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Michal Kobialka / Lecture Series
As homage to Belle Van Zuylen and her "no talent for subordination", this series of lectures at the University of Utrecht in November, December 2008 and January 2009, has been organized in order to explore the labor of thought within and without the Enlightenment as well as the multiple and diverse representational practices associated with it. The guest speakers were asked to address the issue of how the work they are doing in their respective fields intersects with the Enlightenment concepts and definitions in the space of the now.
November 26, 2008
Timothy Brennan
Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature; and English
University of Minnesota
"Giambattista Vico and Enlightenment in the Twentieth Century"
The extraordinary significance of the radical enlightenment of seventeenth-century thinkers like Spinoza and Descartes to reassert the principles of secularism and critical reason was matched, in a very different idiom, by a thinker who explicitly targeted Spinoza and Descartes, ridiculing their rationalist metaphysics and their reliance on a science of deductive reasoning. Giambattista Vico outlined a way of writing and thinking that might be called, by contrast, mythological and demotic. I would like to discuss the significance of Vico’s methodological riposte to the two giants whose have come down to us in historical accounts as the most enabling and influential of the radical enlightenment. My argument will be that for reasons having to do with the manner of thought (not only its content), and the style of argumentation, it was Vico rather than the others who carried on an intellectual tradition that extends from Hermes Trismegistos through twentieth-century Marxism, and itself amounts to an unnamed, but persistent, strain of underground thinking in the Western tradition. The "enlightenment" of the twentieth century—that is, the bringing into the mainstream, and even into policy circles, for the first time the radical social vision of the utopian socialists who demanded complete social equality, equality of educational opportunity, global polity, and cultural catholicism (far in advance of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century enlightenments we still rightly praise) was prepared by the work of Vico, and the (largely unrecognized) tradition he helped sponsor.
Place and time: Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, Utrecht, 16.00h
November 27, 2008
Keya Ganguly
Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature
University of Minnesota
"Social Freedom, the 'Third World', and the Dialectic of Enlightenment"
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s argument about the dialectic of enlightenment is often cited as proposing that "enlightenment reverts to myth" - which was a way for them to express the transformation of rationality into an instrumental and oppressive category in Western thought. Their critique of this regressive dynamic centers on the process by which thought turns from being critical to reproducing the dogmas of the moment. In modern society, this dogma is best exemplified by positivism, a worldview that extends from so-called scientific culture to culture itself, and by means of which "science" has itself turned into myth. As influential as their critique has been, what is often neglected is the dialectical side of their argument - namely, that myth also has aspects within it of enlightenment, as expressed by the radical, transformative possibilities embedded within what Adorno and Horkheimer call "the religion of the ancients", "natural history" and, crucially, the energies of the "Third World". Although the Third World is not a subject of much discussion in this classic work of critical theory, it represents not only the backdrop of social upheavals (along with Fascism) impelling its writing, it also guides the authors' imagination of what they refer to early on in the book as a "true humanism". How and in what ways the categories of thought and feeling usually associated with myth represent the other side of the dialectic, one that bears witness to the fundamental principle Adorno and Horkheimer avow - that "social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought" (a principle that, one might add, is far from the commonly accepted notion that they rejected the project of the Enlightenment) - will provide the basis of my talk. I will argue that to emphasize the negative dialectic in the dialectic of enlightenment offers us a different horizon of social possibilities - specifically for postcolonial thinking.
Place and time: Trans 10, room 0.01, Utrecht, 16.00h
December 8, 2008
Andrzej Piotrowski
School of Architecture, University of Minnesota
"Architecture between Heresy and Enlightenment"
Buildings can be heretical, subversive or deceitful in non-verbal ways. Yet the traditional history of architecture has overlooked that fact and thus silenced the whole spectrum of symbolic/non-verbal phenomena. Although material and visual forms have always represented nascent thoughts and attitudes the period between the time of Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment provides a crowning example in this respect. Religious and secular buildings of the Reformation were instrumental in questioning the relationship between religion and power. In a nuanced play of representational performances rebellious designers subverted the sense of order, which was promoted by Rome and its political allies. In response, initially, the Jesuits defending the status quo constructed environments that reasserted absolute and dogmatic manifestations of power and symbolic certainty. Soon, however, they learned that direct and ideologically overt compositions were not sufficient to counteract representations of their opponents. Through the process of explorations designers of the Counter Reformation refined a truly modern strategy of representations that targeted and eliminated unwanted modality of thought. Against commonly hold beliefs, I assert that late Baroque forms manifested less the creative freedom than they materialized the process of erasing critical thought from religious representations. Church decorations turned critical ideas of the religious reform into seductive play of forms, which eliminated rebellious content to the point of making politically subversive attitudes no longer possible or visible. Only than could such depoliticized representations perform their conservative task during the scientific Age of Reason and the intellectually progressive Age of Enlightenment.
To substantiate this assertion, this presentation will explore examples of some well and some little known architecture from European centers of power as well as the peripheries of the Commonwealth of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The analysis will focus on non-verbal attributes of material forms and their ability to direct the movement of thought and shape political attitudes.
Place and time: Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, Utrecht, 16.00h
December 15, 2008
Rosemarie Bank
School of Theatre, Kent State University
"Enlightenment Thinking and the Staging of the Native in the United States during the Long Nineteenth Century"
What constitutes the ceremony of naming a 'native'? From the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Enlightenment thinking marked the performance of the constructs 'native' and 'American'. This paper explores the staging of some of those constructs and their impact upon selected sites, during the long nineteenth century, in what became the United States. In this examination, I will utilize Michel Foucault’s phenomena of discontinuity, a historiographical practice in which multiple, often contesting, historical sites can be described as juxtaposed "in a single real place". Historicly (and historiographicly), I am interested in how material and analytical strategies adopted from fields other than theatre change as they enter a branch of cultural studies and what light this may shed on the idea that significance in (theatre) historical writing accrues in duration.
Place and time: Belle van Zuylenzaal, Academiegebouw, Domplein 29, Utrecht, 16.00h.
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Michal Kobialka
Belle van Zuylen Chair
November 2008 - January 2009
• Lecture Series
• Inaugural Lecture
• Seminar This is My Body
• Tadeusz Kantor Study Day
Practical information Lecture Series
Admission free. Please make a reservation for the series or one of the lectures by sending an e-mail to belle@theatrestudies.nl
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