On The Threshold of New Materialist Studies

This article answers a question addressed to the author during the selection procedure for a research network: if we were to be awarded funding, would we also work toward formulating (under)graduate degrees in new materialist studies? The article engages with this issue of Forum to provide an original impetus for preliminary thoughts on the institutionalisation of new materialist studies as a platform for academic research and scholarly degrees

Bergson before Bergsonism: Traversing “Bergson’s Failing” in Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy of Art

How did the philosophy of Henri Bergson look before Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism? This article provides a situated answer to that question by performing a close reading of Susanne K. Langer’s early engagement with Bergson in her monograph Feeling and Form from 1953. Both Bergson and Langer argue against polemical philosophizing. Such polemical modes of doing philosophy distort insight into the thought of the philosophers in question and in philosophical questions per se (such as questions about artistic creation). My reading of Langer’s Bergson is therefore infused with what is nowadays called a new materialist impetus of non-linearity, a non-oppositional philosophizing, and the reading follows the methodology of diffractive reading, a thinking outside fixed and fixating schools of thought. I argue that in spite of Langer’s explicit, i.e., polemical objection to Bergson’s work and to its use by artists, it is a Bergsonism with which Langer’s work is infused

Serres on Education

In this latest contribution to Temple Continental: Philosophers for our Time, Iris van der Tuin and Anouk Zuurmond introduce readers to the French philosopher Michel Serres, and his thinking on education. They cover the ‘disparateness’ of knowledge in an internet age, the ‘voyage’ of pedagogy, the inequalities inscribed in institutions, the need for education outside as much as in a library, and the importance of interdisciplinarity. For Serres, education is perhaps best compared to swimming mid-stream as one attempts to cross a river

Serres on Education

In this latest contribution to Temple Continental: Philosophers for our Time, Iris van der Tuin and Anouk Zuurmond introduce readers to the French philosopher Michel Serres, and his thinking on education. They cover the ‘disparateness’ of knowledge in an internet age, the ‘voyage’ of pedagogy, the inequalities inscribed in institutions, the need for education outside as much as in a library, and the importance of interdisciplinarity. For Serres, education is perhaps best compared to swimming mid-stream as one attempts to cross a river

How Eva Louise Young (1861-1939) Found Me: On the Performance of Metadata in Knowledge Production

Human knowers in academic settings today are caught up in computational procedures. Such procedures have constraining and surprising effects on the “findability” of scholars and scholarly works. This chapter argues that, and shows how, digital literacy is beneficial for epistemological and methodological reflection and creativity during the research process. Unraveling the intricacies of the chapter’s author meeting a “forgotten” philosopher—Eva Louise Young (1861–1939)—in a situated human-computer interaction meant acquiring the competence of being critical of, and creative with, Google’s functioning.1 It meant learning that, in today’s algorithmic condition, canonization and knowledge production are complicated posthuman entanglements. Literacy here means combining tool criticism and creativity from media studies with bioinformatical practices of data and information storage, labeling, and retrieval in dynamic settings