Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 07:59:14 -0500 From: Spoon Collective <spoons> Subject: Two Calls for Papers for Benjamin Conference (fwd) Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 01:47:45 -0500 (EST) To: owner-spoon-announcements-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU From: "Mario A. Caro" <ario-AT-uhura.cc.rochester.edu> Subject: 2 Calls for Papers for Benjamin Conference Please note that what follows are two separate calls for papers: one for the "Passagen 2000" Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) workshop and the other for the International Walter Benjamin Association Conference. The former is being held in conjunction with the latter. =============================================================================PASSAGEN 2000: THE CITY, PACE AND SPACE ASCA Workshop July 21-23, 1997 Call for participation - Deadline March 1st, 1997 Contact: ASCA-AT-let.uva.nl Walter Benjamin's historical notes on 19th century Paris, known as the unfinished Passagen-Werk or Arcades Project, were many things at once: a history of Paris, of philosophy of seeing, an experience of city life, and a practice - unfinished because unfinishable - of history writing. The project was meant to free the present from myth by means of a historical knowledge that lies, as Susan Buck-Morss phrased it, forgotten, buried, within surviving culture.(1) Benjamin's Passagen-Werk offers an attempt to rethink the aims and methodologies of history, with an emphasis on history's relevance for the present. But the history it writes - or could not write - is that of material objects, of city life, of visual culture, as perhaps the most symptomatic "way of life" in the present. For ASCA, focused as it is on the present and on a reconsideration of canonicity, this work constitutes a great resource and challenge, source of inspiration and measure of difference. If Benjamin wrote his notes toward a history of Paris as in some essential way "nineteenth-century", what can we learn from this project for an assessment of city culture near the end of the millennium? If anything, Benjamin's work is interdisciplinary, or rather, does not accept disciplinary confinement in any sense at all. It offers insights, ideas, knowledge, for all those interesting issues of cultural analysis, whatever their own disciplinary background, and at the same time constitutes a challenge to everything we have been taught to hold dear by way of methodology. It demonstrates the importance of attention to the experience of being "inside" the object of analysis; of looking around and seeing anew all those images and objects that were always-already there; of mass culture and a cultural pedagogy based on an acknowledgment of its importance. The flaneur, the journalist, the cab driver, the shopkeeper and the shopper are the main characters in a truly cultural vision of the city. By way of a prelude to the international conference on the legacy of Walter Benjamin, held in Amsterdam from July 24th through 26th 1997 and co-sponsored by ASCA, this intensive workshop will be devoted to imagining a Passagen-Werk for the year 2000. It will consist of three days - July 21st through 23th - of intensive debate around position papers which will be distributed ahead of time. Papers can address issues of city culture in the present in the broadest sense: from film, television and the new media to issues of multicultural interaction, architecture and crowds, museums and their contents, reading, time, space: everything one can bring to bear on the cultural life of a city around the year 2000. The city today is most keenly distinguished from other environments by its specific spatial organization and by the temporal constraints it poses. Amsterdam during rush hour is one way of seeing how these two aspects are connected. Do city people find time to read, and do crowded apartments leave them space to do it? Is city space so hyper that the pace automatically picks up? Whereas we do not encourage participants to imitate Benjamin's writing format in this work, his ideas, however loosely construed, are to be considered as a source of inspiration or a bone of contention. No thorough knowledge of Benjamin's work is required; rather, we are hoping for an imaginative engagement with the project he pursued as an entrance into the question of what city life is now and is to be in the near future, how it relates to the past, and how our academic disciplines help or don't help to understand that life analytically. Indeed, one of the greatest challenges to the kind of overall cultural vision that an object such as "the city" requires, is the detailed engagement with that object or a section of it, that is still best described as "close reading". A close reading, then, that - learning from Benjamin's musings about Paris - is always entangled, and contending with, a theoretical reflection that cannot master it. The explicit positioning of the paper in terms of both object and theory as well as method, in terms of the relationship between the present and the past as it is played out in the lived environment of the city, will be an essential criterion for selection. Participation is free and open to all ASCA members, PhD students of affiliated institutions, and interested others. Reasonable housing facilities can be arranged on a first come, first serve basis. Proposals (500 to 1000 words) are to be submitted before March 1st. If accepted, finished papers must be in the ASCA office by May 30th. Papers should not exceed 3500 words (ten pages) and should be submitted on disk or e-mail. (1) Susan Buck-Morss, 1989 The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press =========================================================================== Walter Benjamin Conference 1997: Call for papers The International Walter Benjamin Association will hold its Conference on July 24-26, 1997 in cooperation with Felix Meritis, the Goethe Institute, and ASCA. The theme of the conference is "Perception and Experience in Modernity" and its structure will comprise plenary double lectures followed by series of workshops. The subsections of the workshops are: Vision and Multimediality;Politics of Image and Space; Figures of Experience 1, Presence, Power, Performance; Figures of Experience 2, Allegory, Memory, History. Participants include: George Steiner, Werner Hamacher, Sigrid Weigel, Martin Jay, Samuel Weber and many others. If you are working on Walter Benjamin, you are invited to submit a precis of a paper not longer than 300 words. Your final papers should not exceed 3000 words and will be circulated in advance to the other participants. Abstracts should be sent to the International Walter Benjamin Association, ALW, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam, fax: +31 20 6206863 or 525 3052, e-mail: Benjamin-AT-let.uva.nl, tel. +31 20 6226762.
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