Worlding, Writing: New Critical Genres
Affiliated Faculty: Judy Farquhar, Bernard Harcourt, Joe Masco, William Mazzarella and Patchen Markell
This module explores new modes of writing and reading—not in an effort to affirm expertise but to imagine productive idioms for critical engagement and assemble novel ways of attending to socio-political phenomena. Through the pursuit of what Bruno Latour calls “interobjectivity” and by encouraging promiscuous disciplinary entanglements, the fundamental purpose here is to generate fresh genres of writing and ways of reading that transgress discipline-bound conventions and induce frame-shifting environments. We ask: What are the new media conjunctures (such as blogging, tweeting, 24-hour news, and e-movements) for communicating thought, and how and when do these operate to cultivate political action (if they do)? How should we imagine the relations between reading rigorously and reading openly? What does it take to construct a knowledge environment in which it matters how people know about their worlds because these worlds demand curiosity and generate new questions?
It is also worth asking what these clustered questions might have to do with the many public, economic, and institutional crises concerning the university’s function that are emerging locally and globally right now. These pose questions as to which kinds of experimental knowledge are supported and which seen as trivial, immaterial, or destructive; how vocational versus intellectual training is valued and for whom; whether and when arguments about education as a public good will include anti-normative knowledge; how research as a vocation should be supported in relation to teaching; who ought to be "served" by education—a consuming public, a general public, other researchers, etc. Each of these quandaries transforms what kinds of register and medium academic work would employ: all of them assume that knowledge production maintains, sustains, and engenders worlds. A project of writing differently inevitably raises the question of reconceiving the historical present. World-making happens amidst the urgencies that mark the present as a space in transition. Producing knowledge amidst transition requires a vigorous experimentality that attends to what is unfolding, what seems discontinuous, and what remains suspended in the poetics of mediation itself.
We propose to build on the enthusiasm generated among graduate students and faculty members by our spring 2010 Worlding, Writing Symposium (which featured a global group of writer-scholars from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, science studies, and critical theory) for a worlding, writing module at the University of Chicago.
Arts of Non-Sovereignty
The Worlding, Writing Project at 3CT is organizing a series of discussions entitled The Arts of Non-Sovereignty. Underwriting this project is the sense that being non-sovereign—being out of control—is a profoundly personal and social condition of ordinariness. In three related events over the course of the year we address non-sovereignty from a range of perspectives, using different critical approaches and concepts. The first event addresses non-sovereignty from within the intimate and institutional relations that family life coordinates. The second focuses on the experience of out-of-controledness and is organized around the concepts of risk and chance. The third examines the experience of non-sovereignty, not as disorder but as a felt excess of order.
Losing it: Families, Chaos and the Arts of Attention
November 4 – 5, 2011
Hailing from anthropology, literature, and media studies, the participating artists/writers in this two-day event are radically experimental in the ways they account for the circulation of control and affective disruption within families. The case is: ill or disabled parents, and the ripple effects of the chaotic present that illness induces—both on the memory of being intimately reliable in the family and on speculative capacity. Illness here is a case of immediate/structural crisis. It is as though the event of the loved ones out of control forces new genres into being.
Part One of this event (Nov 4, 10:00–6:30 p.m. | in the Franke Institute for the Humanities) is a conference involving talks/performances by Lauren Berlant (Chicago), Carl Bogner (Wisconsin), Jennifer Montgomery(Independent Filmmaker), Susan Lepselter (Indiana), Susan Schultz (Hawaii), and Kathleen Stewart (UT Austin).
Part Two of this event (Nov 5, 9:00–11:30 a.m. | in Wilder House) November, is a writing workshop led by Kathleen Stewart that will focus on experimental critical attention. **Please note the change of venue to Wilder House**
Rolling the Dice: The Art of Chance
February 3-4, 2012
Rolling the Dice continues our discussion of being out of control. Also conceived as an experimental event, it approaches the experience of out-of-controledness via the concepts of randomization and chance in both their positive and negative valences (positive, as in something to embrace, negative, as in the absence of any other decent approach). Artists/writers in this workshop will include Debbora Battaglia (Mount Holyoke), Yvette Christiansë (Barnard), and Renata Salecl (a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst). This event will be curated by Bernard Harcourt (Chicago) and Susan Lepselter (Indiana).
In A Rut
April 20–21, 2012
The third of our series of events on the Arts of Non-Sovereignty, In a Rut focuses on manifestations of non-sovereignty that take the form not of disorder but of a felt excess of order, particularly in the repetition of ordinary actions and events. We ask: When and how is ordinariness or even roteness deadening and when and how is it a source of novelty or buoyant excess? Must critical work always stake out a position of antagonism to the given? How is ritual repetition and mimesis productive of novelty, excitement, feeling? What are the different ways of inhabiting habit, or of routing routine? What are our ruts contingent upon, how do they continually get re-dug as the same? Are they ever really the same? Addressing these questions and others will be Kennan Ferguson (Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Jackie Orr (Syracuse University), and Diane Nelson (Duke). This event will be curated by Judith Farquhar (Chicago), Patchen Markell (Chicago) and Joe Masco (Chicago).
Past Events
- In a Rut
- April 20 2012
- Rolling the Dice: The Art of Chance
- February 3–4 2012
- Losing It: Chaos and the Arts of Attention - Writing Workshop
- November 05 2011
- Losing It: Families, Chaos, and the Arts of Attention - Conference
- November 04 2011