idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft

Nachrichten, Termine, Experten

Grafik: idw-Logo
Science Video Project
idw-Abo

idw-News App:

AppStore

Google Play Store

Veranstaltung


institutionlogo


17.11.2016 - 19.11.2016 | Berlin

The Politics of Form: What Does Art Know about Society?

What is the task of literature and the arts “when all heads turn towards useful subject matters dealing with administration, commerce, agriculture, import and export, and finances. […] In the midst of this spirit of calculation our taste for comfort expands and our enthusiasm is lost. […] It is a nice thing, this science of economics, but it turns us into morons.” (Denis Diderot, Salon of 1769)

“The situation becomes so complicated because a simple ‘rendering of reality’ says less than ever about reality. A photograph of the Krupp Works or of A.E.G. yields nearly nothing about these institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, such as the factory, no longer produces the latter. So there is in fact ‘something to construct,’ something ‘artificial’, something ‘put in place’.”
Bertolt Brecht, The Three-Penny Trial (1931)

What is the task of literature and the arts “when all heads turn towards useful subject matters dealing with administration, commerce, agriculture, import and export, and finances. […] In the midst of this spirit of calculation our taste for comfort expands and our enthusiasm is lost. […] It is a nice thing, this science of economics, but it turns us into morons.”
Denis Diderot, Salon of 1769

Diderot’s criticism here is in reference to Raynal’s multivolume history of European colonialism (Histoire des Deux Indes). What disquiets him is the mode of representation. Numbers and data narrow our perspective and thereby interfere with the actual task of critique, a task that, at every step along the way, requires attention to a larger context. Over 150 years later, Brecht puts this challenge in more radical terms: The focus on facts, as that which can be readily seen and objectively verified, makes it impossible to understand capitalism as something which is grounded in specific modes of social relations. Diderot and Brecht both respond to this “withdrawal of reality” with artistic means. Diderot participates in Raynal’s project and ‘theatricalizes’ it; Brecht, too, employs theatrical means in representing the social world in its complexity and contradictoriness. He advances a realism that harnesses the constructive powers of aesthetic form in order to undermine the mere appearance of what is right before our eyes.

Both Brecht and Diderot assert implicitly that aesthetics and epistemology ought to be thought of in conjunction, that art makes knowledge available by bridging the gap between the factual and the structural. At issue is not persuasive presentation (which would be the task of rhetoric), but how things are shaped into form. Where art is concerned, a mode of knowing is at play that does not differentiate any longer between the object and its representation. Art, as Adorno says, derives critical social meaning through the autonomy of its forms. The crisis of rhetoric was the politicization of form.

In light of the (ideal-typical) constellation 1769 – 1931 – 2016, our conference enquires into the historical genesis of aesthetic form and into the potential of contemporary art to serve by means of its form as – in Adorno’s words – “stand-in of a better praxis and the critique of praxis.” Aesthetic form, tentatively understood as construction or as mediation between ‘contents’ and modes of representation, is our main concern. Throughout this conference, its theoretical and practical vicissitudes will be at stake.

*******************

Programm

Thursday, November 17
14.00
Ulrich Plass, Matthias Rothe, Falko Schmieder: Welcome and Introduction

14.15–15.30 Keynote Lecture
Moderator: Eva Geulen (ZfL/HU Berlin)

Caroline Levine (Cornell University, Ithaca): Formalism for Change

15.45–17.45
Panel 1: Contemporary Artistic and Economic Practices
Moderator: Alexandra Heimes (ZfL)

Tom Holert (Berlin): Reconfiguring Practice: Contemporary Art's Organizational Response

Leigh Claire La Berge (CUNY, New York): Wages Against Artwork: The Social Practice of Decommodification

************************************************************************

19.00-20.30 Attention!
location: Kino Krokodil, Greifenhagener Str. 32, 10437 Berlin

Film Screening: Havarie, directed by Philip Scheffner

************************************************************************

Friday, November 18

10.00–12.00
Panel 2: New Forms of the Documentary
Moderator: Maria Kuberg (ZfL)

Maria Hofmann (U of Minnesota, Minneapolis): Documentary Film Between Telling and Showing the Truth

Hilde Hoffmann (Ruhr-Universität, Bochum): The Experience of Society: New Forms of the Documentary

13.00–15.00
Panel 3: Expanding Aesthetic Form 1
Moderator: Hannah Wiemer (ZfL)

Matthias Rothe: Mobilizing Critique: Brecht’s and Diderot's Expanded Theater

Rita Raley (U of California, Santa Barbara): The Asemic and the Crisis of the World

15.30–17.30
Panel 4: Expanding Aesthetic Form 2
Moderator: Ulrich Plass

Sianne Ngai (Stanford University, Stanford): Theory of the Gimmick

Anna Kornbluh (U of Illinois, Chicago): The Order of Forms

18.00 – 20.00
Roundtable Discussion: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Form
Moderators: Ulrich Plass, Matthias Rothe

Participants:
Heba Amin, visual artist, Berlin/Cairo
Merle Kröger, author/film producer, Berlin
Torsten Michaelsen, performance artist, Berlin
Eugen Ruge, author, Berlin
Philip Scheffner, director/video artist, Berlin

Saturday, November 19
10.30–12.30
Panel 5: Representation and Temporality
Moderator: Stefan Willer (ZfL/HU Berlin)

Alexandra Heimes (ZfL): Immanence, Repetition, and Revolution: De Sade's and Auguste Blanqui's Axiomatic Writings

Johannes Lehmann (U Bonn): Picturing the Situation: On the Genesis of Discursive and Aesthetic Methods of Rendering ‘the Present’ in the Late 18th Century

13.30–15.30
Panel 6: Literature and Social Totality 1
Moderator: Maria Hofmann

Christine Achinger (U of Warwick/U of Chicago): The End of the Story? Bourgeois Society and the Possibility of Literary Realism

Jette Gindner (Cornell U, Ithaca): Representing Fictitious Capital: Rainald Goetz’s »Johann Holtrop« and Christian Petzold’s »Yella«

15.45–17.45
Panel 7: Literature and Social Totality 2
Moderator: Jette Gindner

Suvadip Sinha (U of Minnesota, Minneapolis): Spaces of Literature: Imagining World through Rabindranath Tagore

Ulrich Plass: The Whole Is the True: Realism and Paranoid Knowledge

********************

Organized by Ulrich Plass (ZfL/Wesleyan U, Middletown), Matthias Rothe (U of Minnesota, Minneapolis), Falko Schmieder (ZfL)

Made possible with support from the University of Minnesota (Talle Faculty Research Award), Wesleyan University, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

Hinweise zur Teilnahme:

Termin:

17.11.2016 ab 14:00 - 19.11.2016 18:00

Veranstaltungsort:

Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung
Schützenstr. 18, 10117 Berlin, Trajekte-Tagungsraum 308
10117 Berlin
Berlin
Deutschland

Zielgruppe:

Studierende, Wissenschaftler

Relevanz:

international

Sachgebiete:

Kulturwissenschaften, Kunst / Design, Sprache / Literatur

Arten:

Konferenz / Symposion / (Jahres-)Tagung

Eintrag:

07.11.2016

Absender:

Sabine Zimmermann

Abteilung:

Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin (ZFL)

Veranstaltung ist kostenlos:

ja

Textsprache:

Englisch

URL dieser Veranstaltung: http://idw-online.de/de/event55935


Hilfe

Die Suche / Erweiterte Suche im idw-Archiv
Verknüpfungen

Sie können Suchbegriffe mit und, oder und / oder nicht verknüpfen, z. B. Philo nicht logie.

Klammern

Verknüpfungen können Sie mit Klammern voneinander trennen, z. B. (Philo nicht logie) oder (Psycho und logie).

Wortgruppen

Zusammenhängende Worte werden als Wortgruppe gesucht, wenn Sie sie in Anführungsstriche setzen, z. B. „Bundesrepublik Deutschland“.

Auswahlkriterien

Die Erweiterte Suche können Sie auch nutzen, ohne Suchbegriffe einzugeben. Sie orientiert sich dann an den Kriterien, die Sie ausgewählt haben (z. B. nach dem Land oder dem Sachgebiet).

Haben Sie in einer Kategorie kein Kriterium ausgewählt, wird die gesamte Kategorie durchsucht (z.B. alle Sachgebiete oder alle Länder).