Cultural Studies Colloquium

As a transnationally open installment of our Cultural Studies Colloquia series, this online research seminar brings the perspective of cultural studies to bear on the smartphone as a key node in the cultural circuitry of our contemporary moment.

We will investigate the virtual world/s created, the online practices facilitated, and the 'artificial intelligences' articulated by the phone and by the digital networks to which it links its users. However, our primary accent will be on the real uses made of the phone in on-site social, economic or political contexts – and on the direct or indirect effects of such uses. How, for example, do the phone and the technologies it mediates impact individual as well as collective lives, agencies, intelligences or imaginaries? How does the smartphone – in analogue life as well as through online operations – transform social, economic, and natural environments? How is the phone produced and marketed, and what are the material or immaterial consequences? Hardly least, how do the smartphone and its affordances impact the political – either as a conduit for misinformation or as a low-threshold tool and portal of democratic participation?

To explore these questions, the seminar will determinedly move beyond Western European and North American contexts, putting a particular emphasis also on Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union as well as on India and other regions of the so-called Global South. The objective is to consider both the local dimensions and the global intersections of smartphone culture/s.

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D. W. Griffiths Monumentalfilme und Sergej Ėjzenštejns Montagefilme, Buster Keatons Komödien und Lev Kulešovs sowjetische Amerikaner in der jungen Sowjetunion, Unterhaltungskino und Filmavantgarden, der Rückgriff auf Bühnentraditionen der „Mintrelsy“ in The Jazz Singer und Dziga Vertovs Film über das Filmen selbst: Das Cultural Studies Colloquium (CSC) wendet sich in diesem Semester Schlüsselfilmen der sowjetischen und der US-amerikanischen Filmgeschichte aus einem kulturwissenschaftlichen Blickwinkel zu. Im Fokus stehen Filme, die für die jeweiligen Filmräume und für zentrale film- und mediengeschichtliche Entwicklungen paradigmatisch sind. Der Horizont reicht von den ersten Langfilmen der Stummfilmzeit bis zum jeweils ersten Tonfilm. Über die Lektüre von zentralen filmtheoretischen Texten und entsprechende Filmsichtungen wird dabei die Entwicklung beider Filmräume sowohl in ihrer jeweiligen Spezifik als auch in ihren Bezugnahmen aufeinander in den Fokus genommen. Gefragt wird nicht nur nach der Entwicklung des Films als technisches Medium und Erzählform in der Stummfilmzeit, sondern auch danach, wie im Film zentrale Konfigurationen der sowjetischen und der US-amerikanische Diskurse sichtbar werden. Diskutiert wird so aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive sowohl die gesellschaftliche Funktion des Films, als auch wie die Filme aus heutiger Perspektive kulturgeschichtlich betrachtet werden können. In den Fokus kommen dabei beispielsweise auch post-/dekoloniale Aspekte oder verflechtungsgeschichtliche Fragestellungen sowohl zwischen den USA und der Sowjetunion als auch in den jeweiligen Räumen selbst. Schließlich wird auch thematisiert, welcher Stellenwert den jeweiligen Filmen in der späteren Rezeption zuerkannt wurde.

Das Cultural Studies Colloquium setzt sich in diesem Semester mit aktuellen Diskursen auseinander, die unter Maßgabe des Begriffs commoning nach Alternativen zu kapitalistischen Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftsformen suchen. Die entsprechenden aktivistischen, aber auch akademischen Ansätze fußen in der Wiederentdeckung der commons, also des Modells der gemeinsamen Bewirtschaftung von Ressourcen. In Abgrenzung zu den Prinzipien des Marktes und des Besitzindividualismus, aber auch in der Kritik staatlicher Regelungsallmacht suchen sie nicht nur nach Produktions- und Verteilungsmechanismen, die sich gegen die Logik eines extraktiven Kapitalismus sperren, sondern überhaupt nach fundamental anderen Formen, wie Gesellschaft und Welt gesehen und gestaltet werden können – nämlich kooperativ, situativ-relational und organisch. Entsprechende Ansätze können sich sowohl auf historische wie auch auf aktuelle Beispiele erfolgreicher Gemeinwirtschaft berufen – etwa die integrale Funktion der Allmende in der vorindustriellen Landwirtschaft, die aktuellen Erfolge von kooperativen Initiativen in 'unterentwickelten' Gesellschaften des globalen Südens (z. B. die Rückkehr zu traditionalen und ortsspezifischen Verfahren der Bewirtschaftung von Fruchtsamen) oder die erstaunlichen Errungenschaften von Initiativen der creative commons (z. B. bei der gemeinsamen Entwicklung von Computer-Programmen wie Linux oder bei der Erstellung von nicht-kommerziellen Internet-Archiven).

"Ästhetik wird gebraucht." Mit diesem Postulat leitet Achim Trebeß das Metzler-Lexikon Ästhetik (2006) ein. Wie er bündig erläutert, interessiert sich Ästhetik "für die Sinne und den Sinn, für die Veränderungen von Wahrnehmungen und deren Medien, für die Gestaltung von Gegenständen jedwelcher Art."

Das Cultural Studies Colloquium knüpft in diesem Semester an die Vorstellung an, dass Ästhetik für die Gegenwart hochrelevant ist. Dabei verstehen wir Ästhetik nicht bloß als einen tief in der Vergangenheit wurzelnden philosophischen Diskurs über 'das Schöne' oder als Bezugspunkt aktueller Vorstellungen von 'gutem Design'. Vielmehr erscheint Ästhetik als Kernbegriff für die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Verhältnis von Menschen, (Um)Welt und Gesellschaft. Tatsächlich provozieren Konzepte der Ästhetik oder des Ästhetischen grundlegende Fragen zu den Funktionsweisen menschlicher Wahrnehmung, zur Rolle von künstlerischer Wertsetzung oder Wertreflexion, aber auch zur Organisation von Alltag, Konsum und Sozialität.

This transdisciplinary research seminar re-investigates the so-called ‘Cold War,’ i.e. the period from the end of the Second World War to the late 1980s which was dominated by the political, economic and ideological antagonism between a Western bloc (led by the USA and NATO) and an Eastern bloc (led by the USSR and the Warsaw Pact). As part of our series of Cultural Studies Colloquia, the seminar will be primarily interested in how the major powers mobilized culture as a medium of geopolitical confrontation. At the same time, we will analyse the concrete cultural effects of such a transnational cultural politics in countries and regions across the globe.

For example, how did 'Cold War' cultural diplomacy shape national and transnational print cultures and the arts not only in Russia and the USA, but also in India, Britain and other European countries? How, e.g., did specific genres of writing (such as the spy novel) or specific clichés in popular music ("Back in the USSR"; "I hope the Russians Love their Children Too") operate within the Cold War as a matrix of political tensions and ideological formations that continues to shape our very present? Further, how did Soviet and Western Cold War cultures differ not only in their 'official,' state-sponsored cultures, but also in terms of  'unofficial' cultural practices. Equally important, in which modes and moments did these two geopolitically opposed formations actually converge? The last question involves considering responses to key historical events anchored in one geopolitical bloc, but inevitably impacting the opposed bloc and reverberating across larger global contexts (e.g. the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Gagarin's orbital space flight and the accomplishment of the Sputnik launch followed by ‘Sputnik Shock')?

This research seminar takes its cues from Simon During's observation that "popular music is crucial to cultural studies" and from Richard Middleton's belief that "a breakthrough in popular music studies would […] reorientate cultural studies in a fundamental way."

Following such leads, the purpose of the seminar will not only be to better understand the music or the practices attending it. Rather, we propose using popular music culture as a productive provocation – a provocation that will invite us to re-think the tenets of cultural theory and to test the purchase of its concepts.

Always opening our ears to the music and to the moves and visuals inspired by it, we will thus embark on a journey to seminal sites of cultural theory and methodology – from the paradigms of historiography and aesthetics via the domains of technology and media studies to theories of performance, body and affect.

"For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. […] Now we must learn to judge a society more by its sounds […] than by its statistics. By listening to noise, we can better understand where the folly of men and their calculations is leading us, and what hopes it is still possible to have."

Thus claimed Jacques Attali in his pathbreaking book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, which was first published in French in 1977. Looking at key theoretical texts published in the last forty years and at current research in cultural studies, our seminar will assess the grand hope that close listening will not only provide new modes for understanding social systems and everyday practices but that a detailed attention to sound might also furnish a basis for envisioning a more sustainable relationship to the human as well as the non-human world.

Since its inception in mid-20th-century Britain, the field of cultural studies has undergone significant transformations: while starting out as a distinctly national discourse of British self-ethnography and democratic empowerment, it also took up influences from continental Europe and was quick to be adopted and modified in many parts of the world. Today, it is common practice to conceive of the various strands of cultural studies according to a vocabulary of related, but fundamentally different and compartmentalized sub-divisions (such as 'American Cultural Studies' vs 'British Cultural Studies').

The overarching goal of this seminar is to develop both an understanding and a critical re-examination of these lines of division in their historical and current forms. By taking into close consideration [1] theoretical foundations like Marxism and structuralism as well as [2] the past and present of cultural studies in India along with [3] key texts from the two formations of 'British' and 'American Cultural Studies', we hope to enable a discussion of the problems and merits surrounding these 'nationally specific' perspectives. Finally, it remains to be seen whether this kind of compartmentalization is inevitable, or whether cultural studies might also be configured as a transnational or global field of research and critical intervention.

This course is part of "WueGlobal - Writing, Learning, Digital Connection" funded by the International Virtual Academic Collaboration Program (IVAC) / Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) / Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF).

Teaching Team: Prof. Dr. Zeno Ackermann (British Cultural Studies), Prof. Dr. MaryAnn Snyder-Körber (American Cultural Studies), and David Janocha, BA (WueGlobal Tutor & International Writing Fellow)

While there are good reasons for understanding cultural studies as an attempt to reach beyond the exclusivist rhetoric of the nation, it is (still) common practice to gear its manifestations to distinct national discourses. Thus, we firmly distinguish between 'American Cultural Studies' and 'British Cultural Studies', implicitly or explicitly constructing the two as self-contained endeavors rooted in specific traditions and serving specific discourses of democratization.

Looking at [a] seminal key texts in the long history of cultural studies as well as [b] new theories, programmatic texts and case studies, the seminar will assess the reasons and effects of such compartmentalization. We will be particularly interested in opening up bipartite constructions of the discipline by paying close attention to the history and present of cultural studies in India. In doing so, we will attempt to bring in a third (seminal) 'national' perspective. However, we will also try to trace the contours and critically test the potentials of a transnational or global cultural studies.

"For indeed, no one has determined what the Body can do," remarks the philosopher Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics (1677): a work that problematizes all too simple divisions as well as hierarchies of mind over body in the philosophical tradition. Three centuries later, a further philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, continues this problematization, but transforms Spinoza's observation into the more direct (and activating) form of a query: "What can a body do?" is the deciding question not only for Spinoza's philosophy according to Deleuze, but also for issues of ethics, dynamics of power, and a full accounting of the interrelations that constitute the worlds we live in (Expressionism in Philosophy, 1968).

This seminar takes up the call to explore what the body can do. Yet more particularly, the course is interested in what study of the body (or of specific bodies) can mean for cultural studies. The goal is, thus, not to neatly answer the question "What can a body do?", but rather to explore a multiplicity of approaches to 'the body' and 'the bodily'. Accordingly, the course has a two-part structure: 

(1) After initial orientation in regards to "Frameworks and Intellectual Legacies" of thinking (through) the body, further sessions focus on "Theories of the Body/Bodies." Among other topics, we will explore the phenomenological project and the notion of "a queer pheno­menology" (Ahmed), the civilizing process and concept of habitus in sociology (Elias & Bourdieu), body discipline and biopolitics (Foucault), the project of a "body without organs" (Deleuze & Guattari), and the possibility of posthumanist embodiment (Haraway & Wolfe). 

(2) In the second block of the course – "Practices of the Body/Bodies" – our discussion will shift from general theories to specific case studies. As a first step we propose considering the bodily intricacies and implications of immunization by way of Eula Biss's experimental text On Immunity: An Inoculation (2014). Further case studies will be developed by course participants and discussed during the end-of-term symposium or 'Study Day' which we have scheduled for Wednesday, 22 January from 10-16.

Wie hängt nun alles zusammen? Auf welche Weise werden Körper und Geist, Subjekt und Norm, Erfahrung und Repräsentation miteinander vermittelt? Dies sind Kernfragen der Kulturtheorie und der Kulturwissenschaften. In unserem Seminar für fortgeschrittene Studierende werden wir uns mit einem Konzept auseinandersetzen, das Antworten verspricht, aber zugleich weitere Fragen aufwirft: dem Konzept der Artikulation.

Im Deutschen am meisten vertraut ist wohl die Verwendung des Begriffs 'Artikulation' als Bezeichnung für eine deutliche Aussprache. Oft heißt es, dass Personen über eine 'gute' oder 'schlechte' Artikulation verfügen. In der Phonetik handelt die Artikulation genauer von der Positionierung der Zunge oder der Regulierung des Atems, um gesprochene Rede hervorzubringen. Gleichzeitig wird in der Semantik die Gliederung von Gedanken als ein Prozess der Artikulation begriffen.

Kulturwissenschaftler wie Raymond Williams und Stuart Hall haben sowohl auf solche sprachwissenschaftlichen Diskussionen wie auch auf den Gliederungsbegriff bei Marx (im Englischen: 'articulation') rekurriert, um die komplexen Verbindungen zwischen materiellen Grundlagen, subjektiven Positionen und kulturellen Prozessen zu beleuchten. So erklärte Hall:

You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? [...] Thus, a theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain condition to cohere together, within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated at certain junctures, to certain political subjects. ("On Postmodernism and Articulation" [1986] 53.)

Unser Seminar beginnt mit einer Annäherung an das flüchtige Phänomen der 'Stimme' und an die soziokulturelle Signifikanz von Klangphänomenen in den Voice und Sound Studies. Einen zweiten Fokus bildet die Auseinandersetzung mit Artikulation in den Sprachwissenschaften und in der Sprachphilosophie. Abschließend werden Schlüsseltexte der Artikulationstheorie in den Cultural Studies sowie den Popular Music Studies diskutiert.

"Boom! The Cathedral is a torch, and the houses next to it begin to scorch. Boom! […] The old lady cannot walk. She watches the creeping stalk and counts. Boom! – Boom! – Boom!" Amy Lowell's prose poem "Bombardment" (November 1914) bears witness to the destructive terror of military conflict. Yet more particularly, the poem evokes warfare as an assault on the senses which seemingly cannot be described. Lowell instead recreates the attack in unrelenting repetitions of "Boom! – Boom! – Boom!"

In this seminar, World War I will be approached as an experience which involved, but also radically challenged cultural structures of feeling: from hearing and vision to smell, taste, touch, and – not least – experiences of pain that both involve and obliterate the senses.

The seminar is a part of the faculty-wide project "Krieg und Frieden: Der Erste Weltkrieg." During the Winter Term 2018/2019 courses will be considering the events and impact of World War I from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The project culminates in an exhibition that will bring together work from a range of seminars in our faculty. These contributions can take graphic-textual form (such as a large-scale posters) or they can bring together film and audio materials. In keeping with the approach of our seminar, our exhibition contributions will explore key 'sense-scapes' of the war.