Research Theme: The Humanities in the Twenty-First Century University

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Theme: The Humanities in the Twenty-First Century University

Future/Recent Events

• 6 February 2009: "The Value of 'Useless Knowledge': Two talks by Professor Marilyn Strathern, DBE, FBA
• 21 November 2008: Round Table Discussion on "The Crisis in the Humanities"
• 27 June 2008: Workshop: Everything in Moderation: Individuals, institutions and intellectuals in flux
• Three workshops related to the Embodied Values and the Environment research project:
  • 19-20 June 2008: Workshop: Embodied Values and the Environment in Practice
  • 10-11 January 2008: Workshop: Environmental Aesthetics and Ethics
  • 5-6 July 2007: Workshop: Philosophy of Nature and Embodied Values
• C.H.A.T. - 11 February 2008
• 28 May 2007: Should the Humanities address normative questions?
• 18 May 2007: Past minds: exploring the cognitive historiography of religion
• 25 April 2007: Environmental and Human Values
• 10 July 2006: Lyotard, Art and Music
• 6 May 2006: Visuality and Cognition
• 15 March 2006: Colloquium A Wealth of Ideas: The Value of the Humanities in Modern Society
• 14 March 2006: Aesthetics, Culture and Society
• 27 October 2005: Cultural taste and participation: the role of the humanities

Professor Marilyn Strathern, DBE, FBA on
The Value of 'Useless Knowledge'

Friday 6 February 2009

1 p.m. Faculty Room North, David Hume Tower
Lecture on "Useless Knowledge - Protest; Mission statements and bullet points"

Abstract:
How to critique good practice? With the double resonance of ethical behaviour and effective action, standard of measurement and target to which to work, 'good practice' is held to bring its own reward. Organisations will be more effective in their performance if they are at once explicit about their goals and honest about their behaviour. Explicitness is often achieved through documentation, and it is a mundane and routine documentary practice that is the subject of this talk. It takes the apparently innocuous format of bullet points -- such are found in university mission statements -- to address Barnett's observation: 'The existence of a mission statement is tantamount to an admission by the university that it is missionless: as a general idea, the university is without mission' [Realizing the university in an age of supercomplexity]. In raising a query about the drive to explicitness, this talk tries to find a narrative form that will not immediately acquiesce in the consumption of criticism. For in a world where criticism is gobbled up as more information, consumer preference or just another instance of explicitness, to answer the question in the coinage of criticism as such would only result in bigger and better good practice.

N.B. A sandwich lunch will be available from 12.30. Please email iash@ed.ac.uk if you plan to attend.

AND

6 p.m., The Bowery, 2 Roxburgh Place
C.H.A.T. (Conversations in Humanities, Arts, and Technologies)

Professor Strathern will lead a public discussion on "Useless Knowledge - Defence: Problems and anxieties"

Abstract:
Policy makers say that knowledge that cannot be communicated is useless knowledge. This defence of uselessness identifies three kinds: extraneous detail that slows down communication; irrelevant parallels; modelling for its own sake. It is not just as an anthropologist that I find reasons to conserve them but as an educationalist.

For further information on C.H.A.T. see http://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/CHAT.html

Round Table Discussion on "The Crisis in the Humanities"

Friday, 21 November 2008
2.30 - 4.30 pm, IASH, 2 Hope Park Square

With the institution of new technological curricula and an increasingly instrumental and utilitarian attitude towards Higher education amongst politicians, the role of the Humanities in the Academy has come under intense scrutiny. Is there really a 'Crisis' in the Humanities, or is it a necessary and continuing aspect of the role of the Humanities to reflect critically on themselves? What are 'the Humanities' in the modern university and how do they relate to the old 'Liberal Arts'? Need the Humanities justify themselves, and how might they best do it?

The general trend in this surge of literature in the subject strongly suggests that the crisis is a genuine one. But the variety of explanations offered also indicate that there is a general state of confusion on how this crisis came about and how it can be dealt with.

An IASH work-in-progress session on this topic elicited a great deal of interest and discussion and we agreed to return to it at an afternoon roundtable. Its main aim will be to re-confront the topic starting from the diverse points of view held in various areas of the humanities.

Speakers:
Dr. Kristof Vanhoutte: "The empty space where God used to be"
Professor Peter Dayan: "The Humanities in the university of the future according to Derrida"
Professor Anne Cranny-Francis: "Turning-point or dead-end: the Humanities at the start of the 21st century"

Please email iash@ed.ac.uk to reserve a place.

IASH Workshop: "Everything in Moderation: Individuals, institutions and intellectuals in flux"
Convenors: Alexander Smith and Charlie Ellis (Postdoctoral Fellows, IASH)

Friday, 27 June 2008
2.00 - 5.00 pm, IASH, 2 Hope Park Square

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have tended to focus on fundamentalists of various hues. For some, the extremist enables one to follow Foucault's maxim that exploring the world through the eyes of the madman can shed light on the everyday. For others, the militant constitutes a character whose behaviour can only be understood pathologically, therefore demanding attention and diagnosis in the tradition of psychoanalysis. Such characters tend to be 'colourful' and hence attractive to those engaged in historical research, but focussing them can give us a distorted picture of social, cultural and political developments. However, it could be the very ubiquity of the moderate that is most unsettling for scholars. After all, moderates often seem to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time; even when they claim to speak for a 'silent majority' they might as well speak for no one if political silence can be equated with apathy, disinterest and/or non-participation. Furthermore, moderates often claim to speak with 'reason' and 'common sense' that invoke Enlightenment traditions in the humanities and social sciences. As a result, moderates perhaps constitute a unique analytical challenge for contemporary scholars of political and social change: subtle characters, they are often only visible in relation to fundamentalists in contrast to whom they can achieve momentary definition. With such images in mind - indeterminacy, fleetingness, the moderate as indispensable footnote to a wider political drama - and in the tradition of recent IASH seminars of an exploratory and provocative nature, this workshop asks: what is the character of the moderate? And how does an assessment of the contribution and role of the moderate help us better understand social, cultural and political developments?

Programme:

IASH hosted a series of three Workshops related to the British Academy funded "Embodied Values and the Environment Project"

The Workshops were on:

Philosophy of Nature and Embodied Values (5/6 July 2007)

Environmental Aesthetics and Ethics (10/11 January 2008)

Embodied Values and the Environment in Practice (19/20 June 2008)

The Programme for each Workshop is below.

Information about the project can be found at http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/nature/ and a report on the Workshops is at http://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/embodied.values.html

Thursday 5 and Friday 6 July 2007
"Philosophy of Nature and Embodied Values"

Programme

Thursday 5th July

Friday 6th July

Thursday 10 and Friday 11 January 2008
"Environmental Aesthetics and Ethics"

Programme

Thursday 10 January

Friday 11 January

Thursday 19 and Friday 20 June 2008
"Embodied Values and the Environment in Practice"

Programme

Thursday 19th June 2008

Friday 20th June 2008

An earlier meeting associated with the project was also held at IASH:

25 April 2007: Workshop on "Environmental and Human Values"

This meeting is the first in a series of workshops addressing the research project: "Embodied values: an exploratory and critical study of reciprocal transfers of spiritual, aesthetic and ethical values between humans and environments". As an interdiscplinary project reflecting on the role of the university in the Humanities in the twenty-first century, this meeting will draw from a centre of (i) ethics and aesthetics; (ii) history of philosophy; and (iii) cultural geography.

Context: The environment is often viewed ambivalently by human beings. As embodied creatures, we consider ourselves as integral parts of it, yet because of our rational, moral, aesthetic and spiritual dimensions we regard ourselves as separate from it. Both anthropocentric and eco-centric perspectives amplify the separation of humans from their environments. Human-centred attitudes view the environment as an instrumental resource, while environment-centred approaches reinforce the separation by continuing to regard spiritual, aesthetic, and moral values as essentially ‘human’ characteristics.

Objective: We aim to conduct a critically reflective investigation into the viability and ethical implications of a rather different model that negotiates both these perspectives. Stoic philosophers and some early modernists resisted the dualist approaches implicit within anthropocentric and eco-centric models. Contemporary theories such as deep ecology and phenomenology oppose the Cartesian dualist legacy, developing notions of ‘embeddedness’, engagement and dependency with which to resist the reduction of the world to mere objects. Our research builds upon these new conceptions of materiality, but from a new perspective of value. We plan to develop a distinctive, innovative model for understanding relationships between environments and humans in terms of moral, aesthetic and spiritual values in each. These questions challenge current conceptions of intrinsic and instrumental value while investigating the attribution of agency to the non-human. We will critically examine the theoretical coherence of this model, its implications, and its application in practical situations.

C.H.A.T. Conversations in Humanities, Arts, and Technologies

C.H.A.T. is an informal occasional discussion group dedicated to exploring the interface between humanities, arts, and sciences in the 21st century. Each session begins with a brief introduction before inviting questions and open debate. Modeled on the hugely successful Café Scientifique series where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, anyone can come to explore the latest ideas in science and technology, CHAT sessions are open to all, and are committed to promoting public engagements with the role of the humanities in the 21st Century.

Enquiries, and suggestions for speakers to: andy.clark@ed.ac.uk

Confirmed future speakers include Dame Ann Marilyn Strathern MA, PhD, FBA, DBE. Mistress of Girton College Cambridge, and William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Cambridge. Dame Strathern will be speaking on Issues Concerning Intellectual Property Rights, date and venue to be announced.

Details of the next CHAT session at CHAT.html

Monday, 28 May 2007
2 p.m., IASH, Hope Park Square

Baroness Onora O'Neill (President, The British Academy) led a structured discussion on "Should the Humanities address normative questions?". In addition to Fellows of the Institute, participants included colleagues from Philosophy, Law, English Literature, and Physics, as well as members of the Institute's Advisory Board.

Friday, 18 May 2007
1 p.m., IASH, Hope Park Square

Seminar on Past minds: exploring the cognitive historiography of religion
Professor Luther Martin (Professor of Religion, University of Vermont; Distinguished International Fellow, Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen's University Belfast) was the guest speaker at this lunchtime meeting which brought together colleagues from a wide range of disciplines, including Divinity, History, Asian Studies, Law, English Literature, Celtic and Scottish Studies, Archaeology, History of Art, Education, Social Policy, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and Cultural Studies.

15 March 2006: Joint Colloquium with the British Academy: A Wealth of Ideas: The Value of the Humanities in Modern Society.
To view the full programme, video clips and an edited transcript of the discussion session click here

Seminar series: New Perspectives for the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century

Thursday, 27 October 2005
Professor Tony Bennett (Director, ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change; Professor of Sociology, The Open University): "Cultural taste and participation: the role of the humanities"

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Tuesday, 14 March 2006
One-Day Conference: "Aesthetics, Culture and Society"

9.30 am	Welcome and Introduction: Professor Susan Manning (Director, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities)
9.40 am	Professor Tony Bennett (Director, ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change; Professor of Sociology, The Open University): Habitus clivé: the dispersed self and the politics of taste
11.00 am	Coffee
11.30 am	Dr. Nick Prior (Sociology, University of Edinburgh): Digitizing Bourdieu: Music, Technology, Production; and Professor Ian Buchanan (University of Cardiff): A Taste for War
1.00 pm	Lunch
2.00 pm	Dr. Peter De Bolla (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge) From Passions to Affects in the Work of Francis Hutcheson; and Dr. Simon Malpas (English Literature, University of Edinburgh): The Necessity of the Transcendental: Kantian Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism
3.30 pm	Tea
4.00 pm	General discussion
5.00 pm	Reception

Abstracts:

Professor Tony Bennett: "Habitus clivé: the dispersed self and the politics of taste"
Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus has played a significant role in reception studies in suggesting that our relations to texts - whether visual, literary, or auditory - are mediated via class-based habitus that provide unified and unifying principles of taste that are manifest across the full range of an individual's cultural interests. This argument is most fully developed in Distinction where Bourdieu, through the reading of Kant that he proposes, further proposes that habitus can essentially be reduced to variants of two positions: the law of the necessary of working class culture and the freedom from necessity embodied in the bourgeois ethos of disinterestedness. Yet Bourdieu claimed that his own habitus was a divided or cleft one as a consequence of the conflicting experiences arising from his social mobility. This paper will suggest that such a divided habitus is the rule rather than the exception, and that the notion of a unified habitus - which plays a central role in Bourdieu's sociology of consumption - is unsustainable. There will be three main aspects to its argument in this regard. First, drawing on the work of Bernard Lahire, it will be argued that Bourdieu is able to produce a unity for different class habitus only by either ignoring the evidence from empirical surveys which suggest the existence of significant intra-individual variations in taste or discounting such evidence through the deployment of structural principles of causality which transform them into mere variations of a common underlying structure. Second, the significance of alternative ways of interpreting such surveys will be illustrated by reviewing the significant dissonances in the tastes of individuals and the much greater degree of shared tastes across class boundaries that are evident in a 2003-4 national survey - using both quantitative and qualitative components - of cultural tastes, knowledge and participation in contemporary Britain. Third, issue will be taken with Bourdieu's interpretation of Kantian aesthetics and the role it plays in his separation of taste into a working class taste for the necessary and the disinterestedness of bourgeois taste. It will be argued that this is an a-historical reading of Kant's work that neglects its role in relation to later programmes of liberal government that aimed to transform cultural institutions into civic technologies that would incorporate the working classes into practices of self government. These aspects of the argument will be developed with reference to the implications of Michel Foucault's work on liberal government for an alternative reading of aesthetics and to Jacques Ranciere's critique of Bourdieu in The Philosopher and His Poor.
Note: the national survey is that conducted for a project funded by the Economic and Research Council and conducted by Tony Bennett ( principal applicant), Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal, and David Wright.

Dr. Nick Prior: "Digitizing Bourdieu; music, technology, production"
A discussion of Bourdieu's increasingly problematic take on culture technologies and their impact on consumption/use. This will be framed by a sympathetic but critical application of Bourdieu to contemporary digital culture, particularly music. The latter opens up a series of challenges to the Bourdieu problematic and is a good test of his applicability to the contemporary cultural terrain.

Professor Ian Buchanan: "A Taste for War"
Today the US and the so-called coalition of the willing are embroiled in a war that is supposedly bringing democracy to the Middle-East and, as an added bonus, making it safe for Wal-Mart. Although there was and continues to be opposition to this war, it has been ignored. The question we must ask then is: is this war really desired? Does it quench a taste for war?

Dr. Peter de Bolla: "From Passions to Affects in the work of Francis Hutcheson"
The paper is about the invention of the concept of aesthetic affect and its subsequent fate in our understanding of artworks as cognitive structures.

Dr. Simon Malpas: "The Necessity of the Transcendental: Kantian Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism"
Since Immanuel Kant's philosophy introduced the notion of transcendental critique, aesthetics has occupied a complex and often problematical position between knowledge and ethics. In the light of Kant's philosophy, writers such as Theodor Adorno argue that, experienced aesthetically, 'art negates the categorical determinations stamped on the empirical world and yet harbors what is empirically existing in its own substance', thereby opening experience to critique. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which contemporary criticism might be able to mobilise this tension within the artwork in order to think the social and political value of artistic presentation in a manner different from more established historicist or ethical modes of criticism.

The Institute is most grateful to the British Society of Aesthetics for its generous support of this conference

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10 July 2006: Symposium on "Lyotard, Art and Music".
The speakers at this afternoon workshop on Postmodern theory in contemporary music were Professor James Williams (Philosophy, University of Dundee) and Dr David Bennett (English, University of Melbourne)

Professor James Williams is the author of The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze (Clinamen, 2005), (With Keith Crome) The Lyotard Reader and Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), Understanding Poststructuralism (Acumen, 2005), Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: a Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), Lyotard and the Political (Routledge, 2000) and Lyotard (Polity, 1998).

Dr David Bennett has edited Cultural Studies: Pluralism and Theory (Melbourne, 1993) and Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1998) and is the author of a number of articles on postmodernism and cultural studies published in New Literary History, Public Culture, Southern Review and Textual Practice.

The Symposium was chaired by Dr Simon Malpas, author of The Postmodern, (London: Routledge, 2005) and Jean-François Lyotard, (London: Routledge, 2003).

6 May 2006: Joint IASH/VARIE (Visual Arts Research Institute Edinburgh) Symposium on Visuality and Cognition.

Guest participant: Professor Barbara Stafford (William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, The University of Chicago, Department of Art History).

This one-day event, which also involved colleagues from Edinburgh College of Art and Glasgow School of Art, considered a series of catalytic questions:

• What generative powers are inherent in form?
• How do images become generic or prototypical?
• How does thought organise itself in art?
• What gives images their power and effectiveness?
• What do we know when we see?
• What viewers and processes does the image presuppose?
• Do we have to think of space in Kantian terms with ourselves at the centre?
• Can we learn from the anthropological study of other cultures that do not conceive of space in the way we do (eg the work of Susanne Küchler, UCL; Jürg Wassmann, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)?
• Are scientific illustrations, as Kuhn insisted, "at best by-products of scientific activity"?
• Is the later nineteenth-century insistence on scientific objectivity and self-effacement a problem? Might this starting-point actually obscure rather than reveal truth?
• What can we learn from images, particularly in the sciences, that are bad, ugly, useless, and misleading? Is there a failure of representation, of utility, of aesthetics, and even of meaning in the sciences?

The occasion also acted as a preliminary planning meeting for the proposed Image and Meaning 3 conference to be held in Edinburgh in 2009.

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