CFP PhD Symposium - Questions of Scale in Contemporary Literature and Criticism - Ghent University, 23-25 March 2016 (original) (raw)
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Theorizing the Subject, 2020
Ever since the Greek philosophers and fabulists pondered the question "What is man?," inquiries into the concept of the subject have troubled humanists, eventuating in fierce debates and weighty tomes. In the wake of the Descartes's cogito and Enlightenment thought, proposals for an ontology of the idealist subject's rationality, autonomy, and individualism generated tenacious questions regarding the condition of pre-consciousness, the operation of feelings and intuitions, the subject-object relation, and the origin of moral and ethical principles. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Marx, and theorists he and Engels influenced, pursued the materialist bases of the subject, through analyses of economic determinism, self-alienation, and false consciousness. Through another lineage, Freud and theorists of psychic structures pursued explanations of the incoherence of a split subject, its multipartite psychodynamics, and its relationship to signifying systems. By the latter 20th century, theorizations of becoming a gendered woman by Beauvoir, of disciplining power and ideological interpellation by Foucault and Althusser, and of structuralist dynamics of the symbolic realm expounded by Lacan, energized a succession of poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist, queer, and new materialist theorists to advance one critique after another of the inherited concept of the liberal subject as individualist, disembodied (Western) Man. In doing so, they elaborated conditions through which subjects are gendered and racialized and offered explanatory frameworks for understanding subjectivity as an effect of positionality within larger formations of patriarchy, slavery, conquest, colonialism, and global neoliberalism. By the early decades of the 21st Formatted: Centered Deleted: Nineteenth Deleted: Twentieth Deleted: Twentieth Deleted: racialized, and Deleted: Twenty-first century, posthumanist theorists dislodged the subject as the center of agentic action and distributed its processual unfolding across trans-species companionship, trans-corporeality, algorithmic networks, and conjunctions of forcefields. Persistently, theorists of the subject referred to an entangled set of related but distinct terms, such as the human, person, self, ego, interiority, and personal identity. And across diverse humanities disciplines, they struggled to define and refine constitutive features of subject formation, most prominently relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment.
Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 2014
is a valuable encyclopedic guide to the explosion of theory of the last forty years. It offers alphabetized, cross-referenced introductions both to major figures in literary and cultural criticism and to many, if not most, of the key movements in the field, such as cultural studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, as well as to less obvious areas such as ethics and the conjunction of law and literature. This is not an anthology of theorists' writing or a general history of theory. But what it does, it does well. Most of the major figures and key movements can be found here, and the two-to six-page entries clearly sum up their impact and point to the most important primary and secondary works. The text, therefore, effectively meets its goal of providing an "easy to access" reference for scholars and students "who do not have specialized knowledge" in the field (ix). The editors provide brief, clear overviews of forty-eight major figures in Western literary and cultural criticism of the last fifty years. Entries, in alphabetical order, cover the temporal spectrum from Sigmund Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure to current prominent thinkers in the field, such as Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben. The majority of the thinkers represented here, however, began their academic studies in the middle of the twentieth century and were therefore well positioned to take prominent roles in shaping theoretical approaches in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. This selection of theorists represents Anglo-American,
London Conference of Critical Thought 2015
The Return of Actor-Network Theory: During the last ten years there has been an unexpected resurgence of interest in the body of literature-cum-methodological toolkit known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and primarily associated with Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. A cross-disciplinary revival, it encompasses philosophy and media theory (the new materialisms, ‘thing theory’, and the Object-Oriented Philosophy of Graham Harman and his adherents), the digital humanities (the rise of digital methods for tracing networks in social science research), and the history and sociology of art (through the recent work on networks of human and nonhuman actors in avant-garde genres), amongst other disciplines. But this development is an intriguing one, not least because it was declared as early as the late 1990s that ANT was defunct, and that the name should be discarded. For example, in an essay called ‘On recalling ANT’, Latour announced that there were four ‘nails in the coffin’ for actor-network theory: ‘the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen!’ Some aspects of this resurgence are simple enough to comprehend. Arriving just ahead of the World Wide Web, ANT would anticipate the vogue for thinking in terms of ‘networks’ as opposed to bordered entities such as ‘nation’, ‘institution’, and ‘society’, even if its own understanding of the concept was different to the topological webs of data it now seems to invoke. Similarly, its controversial injunction to afford agency to human and non-human actors alike, accepting no a priori asymmetry between them, can be seen as an important antecedent to the renewed turn towards materiality and the corresponding critique of anthropocentrism that has been gestating for some time in the humanities. But ANT has been criticised for its philosophical naïveté, its underdeveloped account of power, and its presentism, amongst other things. The time seems ripe to review the merits and limitations of ANT inside of this renewed context, asking whether its takeup in philosophy, media theory, and history of art reinvigorates ANT or repeats its perceived failings. This stream invites papers that a) Consider the contemporary currency of ANT as methodological practice: • Issues of translation: what frictions/novelties emerge when ANT is ‘applied’ outside of the Science and Technology Studies field in which it was originally developed? • Digital methods and ANT: the World Wide Web as a medium to locate and analyse networks: e.g. political controversies, social networks, art genres and movements etc. b) Critically engage with the legacy and philosophical presuppositions of ANT: • Empiricity and the place of the transcendental in ANT. • The mutation of ANT into Object-Oriented Ontology: Graham Harman as a reader of Latour. • ANT and ‘posthumanism’, or the critique of anthropocentrism: is there room for the subject in ANT? • The relationship between ANT and other important accounts of technological mediation, such as Derrida’s concept of originary technicity - recently taken up and expanded by Bernard Stiegler and David Wills. • Latour’s critique of modernity and the nature-culture / subject-object dichotomy, plus its relationship to earlier (dialectical, phenomenological, structuralist, post-structuralist) analyses.