Conference: Bodies beyond Borders. The Circulation of Anatomical Knowledge, 1750-1950, 7-9 January, Leuven

After a bit of upheaval, major relocation of the Bodies in Movement headquarters and two long, painful months of internet silence (during which time most of the BiM team curled up into a tiny, modem-less ball in the corner of an empty room and rocked back and forth, wailing in pitiful denial), we are happy to announce that the BiM blog is back online and on track for constant future updates.

And, to top off the list, we present a fascinating meld of history, medicine and humanities straight from Belgium's Leuven. Celebrating the birth of anatomist Andreas Vesalius 500 years ago, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven will play host to 'Bodies beyond Borders. The Circulation of Anatomical Knowledge, 1750-1950' on 7-9 January 2015.

The conference will fit in with two larger pursuits at KU Leuven: a research project on anatomy, scientific authority and the visualised body in medicine and culture in Belgium, 1780-1930, which investigates the history of anatomy in the country during the long nineteenth century; and an exhibition, 'Unravelling the Body. The Theatre of Anatomy', commemorating Vesalius and his influence on the anatomical tradition. However, further extending its scope, the conference seeks a wider conceptual and geographical focus:

Knowledge does not move by itself - it has to be carried. To better understand how anatomical knowledge moves from place to place, we will seek to trace the trajectories of its bearers.

The call for papers is open until 1 June 2014, with notification of acceptance distributed in early July. Organisers welcome contributions concerning the transit of anatomical knowledge in the widest interpretation of the phrase - from scientists, body parts and models to films, dissections and wall maps. Confirmed speakers include Sven Dupré, Helen Macdonald and many more. See the conference website for further details.

Exhibition & Events: The Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret, London

Tucked away up the stairs of a little English Baroque church in Southwark, London lies the historic Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret, the oldest operating theatre in Europe. Built into the herb garret of St Thomas's Hospital over 180 years ago and rediscovered in 1956, this little handful of rooms crammed full of Victorian medical oddities is a modest but fascinating counterpart to the Surgeons' Hall Museum in Edinburgh.

Like that museum, the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret also hosts a packed schedule of lectures and events on a variety of medicine-related topics, including the history of pathology, after-death photography and the operated body in film and literature. A detailed list of their events for the next two months can be found on the museum website, along with detailed histories of St Thomas's, Guy's and Evelina Children's Hospitals in London, resources for the history of medicine, a digital catalogue of the objects on display at the museum, and more.

Thanks go to the blog post on Penny Dreadful Delights for giving us the opportunity to know about this obscure but special space.

Conference: Ordinary/Everyday/Quotidian, 26-7 September, York

Organisers for the two-day, interdisciplinary conference   "Ordinary/Everyday/Quotidian" at the University of York are currently calling for abstracts. The conference seeks to bring the quotidian onto the stage of academic debate and, by doing so, asks that we focus the rigors of critique upon the usually unnoticed or undetectable. Participants are encouraged

"to ponder, celebrate, and critique the quotidian, ranging from the furtive pleasures of pop to the dubious delights of junk: “Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with signs of one’s deepest nature, clues to secret yearnings, humiliating flaws? What habits, fetishes, addictions, inclinations? What solitary acts, behavioral ruts?”

The event has three confirmed keynotes - John Roberts (History of Art), Jennifer Baird (Classics and Archaeology) and Bryony Randall (English) - and will finish with a colloquium peopled by a further five academics from various humanities-based areas of study. With a keen interdisciplinary slant and compelling subject matter, the conference promises to provide a platform for some fascinating inquiry and dialogue.

Abstracts are due by 16 August and are welcome from any and/or multiple discipline(s). More information can be found on the website.

Article: Bernard J. Hibbitts, "Coming to Our Senses: Communication and Legal Expression in Performance Cultures"

Bernard J. Hibbitts was arguably well ahead of the legal scholaship curve when he published "Coming to Our Senses: Communication and Legal Expression in Performance Cultures" in the Emory Law Journal (41 (1992): 873-960), and he settled into this theme for the next few years until the currency of cyberspace pulled him into more intense study of the implications of technology upon the law. "Coming to Our Senses", the first of a series of publications devoted to the human senses and the law threw an ambitiously wide net into legal, anthropological and historical fields in order to contrast an American-style written legal culture with semi- or largely non-literate "performance cultures".

 

Perhaps a little outmoded today and a little unwieldy in the separation between performance and non-performance cultures, Hibbitts' article is nonetheless a fascinating tour of the unappreciated interventions of the five human senses upon legal discourse and tradition, as well as their cultural significance outside of contemporary Western legal modes. Framed as a survey loosely following anthropological research methods, Hibbitts looks to Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong for theoretical purchase alongside a horde of historical scholars.

"In their highest forms of cultural and intellectual exression, speech routinely gives voice to gesture and gesture gives shape to speech: music gives sound to sculpture, while sculptue gives sustance to music. Law is simultaneously heard, seen, and sometimes even felt and savored. Ultimately, the meaning of significant cultural and legal messages resides less in the individual components of communication (although these must be recognized) than in their synthesis, performance."

Hibbitt's article is available online at a dedicated site via the University of Pittsburgh, or as a pdf article as published in the Emory Law Journal from the Social Science Research Network. The BiM blog is indebted to the Sensory Studies website for providing the link to this text.



Conference: Matter, Life and Resistance, 1-2 July 2013, Canterbury

The Centre for Critical Thought at the University of Kent in Canterbury has announced a two-day conference entitled Matter, Life and Resistance, taking place in Canterbury on 1-2 July 2013. Located within the general field of political theory, the event seeks to explore the crossover, feedback and influence (both historically and in current trends) of theories of materialism, vitalism and resistance within the discipline. The lineup of keynote speakers features Samantha Frost, whose work engages with the body, biology, feminism and new materialisms; and Sjoerd van Tuinen, prolific scholar specialising on Deleuze and Sloterdijk.

 

Proposals are still wanted, with suggested areas for contributions including, inter alia: reinterpreting the history of political thought, particularly the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materialists; connecting a poststructuralist conceptualisation of of life, matter and resistance with biology and the neurosciences (ontogenesis, transductive relations, plasticity, synaptogenesis); and the consequences of speculative materialism in political theory. The deadline for abstracts is set for 5 May 2013. More details can be found on the Matter, Life and Resistance conference blog.

Conferences: Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance, Plymouth, 13 April 2013; and Cannibals: Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture, Manchester, 25-26 April 2013

For the brave amongst us, April 2013 presents a cornucopia of UK conference choices to whet the appetite of the serious horror buff. On 13 April, Plymouth University hosts a one-day symposium entitled Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance, designed "to explore, interrogate and celebrate zombies as a cultural phenomenon through the paradigms of performance, as well as models of performance through the quintessential zombie activities of eating and walking". Contributors are asked to focus on the contemporary (rather than historical) zombie mythos, and are encouraged to take an interdisciplinary approach to a wide range of topics from the ethics of survival in zombie landscapes to zombie gaming and acting dead.

The deadline for proposals to this symposium is set for 30 November of this year. All delegates will also be invited to a zombie film festival which takes place the evening of 12 April and will have the option to participate in an "early morning performance, Just after Dawn of the Dead, in the streets of Plymouth, followed by a conference breakfast".

Manchester-based creative writing and literature collective Hic Dragones follows up zombie marches with a like-minded conference focus, Cannibals: Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture, on 25-26 April 2013. Not quite as specifically concentrated on contemporary modes, this two-day conference seeks papers from all disciplines which address cannibalism in any setting, "from contemporary horror film to Eucharistic devotion, from Freudian theory to science fiction" and beyond. It seeks proposals on topics such as theorisations of cannibalism, maternal infanticide and eating the enemy. The deadline for proposal submission is set at 31 December 2012.

Recorded Lecture: François Laruelle, "Pour une philosophie dite ‘contemporaine’ (Towards a Philosophy Deemed ‘Contemporary’)"

Hiroshi Sugimoto Lightning Fields 168, 2009, © Hiroshi Sugimoto, Courtesy The Pace Gallery

Courtesy of the London Graduate School and the Backdoor Broadcasting Company, we can now enjoy the ambitious and compelling project canvassed by François Laruelle in his talk on 9 May of this year, entitled "Pour une philosophophie dite 'contemporaine'". Designed as a preface to a lecture he delivered at Goldsmiths the next day ("Non-photographie, vers une interprétation quantique"), Laruelle here carefully anatomises the arguments underpinning his call for a form of contemporary philosophy which rebalances the relationship between philosophy and mathematics, and predicates itself on the vectorial and the quantic rather than the object.

His talk, a most useful foreward to his other dense works (some of which have recently or will soon be published in English translation), is equally a series of departures as it is actively propositional. Concerning the arc of his project at large, he notes: "I had to limit philosophy to give way to mathematics; and I had to limit topology to give way to algebra". Indeed, Laruelle underscores decisive points of divergence away from theorists such as Deleuze, Derrida and Meillassoux alongside his deviation from the mascroscopy of the "modern" (i.e, Plato, Decartes, Spinoza, Badiou) in preference of a "contemporary" philosophy which is worked through a relation with the physical by means of "vectoriality". He enquires:

"[W]hat can be invented with history's heritage, what do we do with it? Do we reproduce, remember, smooth, clean the glass or the mirror of language, leaving as always philosophy to be reflected in itself and to auto-model itself? Or do we incline it, 'encline' it (being 'enclined towards', the inclination as Leibnizian concept) and so free up its inventive forces rather than those forces of repression? I put myself in the position of a scientist or an artist for whom philosophy is at once object and materials ... Generic humanity is not a tradition, but an orientation that comes or under-comes"

The lecture can be found archived at the Backdoor Broadcasting Company, where a pdf of the English translation (also distributed to his listeners on the day) can also be downloaded. Laruelle adds, digresses and extrapolates in the talk itself, thus it is worthwhile to both read and listen.

Article: Julia Reinhard Lupton, "Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt"

Just for this month, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies is offering the the whole content of their newest issue of Spring 2012 - entitled "Becoming Media", edited by Jen Boyle and Martin Foys" - for free download. Contributions include Eugene Thacker's "Wayless Abyss: Mysticism, Mediation and Divine Nothingness" and a fascinating cross-media experiment by Whitney Anne Trettien, "Plant Animal Book: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits", which is accompanied by an additional digital essay-cum-gloss to be read relationally with the postmedieval text.

Julia Reinhard Lupton's quirky and reflective article "Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt" is another postmedieval offering in this issue available online throughout March. Lupton spices up seventeenth-century Hannah Woolley's cookbook The Queen-like Closet (first published in 1670) through a peculiar comparative proximity with Hannah Arendt's concept of "judgment", carefully filtered through the register of actor-network theory and object oriented ontology. Through such a perview, Lupton encourages not only a wider reading of Arendt's philosophy but also (and perhaps more primarily) a subtle re-evaluation of the generally quotidian task of cooking and the tactile engagements which form the basis for judgment in the course of preparing food for a table. 

"Bringing the two Hannahs to the same table helps me unfold the preparation of meals as engaging at once a worldly environment and social scripts, setting the scenes in which action, work and labor enter into the most intimate proximity, without, however, losing their distinctions altogether."

 

Blog: BibliOdyssey

BibliOdyssey, a blog curated by Paul K (a.k.a. pecay), features a marvellous, extensive and ecclectic scanned aggregation of "visual materia obscura" including  illustration, diagrams, maps, prints and bookart. Archived at BibliOdyssey in no particular chronological order but tagged under general categories and fully searchable, are illuminations from medieval monster encyclopaedias, zoological and anatomical engravings from the nineteenth century, fifteenth-century alchemical illustrations, Modernist posters, and various other downloadable pictures with no noticeable connection other than that they are curious and/or obscure.

Since its inception in 2005, this blog has garnered widespread popularity as a respository for high-quality digitised imagery, producing (somewhat contrarily) its own textual artefact - the book BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet, published by Fuel in 2007.

In an interview with Elatia Harris at 3 Quarks Daily, Pauk K explains his process in this online archiving adventure:

"the democracy you see on the blog is really a product of combing through all the relevant material and saving what I find attractive. I have an acreage - print art - and I try to be assiduous in plowing all its constituent parts. You may well describe it as attempting to assess the visual scope of culture but that's not essentially where I come from. I'm looking for the outlandish, the intriguing, the bizarre, the beautiful, the breathtaking ..."