ART as MATTER of AFFECT

10 December 2013 10am-1pm

Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, Utrecht

Attendance is free, registration required: nog@uu.nl

This symposium will assess the effects of material and affective turns in contemporary cultural theory on the production and reception of art and visual practices, situating the aesthetic experience as a relationship between the human and non-human, the material and immaterial, the social and physical, the analogue and the digital (Barrett and Bolt 2013). Different genres – e.g. installation, video, photography, new media – will be examined using the potential of perceptual modalities alternative to semiotics and iconography. The symposium will focus on mediations that are not purely cognitive, but also affective (a non-conscious, unstructured experience of intensity, Massumi 1987) and “intra-active” (circumscribed matter and meaning of the art work, as well as the self-contained viewer, emerge immanently from the aesthetic encounter, Barad 2007).

Conveners and chairs: Dr. Marta Zarzycka and Dr. Iris van der Tuin, Graduate Gender Programme, Utrecht University

Funding: Cultures&Identities, Utrecht University

Occasion: Zarzycka’s VENI-project Images at War: Photography, Gender and Humanitarian Aid, Van der Tuin’s VENI-project The Material Turn in the Humanities, the 2013-14 Doing Gender Lecture Series, and the publication of hoogland’s A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics after Representation (University Press of New England, 2014)

On Artistic Activity: Dialogism, Aesthesis, and Corporeality

dr. renée c. hoogland

In this paper, I revisit Kant’s “Transcendental Aesthetic” by way of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism and Alfred North Whitehead’s “critique of pure feeling” in order to explore different forms of art as singular modes of relating to the world. I develop my approach to art in its historical and sociocultural specificity as a site of experience that exceeds the determination and the materiality of objects while remaining rooted in the world because it only obtains in its affective, material, singular actualization. Music, perhaps the most “disembodied” form or art, as well as art jewelry, are examined to address different forms of art in their affective operations and, simultaneously, to inquire into the specific effects of any artistic event in the moment of its emergence and/or creation. While I argue for an understanding of the operations of all cultural expression as an embodied/embedded affective event, my aim is to foreground the singularity of any given artistic encounter in its irreducibility to object or form. Art, I conclude, qua event, constitutes a force with a certain autonomy, an activity of partial becoming that transforms, if only momentarily, our sense of our selves and our experience of the world, and thus opens up the possibility of novelty.

renée c. hoogland is Associate Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, and the editor of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts. Her most recent book, A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics after Representation, is forthcoming with the University Press of New England in January 2014.

Response: Dr. Birgit M. Kaiser

Birgit M. Kaiser is Assistant Professor at the Department of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her publications include Figures of Simplicity. Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville (SUNY Press 2011) and Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze. Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures (with L. Burns) (Palgrave MacMillan 2012). Currently, she is guest editor (with dr. Kathrin Thiele) of a special issue of Parallax on ‘Diffracted Worlds – Diffractive Readings: Onto-Epistemologies and the Critical Humanities’ (forthcoming July 2014).

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Media Studies and the Turns to Sociophenomenology

Dr. Amanda Lagerkvist

In this talk I will discuss what bearing the current emotional/affective and material turns in cultural theory have or could have on contemporary Media Studies. I will give examples of where these turns are most visible: in debates on residual media (Acland 2007), in explorations of mediated obscurity (Jansson & Lagerkvist 2009), in discussions about media mobilities and space (Timm Knudsen & Waade 2010), in the fields of media memory studies (Lagerkvist 2013), and death studies (Christensen & Sandvik 2012), and in the ever-growing area of internet studies (Sundén 2012). The paper argues for the emergence of a broad sociophenomenological framework for conceiving media and mediations, which allows us to embody, move and mobilise media theory in the direction of the lived experiences, materialities and performances in our media saturated world. What kind of media concept is incipient as media scholars embrace these turns in the move from the broadcasting age to the new media ecology? What are the gains and possible losses for media theory? Do these turns imply a particular politics (as regards gender, ethnicity, sexuality)?

Amanda Lagerkvist is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. She is the author of Media and Memory in New Shanghai: Western Performances of Futures Past (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), the co-editor of Strange Spaces: Explorations into Mediated Obscurity (Ashgate 2009), and the author of numerous articles on media space, mobilities and memory in journals such as Space & Culture, Journal of Visual Culture, European Journal of Communication and Television & New Media. Her research interests include relationships between (urban) space, mobilities and mediation, media and collective memory, digital memory cultures and existentialism.

Response: Marie-Pier Boucher

Marie-Pier Boucher is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. Her research draws upon complex systems theory, speculative pragmatism, outer space science and technology, and bio- and neurosciences in addressing architectural and spatial practices. Her work has been published in Arts & Biotechnologies (Presses de l’Université du Québec), Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (University of Edinburgh Press) and Parrhesia, a journal of critical philosophy.