Introduction

Claudia Peppel, Introduction to the lecture Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, The Return of the Past in the Present: The Work of Edouard Manet, ICI Berlin, 16 January 2024, video recording, mp4, 08:31 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e240116_2

The Return of the Past in the Present:The Work of Edouard Manet

In contrast to today’s view that Manet re-interpreted scenes of the past and molded them in intriguing ways into contemporary images, ‘traditional’ critics accused him of plagiarism and technical inaptitude whenever they detected the influence of Italian or Spanish masters upon his work. Instead of retracing Manet’s references to his painterly past, his critics were inclined to mock him, decrying him as ‘the Velázquez of the Boulevard’, or as ‘the Spaniard of Paris’. However, his borrowings were gradually recognized not as impediments to his artistic intentions but as what provided him a language, and a Spanish one in particular, with which to express himself, and this pointed towards significant changes and ruptures in his painterly genealogy. With a psychoanalytic eye upon his work and leaning upon T. S. Eliot’s statement that ‘no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone’, it becomes clear that Manet succeeded in resignifying the past by inserting into it a piece of the present and in recontextualizing the present by relocating it into the past. In dealing with clinical material, the psychoanalyst is confronted with a similar task: engaging in the excavation of memories and searching for meaningful interpretations of these memories in light of the present situation.The psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit or apres-coup proves to be very valuable for an understanding of the complexities of Manet’s citations of the past. Instead of thinking in linear terms, the idea of Nachträglichkeit emphasizes the process of interpreting the present retroactively, so that a twofold process can ensue, as is the case in Manet’s Olympia, where he explicitly cites Titian’s Venus of Urbino. In this exchange between the two paintings, the spectator is challenged to rethink her adoration of The Venus of Urbino and her shock at Olympia. What was portrayed in the past as sensuous beauty is now, in Manet’s Olympia, made more sexually explicit. Manet invites his spectators into these imaginary exchanges, so that neither work can be read again in its germane ways. Olympia is no longer a shocking prostitute, inviting her spectators into her boudoir, and the beautiful woman in Venus of Urbino can no longer be simply adorned as a semi-goddess. Manet has re-invested both paintings with new meanings, moving back and forth between the past and the present. Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst who lives and works in Vienna, Austria. She is a member and training analyst at the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse (WAP), where she is also a member of the Board. She is the head of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Sigmund Freud Museum. Prior to moving to Vienna, she was the past president and supervising and personal analyst at PINC (Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California). She is on the faculty at PINC and at the NYU Postdoctoral Program of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (New York) and she teaches at WAP. She has published numerous articles on the interfaces between psychoanalysis, the visual arts, film, and politics. Her most recent publications include: ‘The Space of Transition between Winnicott and Lacan’, in Between Winnicott and Lacan (2011); the section on ‘Jacques Lacan’ in The Textbook of Psychoanalysis (2012; currently being republished); ‘Living between Two Languages: A Bi-focal Perspective’, in Immigration in Psychoanalysis (2016); ‘Dora, the Unending and Unraveling Story’, in Dora, Hysteria &amp; Gender: Reconsidering Freud’s Case Study (2018); ‘Unexpected Antecedents to the Concept of the Death Drive: A Return to the Beginnings’, in Contemporary Perspectives on the Freudian Death Drive: In Theory, Clinical Practice and Culture (2019); and ‘From Narcissus to Echo: The Imaginary Working under the Mask of the Symbolic’, EPF Congress, 2022. Her book entitled Edouard Manet: Framing the Past and the Gaze is in preparation.Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, The Return of the Past in the Present: The Work of Edouard Manet, lecture, ICI Berlin, 16 January 2024, video recording, mp4, 59:07 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e240116

Analog World-modelling:Anticipating a Post-war World Through Architectural Models

Theodore Conrad was an architect and master craftsman. His miniatures of Plexiglas and aluminum modelled a post-war landscape of glass-and-steel skyscrapers, sprawling business campuses, and domestic mid-century modernism from the 1930s onward. With the help of electrified tools and cameras, a vision of a world in Kodachrome arose long before it existed. Architectural modelling — long before the digital turn — became a powerful tool for testing, constructing, rendering, and selling novel architectural ideas. Teresa Fankhänel is an associate curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and editor-in-chief of the Architectural Exhibition Review. Her recent exhibitions include African Mobilities (2018), The Architecture Machine (2020–21), Built Together (2021), Shouldn’t You Be Working?(2023), and Andrea Canepa: As We Dwell in the Fold (2023). Among her interests are the use of technology and media for architectural design, and the history, theory, and practice of architecture exhibitions. She was a curatorial assistant for the exhibition The Architectural Model (Deutsches Architekturmuseum, 2012) and has published two books on models: The Architectural Models of Theodore Conrad (2021) and An Alphabet of Architectural Models (2021). She is co-editor of the book Are You A Model?, a collection of new research on analog and digital models, which will be published in 2023.Teresa Fankhänel, Analog World-modelling: Anticipating a Post-war World Through Architectural Models, lecture, ICI Berlin, 8 January 2024, video recording, mp4, 39:36 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e240108

Introduction

Claudia Peppel, Introduction to the lecture Teresa Fankhänel, Analog World-modelling: Anticipating a Post-war World Through Architectural Models, ICI Berlin, 8 January 2024, video recording, mp4, 10:10 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e240108_2

Anti-eugenics after the Genome

Since the 1990s, genomics has promised cures for major challenges to human survival, among them disease, food shortages, fertility problems, and climate change. It has offered a vision of a better world by sequencing and modifying the building blocks of life. This promise of a better world echoes the statistical utopianism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the measurement of norms and averages to cure social problems. At least one legacy of this thinking in the current techno-sphere is the idea that good and bad health can be assessed through biometric calculation. What has changed are the tools for measuring these values. Human traits disappear into caches of genetic information, estimated and compared in segments, at a distance from the medical descriptions, social values, historical systems, ecological milieux, and literary conventions that have supplied these traits with meaning. This surplus of information needs new narratives to justify the cost of intervening in life at molecular scales. Drawing out the surprising proximity between narratives and technologies of genomic sequencing, this talk looks back to the concerns of the statistical utopians, and forward to the forms that anti-eugenics might take after the genome. Lara Choksey is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures in the Department of English at University College London, where she is also Associate Faculty in the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. She researches the interplay of science and technology, critical race and postcolonial studies, and sociological realism in modern and contemporary literature. She has published articles and chapters in The Sociological Review, Journal of Literature and Science, Medical Humanities, Journal of Historical Geography, and in The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Her book, Narrative in the Age of the Genome (2021), considers measures of the human in genomic narratives.Lara Choksey, ‘Anti-eugenics after the Genome’, lecture presented at the symposium Coding Utopias, ICI Berlin, 28 September 2023, video recording, mp4, 56:18 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e230928-1

Model Narratives

The models of scientists &#8211; to be found in their diagrams, equations, maps, and even machines &#8211; can be understood as their representations of phenomena in the world. But when we look back into how scientists created those models, we often find processes of narrative-making: scientists, in seeking to understand their part of the world, create narratives about how it might work. And then, in usage, we find those model-representations becoming tools: tools of exploration, explanation and reasoning, activities that often involve scientists telling narratives with their models. So narrative resources come into two processes of scientists’ modelling: first in spinning narratives to help fashion their models of the world, and second in using narrative accounts to reason with and explore their ‘world in the model’. Models and narratives seem odd bed-fellows, but are often conjoined in the creative work of science. Mary S. Morgan is the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics; an elected Fellow of the British Academy; and an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published on social scientists’ practices of modelling, observing, measuring and making case studies; and is especially interested in how ideas, numbers and facts are used in projects designed to change the world. Her most recent books are How Well Do Facts Travel? (2011) and The World in the Model (2012); and the outcome of a major ERC grant: Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800 (edited with Kim M. Hajek and Dominic J. Berry, 2022).Mary S. Morgan, Model Narratives, lecture, ICI Berlin, 30 May 2023, video recording, mp4, 53:25 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e230530

Philosophy’s Mother Envy:Has There Yet Been a Deconstruction of the Mother Tongue?

This essay approaches the problem of untying the mother tongue using Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique of onto-typology, along with the concept of the outre-mère (the ‘beyond-mother’), a limit-figure he and Jean-Luc Nancy devised in their critical assessments of psychoanalysis and its relationship to politics and the problem of mimesis. The essay argues that it will not be possible to deconstruct the figure of the mother tongue, or to untie ourselves from it, as long as we leave unquestioned both the theoretical dependence on figuration and our affective tie ( Gefühlsbindung) to theory.Michael Eng, ‘Philosophy’s Mother Envy: Has There Yet Been a Deconstruction of the Mother Tongue?’, in Untying the Mother Tongue, ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo, Cultural Inquiry, 26 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 25-43 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-26_2

Metaverse Landscapes:Technology and Territory

Coming out of what the New York Times has called a long tradition of innovation and impunity that marks the Silicon Valley, how can one understand the entrepreneurial and territorial politics of the Metaverse and related developments in the digital sphere? Who designs, who populates, and who governs today&#8217;s emergent technologically enabled spaces?Metaverse Landscapes: Technology and Territory, discussion, ICI Berlin, 28 June 2023 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e230628

Contribution

Marlon Miguel and Iracema Dulley, Contribution to panel i - the bichos, the human of the symposium Bichos, ICI Berlin, 14–15 June 2023, video recording, mp4, 25:25 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e230614_07

Who’s Afraid of Ideology?

Artist Marwa Arsanios shares textual fragments from research she conducted for the first and second parts of a video trilogy titled Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Meditating on the voiding effects of war, and the ecological and affective texture of communal resistance and eco-feminist praxis as they emerge in Iraqi Kurdistan, Lebanon, and northern Syria, the text takes us to ecological milieux made of wild medicinal plants, fig trees, Kurdish guerrillas, and farmers in a women-only commune.Marwa Arsanios, ‘Who’s Afraid of Ideology?’, in War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East, ed. by Umut Yıldırım, Cultural Inquiry, 27 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 67-83 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-27_3