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Event Date 22 – 23 March 2012
French Institute
17 Queensberry Place
London, SW7 2DT

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy
Presents:

Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts
2011–2013 (AHRC 914469)

Workshop 2

Case Studies 1 – Transdisciplinary Texts: Dialectic of Enlightenment and Capitalism and Schizophrenia

This two-day Workshop will examine the transdisciplinary dynamics and modes of concept construction of two now-classic transdisciplinary texts from the mid–late twentieth century, one from each of the German and French traditions: Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947) and Deleuze & Guattari’s two-volume Capitalism and Schizophenia (1972 & 1980). Written at strongly contrasting moments in European history – in the wake of fascism and of May 68, respectively – these two texts are in many ways emblematic of the national philosophical traditions from which they emerged: the one dialectical, the other anti-dialectical. Yet they are also texts that are profoundly ‘infected’ by their philosophical others – various early 20th-century anthropologies in particular – in their constructions of histories of the subject and the subject-function. And they share certain general methodological features in common: programmatic anti-systematicity and the writing practice of dual authorship, for example. They have also both been subjected to an increasingly global reception.

The Workshop aims to concentrate on the mechanisms and modes of generality/universality involved in the disciplinary dynamics of the two texts (their ‘models’ of transdisciplinarity); to consider the limitations associated with their historical formations; and to identify the continuing productivity of their afterlives, associated with their insertion into new geo-political contexts.

Day 1: Anti-systematic Systematicity: Negative Anthropology and Dual Authorship in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

Professor Esther Leslie (English & Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London) – Transdisciplinary Reflexes, Trans-species Reflexes
One area in which the influence of Dialectic of Enlightenment is newly and strikingly felt is in questions around animal rights and the relationship between humans and animals. The work has been cited to underpin militant arguments around veganism and specieism. In a politicized German context, the links between the treatment of animals and the treatment of Jews under Nazism has been underlined and even become programmatic. This paper considers Adorno and Horkheimer’s conception of what the animal teaches philosophy – under specific circumstances of unfreedom. The dialectical relation of animal and human – a trans-specieism – pervades the book in a variety of ways, which will be evoked.  At the same time, Adorno and Horkheimer’s transdisciplinary gesture – to know the animal through the human, the human through the animal – is pervasive in the work, such that it is only possible to know philosophy through anthropology, fine art through mass culture, capitalism through ancient myth, and reason through unreason.  It makes for a quivering sense of truth, which resounds in the role of the shudder, shock or twitch, which plays so central a role across, at least, Adorno’s whole conception, if not Horkheimer’s. This deep shudder through animal-human experience is explored here in the light of old and new technologies of representing the animalistic.

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her PhD focused on the work of Walter Benjamin and questions of technology and was published as Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000). She has also authored a biography of Benjamin (Reaktion, 2007).  In 2002 she published Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant Garde (Verso), which excavated the historical relationships between critical theory, European intellectuals and animation in its avant garde and commercial varieties. A subsequent book, Synthetic Worlds: Art, Nature and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005), investigated the industrial manufacture of colour and its impact on conceptions of nature and aesthetics. This straddling of art, science and industry continues to fascinates as she develop a project on the significance of the animated form we call liquid crystal, in its guise as chemical compound and as component of today’s flat screen TVs.

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Event Date 22 – 23 March 2012
French Institute
17 Queensberry Place
London, SW7 2DT

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy
Presents:

Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts
2011–2013 (AHRC 914469)

Workshop 2

Case Studies 1 – Transdisciplinary Texts: Dialectic of Enlightenment and Capitalism and Schizophrenia

This two-day Workshop will examine the transdisciplinary dynamics and modes of concept construction of two now-classic transdisciplinary texts from the mid–late twentieth century, one from each of the German and French traditions: Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947) and Deleuze & Guattari’s two-volume Capitalism and Schizophenia (1972 & 1980). Written at strongly contrasting moments in European history – in the wake of fascism and of May 68, respectively – these two texts are in many ways emblematic of the national philosophical traditions from which they emerged: the one dialectical, the other anti-dialectical. Yet they are also texts that are profoundly ‘infected’ by their philosophical others – various early 20th-century anthropologies in particular – in their constructions of histories of the subject and the subject-function. And they share certain general methodological features in common: programmatic anti-systematicity and the writing practice of dual authorship, for example. They have also both been subjected to an increasingly global reception.

The Workshop aims to concentrate on the mechanisms and modes of generality/universality involved in the disciplinary dynamics of the two texts (their ‘models’ of transdisciplinarity); to consider the limitations associated with their historical formations; and to identify the continuing productivity of their afterlives, associated with their insertion into new geo-political contexts.

Day 1: Anti-systematic Systematicity: Negative Anthropology and Dual Authorship in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

Dr Marc Berdet (Sociology, University of Paris 1) – Institute of Social Research versus College of Sociology: An Anthropological Dispute
‘Do we not have enough taboos?’ That was the way Theodor Adorno reacted to Pierre Klossowski’s presentation, when the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research considered collaborating with the College of Sociology. Adorno wrote to Walter Benjamin (who assisted with the activities of the College with some suspicion) that he was developing a ‘dialectic of the taboo’, against its ‘crypto-fascist’ tendencies. Adorno also deployed this dialectical anthropology with Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which starts with a discussion of some of the College’s theses on myth.  This paper will compare concepts of myth from the French College and the Frankfurt Institute, with the examples of Homer, Sade (whom Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois also analyse), by exploiting these under-rated preparatory discussions. It will thus circumscribe the kernel of this anthropological disagreement as both a political and an epistemological position. The dispute can be resumed in the opposition Adorno sketches between an ambiguous, anthropological materialism, shared by Walter Benjamin, and a progressive, materialist, ‘negative’ anthropology, shaped by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and, later, by Ulrich Sonnemann.

The background text related to this talk is Roger Caillois, ‘Festival’, from Denis Hollier, The College of Sociology (1937-1939), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988, pp. 279-303 (quoted in Dialectic of Enlightenment).

Marc Berdet is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Potsdam, Berlin. He is also associate researcher with the Centre d’étude des techniques, des connaissances et des pratiques (CETCOPRA, University of Paris Sorbonne) and the Centre interdisciplinaire d’études et de recherches sur l’Allemagne (CIERA, Paris). He is currently working in two complementary directions: on the one hand, he is trying to shape a new reading of Walter Benjamin from the standpoint of his ‘anthropological’ materialism; on the other hand, with an updating of critical theory, he aims at analysing the aesthetic of our (post)modern world. He is thus writing two books: the former interprets Benjamin along with his critical method; the latter analyses the ‘phantasmagorias’ of capital. He is also the chief-editor of the website http://anthropologicalmaterialism.hypotheses.org, and is preparing a journal of social research, Anthropology + Materialism, of which the second issue will be on myth (the CFP is still open).

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Event Date 22 – 23 March 2012
French Institute
17 Queensberry Place
London, SW7 2DT

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy
Presents:

Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts
2011–2013 (AHRC 914469)

Workshop 2

Case Studies 1 – Transdisciplinary Texts: Dialectic of Enlightenment and Capitalism and Schizophrenia

This two-day Workshop will examine the transdisciplinary dynamics and modes of concept construction of two now-classic transdisciplinary texts from the mid–late twentieth century, one from each of the German and French traditions: Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947) and Deleuze & Guattari’s two-volume Capitalism and Schizophenia (1972 & 1980). Written at strongly contrasting moments in European history – in the wake of fascism and of May 68, respectively – these two texts are in many ways emblematic of the national philosophical traditions from which they emerged: the one dialectical, the other anti-dialectical. Yet they are also texts that are profoundly ‘infected’ by their philosophical others – various early 20th-century anthropologies in particular – in their constructions of histories of the subject and the subject-function. And they share certain general methodological features in common: programmatic anti-systematicity and the writing practice of dual authorship, for example. They have also both been subjected to an increasingly global reception.

The Workshop aims to concentrate on the mechanisms and modes of generality/universality involved in the disciplinary dynamics of the two texts (their ‘models’ of transdisciplinarity); to consider the limitations associated with their historical formations; and to identify the continuing productivity of their afterlives, associated with their insertion into new geo-political contexts.

Day 1: Anti-systematic Systematicity: Negative Anthropology and Dual Authorship in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

Professor Nancy S. Love (Interdisciplinary Studies, Appalachian State University, NC) – ‘Why Do the Sirens Sing?’ Collaborating, Configuring and Categorizing with Dialectic of Enlightenment
In their 1969 Preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer affirm the changing nature of truth and state that, while the book documents an historical moment, they hope it offers something more to future readers. Here I extend my earlier analysis of how the first excursus challenges the linear logic of narrative form and creates a changing constellation of specific identities. I now examine the chapters on the culture industry and anti-semitism as mirror images within a fractured whole. The false identity created by the consumer products of the culture industry precludes any possibility of an ‘other’. It is mirrored by a virulent anti-semitism that enacts the interchangeability of its categorized victims Individuality, if it persists at all, resides beyond the aesthetic and linguistic categories of mass culture, which can only recognize difference as sameness. It is to be found in the gaps between inner and outer worlds, between the sensory experience of living subjects and their seemingly non-human cultural and political objects.  The possibility of reconciliation, of re-cognizing the Jew and all others as human beings, also resides in this vulnerable space.   Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s collaboration is most evident in these chapter, which fully engage the tensions between philosophy and materialism, between essay and thesis. Configured together these chapters illustrate how Dialectic of Enlightenment can continue to bear witness to the possibility of reconciliation in late capitalist modernity.

The background text related to this talk is ‘“Why Do the Sirens Sing?” Figuring the Feminine in Dialectic of Enlightenment’

Nancy S. Love is Professor of Government and Justice Studies, and Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program, at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, USA.  She is the author of Musical Democracy (SUNY, 2006), Understanding Dogmas and Dreams: A Text, (2nd ed., CQ Press, 2006), and Marx, Nietzsche and Modernity (Columbia UP, 1986; reissued 1996); and the editor of Dogmas and Dreams:  A Reader in Modern Political Ideologies, (4th ed. , CQ Press, 2010).  She is currently co-editor (with Mark Mattern) of New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture.  She and Mattern are working on a co-edited volume, Doing Democracy: Activist Art and Cultural Politics.  Love’s research focuses on music and politics across the political spectrum.

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Event Date 22 – 23 March 2012
French Institute
17 Queensberry Place
London, SW7 2DT

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy
Presents:

Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts
2011–2013 (AHRC 914469)

Workshop 2

Case Studies 1 – Transdisciplinary Texts: Dialectic of Enlightenment and Capitalism and Schizophrenia

This two-day Workshop will examine the transdisciplinary dynamics and modes of concept construction of two now-classic transdisciplinary texts from the mid–late twentieth century, one from each of the German and French traditions: Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947) and Deleuze & Guattari’s two-volume Capitalism and Schizophenia (1972 & 1980). Written at strongly contrasting moments in European history – in the wake of fascism and of May 68, respectively – these two texts are in many ways emblematic of the national philosophical traditions from which they emerged: the one dialectical, the other anti-dialectical. Yet they are also texts that are profoundly ‘infected’ by their philosophical others – various early 20th-century anthropologies in particular – in their constructions of histories of the subject and the subject-function. And they share certain general methodological features in common: programmatic anti-systematicity and the writing practice of dual authorship, for example. They have also both been subjected to an increasingly global reception.

The Workshop aims to concentrate on the mechanisms and modes of generality/universality involved in the disciplinary dynamics of the two texts (their ‘models’ of transdisciplinarity); to consider the limitations associated with their historical formations; and to identify the continuing productivity of their afterlives, associated with their insertion into new geo-political contexts.

Day 1: Anti-systematic Systematicity: Negative Anthropology and Dual Authorship in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

Professor Ackbar Abbas (Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine) – Adorno and the Weather: Critical Theory in an Era of Climate Change
There is clear evidence that global warming and other aspects of climate change taking place today are man-made, and can be linked to a larger series of crises involving science, technology, and the capitalist militarization of knowledge: an instance, with a vengeance, of the dialectic of enlightenment. However, a critical account of the crisis cannot be undertaken without a ‘climate change’ in critique itself, some hints of which can be found in Adorno’s rethinking of history, knowledge, and art in the face of human self-destructiveness.

Ackbar Abbas is Professor of Comparative Literature in the School of Humanities,  University of California, Irvine. His books include Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and Internationalizing Cultural Studies, co-edited with John Erni (Blackwell, 2005). Recent essays include ‘Faking Globalization’, in Andreas Huyssen, ed., Globalizing Cities, and ‘The Fake as Anthropological Object’, in Konzept Böll: Thema 2: Alles eins? Die Globale Zukunft von Kultur und Demokratie (both forthcoming).

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Philosophy and the Humanities

5 November 2009

Albrecht Wellmer (Berlin):
Discussion of  Adorno and the Difficulties of a Critical Reconstruction of the Historical Present

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The Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway University of London (HARC) presents:

10 Dec, 2008
Professor Andrew Bowie ‘The Future of Philosophy’

Professor Bowie explores current trends in contemporary philosophy by stressing the continued importance of the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, and the need to re-contextualise Adorno for the Anglo-American world.

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