Event overview
Scales of Relation – Visual Cultures Public Programme Summer 2014
Anke Hennig (Free University, Berlin) - ‘Poetonomy’ and the Methodology of Error
Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre
Thursday 15th May
5.00-7.00pm
In the first half of the Twentieth Century, Russian Formalism thought of art as a device for the estrangement of everyday experience. Life needed to be freed from the automatization imposed by political, economic, social and media technologies which constrained it within their modes of operation and forms of relation. A significant strategy for attempts to reveal the form of such apparatuses became the methodology of error, as, for instance, in Viktor Shklovsky’s Monument to a Scientific Error (1930). Certain practices of contemporary art, such as Peter Dittmer’s poetry-machine Die Amme (literally 'wet nurse', 1993-2006) adopt strategies that resonate with Shklovsky’s conception of error, but also go a step further by making it into a systematic method with which to speculate on chance, in this case by disarranging linguistic material through error. It is well known that, when an error occurs, technology meets its material limits and its measurements go off the scale. In this talk, drawing parallels between Russian Formalism and recent work in 'speculative poetics', I will explore how a scale of measurement can connect technology to materials and will examine how errors cause technologies to become visible. Central to this will be Ulf Stolterfoht's Ammengespräche ('Wet Nurse Dialogues', 2010), a discursive engagement with Die Amme that evidences the failures of Dittmer’s apparatus and suggests itself as a model of the ‘poetonomic’.
Anke Hennig teaches at the Freie Universität Berlin in the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature and is a Research Fellow in the Collaborative Research Centre 626 ‘Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits’. Her research interests lie in poetics and the philosophy of literature. She has widely published on the poetics of Russian Formalism, Russian avant-garde media theory, and on the aesthetics of totalitarianism. Her recent publications have addressed the chronotopology of cinematic fiction, the present-tense novel, and speculative poetics. She is the author of Sowjetische Kinodramaturgie (2010) and, in cooperation with Armen Avanessian, co-author of Präsens. Poetik eines Tempus (2012) and Metanoia. Spekulative Ontologie der Sprache (2014).
Scales of Relation
Issues of scale have taken on great importance for a wide range of contemporary artistic, scientific, philosophical and political practices. One might take this to signal the emergence of novel problems of scale, which have provoked changes in conceptions of the scalar and in the methodologies one might use to understand that which scales of different kinds promise to delineate.
In differing ways and at different registers, a concern for scale marks and cuts across the recent resurgence of interest in Marxist thought, discourses of biopower and biopolitics, the continuing influence of Lefebvre’s notion of Rhythmanalysis and the conceptual frameworks offered by Actor Network Theory. It is also one way of describing a central concern of Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism, namely, their challenges to thinking on the scale of the human subject. Importantly, and perhaps most obviously, the widening gap between levels of individual agency and globalized geo-political processes - which articulates recent work on ecological and environmental issues as well as attempts to theorize the politics of security and risk - presents difficult questions of a pressing and obviously scaled nature. On these bases, one might ask whether the promise of measure, proportion and resolution held out by the ability to ascertain the scale of things now finds itself deranged. Whilst thinking about geo-political processes in terms of their scales may be familiar from decades of research on political geography, arguably, new de- and re-scaled realities have emerged to put into question the understanding of political territories and social processes that might be offered by such existing methodologies. The exponential growth and speed of exchange that gives shape to the visual cultures of the Internet plays out, for instance, in the spatial and temporal terms of mediatized embodied experiences that are characterised by the global scope of unprecedented and unpredictable scales of social and political relation.
Scales of Relation seeks to foreground and to explore some of these questions and conceptions of scale. The series brings together speakers whose work registers, in some way, the importance of relations of scale. It sets out to ask how the scale of things, their modes of scalability and intensified amenability to being de- or re-scaled – as well as the scales at which one might view or conceive of these - have become a theme of contemporary concern.
Chair: Andy Fisher
…all welcome
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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15 May 2014 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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