant counter-reactions that unfolded across the 1960s — projects that, he will argue, marked major reconceptualization of (negative) agency. Focusing on the ‘Blue Vase’ experiments of the medical researcher Arthur Deikman, and then on the ‘Silent Vigils’ of Santa Barbara Sociologist Charles H. Hubbell, Burnett will sketch the emergence of a specifically ‘apophatic’ attentional programme across the counterculture D. Graham Burnett is a writer, teacher, and maker based in New York City. Born in France, he trained in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, and currently holds the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and History of Science at Princeton University. He is the author of a number of books on technology, nature, and politics from the seventeenth to the twentieth century; and he recently co-edited Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses (Columbia University Press, 2023) as well as Twelve Theses on Attention (Princeton University Press, 2022), the latter a manifesto of the ‘Friends of Attention’ coalition. Burnett is associated with the speculative collective ESTAR(SER), and was a 2023 visiting artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland. www.dgrahamburnett.ne
Mina Loy’s Interrupted Communities
Get PDFThis chapter explores the different types of communities produced in Loy’s works, with a focus on her theorization of modernist poetry in the essays ‘Modern Poetry’ (1925) and ‘Gertrude Stein’ (1927), the pamphlet ‘Psycho-Democracy’, the poem Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923–25), and the sequence ‘Italian Pictures’ (1914), showing that Loy considered the questioning of types of collectivities and communities a fundamental element in the production and reception of modernist art and literature. Through the investigation of Loy’s multilingualism, poetics, and style, the chapter argues that the insistence on the ephemeral, precarious, and shifting temporality of textual communities is the result not only of Loy’s presence within mobile, transnational expatriate groups but also of a feminist stance that refuses participation in patriarchal or oppressive forms of togetherness, aiming instead to imagine possible alternatives
The Trouble with Thinking:Transnational Dialogues on Academic Freedom
Get PDFThe past decade has seen a troubling turn toward autocracy across wide regions of the globe. What may have once seemed confined to parts of the Global South and the former Communist Bloc is now, through the rise of right-wing populism, markedly visible in Europe and North America as well. Among the first groups to be impacted by autocratic impulses are scientists and scholars — those who are vocationally called to think and question. Cases from Iran to Turkey to Russia, from Hungary to Germany and the United States, demonstrate how often governments, or parties or other social forces struggling to capture governments, believe that thinking creates trouble, and how quickly critical views can be silenced. This may happen through actual repressive force or censorship, policy changes or more informal kinds of pressure. It intersects in often undiagnosed ways with the various economic underpinnings of knowledge production. Moving beyond humanitarian frames of scholar rescue, this workshop brings together scholars who have been forced to leave their countries of origin as a result of their resistance to the narrowing of space for thought with scholars currently concerned about the fate of academic freedom in their home countries. The participants of the workshop will explore the playbooks through which scholars have been shut out of sanctioned systems of knowledge production in the Global South and the post-Socialist East, along with approaches they developed to fight this attack on thinking and to rebuild spaces for it in exile. They will track political challenges and structural barriers to substantive academic freedom with a focus on the United States and Germany today. And they will think together towards lessons and tactics which may allow academic freedom to be realized from the ground up as what anthropologist Homa Hoodfar (2017) calls a ‘transnational human right’. Are there shared early warning signs of broader strictures on thinking, including targeted attacks on different academic fields or issues? How are repressive policies, laws, and discourses moving iteratively across contexts, and how are they tied to neoliberal imperatives? What successful strategies have been developed to evade or contest these pressures? What theories or paradigms — including new and global understandings of academic freedom itself — might allow us to navigate between contexts, enable meaningful solidarity, and not only secure but also widen the spaces of critical inquiry
History of Knowledge through the Global South:A Case for Entangled Ecologies
Get PDFIn this brief discussion, I reflect on the significance of using the category of the global south for reconfiguring the scope of the history of knowledge. While I see this as a productive paradigm shift that has already given rise to mould-breaking works, I focus here on the cross-hemispheric histories of extractive capitalism and how both colonial violence and anticolonial resistance have shaped knowledge-making. I argue that thinking through ‘entangled ecologies’ can be a tool for countering the existing conceptual order, which has led to the north-south division in the first place. Attending to epistemic and ontological entanglements would enable us to ask better and deeper questions about the increasingly complex interconnections across human and nonhuman worlds, especially given the planetary crises we face today
Making Germany’s Hidden Yet Omnipresent Colonial Past Visible
Get PDFFor thirty years, Berlin was the metropole of the German colonial empire. For most German citizens, however, this statement is relatively unknown. Even though there is an increased interest in decolonial praxis within Berlin-based cultural and educational settings, the persistence of such efforts and their implications within larger society is hard to assess in advance. In response, this text proposes a walking tour through Berlin, highlighting places related to this part of German history. In doing so, it demonstrates the presence of many references to colonialism spread through the city and, more significantly, many initiatives and projects seeking to make this past more visible. By offering an overview of four specific locations within the city, this chapter hopes to critically reflect on the extensive trajectory of the ongoing struggles for historical reparations
