keynote speakers | postmodernconference

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS.

RUGGERO EUGENI

Posts. How media defined, un-defined and re-defined Modernity

The debate on postmodern has taken place in a well-defined way since the 1970s. It has articulated four significant areas of phenomena, to which we will assign different names (by keeping the term “postmodern” as a meta-term for all of them):

(a) a series of social, industrial, economic and financial transformations (Postmodernity);

(b) a series of changes of the experiential forms lived by social subjects – concentrated for example on the acceleration, complexification and presentification of temporality (Postmoderness);

(c) a series of evolutions within the intellectual and philosophical field, from post-structuralism to the Nietzsche Renaissance (Postmoderne);

(d) and finally a set of expressive phenomena linked above all to the area of architecture, literature and subsequently of cinema (Postmodernism).

The most recent debate on the end of postmodern, remained basically linked to the articulation of the four areas, recording and enhancing the transformations that emerged from the zero years on the levels of (a) political and economic phenomena (globalization, digital and network capitalism, etc.: Re-modernity), (b) social experience (reflexive Modernity, culture of 24/24, etc.: Re-moderness), (c) philosophical phenomena (the new realism, the naturalization of the theory, etc .: Re-moderne) and (d) literary, cinematographic and more generally expressive phenomena (new modernism, new realism, etc: Re-modernism).

This intervention intends to argue that this reasoning scheme is undoubtedly useful for mapping the problems at stake and studying their reciprocal relationships, but fails to grasp a more profound dynamic that moves both the birth of the postmodern and its overcoming. This dynamic is linked to the concrete, experiential and theoretical evolution of the media within society. In other words, I propose that the development of the media has touched much more profoundly than we usually consider the social perception of collective transformations, determining forms of experience and a collective feeling that have been variously transcribed in terms of postmodern and its overcoming. These transcripts, on the other hand, have primarily erased the role of media in determining the experience and feeling they express.

The intervention, therefore, proposes a rereading of the transformations outlined above in light of the profound evolution undergone by the media from the 1970s until today. From this new point of view, the advent of postmodern appears to be strictly linked to the last phase of the twentieth-century media characterized by the domination of electrical media (television, video) often distributed in broadcasting mode. The electrical media (and their diffusion in the artistic sphere with the first examples of video art and video installations) allow a re-enactment of the media past and favour an overlap between the restricted portion of Modernity in which the media were born (from the beginning of the nineteenth century) and the entire modern age.

The evolution of postmodernism closely follows the rapid erosion of electrical media by electronic-digital ones and the replacement of the dominant mode of broadcasting distribution with that of telematic networks. This transformation appears at first to legitimize and reinforce many postmodern assumptions: the computer as meta-medium allows the re-enactment of all the media of the past through processes of “remediation” and “relocation”. However, starting from the zero years, the real extent of the digital and telematic turning point emerges: the media are no longer perceived as delimited spaces of representation/transfiguration/construction of the reality throughout the forms of entertainment, fiction and information; instead, they become an integral and operative part of extra-media reality. This turning point is determined by the fact that digital technologies establish an overall data economy based on capture, storage, processing, distribution and visualization of data in real-time; this data economy, yet involving the media, in fact establishes a much wider circulation that includes all the other areas of social life: from finance to defense, from surveillance to medicine, and so on.

This new awareness of the "de-mediation" of the media causes the assumptions of the postmodern collapse in favour of a renewed relationship with reality and with the past. The critical point of this relationship is the setting aside of the distinction between media and reality that had crossed the history of the media throughout Modernity; and the recognition of a link between media and social, political and economic agency of subjects – and then, to their sense of responsibility.

Short-bio

Ruggero Eugeni is professor of Media Semiotics at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milano). Among his most recent works: Neurofilmology. Audiovisual Studies and the Challenge of Neurosciences (edited with Adriano d’Aloia, Milano 2014); La condizione postmediale (The Postmedia Condition, Brescia, 2015); Teorie del cinema, Il dibattito contemporaneo (Film Theories. The Contemporary Debate, edited with Adriano d’Aloia, 2017, Limina Award 2018). His website is Media|experience|semiotics, https://ruggeroeugeni.com/.

ROBERTO MORDACCI

From Post-modernism to Neo-modernity

It is time to re-assess our understanding of the present era. The most common etiquette used in the last fifty years at least – i.e. “post-modern era” – is clearly unable to explain most of the ongoing cultural and political phenomena that cause the tensions we find ourselves in. Post-modernism has become an ideology that – especially through the impact of some philosophical ideas – has worsened the situation and impaired our capacity to respond to the critical issues of our time. Philosophical tenets such as “the death of the subject”, “the end of history”, “the end of philosophy” and “the farewell to truth” have been widespread by post-modernist thinkers such as Lyotard, Derrida, Rorty and Vattimo since the 1970s. These ideas have paved the ground for a mass-culture that rejects any positive ideal for the future. This generalization to the masses of a culture which has no hope in the future is becoming the most dangerous threat to our identity and to our planet.

Yet, history has not come to an end, and neither philosophy or the arts or culture have. They are in a turmoil and in a fight the result of which will determine nothing less than the fate of the European-Western way of life and maybe the global surviving of humanity. It is necessary to recognize that the actual era is not only the end of something but the beginning of something else as well, and that our culture has the duty and the necessity to delve into its resources in order to create a new understanding of where we want to go and where we should go.

There are signs of a change: the idea of a (human) subject has come back in a dialogue with the neurosciences and the challenge of the post-human technology; mainstream philosophers have revitalized realist conceptions concerning truth, science, ethics and politics; the arts and literature show a resurgence of creativity, especially in young artists, that looks again at the future as a possibility for new ways of expression. Most of all, there is a growing need for a normative outlook in social and ethical problems, avoiding any kind of dogmatism.

These signs are nothing if there is no solid ground, in higher education and in the cultural elites, for a fresh look at the possibilities inscribed in the present challenges. We need a new philosophy of history, even a new philosophy of human progress.
This is why our era is similar to the beginning of modernity: during the XV and XVI centuries, philosophers, scientists and artists gave birth to new conceptions of their disciplines and in general of the human condition and its history. Imagination, rationality and creativity were inscribed in a common dynamic towards the future. One example, utopian thought in politics, offers the main characteristics of this trust in the possibility of a just and happy life.

Our present condition is one in which we cannot refuse the challenge to use our heritage for a better future. We need to write our own Utopia: a new form of utopia, grown up through the awareness of dystopia as a possible result of (bad) utopias.

Short-bio

Roberto Mordacci is Full Professor of Moral Philosophy and Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy of San Raffaele University, Milan. He teaches Moral Philosophy, Philosophy of History and Leadership and Teamwork in the Medical Profession at San Raffaele. He also teaches Philosophy of Management at Libera Università Luigi Cattaneo, Castellanza (VA).

He is the Director of the International Research Centre for European Culture and Politics (IRCECP), and has founded the Centre for Public Ethics (CeSEP) in 2007 and the Film & Philosophy Lab in 2011. His research and teaching activities include issues in the philosophy of history (modernity, postmodernism, neomodernity, utopias), normative ethics (the principle of respect, critical personalism), neuroethics, philosophy of management, bioethics and the philosophy of film.

Among his recent publications: La condizione neomoderna (Einaudi, Torino 2017); Come fare filosofia con i film (a cura di, Carocci, Roma 2017); L’etica è per le persone (San Paolo, Milano 2015); Bioetica (ebook; Bruno Mondadori, Milano 2013); Rispetto (Cortina, Milano 2012). Recently published in English: A Short History and Theory of Respect, "International Philosophical Quarterly", 59, 2, issue 234 (June 2019), pp. 121-136; Moral Theories, in H. ten Have (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics, Springer, Dordrecht 2015; From Analysis to Genealogy. Bernard Williams and the End of the Analytic-Continental Dichotomy, “Philosophical Inquiries”, 4, 1 (2016), pp. 71-84.

KREŠIMIR PURGAR

In the Desert of Images: A Reverse Side of Simulacrum

In a book published in 2002, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that the twentieth century was marked by the desire of people to return to the Real, to the kind of reality we distanced from during the Second Industrial Revolution. According to this thesis, the two world wars, the socialist revolutions and terrorism are indications that the Real is finally really happening and that violence towards one another is a form of confrontation with one's own fantasies and fear of the other. As an ardent Lacanian, Žižek will find in the theories of the famous French author sufficient arguments to defend his own theses, which can be summed up that “passion for the Real” culminates in a sort of theatrical spectacle thanks to the power and proliferation of images.

Today we take for granted Žižek's thesis that the demolition of Twin Towers meant the realization of the popular fantasy that the Hollywood film industry offered in the disaster movies as a typical postmodern genre. But it is not Žižek's cynicism that I find problematic: the problem is that it is based on the wrong premise. Namely, Žižek says that what happened on 9/11 suddenly entered our reality as a phantasmatic screen illusion, but not in the way that reality disturbed the image we have of reality, but that the image itself penetrated reality and shattered our notion of it (p. 16). So, in that specific case, the basic procedure of creating and destroying the concept of reality takes place, according to Žižek, through images. We could agree with this thesis if Žižek did not provide a few pages further a description of what he considered the potential effects of images: “This is what the compelling image of the collapse of the WTC was: an image, a semblance, an effect, which, at the same time, delivered the thing itself. This effect of the Real is not the same as what Roland Barthes, way back in the 1960s, called l'effet du réel: it is, rather, its exact opposite: l'effet d'irréel (p. 19).

Not questioning the general position of psychoanalytic theory that the Real is the exact opposite of reality, we can in no way agree with the proposition that an image can produce both real and unreal effects at the same time. We can understand the function of an image either at the idol/incarnation level or at the symbol/representation level. An observer cannot understand the concept of an image (let alone the meaning of it) unless he or she has taken in advance a specific position of the concept of the image itself. Unlike psychoanalytic theory, in general image theory there is no area of transition between interpreting the image as a simulacrum and as a representation. This imagined transition area, if any, is not related to the image but to the ideology and different disciplinary practices of image interpretation. If it cannot happen today that the picture of Christ is been confused with the material, real body nailed to the real cross which might even look exactly the same as one on the Calvary two thousand years ago – and no matter how realistic the semblance of Christ's body is – how can we claim today that an image may break the barrier of reality and deliver “the thing itself”? There are three possible reasons why we may do so: either because 1) we subordinate the ontological otherness of the image to one's particular interests, or 2) we do not know that the image is always separate from what it depicts or 3) we don't account for the fact that, following our example, the Twins demolition images became popular because they were not images at all but a real event (proved in addition, unlike images of Christ, by hard evidence). We observed the demolition of World Trade Center towers in direct transmission, which, precisely because it was direct, was not and could not be an image.

We can live either in the “desert of the Real” or in the “desert of images” – not both, or at least not both at the same time. Images do not represent reality and are not related to the order of reality but to the order of images. Žižek, apparently following Jean Baudrillard's three orders of simulacra, attributed the distinction reality/imagination only to modern societies while both authors consider postmodern societies as those where difference between reality and representation has been lost. Arguing that it is ontologically not possible to confuse images with reality, in the lecture I will remind of some key points in this regard from my latest book Pictorial Appearing. Image Theory After Representation and make reference to Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au langage and Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups.

Short-bio

Krešimir Purgar teaches visual studies and image theory at the J. J. Strossmayer University in Osijek, Croatia, where he holds a position af Associate Professor. Recently he has authored Pictorial Appearing – Image Theory After Representation (Bielefeld, 2019) and Iconologia e cultura visuale – W.J.T. Mitchell, storia e metodo dei visual studies (Rome, 2019). He edited and co-edited several books, most recent being Theorizing Images (Newcastle, 2016) W.J.T. Mitchell's Image Theory – Living Pictures (New York, 2017), while forthcoming are his edited collections The Iconology of Abstraction (New York, 2020) and The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies (Basingstoke, GB, 2021).

JOSH TOTH

Metafiction and Plasticity, or the Dehiscing Wound of Postmodernism

How do we reconcile the end of postmodernism (the rise of a new sincerity, postirony, neo-realism, metamodernism, etc) with its apparent intensification (what Jeffery Nealon calls “post-postmodernism” or what Gilles Lipovetsky calls hypermodernism)? If the former is associated with a new wave of aesthetic production—one that has been forming since at least the fall of the Berlin Wall (when late-capitalism began mutating into ever more unstable forms)—then the latter is surely most obvious in the post-truth world over which the current American president now presides. While the former is marked by something seemingly reactionary, almost naively modernist, the latter is tied to an ongoing metastasization of the most extreme and simplified strands of postmodernism.

My talk will approach this end that is also a troubling intensification by circling around two basic assumptions:

We must, in the footsteps of Jürgen Habermas, carefully parse the societal from the cultural. Or rather, for our purposes, we must keep in mind Linda Hutcheon’s efforts to distinguish between postmodernity and postmodernism. If, after all, a type of legitimation crisis was evident 30-40 years ago (lamented by Habermas yet celebrated by Jean-François Lyotard), its full potential is only now becoming evident. But this is not to champion a Habermas over a Lyotard. At their best, the two theoretical types surely agree more than either would like to admit. Postmodernism and/as poststructuralism was more nuanced and invested in the legitimate than its current societal intensification implies. The problem is that such nuance was often naïve and too easy to miss, that postmodernism opened itself to and invited its exploitation.
In the wake of a now exhausted or popularized postmodernism and in the face of an intensified postmodernity, the current cultural avante garde must bring to light the lost nuances of the former while avoiding a simplistic revival of anything like (say) phallic monism or naïve sincerity. It must avoid “oscillation,” or succumbing to a new game of pretend—which is, after all, the game that marks all manner of today’s social media, political discourse, and reality TV.

With these assumptions in mind, I will propose the following: contemporary aesthetics are at their most efficacious (in the face of postmodernity’s intensification) when they align with an on-going “return to Hegel.” The ethical potential of such a return is most overt in the recent shift from the historiographic metafiction of high postmodernism to what I would like to call the historioplastic metafiction of a renewed postmodernism. While the former tends to maintain an emphasis on the instability and contingency of the graphic/symbolic, the latter (even as it sustains many of the conceits of its predecessor) shifts our attention to the infinifte Real that perpetually escapes or frustrates its symbolization. Metafiction (as a narrative, or aesthetic, form) is capable of both inflicting and healing a type of epistemological wound—a wound we might say, even more paradoxically, that is healed through its perpetual dehiscence. This negation of what is negated sublates (i.e., holds to by letting go of) what is lost. Within the confines of a specific narrative text, what is lost and carried over is the Real of a (historical) thing, or that which is anterior to a purely subjective present; within the broader horizon of contemporary cultural production, what is lost and carried over is postmodernism itself. To put it as provocatively as possible: the way out of a now omnipresent “postmodern state” is to be even more postmodern than postmodernism.

Short-bio

Josh Toth is Associate Professor of English at MacEwan University. His various publications include The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary (SUNY, 2010) and Stranger America: A Narrative Ethics of Exclusion (Virginia, 2018). He is currently completing a book titled Truth and Metafiction: Plasticity and Renewal in American Narrative (Bloomsbury Press).