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| Aby Warburg and the Orbits of research
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| * A thematic project by Lisa Robertson, with guests Antonia Hirsch and Matthew Rana (October-December)
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| SYLLABUS
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| In 1609 Johannes Kepler discovered in the sky the active geometry of the ellipse, transforming the closed and static geometry of the circle into the elliptic orbit of mobile centers and magnetic empathies. Aby Warburg recognized in Kepler’s eccentric ellipse a figure for the generative space of a new thinking. Within an actively configured field of art history Warburg charted intermediary relationships, divergent couplings of imagination and reason, desiring continuities and transformations in the life of images. The ellipse was Warburgs “thinking space,” figure for an always transforming, fully implicated relationship to research.
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| This Fall we’ll explore Aby Warburg’s innovations in research methodology. What could research come to mean, as an open experiment in cognition and making? Much like “concept”, the word has ossified in our discourse and perhaps also in our practice. Here we’ll open to a compassionate scrutiny research’s potential techniques, histories, stances, projections, dreams, wagers, games and structures.
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| Warburg, born in 1866, was an art historian by academic training, in an era when clear disciplinary boundaries had not yet achieved their vertical consolidation. What Warburg achieved between 1889, the year of his doctoral thesis publication in Strasbourg, and his death in Hamburg in 1929, was the sustained development of three intensively inter-related research practices: Art Historian, (The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity) Librarian, (the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, now the Warburg Institute in London) and Visual thinker (The Mnemosyne Atlas). I am differentiating these three practices for rhetorical clarity, when no such clear differentiation determined Warburg’s ways of working. He thought across and via the energetic recombination of these various modes of material and scholarly research and their manifestations. And it was the experience of passionate energy, of dynamic temporal, even transhistorical and transcultural synchronic agency, that ran as a fundamental gesture through the scholarly, the bibliophilic, and the image-based work, disturbing the proprieties of historical periodicity and chronology, indexical logic, and formal analysis alike. For Warburg, Mnemosyne, the play of memory, unfolded among the charged intervals of image, document and concept in errant suspension. Revival, the interpretive cliché of renaissance culture, was turned to its full, discontinuous and disruptive vitalism. Research was the living orbit of a charged relationship with History and image.
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| We’ll let the radically heterodox thinker of Hamburg inflect and revivify what research could be now. Activities will include lectures, readings, collaborative presentations on the work of scholars shaped by the Warburg Library (including Giorgo Agamben, Frances Yates, Carlo Ginzberg, Erwin Panofsky, Georges Didi-Huberman), and individually determined research projects. Guest speakers: Matthew Rana (Gothenburg) and Antonia Hirsch (Berlin). Also proposed: a film screening (Pedro Costa’s Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie)
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| Apart from consistent attendance, assigned readings, and participation in discussions, two assignments will complete this thematic project.
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| 1/ A Group Presentation on one of a selection of writers and thinkers. These are people who directly influenced Warburg’s work and development, or they are scholars whose work was shaped by their research in his library at the Warburg Institute. The presentations will be done in pairs or threes (depending on class size) and should last around 20 minutes. They should introduce the scholar’s work generally, discuss its relation to Warburg’s projects, make reference more explicitly to one text, and prepare the class for a discussion on the same. In addition to the class presention, each of you will please hand in two pages of written response to the scholar in question on the day you present.
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| 2/ Research Project. Each student (collaborations are again possible) will, over the course of the term, develop their own research project. This will mean developing and exploring research methodology, and shaping a discourse around this methodology. The topics are at each student’s discretion, and it is perfectly fine and even desirable if they relate to ongoing projects. But the focus here is on developing, expanding, problematizing and intensifying your approaches to research as a practice. By November 5, everybody should have decided on her field. Please hand in a one page research proposal on Nov. 5.
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| OCT 8
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| morning: Introduction to Warburg: The Atlas, The Library, The Art Historian
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| afternoon: Images of Research: The Ellipse, The Interval, The Table
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| OCT 9
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| morning: Panel C/ Kepler and the Ellipse
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| afternoon:
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| OCT 10
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| morning: Philippe-Alain Michaud and the interval
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| afternoon: Student presentations: Agamben, Potentialities, Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
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| http://www.cscsarchive.org/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2010-11-02.8261782670/file
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| http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm
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| NOV 5
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| Research Proposals Due
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| The Warburg Library
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| http://scholar.harvard.edu/christopherdjohnson/files/from_arsenal_to_laboratory.pdf
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| Aby Warburg: “From the Arsenal to the Library”
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| Fritz Saxl: The History of Warburg’s Library (in Gombrich : Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography)
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| afternoon:
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| student presentations: Richard Semon, The Mneme: Anna and Jasper
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| http://archive.org/stream/cu31924100387210#page/n9/mode/2up
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| Darwin, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals: Kevin and Jason
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| http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=F1142&viewtype=text
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| NOV 6
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| morning: The interval, montage/ Michaud “ Crossing the Frontiers: Mnemosyne between Art History and Cinema” in Aby Warburg and the Moving Image
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| afternoon:
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| student presentations: Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: Sabrina and Machteld
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| http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1051/1051-h/1051-h.htm
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| Frances Yates, The Art of Memory: Hannah and Micha
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| http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/index.php?id=446
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| evening: 20:30 WORM Screening: Pedro Costa "Où gît votre sourire enfoui ?" (Where does your hidden smile lie)
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| NOV 7
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| morning: discussion of Costa film
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| reading: Omar Berrada interview with Bouchra Khalili
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| afternoon:
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| Student presentations: Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form: Graham and Marten
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| George Didi-Huberman, Atlas: Roos, Liz, Christian
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| http://www.corpusweb.net/cd06-possibility-of-a-gay-science.html
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| http://www.museoreinasofia.es/images/descargas/pdf/2010/19GD_en.pdf
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| evening, 7:00 pm Antonia Hirsch Lecture: De Sidere
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| Antonia Hirsch is an artist whose work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Power Plant, Toronto, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Tramway, Glasgow, and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, among others. Her work can be found in public collections such as that of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry, Miami Beach. Her writing and projects have appeared, among others, in artecontexto, C magazine, Fillip, and The Happy Hypocrite. She is the editor of the anthology Intangible Economies, published by Fillip in 2012.
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| De Sidere: Undoing Property
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| Departing from Nicolaus Copernicus's dual expertise—astronomical and economic—the talk considers planetary and monetary circulation in order to speculate on parallel movements of thought animated by affect. The title of this talk points to a metaphoric figure: the term “desire” is thought to stem from Latin de sidere, meaning “from the stars.” This conjures the notion of reaching for the stars, an infinite expanse (and the potential for infinite expansion—one of the basic tenets of capitalism), of factual science inflected by myth and dream, and the idea of an ordering of chaos into a system of constellations that can be read and possibly illuminate the future. Proposing circulation as an expanded form of exchange (the fundamental expression of economic activity) and a social process that involves as its necessary elements representation and abstraction, De Sidere will propose exchange to be crucial to the process of self-articulation and the formation of ethical structures.
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| http://thesurpluslibrary.com/
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| http://www.antoniahirsch.com/
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| NOV 8
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| morning: Kepler’s Optics,
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| student presentation: Phillippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Movement: Allison
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| afternoon:
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| Antonia Hirsch Workshop
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| DEC 10
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| morning:
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| reading: Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity “The Theatrical Costumes for the Intermedi of 1589”
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| afternoon: Presentation of final Research Projects
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| evening: Matthew Rana Lecture
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| DEC 11
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| morning: Presentation of final Research Projects
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| afternoon: Matthew Rana Workshop
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| DEC 12
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| Presentation of final Research Projects
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