Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event Date 25 – 26 January 2012
The Modelling Studio
Dorich House Museum, Kingston University
67 Kingston Vale
London
Greater London
SW15 3RN

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy
Presents:

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

Workshop 1

From Science and Technology Studies to the Humanities:
The State of the Field & The Concept of ‘Problem’

Professor Andrew Barry (Oxford)  - The Geographical Problem

We cannot assume that a clear division can be made between disciplines and interdisciplines. After all, disciplines always contain elements of other disciplines, and those who support the formation of interdisciplines may nonetheless seek to govern what counts as interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research. Nonetheless, if all disciplines are interdisciplinary, different disciplines tend to foster different forms of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the constitution of those interdisciplinary disciplines – including Geography, Anthropology and Archaeology – that cut across the boundaries of the social and natural sciences and the humanities. In the paper, I review a series of distinct modes and logics of interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, and examine the distinctiveness of a geographical approach to the problem of the relation between the natural and social sciences.

————————————————-

talk:

PLAY

download

————————————————-

questions:

PLAY

download

————————————————-

back to main conference page

Event Date 25 – 26 January 2012
The Modelling Studio
Dorich House Museum, Kingston University

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy
Presents:

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

Workshop 1

From Science and Technology Studies to the Humanities:
The State of the Field & The Concept of ‘Problem’

Dr Fredéric Rambeau (Paris) -  ‘Deleuze’s Concept of Problem’

The concepts of ‘problem’, ‘problematic’ and ‘problematizing’ have been essential in the renewal of criticism in French contemporary philosophy, in particular with Canguilhem, Deleuze and Foucault. However, these concepts have been used in two different and, apparently, opposed ways. On the one hand, there has been a shift of philosophy as a specific discipline from its own tradition and its self-justifying procedures to its contemporary outsides: politics, art, psychoanalysis, and so on. On the other hand, the concept of problem is also that through which philosophy can grasp its own difference, across the contingency and variety of singular cases. I will be dealing, more specifically, with the paradox at stake in Deleuze’s conception of problem. Problems are always included in cases, but they can also be extracted from cases, or hover over them. This unresolved issue should lead us to question Deleuze’s singular practice of transdisciplinarity.

—————————————————

talk:

PLAY

download

—————————————————

questions:

PLAY

download

—————————————————

back to main conference page

Event Date 25 – 26 January 2012
The Modelling Studio
Dorich House Museum, Kingston University

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy

Presents:

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

Workshop 1
From Science and Technology Studies to the Humanities:

The State of the Field & The Concept of ‘Problem’

Professor Patrice Maniglier (Essex)
Problem-Sharing: The Role of Problems in Transdisciplinarity from the Standpoint of the French Epistemological Tradition

The concept of problem is an ambiguous instrument for the understanding of transdisciplinarity. On the one hand, it seems that the concept of problem might help debunk the idea that disciplines are defined by their objects. And such a critical argument could be made with reference to the work done by the French epistemological tradition that followed Bachelard, which challenged the representational, object-based, conception of knowledge or thought in general. On the other hand, however, this very tradition argued that problems were discipline-specific, or, at least, that they were always framed – in particular by what Bachelard called a ‘problématique’. Problems are not given, but are precisely the output of disciplinary specialization. (Physics is not an attempt at answer to our ordinary experience of the world, but rather a way of reformulating the questions that we should ask ourselves, in order to make them actually precise.) How, then, can they be shared? And if they aren’t, does that mean that the different disciplines simply have nothing to tell to one another? This is certainly not a conclusion Bachelard would have liked.

I would like to argue that the reason why problems are so important in transdisciplinary studies is that they are precisely that which we do not share, precisely that from which and about which disciplines diverge, in the sense that they are constructed differently in different disciplines. Instead of thinking of the different disciplines as responding to the same problems, as if these were merely given prior and outside of any specific disciplinary field (ultimately in something like our ‘ordinary experience’), I will argue that problems do not have any stable identity, but only exist as equivocal notions which can be used and practiced in order to realize how and where they become different. In other words, the concept of problem is the very reason we misunderstand one another. But misunderstanding here must not be perceived as a failure to communicate, as a purely negative determination, but rather as the element thanks to which the disciplines can communicate, i.e. relate to one another, and, more precisely, pass from one to the other. Ultimately, misunderstanding should be conceived as a certain kind of identity. I will import the concept of misunderstanding that the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has used to explicate, in Deleuzian terms, the comparative method and the anthropological relation, in order to clarify the kind of identity that a problem is and the reasons why problems are so rightly deemed important for transdisciplinary studies, thus justifying in passing a strong analogy between transdisciplinary and transculturality.

—————————————————

talk:

PLAY

download

—————————————————

questions:

PLAY

download

—————————————————

back to main conference page

Event Date 25 – 26 January 2012
The Modelling Studio
Dorich House Museum, Kingston University

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy
Presents:

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

Workshop 1

From Science and Technology Studies to the Humanities:
The State of the Field & The Concept of ‘Problem’

Dr John Kraniauskas (Birkbeck) -
Transculturation and Transdisciplinarity: A Brief Conceptual History

The concept of transculturation, coined by the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940, emerges from an attempt to derive the dynamics of Cuban culture from the histories of the production of sugar and tobacco. Ortiz presents this process as a ‘counterpoint’ between local and imperial histories, on the one hand, and of slavery-based plantation and peasant farming economic structures, on the other. More specifically, ‘transculturation’ appears as an idea at the moment that the differences structuring Ortiz’s counterpoint are being subordinated to industrial ‘modernization’ (in particular, the mass production of the cigarette). With Ortiz, the term is first deployed critically within anthropology (between Lombroso and Malinowski). Subsequently in the late 1970s, with Angel Rama, it becomes an important feature of Latin American literary criticism and history, tracking and charting the dynamics of narrative composition. It thus comes to describe a kind of peripheral modernism, a ‘transcultural avant-garde’ emerging from processes of more or less violent modernization. In this sense, it momentarily became an alternative to the term that has dominated the international reception of contemporary Latin American literature: ‘magical realism’. More recently, ‘transculturation’ as a critical concept has fallen into disuse, its place taken by others such as ‘hybridity’, as the perceived globalization of cultural forms became critical common sense. Through a brief historical account of its critical content, this paper will seek to recover the transdisciplinary contents of the concept of transculturation as (a) a descriptor of always-already-transculturated cultural experience and forms, and (b) as a concept that is fundamentally porous to its outside and its trans-disciplinary conditions. In this sense, following in the footsteps of William Pietz and Michael Taussig’s accounts of ‘fetishism’ – classics of transcultural analysis – I will venture a close relationship between the logics of transculturation and the logics of accumulation.

————————————————————-

talk:

PLAY

download

————————————————————-

questions:

PLAY

download

————————————————————-

back to main conference page

Event Date 25 – 26 January 2012

The Modelling Studio
Dorich House Museum, Kingston University

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy
Presents:

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

Workshop 1

From Science and Technology Studies to the Humanities:
The State of the Field & The Concept of ‘Problem’

Professor Emily Apter (New York)
‘Doing Things with Untranslatables’ : The Problem of Translation and Untranslatability in the Comparative Humanities

Translation—its practice, the institutions that support it, and increasingly the theory of translation—is at the heart of a number of current disciplinary debates.  These include rather heated polemics on the difference between World and Comparative literature; on the impact of globalization on university culture; on the purchase of philosophy in literary studies, and of linguistically-oriented approaches within philosophy. The number of publications devoted to the practices and theory of translation has increased dramatically in the past decade.  The trickle of ‘Translation Studies’ readers, anthologies, and conferences has become something else – a disorganized stream, perhaps. The very number and variety of works suggests the combination of excitement and disaggregation characteristic of an emerging discipline.

There are substantive historical reasons for this increased interest.  The Cold War’s distribution of political and economic power into recognizable and antagonistic blocs served to focus intellectual attention on linguistic and cultural blocs, to the profit of a largely European worldview, and to the detriment of a more fragmentary and variegated cultural landscape, always latent but patent and increasingly important since 1989.  In every respect, translation has taken center stage since the fall of the Berlin wall. This may seem paradoxical, given the global reach English has achieved in commerce, politics and the academy.  In step with this globalization of English, however, an increasing need is felt, in each domain, to attend to particular cultures, regions or markets: India and South East Asia; China; Latin America; and of course the Arab world, whose relations to what can no longer be called ‘the West’ were manifestly disregarded in the Cold War era.

Translation, from trans-latio, the old word for imperial as well as linguistic movement or displacement, is the key term in this new landscape.  How does a culture or a work, specific to a location or a time, travel? What is the relation of so-called peripheral cultures to metropolitan ones?  How do increased mobility and increased ease of communication change our objects of study?  Who translates, why, to what ends?  Are there un-translatable terms, concepts, or problems? If so, what challenges and opportunities do these classes of terms pose and provide to scholars?

Within translation studies a nodal field that might be called ‘untranslatability studies’ has gained traction recently.  It criticizes models of ‘world literature’  (developed by Moretti, Casanova, and Damrosch among others) on the grounds that they presume translatability as a given.  The result has been a practice that accounts insufficiently for incommensurability or the untranslatable within literary heuristics.  The notion of an Untranslatable takes its cue from the subtitle of a project published in France as the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des Intraduisibles  [The Vocabulary of European Philosophies: A Dictionary of Untranslatables]. In conceptualizing the project, Barbara Cassin was committed to activating philosophy as both medium and life-form.  Here, the Untranslatable refers to a term that has, historically, been left untranslated as it transferred from language to language (as in the examples of Polis, Begriff, Praxis, Aufheben, Mimesis, Feeling, Lieu Commun, Logos, Matter of Fact), or that has been constantly subject to mistranslation and retranslation (especially evident in such entries as Subject, Translation, World, Truth, Sense, Sovereignty, and Categories).  The Untranslatable can sometimes be defined as an intractable nub of semantic opacity – as something stubbornly resistant to equivalency and substitution.   It has affinities with what Wittgenstein termed the Unspeakable.  It is a boundary line of the sacred, that issues the edict “Do not translate here!  Thou shalt not translate me!”  And it is arguably a convergence point where the void of meaning in one language finds its counterpart in another.  The Untranslatable challenges the soft international diplomacy model of translation, traditionally defined by the desire to screen out disagreement and avoid direct encounters with insecurable knowledge.  I will argue, then, that ‘doing things with Untranslatables’ has become a new kind of theoretical practice and pedagogy in the transdisciplinary humanities.

—————————————————————

talk:

PLAY

download

—————————————————————

questions:

PLAY

download

—————————————————————

back to main conference page

Event Date: 16-18 September 2010
University of Oxford

‘Teutonic Philosophy’: Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) in context, his life and the reception of his writings

A conference to be held at the University of Oxford 16-18 September 2010

The theosophical works of Jacob Boehme [or Jakob Böhme] (1575– 1624), the ‘inspired cobbler’ of Görlitz, have influenced Western culture in complex and profound ways, from the radical sects of the English Civil Wars to twentieth-century Russian Orthodox theology. This interdisciplinary conference will draw on the insights of literary, philosophical, theological and historical scholarship to illuminate Boehme’s thought and trace the reception of his writings over four centuries.

Keynote Speakers:

—————————————————————–

Prof Andrew Weeks - ‘Boehme’s roots in Radical Anticlericalism and Paracelsian Nature Theory’

PLAY

download

—————————————————————–

Prof Nigel Smith, ‘Did anyone understand Jacob Boehme? The lure of theosophy in the early modern world’

talk:

PLAY

download

questions:

PLAY

download

—————————————————————–

Prof Bruce Janz, ‘Why Boehme matters – or should matter – today’

talk:

PLAY

download

questions:

PLAY

download

—————————————————————–

Programme: ([download id="1"] as .doc file)

The Institute of Philosophy  in association with Heythrop College presents:

Consciousness and the Will:

Celebrating the Work of Brian O’Shaughnessy

Event Date: 17th- 19th June 2010

——————————————

Tyler Burge (UCLA) – Origins of Perception

——————————————

talk:

PLAY

download

——————————————

questions:

PLAY

download

<< return to main conference page >>

The Institute of Philosophy  in association with Heythrop College presents:

Consciousness and the Will:

Celebrating the Work of Brian O’Shaughnessy

Event Date: 17th- 19th June 2010

——————————————

Mike Martin (UCL) – Keeping up with O’Shaughnessy’s Appearances

——————————————

talk:

PLAY

download

——————————————

questions:

PLAY

download

<< return to main conference page >>

The Institute of Philosophy  in association with Heythrop College presents:

Consciousness and the Will:

Celebrating the Work of Brian O’Shaughnessy

Event Date: 17th- 19th June 2010

——————————————

Thomas Crowther (Heythrop) – The Epistemic Function of Wakeful Consciousness

——————————————

talk:

PLAY

download

——————————————

questions:

PLAY

download

<< return to main conference page >>