De-Constituting Wholes:Haunting, Eclipse, Plasticity

The yearlong multidisciplinary ICI Project ‘Constituting Wholes’ explored the critical potential of remobilizing the notion of the whole. In which ways are wholes constituted and how do wholes constitute, determine, and control their parts? Does the constitution of wholes necessarily involve an exclusion – not only of some parts and of other conceivable wholes but also of some aspects of its constituting elements? When wholes are said to be more than the sum of their parts, this ‘more’ contains both a promise and a threat. The workshop proposed that such promising, threatening excess should also be thought in terms of de-constitution; and its three panels investigated different modes of negativity under the headings ‘Haunting’, ‘Eclipse’, and ‘Plasticity’. Programme Wednesday 9 July 2014, 16:00-20:00 Part 1: Haunting Moderation: Nahal Naficy Haunting is a method for exploring how objects, processes and affects make themselvesknown in other than obvious terms. By pointing to forms of historicity, violence,and dispossession, haunting disrupts the naturalness of evidence and the transparencyof ‘things’, knowledge, or experience. Space and time cannot remain intact when the tactilityof everyday life is mediated by the labor of the negative. Indeed, thinking through hauntings haunts you back. It suggests an aporetic immanence that obfuscates any capacity for a totality, or whole. Informed by psychoanalytic, feminist, queer and post-colonial perspectives, this panel seeked to trouble the unforeseeable, the unknown, the absent and theinvisible in methods, archives, and systems of justice, desire, and death. Thursday 10 July 2014, 11:00-19:00 Part 2: Eclipse Moderation: Filippo Trentin Eclipse is an event without history, an event that nullifies the visibility supplied by a narrative. If day and night mark the turnings and passages of the world, the world rightly told, then eclipse is the event of this &#8216;everyday&#8217; world’s wrongness. Seeking to think not about eclipse but according to eclipse — not &#8216;in light of&#8217; but &#8216;in eclipse of&#8217; — this panel explored the methodology of thinking within the wrongness of the world, a wrongness for which even the word &#8216;eclipse&#8217; may be wrong. Part 3: Plasticity Moderation: Daniel C. Barber The notion of plasticity challenges the idea that wholes are constituted through subsumption and that such wholes ought to be resisted according to a logic of exemption or excess. Plasticity names the transformative nature of immanent processes of the giving and receiving of forms, thus allows to consider the question of wholes beyond the dichotomies of components and composites or object and context. Yet the concept often conjures expectations of individual adaptation in a neo-liberal order and thus calls for a critical assessment. Exploring the potentials and pitfalls of the concept in diverse fields, the panel asked whether it is possible to proceed not from the “constituting” of wholes but their de-constitution in morphosis.De-Constituting Wholes: Haunting, Eclipse, Plasticity, workshop, ICI Berlin, 9–10 July 2014 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e140709

The Case for Reduction

The ICI Berlin with its 2020-22 cohort of fellows is pleased to present the first publication to come out of its core project &#8216;Reduction’, launched in autumn 2020. Critical discourse hardly knows a more devastating charge against theories, technologies, or structures than that of being reductive. Yet, expansion and growth cannot fare any better today. The Case for Reduction suspends anti-reductionist reflexes to focus on the experiences and practices of different kinds of reduction within and across different fields and approaches — from the sciences, technology, and the arts, to feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches. The event seeks to allow critical attention to dwell on specific forms of reduction and to explore their generative potentials, ethics, and politics. Which reductions are to be avoided and which are to be endorsed? Can their violences be contained and their benefits transported to other contexts? Introduction by Christoph Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger Talk by Sabine Mainberger A Case of Reduction In the European history of thinking about visual art, there is a predilection for extreme reduction: time and again, interest focuses on a single line. It provides an occasion to raise fundamental questions about artistic activity and to problematize artistic practice, work, authorship, and the art system. For example, the one eminently &#8216;fine&#8217; line allows one to recognize the unmistakable author; the sketchy line or the simple circle gives one a glimpse of the range of a mastery; the one effortlessly drawn line reveals the artist&#8217;s membership in a socio-aesthetic elite, and so on. From remarks on the line drawn with a light hand or the spontaneously placed brushstroke in the early modern period and in antiquity, the sinologist and philosopher François Jullien has established a bridge to Far Eastern art and aesthetics. Apparently, European and Chinese culture share the fascination of the one line; despite all other profound differences, their aesthetic ideals seem to converge here. Against this background, a prominent example from recent art history can be understood as an amalgamation of the Western and the Eastern &#8216;cult&#8217; of the one simple line &#8211; and as a (self-)ironic commentary on it. Followed by a discussion with Alberica Bazzoni, Christopher Chamberlin, and Iracema DulleyThe Case for Reduction, book presentation and discussion, ICI Berlin, 28 October 2022 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e221028

Wholes Which Are Not One:On the Critical Potential of a Non-Dialectic Figure of Thought

The mutual, dialectic constitution of parts and wholes has come under suspicion in critical discourse for exerting violence dissimulated as harmony, and for allowing no way out despite the exclusions that it produces. But how can we avoid entering this dialectics without reifying either wholes or parts as simply given, as safe starting points for critical reflection, analysis, or practice? The workshop addresses this question by inquiring about both the one and the not in the notion of ‘Wholes Which Are Not One’, this year’s ICI Research Focus. Considering the one, the first two parts addressed issues of counting and accounting. What counts, for example, as valid reasoning in science? How does Darwin’s epistemology rely on an analogy with accounting? How can an opera contest both the certainty of counting and the accountability of language? How do certain accounts of history account for the desires incited and abjected by a traumatic past? How can hoarding help us make sense of what this whole that we call the market cannot account for? And what, indeed, would it be like to give an account that is not one? The third part suggested that the not in ‘wholes which are not one’ emerges from a point irreducible to the ambivalent dialectic of wholes and parts. Motivated by the sense that such a dialectic is part and parcel of regimes of coloniality, the panel proposes the notion of the ‘annihilation of the world’, and articulates this proposal through a consideration of refusal, decolonization, and failure in the thought of Malcolm X; the use of apocalyptic language in discussions of terrorism; the appropriation of anti-colonial literature; and queer performance in dictatorship architecture.Part 1: What Counts Stefano Osnaghi: Contradiction and Complementarity in Indeterminist Accounts Zeynep Bulut: Numbers, Syllables, and A Voice &#8211; Einstein on the Beach Alice Gavin: ‘I Don’t Answer For What You May Have Lost’ Part 2: Unsettling Accounts Nahal Naficy: There Was One, There Was Not One: Some Accounts of Contemporary Iran Volker Woltersdorff: Sexual Ghosts, or How to Make History Whole? Robert Meunier: From Collection to Experiment, from Accounting to Analyzing &#8211; Johannsen’s Critique of Darwinism David Kishik: Garbage Studies Part 3: The Colonial Whole: Failure, Refusal, Annihilation Daniel C. Barber: Intelligence Against the World &#8211; Malcolm X on Race and the Religion of Recognition Anaheed Al-Hardan (with David Landy): Representing Palestine, Disappearing Palestinians &#8211; The Double Appropriation of Ghassan Kanafani’s Return to Haifa Bobby Benedicto: Paramodern Futures &#8211; Queer Space and Dictatorship Architecture in Metropolitan ManilaWholes Which Are Not One: On the Critical Potential of a Non-Dialectic Figure of Thought, workshop, ICI Berlin, 4–5 July 2013 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e130704

Margins of Error

Mistakes are typically tolerated as long as they are contained within a margin of error. What would it mean for error to stray from these margins, to escape routine procedures of error correction? Can error be thought against the very norms that seek to correct for it – that is, according to a marginality that would be error’s own? The first presentation of the collective work undertaken as part of the ICI’s core project ERRANS ventured beyond any straightforward negative determination of error and erring, challenging the roles they are assigned in mainstream politics and thought. ERRANS opens up a rich field of associated terms, invoking notions such as errantry and errancy, in order to explore the close connection between error and wandering. Many of today’s radical and critical projects seek to invert culturally dominant hierarchies of value involving some figure of imperfection or failure. Drawing on such chiasmatic operations, we examined how historically valued categories such as truth, reason, nature, the human are not only dependent on, but haunted by reconfigured engagements with their errant others – falsity, madness, the monstrous, the inhuman. We want to free the images of disorder, failure, and ruin from the teleological frames within which they remain confined by neoliberal discourses of achievement and progress. Yet sometimes what appears to be a radical challenge runs the risk of leaving underlying structures intact. Thus we are interested in the strategic potential of errancy as an alternative to direct assault or radical critique: what might be gained by eschewing a logic of opposition in favor of one of deviation, deviance, going astray, or swerving? How and where might radical interests be best served not by transgressing into a new territory, but by strategies of tinkering, irritation, small acts of sabotage – of queering in every sense? When might the pressure to follow established pathways be effectively interrupted not by a direct reversal, but by straying from the course, losing one&#8217;s way, or simply pausing in hesitation? This workshop explores the zones in which binary oppositions begin to fade and the spaces where new meanings and values have not yet emerged: New margins of – and for – error.Margins of Error, workshop, ICI Berlin, 30–29 June 2015 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e150630

Translation, Mediation, Power

Translation can be understood in different ways: as a practice, a concept, a technique, a method, a site of contestation. This symposium is especially interested in the unsettling potential of translation as a form of mediation that can either re-enact or challenge structures of power. In this way, translation can afford hermeneutic complexity, which complicates the dynamics of the particular and the universal, the local and the global, that dominate debates on coloniality, imperialism, and neo-liberalism. As much as translation can establish hierarchical equivalences and binary oppositions, it can also expose, or even open, cracks through which attempts at separation, fixation, totalization, and subjugation might be displaced. In dialogue with the current debates that intersect the field of translation studies with anthropology as well as media, postcolonial/decolonial, gender, and queer studies, this symposium invites reflection on questions such as: What kinds of materiality and mediality are involved in translational processes? What kinds of historical, sociocultural, political, and linguistic transformations are related to translational effects? What is the relationship between translation and positionality in discourse? What are the affordances and limits of translation as a method? This symposium explores the conceptual, methodological, ethical, and political implications of translation as well as the collective nature and historical situatedness of specific translational acts and events.Translation, Mediation, Power, symposium, ICI Berlin, 12 June 2023 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e230612

ICI Publication Style Template

This is how the Word Template available for download at https://press.ici-berlin.org/pdf/ICI-Publications_Style_Template.dotx would be rendered

Welcome message 歡迎您！

World of International Cuisines 國際廚藝 匯聚於

Class Acts 學院消息

Tried and tested 經驗之談 The International Culinary Institute (ICI) and its sister institutions the Hotel and Tourism Institute (HTI) and the Chinese Culinary Institute (CCI) provided students with an array of fun and educational opportunities 國際廚藝學院與其姐妹機構酒店及旅遊學院和中華廚藝學院一起為學員提供各種寓學於樂的機

Recipe for success 成功秘訣

Class acts 學院消息: Tasting victory 勝券在握 Grape expectations 美酒之旅 Global exchange 國際交

Class Acts 學院消息

Recipes for success 成功之道 The International Culinary Institute (ICI) and its sister institutions, the Hotel and Tourism Institute (HTI) and the Chinese Culinary Institute (CCI), provide students with an array of fun and educational opportunities 國際廚藝學院及與其相輔相成的酒店及旅遊學院和中華廚藝學院，積極為學員提供各種學習機會，讓學員透過校內課程增長知識之餘，更可與專家交流及參加特別活動和比賽，開拓視