CRASSH

Chair: Dr Alexander Marr

A public conversation between Professor Ann Jefferson (University of Oxford and currently a Fellow of the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies) and Professor Darrin McMahon (Dartmouth College) about the history of genius and organised as part of the Genius before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and Science research project.

Professor Jerome McGann (University of Virginia) will give a public lecture as part of the CRASSH Mellon CDI Visitng Fellowship programme.

Abstract

As my title suggests, Hans-George Gadamer's dialectic of enlightenment is my point of reference. I mean to recover and revise Gadamer's thought by shifting it from a philosophical to a philological perspective. From the living example of certain individuals, I propose a model of humanist enquiry that seems to me worth preserving and emulating, particularly now when educational policy is reinvesting so heavily in a technical expertise offered by the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics)

The sixth Balzan Skinner Lecture with Balzan Skinner Fellow 2014-15 Dr Anna Becker.

While ‘gender’ is a well-established subject in many historical disciplines, such as cultural history, social history and global history, the same cannot be said for the history of political thought. Especially once we turn to the sort of early modern political thought that can be seen as republican in a broad sense, women seem to disappear. They are simply not political: they are not citizens, they cannot participate in the sphere of the city or the commonwealth. In my lecture I shall develop a methodological approach to the question of how to write gender in and into the history of political thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms and show – as Joan Scott has suggested – that gender is indeed a ‘useful category’ in the history of political thought.

Katherine Hayles - A Theory of the Total Archive: Infinite Expansion, Infinite Compression, and Apparatuses of Control

Keynote / Public Lecture from the conference The Total Archive

Conference Summary

Conveners

Boris Jardine (University of Cambridge)

Matthew Drage (University of Cambridge, PhD candidate)

Ruth Horry (University of Cambridge)

Summary

The complete system of knowledge is a standard trope of science fiction, a techno-utopian dream and an aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon’s House, the Encyclopaedia and the Museum. It is also an ideology – of Enlightenment, High Modernism and absolute governance.

Far from ending the dream of a total archive, twentieth-century positivist rationality brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum to Mass-Observation, from the Unity of Science movement to Isaac Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica, from the Whole Earth Catalog to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies hard. These projects triumphantly burst their own bounds, generating more archival material, more information, than can ever be processed. When it encounters well defined areas – the sportsfield or the model organism – the total archive tracks every movement of every player, of recording every gene and mutation. Increasingly this approach is inverted: databases are linked; quantities are demanded where only qualities existed before. The Human Genome Project is the most famous, but now there are countless databases demanding ever more varied input. Here the question of what is excluded becomes central.

The total archive is a political tool. It encompasses population statistics, GDP, indices of the Standard of Living and the international ideology of UNESCO, the WHO, the free market and, most recently, Big Data. The information-gathering practices of statecraft are the total archive par excellence, carrying the potential to transfer power into the open fields of economics and law – or divest it into the hands of criminals, researchers and activists.

Questions of the total archive engage key issues in the philosophy of classification, the poetics of the universal, the ideology of surveillance and the technologies of information retrieval. What are the social structures and political dynamics required to sustain total archives, and what are the temporalities implied by such projects?

In order to confront the ideology and increasing reality of interconnected data-sets and communication technologies we need a robust conceptual framework – one that does not sacrifice historical nuance for the ability to speculate. This conference brings together scholars from a wide range of fields to discuss the aesthetics and political reality of the total archive.

Conference Summary

What is criticism? There is a telling irony in the fact that a word concerned with the making of clear separations and distinctions (< Greek krinein) should be used of early modern practices so various and so very often blurred in their disciplinary affiliation, method, aim, and indeed location. Thinking about literature and the visual arts is found in many places – in treatises on the arts of poetry or painting; in defences, apologies, praises, and paragoni; in critical prefaces, dedicatory epistles, commendatory verses, letters, and essays; in commentaries, editions, reading notes, and commonplace books; within or on the thresholds of works of poetry and painting (and in the on-stage audience of the play-within-a-play). It is situated between different disciplines and methods – borrowing structure, terminology, and taxonomy from rhetoric and logic, for example, or using the analogy of one art to think about another, as when Renaissance literary theorists build on a long tradition (it is there in Aristotle, and in Homer) of thinking about the visual arts in order to think about poetry, fiction, and mimēsis. Critical ideas and methods come into England from other places, most notably Italy, France, and the Low Countries, and take root in particular locations – the court, the Inns of Court, the theatre, the great house, the university hall, school, and library. And commonplaces of classical poetics and rhetoric – decorum, speaking pictures, nature and art, necessity and probability – serve both to connect and to measure the space between different critical discourses. Tracing the history of the development of early modern thinking about literature and the visual arts therefore requires that one think about various kinds of place – both material and textual – and the practices particular to those places; it also requires that those different places be brought into dialogue with each other. This is work that has yet to be done, and its lack accounts for the ongoing reluctance of many critics, literary historians, and art historians to engage fully with early modern thinking about the very materials they study. This conference will bring together scholars working in departments of English, modern languages, classics, and art history to look at the many different places of early modern criticism. It aims to initiate a dialogue involving scholars who are interested in the scope of criticism, and in looking at what happens on its margins; and who are keen to interrogate their own critical practices and disciplinary methods by investigating their history.

CRASSH Mellon CDI Visiting Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah (New York University) in conversation with Professor Ash Amin (University of Cambridge).

Abstract

“Cosmopolitanism” is an ancient idea – that we are – or should aspire to be –citizens of the world and not merely beholden to a local community. This originally Epicurean and then Christian ideal has become one of the most pressing issues in modern ethics and political thought thanks to the brilliant work of Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers inaugurated a debate that has also been taken forward by Martha Nussbaum and Danielle Allen. If globalization has become the condition of modern society what are the implications for ethical action? Can we care for distant others as vividly as we do for our own immediate ties? How do the claims of a universal ethics stand against the recognition of cultural difference? What “habits of co-existence” are required to make the global world habitable? What narrative or moral or affective obligations make sense in or across modern societies?

Test for encoding purposes.

Gandhian nonviolence is often misconstrued as a static moral injunction against violence or simply a condemnation of violent resistance. Gandhi himself is portrayed as a saintly idealist, pacifist, or purveyor of conviction politics – a moral critic of politics, speaking from standpoint of conscience and truth. I aim to show why this view of Gandhi and Gandhian politics is misleading. Against the saint-as-politician, or the moral man of conscience, I pursue Gandhi’s political thinking from the vantage point of Gandhi the political actor and innovator who vividly understood that politics is closely bound to the possibility of violence. This was the core of Gandhi’s realism – a view of politics as shaped by endemic tendencies towards conflict, domination, and violence coupled with an account of how nonviolent political action can constrain and mitigate these same tendencies to effect progressive change.

When ends are pursued without sufficient attention to the practical means necessary to enact them, for Gandhi, it gives free reign to the negative entailments of politics: to forms of incitation and indignation, resentment and hostility that dehumanize political opponents; and to psychological temptations towards violence and attendant forms of moral erosion. This lecture explores Gandhi’s understanding of the negative passions and egoistic dispositions that both enable and are enabled by the dynamics of political contestation. I consider Gandhi’s account of the moral psychology of violence alongside the analyses of Max Weber and Reinhold Niebuhr – thinkers particularly significant for the development of realism in the twentieth century. I aim to show how Gandhi’s political thought bridged developments in both Indian and Western intellectual traditions and political repertoires to produce a novel synthesis and provocation.

Mark Mazower, Ira B. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University, will give a public lecture as part of the CRASSH Mellon CDI Visiting Fellowship Programme.

Mark Mazower is Ira B. Wallach professor of history at Columbia University. Trained in classics, philosophy and history at Oxford, and in international affairs at Johns Hopkins University, he is the author of several books on the history of Greece, modern Europe and international affairs. These include: Inside Hitler's Greece: the Experience of Occupation, 1941-44 (Yale, 1993), Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (Penguin, 1998), Salonica: City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 (HarperCollins, 2004), Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (Penguin, 2008) and most recently Governing the World: the History of an Idea (Penguin, 2012). He comments regularly on international affairs for the Financial Times and the Guardian, and reviews for the TLS, the New York Times, the LRB and other journals.