Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia": Matthew Biro
"Mass Ornament, Mass Control: Leni Riefenstahl's Fatal Interpretation of a Practice" - Matthew Biro
Group I: Elizabeth Sears, Thelma Thomas, Whitney Davis, Alex Potts
"Eye Training" - Elizabeth Sears
"Images of Erotic Desire in 'Early Christian' Art" - Thelma Thomas
Standpoints and Our Form of Life: Ludwig Wittgenstein's House for his Sister (1926-28) - Whitney Davis
Group II: James Porter, Yopie Prins, Sara Rappe
"Sublime Subjects: Foucault's Humboldtian Project" - James I. Porter
"Singing the Body Electric: The Occidental Eccentricity of Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau" - Sara L. Rappe
Group III: Sally Humphreys, Yun Lee Too, Webb Keane
"Classics and Colonialism: toward and erotics of the discipline" - Sally Humphreys
"Walking Libraries" - Yun Lee Too
"Missionaries, modernity, and the paradoxes of the Christian Subject" - Webb Keane
Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda documentary film Olympia, which received the Nazi's State Prize for Film [Staatspreis fur Film] in 1938, makes use of multiple popular and avant garde practices appropriated from the visual culture of the Weimar Republic. My talk examines one of these practices, Riefenstahl's strategies of "mass ornamentation": the aestheticized and serial representation of objects and human beings that appeared in certain forms of film, performance, and photography produced in Germany in the years before 1933. Theorized as early as 1927 by Siegfried Kracauer, mass ornamentation, in Kracauer's eyes, offered both critical and reifying possibilities. In Riefenstahl's hands, however, mass ornamentation was divested of its critical functions. Instead, in Olympia, serial representations of idealized human bodies were generally used to eradicate differences and, thus, for authoritarian and ultimately fatal purposes.
Art History became a university subject in the 19th century; art historians since that time have had a mandate to train an elite to see more than and differently from those outside the field. This paper will examine the disciplined gaze of the art historian, analyzing exercises devised to teach visual analysis and considering the projects implied in the training. Central to the paper will be "visits" to early 20th-century seminar rooms and lecture halls in Germany and the United States - via memories, class notes, and interviews.
Not surprisingly, most historicans of Early Christian art are mainly concerned with religious aspects of images, with traditional emphases on the representation of developing Christian doctrine and on apparent stylistic manifestations of spirituality. "Images of Erotic Desire in 'Early Christian' Art" will discuss how that historiographic legacy has excluded popular iconographies of desire from constructions of the visual culture of the period.
Standpoints and Our Form of Life: Ludwig Wittgenstein's House for his Sister (1926-28) - Whitney Davis
In 1926-28, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who for some time thereafter professionally identified himself as an architect) completed a house--begun by the young interior designer and budding architect Paul Engelmann (a student of Adolf Loos)--for his wealthy sister Margarethe (Gretl) Wittgenstein. The house was intended to showcase her collection of art and objets d'art and seems to have revolved around her collection of full-size plaster casts of well-known Greco-Roman sculptures; more broadly, it was to be the setting of, and theater for, her highly cultivated and sociable way of life as a major patron of the arts (e.g. of the Viennese Secession) and of music. This aspect of the origin and function of the house, however, has been largely ignored by commentators, who have concentrated instead on ways in which the house might be said to express or display a Wittgensteinian architectural aesthetic, constructive or formal logic, or philosophical outlook to be derived, chiefly, from his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Without denying these possibilities, I focus on Ludwig's response to his sister's way of life and consider the house as an attempt architecturally to embody both his and her "standpoints" in relation to that way of life and in relation to each other--most broadly, as an expression of Wittgenstein's understanding of the place of a standpoint in a form of life and of the problems a group of people who share a form of life necessarily still confront in appreciating (in literally being able to locate or to see) one another's standpoints therein. To develop my interpretation, I draw both upon a detailed analysis of the construction of perspective effects and other visual and architectonic aspects of the house and upon an explication of Wittgenstein's doctrine of Lebensform as stated in his later philosophical writing (chiefly the Philosophical Investigations, completed in 1949).
Self-fashioning is the idea that subjects are not found in the world but are invented, that they can actually take possession of their fabricated lives by becoming their own authors, by applying their own agency to themselves and by giving shape to their lives, thus affirming their (fictive, constructed, self-fashioned) selves through what is, in essence, an ascetic and an aesthetic practice of self-making and sublimation. The body is one of the basic loci of this art of self-construction. And on the Foucauldian view, the way forward to a new and unpredictable postmodern form of subjectivity is by way of a return to what is held to be the classical model of self-production, the Greek and then Roman "art of life" (techne tou biou), which is the art of "excercising a perfect mastery over oneself," in other words, an "aesthetics [and "ascetics"] of existence," constructed by and within a system of relations of power. "The idea of the bios [life] as a material for an aesthetic piece of art is something which fascinates me."
So Foucault. Curiously, the source of this fascination and its authority as a threat to established certainties is found not in ancient sources but in Nietzsche's view "that one should create one's life by giving style to it through long practice and daily work, "Through the elaboration and stylization of an activity in the exercise of its power and the practice of its liberty." And whatever else one may wish to say about this apparent view of Nietzsche's, its source is the classicizing humanism of the late eighteenth century, namely that of Winckelmann and Humboldt. Not only does Humboldt give us a "classical" form of the will to power; he suggests how the will to power, the displacement of the subject, is part of the constitution of classical (modern) subjectivity. Identity here is not a latency to be realized but an interplay of forms and forces, of sheer exertions and desires, that is in fact idealized. Is it any different in Foucault's asceticism and aesthetics of the self? Exploring these approximations around the-then constructed, now disavowed-classicist, humanist subject, from the eighteenth century to the postmodern present, will be the focus of this paper.
The American Transcendentalists revert to Platonism as a way of valorizing their disembodied poetics, an enterprise perhaps best captured in Emerson's image of the walking eyeball or Whitman's "body electric." This discourse in turn appeals to the non-Western poetics of, e.g. the Bhagavad Gita, for a kind of authorization of the Unitarian or universalist pretensions of the movement. Alongside this global metaphysics, the Transcendentalists explored the politics of the body and its liberation, casting their transparent gaze on the anti-slavery movement, on sexual practices, and on the civil subject.
This paper looks at the discipline of philology (both 'classical' and 'orientalist'), and at the concept of the 'classic' ancient text, in terms of contradictions: between the romance of discovery and the asceticism of discipline, the remoteness of antiquity and the connectedness of 'tradition,' the classic as a site of inner spiritual values and of national identity.
Since Luciano Canfora's extraordinary study 'the vanished library,' the Library of Alexandria has become antiquity's library par excellence and at that, an institution that is so important and crucial to our intellectual histories precisely because it no longer exists. My paper, however, offers a way of reading through and apart from this otherwise heart-rending lacuna by exploring a representation of textuality that comes largely from later imperial North Africa. Here the literary intellectual or 'pepaideumenos' constructs himself and is constructed as the 'walking library,' the embodied receptacle of bookish culture that has been displaced from its historical origins. The cultured man through his vast reading knowledge comes to personify the book collection, and in so doing, suggest that the library in antiquity may have had far more various manifestations than is generally assumed. Furthermore, the sources I read - Vitruvius, Apuleius, and Athenaeus - reveal that the 'library''s authority is itself complex inasmuch as the 'pepaideumenos' may stand as a critical presence possessing literary omniscience or as a figure who throws into question the idea that a person might reliably represent literary knowledge. The 'walking library' is an individual on whom a self-consciously literate and learned age has projected both its aspirations and its anxieties.
Twentieth-century missionaries in colonial and post-colonial societies were often highly self-conscious and anxious about their relationship to modernity. On the one hand, they saw themselves as crucial agents of modernity, rationalizers of education and economics as well, of course, as religion. On the other hand, they were aware that modernity was commonly supposed to entail secularity. Some of the paradoxes become most evident in their ethnographic work, which was in an equally troubled relationship to the emerging discipline of anthropology-to which some missionaries were devoted and important contributors. This paper concerns the relations among missionaries, the concept of 'culture' and its disciplinary division from 'religion.' In exploring these relations, the paper will show how missionary work encounters more general conceptual and practical paradoxes arising out of the effort to define and live as a 'modern' subject.
*******"Body/Bildung" is part of the "Rethinking the Humanities" project*******