Dissolving the Subject: History and Philosophy of Flow

Keynote address

“Floating Signifiers on the Mississippi: Herman Melville’s Confidence Man.”

Response

10:00

Bodies and Circulation: The Economy of Flow

8) From Goethe's 'Pflanze' to Ford's 'Plant': The Comparison of Two Cultural Symbols

--Christian Weber, German and History & Philosophy of Science, Indiana University

Both models, however, share some common features, and their promoters, it seems, agree in particular about one crucial and fundamental aspect – they are both proponents of a philosophy of flux. Goethe’s version of it is encapsulated in a verse of the “Metamorphose der Pflanzen”, which also comprises a poetic (pre)-conception of the Bildungsroman: “Bildsam ändre der Mensch selbst die bestimmte Gestalt”. In Ford’s autobiography this sounds similar but a bit less poetic: “Life, as I see it, is not a location, but a journey. […] Everything is in flux, and was meant to be. Life flows.” However, it is also a matter of agency, and herein – as well as in other aspects – Goethe and Ford depart. In fact, the Fließband of Ford’s plant is ultimately an inversion and revision of Goethe’s concept of the metamorphosis of plants.

I conclude my presentation with a flighty glance at some texts from the vast amount of German travel literature of the 1920s, in which both conservative and socialist authors of diametrically different political stances agree on their rejection of the Ford plant and thus confirm their own cultural bias.
Christian Weber is a PhD candidate in Germanic Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is writing his dissertation on “Goethe’s Critique of Imagination” (working title). Other interests include: Literature and Philosophy of the Enlightenment (esp. Lessing, Herder, and Kant), Romanticism & Early Modernism (esp. Kleist, Kafka), ‘Realism’ in Literature (Johnson), Fordism, ‘Americanism’ and ‘Anti-Americanism’ in Europe, Philosophy of Biology.
9) Liquid Agencies in Thomas Heywood's 'Fair Maid of the West'

--Hillary Eklund, English, Duke University

--Isabel Kranz, Media of History-History of Media Graduiertenkolleg, Bauhaus University Weimar

This history is intimately related to the retreat into private space that took place in the 19^th century: While life in the metropolis became an endless flux of people and commodities, the home promised a safe haven from the bewildering mosaic of the street. Here, the bourgeois citizen could relax from the strains of keeping up his public persona. At home, stability was cherished, whereas commercial life required continuous progress.

How does the aquarium in the bourgeois drawing room fit into this picture of neatly separated spheres? What dreams were attached to these installations? What visions were manifested in confining the movement of living creatures for the purpose of display? Should we consider these aquariums merely as decorative artworks or as precursors to cinema and television screens? What concepts of nature and culture are rendered by domesticating sea life?

Analyzing mostly popular French magazines of the time, the purpose of this paper is to provide some theses on the relationship between the bourgeois fascination with marine life and the desire to control exotic worlds by incorporating them into the private home. By doing so, I hope to come to a better understanding of the concept of the bourgeois interior as hinted at in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.

--Abigail Derecho, Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University

These new paratexts are appropriations of existing media works. They are consumer productions, made possible by increasingly affordable and accessible digital media. However, these recent additions to the flows of media have not gone unchecked by corporate media producers. Rather, consumers who appropriate media texts have operated for the last two decades in a climate of censorship. In this paper, I will trace the history of legislative and legal battles, beginning in the mid-1980s, surrounding the question of whether and how media audiences should be allowed to transform existing texts. I will discuss how a discourse of “theft vs. art” has informed these debates, and will investigate the philosophical underpinnings and assumptions of the theft vs. art opposition, drawing upon Derrida’s idea of the “archontic” as both a drive to archive (gather together) and limit (determine what gets to be in the archive, and what must be kept out of the archive).

Keynote address

Title [TBA]

Roundtable discussion

The Rhythm and Regulation of Flow

12) The Flow of Traffic: Adorno on Poetic Language in Late Capitalism

--Heather Fielding, English, Brown University
For Adorno, “flow” is a useful metaphor for the poetic dimension of language, which resists the reifying logic of instrumental reason. In this respect, flow implies constant movement, as opposed to the discrete teleological motion of an instrument, or static homogeneous invariability. This paper examines Adorno’s essay “Punctuation Marks,” which complicates this concept of poetic flow by describing it with a technological metaphor.

Adorno usually relies on inorganic but non-technological metaphors to describe poetic language. Rustling leaves and constellations are his prominent figures for describing language that cannot be reduced either to a technological tool or to an aspect of a human subject who uses it. Adorno argues that punctuation marks function poetically, because they cannot be fully assimilated to the semantic and open up a single written text to a multiplicity of oral readings. But instead of choosing a figure of a river, or a planet’s orbit, to describe this function, Adorno figures the punctuation mark as a traffic light regulating the flow of language in a text. The poetic dimension of language turns out to be precisely technological.

In this metaphor, the poetic traffic signal makes a text heterogeneous, since it transforms immobile written signs into a moving flow of traffic. But this kind of heterogeneity is not opposed to the instrumental mode of thought Adorno associates with late capitalism, since traffic lights are instruments that calm, contain, and regulate an overflow of cars. Traffic lights, that is, seem to replace an uncontrolled heterogeneity with a totally reified, efficient homogeneity. However, Adorno theorizes that instrumental technology as a kind of poetic heterogeneity, a flow that must necessarily be arrested, managed, and controlled. In late capitalism, Adorno suggests, the flow of the poetic must always already be instrumental; the poetic’s ability to resist reification comes from the interior of reification itself.
Heather Fielding is a PhD candidate in the English department at Brown University. She is at work on a dissertation entitled "The Noise of Modernism: Literature, Technology, and Reification." Using critical approaches from media theory and Marxist theory, she argues that as a contradictory response to the objectifying imperatives of reification, modernism models literature on technology and imagines the literary text as a device with automatically moving parts. She is the organizer of a Mellon Workshop and lecture series, "Critical Approaches to Modernity," and has presented papers at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts and at the Technisierung/Ästhetisierung conference sponsored by the Technical University, Darmstadt, Germany.
13) Time/Frame: Flows of Duration in Hiroshi Sugimoto's 'Theaters' Series

--Tina Gregory, Art History, The Graduate Center (CUNY)

This discussion touches on historical attempts to “frame and encode” the temporal in artistic theory and practice, including Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura and its reliance on concepts of flow, and Etienne Jules-Marey’s nineteenth-century attempts to interrupt and examine the flow of bodily movement through photography. Primarily, it argues for a reading of Sugimoto’s contemporary practice in light of Gilles Deleuze’s second volume on cinema, The Time Image. Focusing on Deleuze’s reworking of Bergson’s concept of durée, it positions the formal and conceptual practice of timing and framing present in Sugimoto’s photographs as conversant with Deleuzian spatio-temporal demarcations, and analyses their relationship to (and reliance on) the concept of temporal flow as a continuous, indivisible entity. For this particular moment in Deleuze’s analysis, and for Sugimoto’s meticulous photographic practice, temporal flow is not interrupted, but analysed; not arrested, but harnessed. Overall, this paper seeks to provide a critical model for discussing cinematic concepts of spatio-temporal flow into the ongoing debates on photographic representation.

--Robert G. Ryder, Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University

But if a melody is one kind of flow, rhythm is another: while also using the metaphor of music, Émile Benveniste writes that “one can be lead to understand that rhythmos, significantly, [is] literally ‘a particular manner of flow’ [manière particulière de fluer].” By looking closely at the musical examples in these two contexts, this paper is concerned with the difference between Husserl’s melodic flow and Benveniste’s rhythmic one. Why, for instance, would Husserl’s use of the melody to exemplify a specific temporal object preclude a discussion of the melody’s rhythm? Is it even possible to separate melody from rhythm? In Stiegler’s final chapter of La désorientation, where he also discusses Husserl’s primary retention as a melodic flow, there is no mention of rhythm. This paper argues that rhythm, as its own “particular manner of flow,” is an essential element when considering Husserl’s notions of the temporal object (and therefore of the temporality of consciousness in general), and offers possibilities for how rhythm is to be implemented.

4:30

The Pandemic: Fluid Communities

15) The Pen and the Syringe: Autoimmunity and the (Un)readability of Flowing Blood

--Neal DeRoo, Philosophy, Boston College
This paper will examine Derrida’s critique of the “autoimmunity” of Western “tele-technoscientific” culture. It is by way of this “autoimmunity” that Western culture (with its fetishes for telecommunication, technology, and science) attempts to purify itself from all that would pollute what it considers “sacred.” To illustrate this “autoimmunity,” I will examine language in this “tele-technoscientific” culture, and show how it seeks to “purify” itself from the living body by abstracting, universalizing, and symbolizing the body in discourse. By so doing, it purifies itself of the flowing blood of the living body, and sanitizes the body into little more than symbols.

Next, I will show how Derrida challenges this conception of language. In “Circumfession,” Derrida attempts to re-introduce the living body into Western language by equating writing with flowing blood (that of his own circumcision and of his mother’s bed sores). By so doing, he shows the dual inadequacy of Western language to systematize the body: first, by attempting to systematize it in a form that excludes the flowing of blood in the actual living body (i.e. a phallocentric, or a phallogocentric systematization); second, by making writing/flowing blood, that is, writing as a flowing of blood and the flow of writing as/in one’s own blood, “unreadable.” Indeed, it is precisely because the (male) body is abstracted, universalized, and symbolized in discourse that the actual, living, bleeding body cannot be read there. This “unreadability” of flowing blood emphasizes the exclusion of the living body from Western discourse. This exclusion, in turn, is emblematic of a deeper exclusion that lies at the heart of Western “tele-technoscientific” culture and necessitates a search for community (from the Latin com-munitio, “common defense”) that lies at the heart of Western autoimmunity.

Neal DeRoo is currently in the Philosophy PhD program at Boston College. Previously, he received a Master’s of Arts degree from the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His Master’s thesis, entitled “Confluent Confessions: The Flowing Together of Deconstruction and/as Religious Confession,” examined Derrida’s critique of religious confessions, situating it within a larger Derridean critique of a particular type of exclusion that was connected to patriarchy and, in Derrida’s words, to the “tele-technoscientific” culture of the “globo-latinzed” world. He has participated in conferences on topics ranging from Augustine to Merleau-Ponty to the recent theological movement known as “Radical Orthodoxy.” His undergraduate work was done at Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, MI.
16) How the Bird Flew: Analyzing Discourses of National Accountability and Global Responsibility in Response to the Threat of a Global Avian Flu Pandemic

--Nick Muntean, Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas-Austin

Over the past year, American media outlets have devoted ever-increasing attention to the "bird flu" (aka "avian flu", "H5N1 virus") and its potential ability to mutate from a an isolated Eurasian environmental issue into a global health crisis. While much of this discourse has centered around the possibility of the virus' ability to mutate from an avian strain into one that can be passed amongst humans, considerable focus has also been paid to the ways in which various countries have (or haven't) applied energy and resources to preventing and/or containing flu outbreaks within their respective national boundaries.

The manner in which these national responses to a fluid, migratory, trans-national problem have been portrayed in American media outlets allows for several points of analysis, particularly, the processes through which the potentially global nature of this health problem have been localized to the accountability (and, in some cases, culpability) of individual nations. Furthermore, by examining the ways in which these discourses are constructed and presented in the national American press, it is possible to analyze how notions of "first-world" and "third-world" nations are contemporaneously constructed in binary opposition to one another while serving to re-entrench conceptions of globalization and the "global village" as a foregone conclusion.

The primary sources of analysis for this project are American print media outlets, such as Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times. Much of the theory informing this analysis comes from Arjun Appadurai's work on globalization, particularly his notions of ideoscapes, mediascapes, and technoscapes. By analyzing the ways this fluid threat is conceptualized in national and international terms, it is possible to come to a greater understanding of the processes through which we construct notions of national and international responsibility in light of pre-existing notions of the developmental status of particular nations.
Nick Muntean completed his Bachelor's degree at Johns Hopkins University, earning a double degree in Philosophy and Film & Media Studies. He is now pursuing his Master's degree in the Media Studies Program of the Radio-Television-Film department at University of Texas - Austin. Primary fields of interest are the ways in which new technologies remediate society and cultural practices, the consolidation of media ownership and its effects on popular conceptions of the idea of "authority", and the notion of a "final draft" in news stories on corporate media websites.
17) Clouds at Speed: Swarm Dynamics and Flexible Topologies

--Sebastian Vehlken, Media of History-History of Media Graduiertenkolleg, Bauhaus University Weimar

The term swarm seems to have become a paradigmatic mode of representing collectivities whose complexity and internal dynamics exceed the conceptual framework of what might be called network science. In contrast to the basically static topology of networks which highlight the spatial organization of a network over its dynamic development in time, swarms challenge this notion of space and time, and thus undermine the ideas of the Cartesian geometry. Since communication and movement amalgamate, the swarm additionally evokes an information theory without channels – a concept of networks without nodes and edges.

Not unlike clouds, swarms are fuzzy phenomenons. They paradoxically put themselves in a concrete form by an ‘indifferencialization’ of single elements into a dynamic, heterogenous multiplicity. Swarms therefore represent a constant flow, fluctuation, and morphology that is not representable in logics of cause and effect or by other rational measures.

I would like to examine two approaches that nevertheless made an effort to arrest the dynamics of swarms, and in the same instant indicate an epistemological transformation in the know-ledge of swarm behavior. On the one hand an early biological and ethologic approach (around 1900), that tried to understand the superorganisms of social animals such as bees or fish. On the other hand a later cybernetic knowledge of those swarms, which modelled animal group behavior in terms of mathematical information theory (as early as in the Macy Conferences around 1950) and, as an outcome, prepared the field for a later biologically inspired computer science. But while the earlier approach quickly began to serve as an (ideological) blueprint for a ‘State of nature’ (Eugene Thacker), the latter neutralized these political metaphors, replacing them with technological notions. This liberation seems, from my point of view, to be the initial condition for today’s euphorical and interdisciplinary use of the dispositive (Michel Foucault) of the swarm – from anti-hegemonial smart mobs to a swarming in military affairs.
Sebastian Vehlken is a scholarship holder of the Graduate School Mediale Historiographien (Media of History - History of Media) of Bauhaus-University Weimar, University of Erfurt and Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. He works on a PhD project entitled Swarms. Medialities and Policies of Fuzziness. He studied Film- and Television Studies, Publicity and Communication Studies, and Economics at Ruhr-University Bochum and Media Studies at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. In 2004, Mr Vehlken graduated with a M.A. thesis on Stafford Beer's Cybersyn network and Operations Room in Chile during the era of Salvador Allende. He is especially interested in the (techno-) history of the computer, cybernetics, and recently in mobile networks, processes of self-coordination, emergent behavior in complex systems, and animate architecture.

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