Just found out about this symposium, which has, like, a total rock-star line-up of speakers. There’s a link to papers buried below the fold, but before you get too excited it requires an institutional or indidividual subscription to Critical Inquiry. And I don’t know what that entails (in fact, it’s news to me that CI had an electronic component).
ARTS OF TRANSMISSION
A Discussion Conference
May 21-22, 2004This event calls together experts from a range of disciplines—literature, sociology, anthropology, science studies, filmmaking, and more—to examine relationships among ideas and cultures of communication past and present. Today, authorship, reading, the concepts of information and communication themselves—the basic terms in which we think about creative work are changing beyond recognition. This conference will bring together new perspectives able to perceive common issues extending across otherwise deep historical, theoretical, and disciplinary rifts.
The University of Chicago
Swift Hall, 3rd Floor auditorium, 1025 East 58th Street, Chicago, ILPlease register if you would like lunch: franke-humanities@uchicago.edu
For more information, please call the Franke Institute for the Humanities at 773-702-8274
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CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
FRIDAY, MAY 21
9am - 12pm
I. Forms and Media
Elena Esposito, Sociology, University of Urbino
“The Arts of Contingency”
Gregory Nagy, Classics, Harvard University
“Transmission of Archaic Greek Sympotic Songs from Lesbos to Alexandria”
Alan Liu, English, University of Santa Barbara
“Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New
Encoded Discourse”
1:30pm - 3:00pm
II. Writing and Memory
Ann Blair, History, Harvard University
“Note Taking as an Art of Transmission”
John Guillory, English, New York University
“The Memo and Modernity”
3:30pm - 5:00pm
III. Universal Languages
Roger Chartier Director of Studies, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, Paris
“Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the Digital Text”
Lorraine Daston, Max Plank Institute, Berlin
“Type Specimens and Scientific Memory”
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SATURDAY, MAY 22
8:45am - 10:15am
Institutions and Impediments I
Mary Poovey, English, New York University
“The Limits of the University Knowledge Project: British India and the East
Indiamen”
Janice Radway, Literature, Duke University
“Research Universities, Periodical Publication, and the Circulation of
Professional Expertise: On the Significance of Middlebrow Authority”
10:30 - 12:00
Institutions and Impediments II
Peter Galison, History of Science, Physics, Harvard University
“Removing Knowledge”
Friedrich Kittler, Media History and Aesthetics, Humboldt University, Berlin
“Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, Harder”
1:30pm - 4:30pm (Note change in location)
Film Studies Center, Cobb 306, 5811 S. Ellis Avenue Chicago, IL
The Arts of Transmitting Transmission Arts
David and Judith MacDougall, Filmmakers, Australian National University,
Canberra
Introduction to their film Photo Wallahs
Film Screening and Discussion
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Panels at the conference will address papers to be published inCritical
Inquiry (Autumn 2004). Since these papers will not be read at the
conference, you can consult them in advance at:
www.journals.uchicago.edu/CI/journal/roughcut.html
Conference Respondents include:
Danielle Allen, Classics, Committee on Social Thought, Political Science,
University of Chicago
Bill Brown, English, University of Chicago
James Chandler, English, Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago
Dipesh Chakrabarty, South Asian Languages & Civilizations, History,
University of Chicago
Frances Ferguson, English, Johns Hopkins University
Tom Gunning, Cinema and Media Studies, Art History, University of Chicago
Mark Hansen, English, Princeton University
Adrian Johns, History, University of Chicago
Sudipta Kaviraj, Political Studies, School of African and Oriental Studies,
University of London.
Mashall Sahlins, Anthropology, University of Chicago
Joel Snyder, Art History, University of Chicago
Candace Vogler, Philosophy, University of Chicago
David Wellbery, Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, University of
Chicago
The conference organizers are James Chandler, Barbara E. and Richard J.
Franke Professor of English and director of the Franke Institute, Arnold
Davidson, professor of philosophy, and Adrian Johns, professor of history,
all at the University of Chicago.
Matt,
The conference was quite intellectually stimulating, with unexpected synergies of themes (as well as interesting differences in approach) among the papers and respondents. F. Kittler and L. Daston, unfortunately, were not able to make it to the event, though their papers were represented. The format of the conference was somewhat unusual: the audience was to have read the papers in advance, and the presentations at the actual event consisted in each case of a "response" to the paper and then a "rejoinder" by the author of the paper. (Mark Hansen gave an excellent response to my paper; and I gave a rejoinder that contrasted his phenomenological approach to the "embodied" reception of information with my approach to the production of information in the collective bodies of corporations.) One of the great surprises and highlights of the conference was the presence of David and Judith MacDougall from Australia, who screened their documentary _Photo Wallahs_ about the use of photography in an hill station town in India. The screening and discussion (about the nature of photography and its transmission through the film medium) occurred at the end of the conference, however. Prior to that, as WJT Mitchell observed at one point in the proceedings, the conference concentrated almost wholly on the the arts of transmission in the ages of print and of the Internet. (Indeed, this was the unofficial theme of the event, since so many of the papers, even when addressing early print culture, were explicitly haunted by the contrast of digital culture. Chartier's paper was a case in point.) Missing until the MacDougall event was any real attention to the rich spectrum of audiovisual media from photography on.
Critical Inquiry now has a "preprint" series called _Rough Cut_, which is analogous to a scientific preprint series. The papers for this conference are now on the preprint site in both HTML and PDF, and will later be published in Critical Inquiry. The site does require a login, but I'm not sure of what sort. I can get in through my university library's proxy server.
Thanks for the report, Alan. I'm glad to see Critical Inquiry now supporting work in media/digital studies. (Maybe PMLA will follow in another five years.)
I found the Rough Cut page and downloaded a stack of essays, yours included.
Posted by: MGK at May 31, 2004 10:11 AM | Link to Comment