Call for papers

CFP: Organitechnoscience.

Organic and technical aspects of literary discourse

International Online-Conference (7-9 October 2020).

Jointly organized by the CEREG research group (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) and the research programme SFB 1285 “Invectivity” (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)

Since the second half of the 20th century, it has been possible to observe a fundamental paradigm shift in the scientific discourses of various disciplines: The separation between the organic and the technical, which has shaped the “Western” history of ideas for centuries and structured “Western” imagination in a lasting way, seems to have disappeared. The connecting lines drawn between the organic and the technical in the 17th century (e.g. the link between man and machine in Descartes or La Mettrie) are currently being radicalized in the form of a hybridization of these seemingly incompatible areas. A new interest in the relationship between nature and culture is linked to this. For example, in La fin d'un grand partage (2015) Pierre Charbonnier uses texts by Durkheim, Levi-Strauss and Descolas to investigate how the dualism of nature and society is gradually being revised and possibly overcome in the context of climate change and environmental issues. A similar process has taken place in recent decades in (post-)feminist discourse as highlighted in the various manifestos of Donna Haraway. These are first based on the central “thought figure” of the cyborg (The Cyborg Manifesto, 1985) and later on that of the dog (The Companion Species Manifesto, 2003). Positions of constitutive links between organicity and technicity such as those of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (e.g. Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2, 1980) are revitalized in the wide-ranging confrontations with New Materialisms (e.g. Jane Bennett, 2010).

The claimed paradigm shift – from separation to hybridization – reveals itself as a multifaceted process and becomes the scene of a contested terrain of epochal naming practices: Previously unthinkable associations such as “naturecultures” (Donna Haraway, 2003) or relations such as “écotechnie” (Jean-Luc Nancy, 2007), which emphasize a hybridization of the organic and the technical (such as “organitechnoscience"?), replace the era of “technoscience” proclaimed in the last quarter of the 20th century (Bruno Latour, 1987; Marie-Luise Angerer, 1999).

Due to its fundamental constitution, the field of Literary Studies is a central ground for these negotiations, as it has always been transdisciplinary and fed by figures of thought from Philosophy, Sociology of Science and Cultural Studies. A large number of the newer and newest approaches in the discourse on literature work on the basis of technical and organic figurations such as the hybrid (Norbert Mecklenburg, 2008), but also the swarm (Eva Horn / Lucas Marco Gisi, 2009), the diffraction (Birgit M. Kaiser / Kathrin Thiele, 2017) or the graft (Uwe Wirth, 2011). While technicity and organicity have long been treated as contradictions, they are increasingly becoming relations of complex associations, scandalous intersections and closely interwoven entanglements. Thus, the Janus-headedness of nature and technology becomes clearer. However, the literary-scientific negotiation of this strange relationship does not appear to be productive solely in relation to transfers between disciplines. Rather, concrete questions about literature and its scientific negotiation can be examined. For example, one might ask how “parasite” (Michel Serres, 1980) and “interference” (Sebastian Donat et al., 2018), two possible figurations of disturbance in text production and reception, relate to each other. In other words, one can ask what distinguishes Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome” (Mille Plateaux, 1980) from Network Theory (Stefan Kaufmann, 2007) in discourses on the literary field or intertextuality. These and other questions will be explored in the international conference format.

The discussion will focus on the relationship between organicity and technicity (as tension, interplay or combination). The conference intends to explore the various organic-technical figures of thought in German-language texts that deal with literature in various ways (literary theory, literature on literature, philosophy, cultural studies, essayism).

The following aspects are of particular interest for the conference and the processing of the complex of organicity and technicity:

 -      older forms of the current organic-technical figurations (from the Middle Ages until today)

-       the influence of French and English theory on German literary and theoretical discourse (theory and culture transfer)

-    theoretical definition and differentiation of and between “paradigm”, “figure of thought”, “model of thought”, “metaphor”, “figuration”, etc.

-       materiality of theory: its decline and the efforts to bring it back

-     politics of theory (biopolitics, queer theory, critical race theory, enlightenment/anti-enlightenment discourses, as well as the connection between hybridization dynamics and reasserting essentializations of nature and culture)