Panel organisers:

Anne Beaulieu (STS);  Annamaria Carusi (Critical Theory/STS); Aud Sissel Hoel (Visual and Media Studies); Sarah de Rijcke (STS)

Researchers in STS, media theory and critical theory share an interest in mediated practices. Furthermore, science and technology studies and humanities based studies of media and culture (including film, art, literature, music) have common concerns with regards to representations, meaning systems, social and institutional aspects of science, media and culture, and the politics and ethics of interventions in these domains.  Researchers often draw upon overlapping perspectives and theories—though these are often deployed in different ways by scholars of science, and scholars of media and culture.  The aim of this panel is to build on precedents (Thacker’s Biomedia, van Dijck’s ImagEnation, etc.) and to further explore these overlaps and divergences, and the ways in which concepts, ideas approaches and perspectives might travel more effectively across science and technological studies, media studies and cultural studies.

We invite papers that show how a concept developed in one field can be used in the other, either via analysis of examples, by adopting a hybrid approach, or by theoretical reflection.

Papers for the panel could address:

• Relations between ideas of medium and technologies in STS and media/critical theory.
• Analyses of visual, textual, and audio objects that use a combined approach from STS and media/critical theory.
• Different ideas of agency (for example, in the context of authors and artists as well as social actors).
• Different understandings of interpretation as an act, practice and process.
• The relation between local and situated meanings on the one hand and general and abstract terms on the other, and issues of circulation of meaning in mediated settings.
• Approaches to contextualised ethics and socio-political responsibility or intervention that draw on STS and media/critical theory

If your are interested in submitting a paper for this panel, please do so via the conference website. Submission deadline: 18 March.

The Media Acts conference photographer Bård Ivar Basmo took a large amount of great pictures during the event (see his photos here), and this photo was taken during the preparations for my talk just before the conference started.

“I do not think I ever reflect in words.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (Peirce Papers; Ms. 619:8, 1909)

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)

March 21 and 22 this year I took part in a scholarly event quite out of the ordinary. The focal point of this event was a tableau of drawings made by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), exhibited here, in the premises of the Collegium for the Advanced Study of Picture Act and Embodiment (Humboldt University, Berlin), for the first time in history. As it turns out, Peirce drew incessantly throughout his life, quite literally sketching out his philosophical ideas. The Peirce Papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard, therefore, contain thousands and thousands of drawings, ranging from meticulous and bizarre notation systems and variational sequences of Kandinsky-like line drawings, via intricate labyrinths and physiognomies, to idle doodles and mere scribbles. With a view to the sheer amount of drawings Peirce left behind, and, not the least, with a view to the nature of his thinking (accentuating as it does the iconic or visual aspects of cognition), it is surprising that, until now, there has been made no attempts at systematizing or making sense of these drawings. Even the ambitious Peirce Edition Project has decided to leave out the majority of Peirce’s sketches. John Michael Krois, co-director (together with Horst Bredekamp) of the abovementioned Collegium, initiated this workshop to start rectifying this. Similar attempts are made by the Graduiertenkolleg Schriftbildlichkeit at the Free University of Berlin, directed by Sybille Krämer, where Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer is currently pursuing a postdoctoral project focusing on Peirce’s notation systems.

Speakers at the workshops were: Krois, Meyer-Krahmer, Helmut Pape (Berlin, Bamberg), Frederik Stjernfelt (Berlin, Aarhus), Mark A. Halawa (Duisburg), and Steffen Bogen (Konstanz). The discussants included Krämer, Bredekamp, Elise Bisanz (Lüneburg), Mirjam Wittmann (Wien), and Dieter Mersch (Potsdam).

The tableau of Peirce drawings where put together by Moritz Queisner (Berlin), Franz Engel (Berlin) and Tullio Viola (Berlin).

“All division of the manifold is held together by the form of the conceptual act of synthesizing and the conceptual act of separating, by a synopsis that is at the same time a diaeresis.”

Ernst Cassirer (“Mythic, Aesthetic and Theoretical Space,” 1969, pp. 8-9)

For several years now a variegated group of scholars interested in the thinking of the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) has met each year in Berlin to discuss one of Cassirer’s key texts. The annual Cassirer workshop is organized by Bernd Henningsen at the Nordeuropa-institut in collaboration with John Michael Krois, both at Humboldt University. I was invited to join this group last year, when the text to be subjected to scrutiny was “Form und Technik” (1930), a truly rich and thought-provoking essay where Cassirer deals explicitly with technology for the first time. The reason why I was invited was that a few years before, a colleague of mine in Trondheim, Ingvild Folkvord (Department of Modern Foreign Languages, NTNU), and I had edited a volume of texts by Cassirer in Norwegian, including the “Form und Technik” essay. (Ernst Cassirer:  Form og teknikk – Utvalgte tekster. Oslo: Cappelen, 2006).

From the Spiegelsaal staircase.

The text this year was “Mythic, Aesthetic and Theoretical Space” (1931, English version published in Man and World, 2 (1969): 3-17), which, by the way, is also contained in our Norwegian volume. Apart from Henningsen, Krois, Folkvord and myself, the discussants included, among others, Jean Lassègue (Paris), Mats Rosengren (Södertörn), Frederik Stjernfelt (Aarhus), Marion Lauschke (Berlin), and Franz Engel (Berlin). The discussion covered a great many topics, but two issues figured prominently, namely if and how to draw the line between aesthetic and theoretical space and what one is to make of Cassirer’s idea of “pure significance” (reine Bedeutung). My presentation, entitled “Kant, Cassirer and the Privilege of Mathematics,” compared a transcendental model of cognition, exemplified by Immanuel Kant’s approach in Critique of pure Reason, with what I referred to as a “differential” model of cognition, exemplified by Cassirer’s mature philosophy of symbols and tools. My main point was that Cassirer’s expansion of Kant’s critique of reason to a critique of culture is transformational: After the expansion cognition is no longer the same. What I was saying, then, is that Cassirer’s mature thinking expounds a model of knowledge that is not merely relational but in fact differential. Whereas the traditional transcendental model assigns constitutive power to the subject, conceiving cognition, therefore, on a dyadic model where the constitutive power is unidirectional, Cassirer expounds a model that is triadic. Constitutive power is not ascribed to “cognition as such” (whatever that might be) but to the intervening and essentially “foreign” symbols and tools, leaving us with a multidimensional and multidirectional view of knowledge. The process of objectivation is, for Cassirer, a differential process (see quote above). I also made some critical comments as to Cassirer’s tendency, like Kant before him, to privilege mathematics, even after his philosophy had taken a “symbolic turn.”

In the years to come, the annual Cassirer workshop will be organized differently, due to Henningsen’s retirement. Next year, therefore, the workshop will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden.

This time in Berlin I had the opportunity to spend a whole week in this city that intrigues me so much, renting an apartment in Schöneberg together with my colleague and travel companion, Ingvild (mentioned above), who, of course, also took part in the Cassirer workshop. In between my work sessions with Ingvild (we are editing yet another volume on Cassirer, this time in English) and my meetings with German colleagues, I also found the time to go to a classical concert which took place in the Spiegelsaal in Clärchens Ballhaus with its irresistible run-down splendour. My trip also included some minor excesses, such as for instance buying a fabulous dress in one of the independent designer shops in the Nollendorf neighbourhood. I simply love it! (Have to be careful now, not wanting my research blog to degenerate into a fashion blog. But one has to admit that Berlin is a shopping paradise when it comes to alternative fashion. Turning now to a safer subject like, well, the weather.) As elsewhere in Europe, this year’s winter in Berlin has been extraordinary long and hard. When I was there in February the temperatures were still freezing.