Universalisms in Conflict – Post-Colonial Challenges in Art History and Philosophy
Samstag, 10. März 2012 - 14:00 Uhr
Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien
Datum | 09.03.2012 - 10.03.2012
Ort | Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Wien, M13
Symposium veranstaltet vom Institut für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften
Konzept: Christian Kravagna, Ruth Sonderegger
Teilnehmer_innen | Chika Okeke-Agulu, Fahim Amir, Sabeth Buchmann, Marina Gržini?, Monica Juneja, Jens Kastner, Christian Kravagna, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Marion von Osten, Ruth Sonderegger, Isobel Whitelegg, Franz Wimmer
Die westliche Kunstgeschichte hat vor kurzem begonnen, die Herausforderungen der kulturellen Globalisierung zu diskutieren. Neue und oft konkurrierende Konzepte wie "World Art Studies" und "Global Art History" zeugen von den Anstrengungen zur Überwindung des zunehmend eingestandenen Eurozentrismus der Disziplin durch Ausweitung ihres Gegenstandsbereichs auf andere Weltregionen. Die Rhetorik der "neuen Herausforderungen" und einer notwendigen "neuen Orientierung" der Kunstgeschichte übersieht jedoch häufig die politischen Dimensionen der anti- bzw. postkolonialen Kritik von Geschichtsschreibung. Alternative Modelle, basierend auf Fallstudien spezifischer Konstellationen in transkulturellen Kontaktzonen, sind imstande, tiefere Einsichten in die interkontinentalen künstlerischen und diskursiven Beziehungen unter kolonialen und postkolonialen Bedingungen zu ermöglichen. Das Symposium versammelt ausgewählte Fallstudien in postkolonialer Kunstgeschichte; es diskutiert Kriterien, Begriffe und Methoden der Auswahl und Untersuchung solcher Beispiele, die als relevant und paradigmatisch für kritische Revisionen etablierter Kanons und Narrative der modernen Kunst sowie vorherrschender Konzepte von Zentrum und Peripherie verstanden werden. Das Symposium erinnert darüber hinaus an Projekte und Diskussionen, die den gegenwärtigen Debatten über "globale" und/oder post-eurozentrische Kunstgeschichten voraus gingen.
Die westliche Philosophie war seit ihren Anfängen von universalistischen Ansprüchen geprägt. Ihrem Begehren nach Einheit zum Trotz war die okzidentale Philosophie jedoch nie ein vollkommen eindimensionales Projekt. Kritische Stimmen aus den eigenen Reihen haben die universalistischen Ansprüche der Philosophie immer wieder herausgefordert - in der jüngeren Vergangenheit insbesondere auch Kritik aus der Perspektive der Dekolonisierung. Gleichzeitig sind universalistische Forderungen aber auch immer wieder integraler Bestandteil emanzipatorischer Kämpfe gewesen, nicht zuletzt von anti-imperialistischen und antikolonialen Kämpfen. Deshalb kann das Denken, Handeln und Kämpfen im Namen universalistischer Prinzipien nicht einfach als ideologisch ad acta gelegt werden. Doch es bleibt ein von Gewalt durchsetztes Faktum, dass die westliche Philosophie sich kaum mit den dekolonialen Affirmationen, Variationen, Weiterentwicklungen und Zurückweisungen okzidentaler Philosophie befasst hat. Deshalb stellt unsere Konferenz genau solche Begegnungen und ihre zeitgenössischen Herausforderungen ins Zentrum. Darüber hinaus geht es um die Frage, ob postkoloniales Philosophieren in ähnlich spezifischen Konstellationen praktiziert wird, wie sie oben für die Kunstgeschichte skizziert wurden.
Ruth Sonderegger
Christian Kravagna
Saturday, March 10
Moderation: Fahim Amir and Ruth Sonderegger
14:00
Introduction
14:15
Franz Wimmer
Conflicting Universalisms - The Case of Philosophies
Starting from the need for culturally generic concepts and methods in
philosophy, this paper aims to discuss the following points:
1) The history of philosophy plays an important role in philosophy, yet
the historiography of philosophy still tends to be generally Eurocentric.
How can we describe and teach histories of philosophies with a less
centrist perspective?
2) Not only with regard to history, but all fields of philosophy must find
ways to overcome colonial and other hegemonic inequalities. Wiredu's
proposal of "conceptual decolonization in African philosophy" demonstrates the possibilities as well as the difficulties of such a project.
3) Philosophy in an intercultural perspective aims to overcome monocultural, and also merely comparative approaches. The intention is to discuss philosophical problems by mutually recognizing and criticizing the positions of regional traditions.
4) Since culture-based traditions in philosophy differ in many basic
ways, different types or strategies of centrism ought to be distinguished
in order to establish complex, i.e., polylogic interactions among philosophers on a global scale.
Franz Martin Wimmer, currently retired, was professor of philosophy
at the University of Vienna. He studied philosophy and political
science in Salzburg and was a visiting professor in the U.S., Costa
Rica, India, Germany, and Austria. His major publications include:
Interkulturelle Philosophie - Theorie und Geschichte (1990), Philosophy
and Democracy in Intercultural Perspective (co-editor, 1997), Essays on
Intercultural Philosophy (2002), Globalität und Philosophie (2003), and
Interkulturelle Philosophie. Eine Einführung (2004, reprint 2009). His
research focuses mainly on intercultural philosophy; for details see:
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/Franz.Martin.Wimmer
15:45
Nelson Maldonado-Torres
What is Emancipatory about Universalism?: Reflections by Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Gloria Anzaldúa
I hereby sketch a position of universalism as radical diversality on the basis of the work of Caribbean theorists Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter and Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa. I begin with a discussion about the traps of universalism, with particular reference to the formulation of its opposite, extreme particularism, relativism, and racism, and continue to elaborate ways in which references to the universal in humanity can serve emancipatory interests and avoid the usual pitfalls of the universal. I present Caribbean, Latina/o philosophy, and parts of Latin American and Africana philosophy as precise efforts to elaborate such a conception of universality, and raise the question about the renewal of European philosophy and of fields that assume its typical universalizing scope in relation to those decolonial intellectual formations. Of particular importance in the discussion will be ideas of epistemology, art, and science as they figure in the works of Fanon, Wynter, and Anzaldúa.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres is Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is also President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Co-director of Critical Caribbean Literature Studies at Rutgers.
17:30
Marina Gržini?
Occidental Universalist Thinking and / or the Decolonial Approach?
The major issue I want to explore is what happens at the juncture of occidental universalist thinking and a decolonial approach when both approaches contemplate contemporary theory's possibilities for exposing and undermining racist, anti-Semitic, and colonial realities. After all, these realities are firmly reproduced through the war-State, postmodern fascism (fragmentation of the social), and coloniality. How does contemporary theory deal with an ultra-intensified process of de-politicization that works with capitalist financialization? Is theory capable of infiltrating the processes of exploitation, discrimination, and expropriation in order to dismantle the basis of a neoliberal global capitalist mode of production, rather than simply exuberantly reporting on the representation strategies of this mode? What I, and most of us find necessary is to rearticulate theory in the wider context of the social, economic, and the political. Rather than dispersion into micro-politics, we inquire into ways to elaborate political art as a possibility to talk about racism, introducing "potential history" that develops new formats of epistemologies capable of countering Eurocentric Western genealogies and demanding a re-politicization of life and art with a historicization of biopolitics through necropolitics.
Marina Gržini? is a philosopher, artist, and theorist. She is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her current research focuses on processes of decoloniality, analysis of global capitalism, and questions of biopolitics and necropolitics. Marina Gržini? has lectured widely (Kyoto Biennale, UC Berkeley's Center for New Media, Tokyo, Berlin, etc.). Her most recent publication is Re-Politicizing Art, Theory, Representation and New Media Technology, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and Schlebrügge editors, Vienna 2008. Gržini? has been involved with video art since 1982.
19:00
Jens Kastner
Equality and Difference on the Move
The social movements that rang the bell for a new round in the debate on universalism present a confrontation of two different approaches. One approach upholds the equality of human beings - regardless of whether they are characterized as speaking, vulnerable, or alienated, and takes this as the starting point for describing novel forms of political mobilization. The other approach founds political agency in class, gender, and colonial differences along with their intersections. However, this is not a confrontation of particularism and universalism, but rather, two kinds of universalism with different foundations: an ontological universalism on the one hand, and a strategic one on the other. The lecture discusses the interdependencies between social movements (from the neo-Zapatist uprising to the precarity movement) and theory production and their varying consequences.
Jens Kastner, sociologist and art historian, currently works as a freelance author und university lecturer in Vienna. He taught at the Institute for Sociology at the University of Muenster (1999-2004), the Center for Latin American Studies (Cela), University of Muenster (2004-2006), the Vienna Art School (2005/2006), the "International Development" study program, University of Vienna (2008 and 2010), the Institute for Economic and Social History, University of Vienna (2008), and the Institute for Art and Design, Vienna University of Technology (since 2009). Since 2008, he has been a research associate/ senior lecturer at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Kastner has published articles on social movements, cultural studies, and contemporary art in several newspapers and magazines. Moreover, he is coordinating editor of Bildpunkt, the IG Bildende Kunst journal. In 2011 he was awarded the ADKV-Art Cologne prize for Art Criticism. For more information, see: http://www.jenspetzkastner.de
Organisation: Dunja Reithner
Assistentinnen: Verena Melgarejo-Weinandt, Sophie Schasiepen