Coding-Decoding-Recoding

Ruxandra Bageac, In Defence of Community Arts in Critical Art Historical Discussion

University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

What is included in and excluded from art historical discourse must be renegotiated. Often in critical discussions of the participatory and socially engaged, community arts—the community-based practices of the British Community Arts Movement throughout the 1960s and 1980s—are woefully neglected. Since their inception, community arts have struggled with aesthetics and the art establishment despite fulfilling many of the tenets of artistic practice later espoused by participatory and dialogical artists. Lying between arts and activism, socially engaged and collaborative practices such as community arts challenge traditional modernist art criticism. They challenge systems of knowledge of art and, following the avant-garde of the early 20th century, disrupt conventional social and art codes. Both community arts and contemporary arts may overlap with socially engaged, participatory, collaborative or dialogical practice. Unfortunately for the Community Arts Movement, art criticism did not begin to grapple with these trends in art practice until long after the movement fell to market domination and the whims of the Arts Council of Great Britain. Now, while art historians write about participatory and collaborative works with enthusiasm and diligence, they remain cold toward community arts. This paper draws a comparison between community arts and contemporary arts, arguing that the same themes and concepts addressed in discussions of what is now referred to as ‘the social turn’ can be applied to products of the Community Arts Movement. This defence of the Community Arts Movement against the cultural hegemony of established art historical study centers around works produced by the Craigmillar Festival Society (1962–2002) of Edinburgh, Scotland. Employing personal correspondence with participants and archival research alongside critical reviews of recent relevant academic work, this paper carves a place for community arts in art history.

Maria Laura Flores Barba, Bearing Witness: Martyrs and Onlookers in Mexican Colonial Painting

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

Depictions of martyrs and their torments were a common topic in early modern Europe, especially in the context of the Counter-Reformation. David Freedberg noted how there was a special 'taste' for martyrdoms in Antwerp during the last years of the sixteenth century while other scholars have explained their presence as a characteristic of the Baroque in Spain and, consequently, in New Spain. In this paper, four martyrdom paintings by two Mexican colonial painters, Francisco de León and Diego de Cuentas, will be analyzed, with special attention paid to the representation of witnesses and their relationship to onlookers. I argue that these two figures were crucial not only to balance the composition as Leon Battista Alberti recommended, but to complete the cycle of bearing witness, especially important in the religious context of New Spain. It was also a process of decoding and recoding that created a kind of painting specific to this time and place.

Hélène Bigras-Dutrisac, Reconstructing Oneself: Multiplicity, Trauma, and the Self

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

Experiences of trauma inevitably affect one’s understanding of one’s self and/or the world. The most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), for example, includes “overly negative thoughts and assumptions about oneself or the world” and a “distorted sense of blame of self or others” in its diagnostic criteria for trauma- and Stressor- Related Disorders category (American Psychiatric Association). In her chapter, “Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and Personal Identity,” Susan Brison asks us to consider this link between the self and trauma, asking what happens when a person’s sense of self is shattered so deeply by an experience of trauma that they are left feeling like a different person than who they were “before being traumatized.” Before answering this difficult question, however, she rightfully asserts that its answer will depend on “how one defines ‘trauma’ and ‘the self’”. In this paper, I present alternative approaches to both ‘trauma’ and ‘the self’ grounded in intersectional, anti-oppressive, and queer feminist scholarship that challenge the definitions traditionally used in mainstream philosophy and psychology. Working primarily from Mariana Ortega’s In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self, I argue that Ortega’s conceptualization of ‘the self’ as multiplicitous allows for a broader understanding of sexual trauma as interrupting and informing one’s sense of self rather than as always necessarily fragmenting or even destroying this ‘self.’ As I demonstrate, conceptualizing the self as multiplicitous allows for a more inclusive discussion and analysis of sexual trauma that acknowledges and addresses the multitude of different forms that sexual trauma can take.

M. Emma Butterworth, An Exploration of Case in Gujarati

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

Gujarati is an Indo-European language spoken in the state of Gujarat, located on the mid-western-most edge of India. Despite its presence and wide-spread use as the native language for some 50,000 speakers across the globe, the amount of information known about its linguistic structure is extremely limited. What is known is that it includes a rich morphology, grammatical number and gender agreement systems, complex verb constructions and most importantly for my purposes, an overt grammatical case system. Over the course of this fall semester, I (along with my classmates) had the opportunity to elicit data on this language from a native speaker. This data included both the sentences in Gujarati and their English translation. By tracking the linguistic patterns (both phonological and morphological) within the elicited data, certain consistencies became apparent and rules started presenting themselves. However, one specific marker, namely that of the patient marker [-nɛ], appeared in a variety of environments with what seemed to be a variety of different meanings attached to it. Language is anything but haphazard, so what accounted for these inconsistencies? By presenting sample data that show the marker in these various environments, I will define the various meanings contained within the different iterations of this marker and illustrate how syntactic structure, animacy, and environment impact the lexical information communicated through this marker. In doing this, I will also exemplify and detail how linguists and field workers decode language on a daily basis in order to better understand one of humanities’ greatest inventions.

Alba Devo Colis, Hermenéutica y literatura: Una aproximación a las posibilidades del texto

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

La hermenéutica ha emprendido un largo viaje desde su acepción como develadora de textos religiosos para afincarse como una posibilidad cada vez más difundida y sólida de aproximación al texto literario. Paul Ricoeur dedica su obra a definir, abordar, poner en práctica y proponer una aproximación desde esta perspectiva a diversas manifestaciones de la cultura. En Freud, una interpretación de la cultura el filósofo propone como tareas de la hermenéutica la de manifestar y reestructurar un sentido, así como la de "la desmitificación como reducción de ilusiones" (28). Así entendida, la hermenéutica oscilaría entre el desembarazar al discurso de sus "excedentes" y el dejarlo hablar una vez liberado, desde su sentido pleno. Acción doble que va, como Ricoeur lo dice, de la "voluntad de la sospecha" a "la voluntad de escucha". Sin embargo, para que estas voluntades se actualicen se deben perfilar hacia lo no explicitado: el símbolo. Considerar al texto literario desde la perspectiva dual del símbolo es aceptar que se origina en constante cambio, ya que el sujeto del cual parte la obra literaria no se da en simultaneidad, sino en una temporalidad que conlleva actualización y potencialidad. Por tanto, si este sujeto es un ser potencial y actual, esta condición se verá reflejada en la obra, la cual a su vez será susceptible de sucesivas determinaciones. En esta ponencia se busca argumentar que el texto literario constituye el enmascaramiento del deseo del escritor, lo que se ensaya a partir del análisis e interpretación de los símbolos literarios concretizados en la metáfora.

Amany Dahab, Expressionism: A Paradigm to Approach Sufism and Islamic Architecture

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

In his book The Culture of Building and The Building of Culture, Nasser Rabbat speaks of the need for a paradigm of studying and creating Islamic architecture wherein no final or complete meanings would be imposed through emphasizing any glorious, transcendent, or excessive formations. Instead, such a paradigm shall create a context for spectrums of potential meanings that are imposed neither formally nor functionally. The Western paradigm of the study of Islamic architecture, which started in the 18th century and was dominated by Cartesian reason, falls short of going beyond the monumentality of Islamic architecture to reach the significance that lies in its expressiveness. As an alternative paradigm, I argue that Expressionism as Deleuze defines it according to his reading of the post-Cartesian philosophy of Spinoza and Leibniz would allow for a deeper understanding of Islamic architecture in relation to the intellectual context in which it emerged. Starting from the model of the Deleuzian Baroque fold, I suggest a reading of Islamic architecture and Sufi poetry as a fold. To legitimize such a reading, I start by illustrating the contribution of Sufi thought to the development of the concept of expression starting from the translation of Plotinus’s Enneads into Arabic, to the translation of the works of Sufis such as Al- Gazzali into Latin and the influence of Ibn Arabi in Spain. Then I discuss the shortcomings that accompanied the introduction of the concept of the fold into the theory of architecture before I illustrate how expressionism as a paradigm would avoid such shortcomings and broaden the scope of the study of Islamic architecture and Sufism.

Adam Debosscher, Recoding WWI With Photography in Timothy Findley’s The Wars

My presentation will aim at unpacking the paradoxical way The Wars is constructed. The novel is presented to us by a narrator who tells us that “you begin in the archives with photographs” to explain to the reader how the narrator went about researching who Robert Ross is. The presence of the archive, as a form of authority that legitimizes the story of Robert Ross, is paradoxical. The point of telling Robert’s story seems to be to provide a different perspective of the Great War than the big H History of the War, but the narrator feels the need to go to the archive where History is legitimized in order to legitimize Robert’s narrative. The archive is full of photos. The description of these photos plays a major part in creating a sense of reality (Barthes), of anchoring this narrative within an intertextuality of narratives about the war that the reader is already familiar with. Since the reader already knows the history of the War, Findley only needs to provide the most economic descriptions to make the reader provide the rest of the recesses of his or her memory. One photo in particular captured my interest: the photo of Ross burning - “Robert Ross comes riding straight to the camera […] bright tails of flame are streaming out behind him” (10) - this description appears very early in the novel, but the events only come at the end of the story. Although these photos are presented by the narrator as a means of legitimizing the story of Robert, they are in fact a way for Findley to make us forget that this is all made up, or do they do more than just that?

Michael Iannozzi, The Words of Where We’re From

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

Traditionally, once fieldwork in a community was complete, the researcher left, and the participants never saw what became of those recordings and digitized materials. My research involves conducting interviews with Heritage Italian speakers in Sarnia and with speakers of the Southwestern Ontario dialect of English. Once the interviews are completed, The Western Archive of Dialects and Languages (WADL) is a new project between the author and Western Libraries to ensure the community directly benefits from sharing their stories, materials, and time with the researcher. The information they share is returned in a permanent, secure, and digital way. This ensures that future generations will be able to access their heritage and history. I will be presenting a smaller version of the archives, specifically on the Italians in Sarnia, that has been sponsored by Library and Archives Canada. The goal of this presentation will be to show what is feasible and that linguistic fieldwork can lead to publicly-accessible archives to benefit other researchers and the communities as well. Through my work with Lambton County Archives: I code the website, use Dublin Core standards for metadata (Kunze et al., 1998), and digitize materials. I use Omeka software for the framework. The archive is made up of many photographs, documents, and videos. I have collected and digitized just under 600 photographs so far. It is also made up of documents: digitized copies of boat tickets to cross to Canada, citizenship papers, letters, (delicious) recipes, and other ephemera. Now is the time to create an online presence: both for academics and for the public. There are research opportunities in this data, from a great number of disciplines. The communities are also interested in hearing these stories, seeing these photos, and cooking some of the recipes.

Alexandra Irimia, “The Department of Codes:” How Overcoding Works (Even When it Doesn’t) in Bureaucratic Dystopias

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

The paper argues for an interpretation of bureaucratic dystopias in literature and cinema through the lens of encoding practices. More specifically, it seeks to demonstrate how the genre is built upon the premise of an excessive proliferation of code inaccessible to the everyman that is usually cast as the protagonist of such narratives. The prime examples are, of course, Kafka’s Castle and The Trial, as well as George Orwell’s 1984. However, while keeping these texts in mind, I will focus on lesser known works, namely Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and Nicola Barker’s H(a)ppy, which I will relate to Terry Gilliam’s iconic 1985 Brazil, Robert Edwards’s 2006 Land of the Blind and Anca Damian’s 2011 Crulic – The Path to Beyond as cinematic counterparts heavily indebted to the topos of dystopic bureaucracy derived from overcoding practices. My main hypothesis is that when the code supersedes the message (in semiotic terms, when meaning-formation mechanisms rely more on signifiers than on signifieds) the unavoidable gap between the two widens beyond any actual possibility of mastery. Therefore, the arbitrary character of the sign becomes an overpowering ruling principle which destabilizes – and eventually crushes – not only the subject confined in the dystopic universe, but also the very possibility of meaning. The ensuing demonstration makes use of written theoretical statements signed and stamped by Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Juliet MacCannell.

Ishrat Ibne Ismail, Subverting Gender Normativity in McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

Carson McCullers’ (1917–1967) novel, The Member of the Wedding (1946) recounts Frankie Addams’ struggles against a heteronormative system that insists that gender and sex follow a strictly heterosexual pattern. Insisting on finding her sexual identity, Frankie finds herself forlorn and isolated from society in southern America, often asking about who she is and where she belongs. She imagines remedy from her isolation in her brother’s wedding at Winter Hill. Although she dreams of a harmonious union in which she can live with her brother and his wife in order to get rid of her own terrible psychic situation, Frankie is unsuccessful in realizing this dream and eventually isolates herself further from her brother and his wife, and from society generally. Frankie’s recourse to isolation and alienation stems from her inability to perform society’s stipulated gender roles, in which she is unable to perform the traditional feminine role. The novel examines the discourses of gender and sexuality that enforce heterosexuality as norm. McCullers’ nonconforming character, Frankie, is contrasted with other conforming heterosexual characters in the novel. Frankie brings into light the performativity of gender and sexuality with an atypical physiology which signifies her inner freakishness. The novel interrogates what gender stands for and how it is not an inborn characteristic but a socially-constructed behaviour, that is, a performance. Through Frankie, McCullers shows how coercive social norm imprisons non-gender conformist in America and challenges the cultural intelligibility of insisting that everyone ‘do’ gender in the same way. This paper examines how gender acculturation asks for and controls sexual conformity and shows how McCullers critiques that acculturation by subverting the coercive mandatory gender performance. By so doing, the paper further examines how McCullers subverts gender normalization through Frankie’s characterization.

Samar Khan, How women talk about problems and share advice about Postpartum Depression (PPD) in an Internet discussion forum: A discourse analysis

York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

This study aims to examine the discourse on women's mental health, and the ways in which women utilize online support groups to cope with postpartum depression (PPD). When women tell or share stories with others, they are sharing their understandings and constructing meanings associated with their illness, while also reaching out to establish a relationship with other women with similar symptoms/experiences. This type of support can not only be significant in behaviour change, treatment adherence, and condition management, but it can also be empowering. This study presents a preliminary analysis of language and discourse patterns in forum posts by users who are experiencing symptoms of PPD. The texts which comprise the data for this study consist of public messages posted to the website, MedHelp.org, and they are divided into four categories: those who describe a particular problem pertaining to PPD or having PPD symptoms, for which, then, help is sought (I refer to them as ‘problem messages’); those who respond to these problem messages, stating that they, too, are suffering from similar experiences and show solidarity (I refer to them as 'matching messages'); those who respond to problem messages, usually by offering advice or feedback (I refer to them as ‘advice messages’); and those written by authors (of the problem messages) themselves, in response to the advice messages (I refer to them as ‘thanks messages’). The data consisted an examination of ten threads with a total of 72 messages, including 11 problem messages, 19 matching messages, 26 advice messages, and ten thank you messages. Moreover, purposive sampling technique was used to identify a range of threads that would provide suitable diversity of the types of problems users experience with regards to PPD, as well as the language they use to communicate and provide support. Accordingly, I argue that online forums are not only a viable platform to assess women's level of distress through the language they use, but it is also space that can be empowering for them.

Won Lee-Jeon, Metalogue: Two Simultaneous Worlds

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

A metalogue, a literary exercise frequently used by Gregory Bateson, is an imagined dialogue on “some problematic subject.” A metalogue ‘happens’ beneath the surface of the 2 logical flow of time and space, between the differences of the two people participating in it.

Distinct positions are presented, but are not fixed. The thoughts, logic, and language of the players necessarily evolve to adapt to the shifting context of their interaction. This metalogue is a fictional conversation between “mere artist” Marcel Duchamp and anthropologist/psychiatrist/cyberneticist/epistemologist Gregory Bateson occurring in the middle of Duchamp’s talk “The Creative Act,” held at the conference of the American Federation of the Arts in Houston, Texas on April 6, 1957. Both Duchamp and Bateson were present during the roundtable discussion, and they are called into dialogue with one another at ‘another dimension.’

They instigate a concurrence of their ideas on mental processes in art. They share particular experiences in their distinct disciplines. Bateson is concerned with the old dichotomy of mind and substance (or the relation between map and territory) that muddles communication and amplifies conscious purpose untethered from the rest of the systemic entity. Duchamp, carrying the thesis of “The Creative Act” into the metaloguing realm, poses questions of intention, collective judgment, and the problem of description. While Bateson’s primary concern is the epistemological follies of most human adaptation destroying the systemic ecologies on the world, Duchamp is plagued by the question of truth. Both have distinct, but related ideas on the mediating role of aesthetics. They bare their presuppositions. They get theoretically dense, but share stories to remind each other, and themselves, that they are human beings. Their commonalities emerge through their differences, and this ongoing tension may illustrate an integrated picture for both figures to learn from.

Shannon Lodoen, Of Myths and Mounties: An Examination of Canada(’)s Past”

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

The symbol of the Mountie is comprised of many conflicting aspects of Canadian cultural identity, some still visible today and others lost in the depths of what Barthes calls our “mythical past.” As the “face” of Canada, and in many ways a microcosm of the nation, the RCMP must embody the values, sentiments, and loyalties of the greater Canadian population in order to be readily accepted and respected – a task greatly complicated by the fact that these values, sentiments, and loyalties have been difficult to pin down consistently throughout Canada’s nationhood (not to mention the differing values, sentiments, and loyalties between various groups within Canada at any given time). The image of the Mountie has therefore been forced to undergo many changes since the RCMP’s inception, shifting and adapting to incorporate the popular aspects of Canadian cultural identity at specific points in time.

In this presentation, I utilize Barthes’ conception of myth as a framework to analyze the RCMP’s history, employing Michael Dawson’s The Mountie from Dime Novel to Disney to trace early Canadian myths – mainly figuring the nation as white and English- speaking – to contemporary times. I highlight how the old stereotypes, ideals, and values which once defined “Canadianness” have been recoded as the quintessential aspects of Canadian identity that we recognize today. I argue that the RCMP’s history, and Canada’s history more generally, is not fixed but is rather being continually edited and rewritten to serve a political agenda that seeks to sanitize the past and ensure its coherence with Canada’s current narrative of tolerance and acceptance. The consequence of treating history as fiction and mythologizing the past, however, is that our national identity becomes founded on falsehoods and ideals rather than on the actual events – both good and bad – that have brought Canada to where it is today.

Deanna MacNeil,

York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

I am a white domestic adoptee from a closed adoption in Nova Scotia, Canada. I was adopted into a white family with a brother who was adopted before me. Nova Scotia has closed adoption laws requiring adult adoptees to seek “permission” and “mediation” from Nova Scotia community services to access limited adoption information. The adoptee should follow norms they did not create in order to “belong” within their families and societies. My paper sees adoptee unknowing differently; as a space for possibility rather than compliance. Adoptees who lack knowledge of their biological origins have a complicated relationship with fantasy. Not knowing their histories or beginnings creates an in between space of the real and the unreal as a site of repression and fantasy holding the adoptee’s unintelligible losses and gains. In betwixt and in between is a site of regeneration for the adoptee where they can create multiple identities, desires, and possibilities for self. Fantasy and repression always work within this space, though fantasy is the stronger of the two when unknowing or unreality is dominant. The search for knowledge, also known as reunion in adoption circles, kills the fantasy and disrupts the space with reality/knowledge. Knowing and reality are the death of the psychic fantasy space limiting the adoptee’s fluidity with identity. Reality and knowledge can never match the adoptee’s fantasy and disintegration of self is repeated once again. However, the liminal space is also a metaphor that can be accessed again through song and story as ‘being not becoming’. The adoptee’s transitional space creates the capability of regenerating and maintaining endless, unfiltered possibility for self in relation with the other. I connect J.M Barrie’s Peter and Wendy with the adoptee’s fantasy realm to align their in between space with imagination and creativity.

Jessica Marino

This essay analyzes how urban spaces in Berlin can be decoded and recoded with new significations by artists in an effort to recall a tragic or traumatic event from the past and highlight the “presence of absence” (Bach 2013) that such spaces evoke. Many times, these are empty spaces, or voids, that are transformed into sites of memory (as understood according to Pierre Nora) where the memory of the past is decoded from the layers of history embedded in the spaces and recoded in the artist’s work making absence visible to the naked eye. The work of Christian Boltanski, in particular “The Missing House” installation on 15/16 Große Hamburgerstraße, Berlin, evokes the “presence of absence” by displaying the names of the people who used to live there in the firewalls adjacent to the now-absent structure. Topographically representing the history of Nazi Germany and the impact its anti-Semitic legislation and WWII had, this empty space recodes the significance of Germany’s past and the Holocaust. Examining Boltanski’s installation from a memory studies perspective together with other examples of his work and other artists, this essay will decipher the voids in Berlin that have been transformed into sites of memory, reframing our understanding of a city’s topography. One iconic example representing the palimpsestic layers of Germany’s past is the no man’s land on Potsdamer Platz during the Berlin War era. Wim Wenders decodes the history of this site in Wings of Desire so that the audience may recode it with new significations. By examining these two concrete examples from a transdisciplinary view, this essay proposes to recode our understanding of voids, art and its representations of absence.

Jeff Masse, The Illiad’s Social Network: Visualizing Heroic Speech Performance

The Homeric hero is a muthõn rheter (Il. 9.443), a performer of speech acts. He is a figure whose words are operative by virtue of their dactylic hexameter form, the meter which, when uttered, enacts the oral tradition. Like the bard who needs an audience to hear and interact with his song, the performing hero requires a community of listeners to receive his performance and judge its value. This project identifies, quantifies, and defines the listening communities that the Iliad constructs by building a network graph from the direct speech interactions expressed in the narrative present of the poem. It then approaches this image through concepts of social network analysis or SNA, a methodology developed by sociological structuralism to produce qualitative interpretations of the quantitative data presented by mathematically constructed network images. The macroscopic, relational perspective these images offer is a useful tool for visualizing connections and presenting a simplified viewpoint into complex systems. They can, therefore, render multifaceted and developed features of Greek literature, like speech and community engagement, visible and intelligible in one moment. This interdisciplinary study showcases the usefulness of applying network models to Homeric poetry. The purpose of this study is to explore how the Homeric hero employs speech to situate himself among other performers. To present a focused investigation, I concentrate on Odysseus’ relationship with Diomedes in the Iliad, a traditional partnership that evokes and stresses the effectiveness of Greek cooperation during the siege of Troy.

Pascal Michelberger, Decoding Fraktur: Complex Meanings of a ‘German’ Typeface

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

Especially in the age of social media, the use of Fraktur typefaces in Germany appears to have become a highly delicate issue. While its appearance seems to be accepted on beer labels, newspaper heads, or traditional restaurant signs, attempts of incorporating Fraktur in more official contexts have resulted in controversial debates regarding its alleged status as ‘the Nazi typeface’. Interestingly, perhaps even more passionate than the original outcry are typical counter-reactions quickly pointing out that the history of Fraktur reaches back a lot further than the Third Reich, and that for this very reason, labelling Fraktur as a signifier of fascist ideology is unwarranted and ‘unhistorical’. In this light, my study seeks to argue that the ‘meaning’ of Fraktur writing can neither be fully reduced to the years of Nazi rule, nor exclusively to its long history before the Third Reich. In fact, I suggest that the perception of Fraktur as ‘nationalist’ – or ‘National Socialist’ – has not arisen solely out of its usage by the Nazi regime, despite its long history in Germany, but also precisely out of a tradition of Fraktur writing in Germany that had already been associated with nationalist ideas and values long before the 20th century. Fraktur is the typeface of German history, culture, and all of its achievements, but it is also the typeface of deeply-rooted German nationalist feelings that found an atrocious outlet in National Socialism. Today, it appears that its use is regarded as inherently political, triggering fears of associating Germanness with Nazism. Under these parameters, decoding the ‘meanings’ of Fraktur and its perception within German society requires a historical investigation that dates back much further than the years of National Socialism and that acknowledges an interconnection between type and nation that arguably nowhere in Europe is as tight-knit as in Germany.

Joevenn Neo, On Textual Machines

Emory University, Atlanta, GA, United States

Is there a relationship between our language and the “materials” of our world? How do our languages effect “material” changes, and under what circumstance is this “materiality” coterminous with the “linguistic”? For philosophers, there holds an ideal relationship that binds the coterminosity between our language and the materiality that we allude to; this ideality provides a link that allows our language to be able to say what things are, and simultaneously lets the materiality of our things be accorded to the language of our provision. This ideal link provides us with a continuum that allows our languages to “think” about our materials, as well as for our materials to “be thought” by language. The only problem that this ideality brings is that if we, philosophers, become mere producers of ideality, where the continuum of the ideal becomes conflated with the production of the real. In such an instance, this “ideal-real production”, which believes that the manipulation of our languages can entail the manipulation of our reality is in fact hinged on a manipulation of ideality, and does not allow us to actually understand what the relationship between ideality, our language, and our materiality entails. In order to avoid such an “ideal-real” production of philosophy, I will use Francois Laruelle’s works to explore several strands to understand how our languages and our materials can be related, without having to hinge on an unwarranted ideal relation between them.

Matt Prokopiw, The Sacred and the Profane in the Spectacle of Sports: Perspectives of the Digital Age

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

The sociologies of sport and fandom area areas of study whose particularities draw interest from a wide range of scholarly perspectives, as the objects of study prove to be quite complex and rich assemblages of actions and signs. This presentation will therefore explicate the spectacle of sports in Western society from the perspective of the sociology of religion, namely that of French sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and Michel Maffesoli, both of whom prioritize the significance of sociality in their scholarly contributions on religion, which infuses the quotidian of Western culture with mythological forms and contents. Effectively, this perspective dissuades us from dismissing the significance of the minutiae and complexities of ‘popular culture’, in particular the ‘spectacle’ and ‘fanaticism’ of sports. Of particular interest, besides the aforementioned analytical frame, is the inclusion of digital sources of discourse analysis, which for the sociology of sport is a novel and rich source of study. In other words, it is only recently that sports spectators have begun to congregate online as a way of participating in the spectacle of sports. These digital gatherings are revealing insights into the rituals of sports in greater number and detail than ever before (much to the benefit of scholars, even when considering our inability to be assured of how long these forms of digital interaction will continue to persist – specifically, the unhindered public access to these gatherings). What will become clear from this presentation on the spectacle of sports then is how our reputedly secular society can be shown to be formally engaging in rituals characteristic of religious organization, whose scope and implications may be far-reaching.

Rashad Rehman, Pieper’s Reading of Plato’s Sophist

Josef Pieper’s reading of Plato’s Sophist raises various philosophical and textual questions pertinent to hermeneutics. Pieper’s reading of the Sophist is as follows: The “sophist”, though an ancient figure (and movement) arising in Plato’s dialogues (primarily the Sophist), remains a contemporary figure that must be faced in every age. In this brief talk, I will outline this reading of the Sophist and display its large-scale ramifications of his thesis for hermeneutics and historiography. Pieper associated the sophist with various theses: the flattening of reality, the rejection of the dignity of the language and binding the art of persuasion with brute force, et cetera. For Pieper, these sophistic theses arise by way of various manifestations and counterpart articulations. However, what is hermeneutically distinctive about Pieper’s reading is twofold. First, his position is based upon the notion that there is an objective meaning to a text, and our interpretations of them must be aligned either with their original meaning, or with an equitable interpretation. Second, Pieper’s reading displays that interpreting canonical texts cannot be motivated by ulterior factors e.g., political motives; Pieper reads the timelessness of the sophist not on the basis of using it to drive his own philosophical viewpoint, but to read Plato in such a way that one brings to light Plato’s original meaning with modern implications. The “novelty” (not sophistic novelty!) arises in the perceptiveness of Plato, not in the distortion of Plato. The irony of Pieper’s reading is that it intentionally avoids the principles the sophist would adopt in interpreting a philosophical text—the sophist would bend words/language to suit ulterior motives e.g., practicality/utility, adopt novelty over truth and would attempt to flatten history via historical constructionism.

Jeremy R. Smith, Rebellious Postulations: A Transformation in the Non-Philosophical Understanding

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

With a multitude of texts being translated for the academic Anglophone audience within the past decade, the oeuvre of philosopher François Laruelle has been interpreted, utilized, and mutated in interdisciplinary contexts and methodologies. Theoretical practices, such as feminism, Marxism, afropessimism, digitality, animal studies, science studies, among many others, have found association with the non-philosophical practice that Laruelle has matured over the course of forty years. Such commitments are cause for celebration in the (Anglophonic) humanities; but, in seeking to develop a proposed “democracy of thought,” this institutionalization of non-philosophy does not liberate itself, along with such associations, from the commodification of thought. By turning specifically to the early writings of Laruelle periodized as “Philosophie I,” however marred by the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy’s authority he shapes it up to be, I seek to bring to the fore two factors for the future of non-philosophy: rebelling against the dominant integration of its interpretation as an ethical theory, on the one hand, and to address the political materialism inherent in these works that can break non-philosophy, as well as any future practice or theory drawn from contemporary work, away from its commodification on the other. In order for theory and practice to be torn “from the philosopher and give[n] to the one who does not ask for it: ordinary man,” I will pose several rebellious postulations drawn from Laruelle’s text, Au-delà du principe de pouvoir (Paris: Payot, 1978), to bring about not only a transformation of the non-philosophical understanding, but towards a transformation in political interpretation, one that moves from signification to signi-fiction.

Katie Smith, Further Evidence for Morphomes: the H-Pattern in Ibero-Romance

Verb stem allomorphy is one of the most significant morphophonological changes from Vulgar Latin into Modern Romance. Following the historical loss of vowel length distinction, Castilian diphthongized the Vulgar Latin mid-low vowels [ɛ] to /je/, and [ɔ] to /we/ in stressed syllables (Lloyd 1987). These alternations give rise to the N-pattern, taken as evidence of distinct morphomes (Aronoff 1994; Maiden 2009, 2018). Another morphomic pattern is the L-pattern of Maiden (2009). The L-pattern consists of velarization and palatalization resulting from the ‘yod effect’ and the palatalization and affrication of velars (Maiden 2009, 2018). These morphomic patterns have no phonological or functional content, but they are recurrent for typologically similar verbs in the grammar of each language and systematic in their occurrence. We propose a third pattern, derived from the N-pattern, which we call the H-pattern, and which provides further evidence for morphomic patterns in Romance language. Maiden (2009, 2018) categorizes these verbs as N+L-pattern verbs. Although Maiden (2018) argues that the appearance of high vowel alternation in the L-pattern cells is a result of the yod effect and palatalization historically, there is no synchronic velarization or palatalization present in these paradigms. Therefore, the H-pattern should stand alone in synchrony. The proposed H-pattern includes the preterite as it is essential to show the role of metaphony in these verbal paradigms that does not appear in regular N-pattern verbs. Including the preterite in the N-pattern paradigms does not change the distribution, as there is no metaphony in the preterite of N-pattern verbs. These patterns across Ibero-Romance thus provide us evidence for morphomes and indicate that morphomes are psychologically real. The patterns have their roots in historical phonology but their persistence in modern Ibero-Romance is due to purely morphomic reasons.

Rini Tarafder, Literally, a Literary Crisis: Authorship in Ashadh ka ek din and Evam Indrajit

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States

Ashadh ka ek din and Evam Indrajit are two classics of modern Indian theatre that virtually launched the theatrical careers of their playwrights. The first, written by Mohan Rakesh in Hindi and published in 1958, immediately resonated in literary, critical and theatrical circles. Evam Indrajit, written by Badal Sircar in 1963, was published in the July 1965 issue of the journal Bohurupee in Calcutta. The play was performed the same year by the group Souvanik in Calcutta, and while Badal Sircar was himself in Nigeria, he turned into the “enfant terrible of the playwriting scene” overnight (Katyal 27). Both Ashadh ka ek din and Evam Indrajit represent the struggling writer facing-off against an alienating society. In this paper, I analyze these plays employing Bakhtin’s architectonic framework of the relationship between the Author and the Hero in aesthetic activity. With this reorientation, I argue that the playwrights dramatize a crisis in the very act of authorship in the plays. The playwrights authorize a ‘birth’ and ‘death’ of the Author and the Hero within narrative, which is further problematized by the contested terrains of modernity in post-independent India. This modernist dialogism in Ashadh ka ek din and Evam Indrajit stems from the playwrights’ own location within the plurality of postcolonial modernity in India, and is revealed in the simultaneous presence of agonistic/antagonistic attitudes to historical questions on modernity, women in the urban space, and the very nature of authorship.

Jacob Vangeest, Nietzschean Plasticity

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

Three thinkers dominated French theory during the 20th century: Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. The intersection of socio-political movements—the end of WWII, the discovery of humanitarian atrocities pervaded by the Communist USSR, the decentralization of capitalism, and the birth of what we might today call neoliberalism—led to an existential grappling with the dogmatism present in large areas of modern thought. In particular, the perceived dogmatism of Marxism and psychoanalysis was contrasted with a more plastic politics that could be derived from Nietzsche. This presentation examines the development of one strand of what Laruelle calls “Nietzsche-thought” [pensée-Nietzsche] in light of three texts: Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Laruelle’s Nietzsche contre Heidegger (1977). I begin with an analysis of decoding/recoding in Anti-Oedipus which takes place through a selective affirmation or intensification. Through a reading of Nietzsche and Philosophy I situate a kernel of this conceptualization in Deleuze’s earlier work on Nietzsche. After unpacking the Deleuzian reading, I move to examine the way that Laruelle’s early work (prior to his non-philosophy) on Nietzsche not only builds upon but (in a Nietzschean sense) overcomes Deleuze’s Nietzsche through an intensification of difference/différance (a différance, it will be noted, which also seeks to overcome Derridean différance) expressed in a machinic materialism of the Eternal return of the Same and the Will to power, which pushes beyond Deleuze’s understanding of decoding. Ultimately the aim of this lineage, of a more plastic materialism which seeks to overcome the dogmatism of historical materialism and psychoanalaysis, moves us to what Laruelle terms a Continental Politic, which, in its plasticity, aims to be a more useful way of thinking politically in the contemporary world.

Laila Zaitoun, Decoding the Political Through the Aesthetics of Amiri Baraka’s Poem

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

Jazz poetry, that was generated out of the black movement’s appeals to justice, is usually defined as that trend of poetry that recodes jazz music in terms of rhythm, rhyme, noises and/or sounds. Amiri Baraka, who was known before as Le Roi Johns, is still regarded as one of the leading figures in this poetic movement. Both politics and aesthetics intertwine in Baraka’s poetry when addressing the audience, who are stirred by both the content and the form. Hence this paper is an attempt to shed some light on the aesthetic and the political in Amiri Baraka’s poem Somebody Blew up America. I argue in this paper that both form and content tend to decode each other, i.e. the content becomes the form as the aesthetic aspects of the form embrace political implications. Jazz poetry heavily relies on music which involves various dimensions as repetitions and sounds along with certain linguistic features in the sentence construction, diction, level of clarity and spontaneity. Jazz poetry is free and revolutionary since the authority of the European and white American literary measurements are noticeably absent, and this aspect demonstrates the interrelationship between politics and aesthetics.