Aarhus Universitets segl

Mauro Carbone and Paolo Vignola: Towards a Phenomenology of the Screen – Moderated by Mitra Azar

Aesthetic Seminar

Oplysninger om arrangementet

Tidspunkt

Mandag 9. september 2019,  kl. 14:15 - 17:00

Sted

Kasernen, Aarhus University, Langelandsgade 139, Aarhus C, Building 1584, Room 124

What philosophical concepts are necessary in order to understand the proliferation of screens and interface culture? What material understandings and experiences underlie their environments? How can this proliferation be read as symptoms and used to diagnose a current political and social crisis? Engaging such questions, philosophers Mauro Carbone and Paolo Vignola will present and discuss developments in phenomenology – from Plato to Bernard Stiegler – in relation to media technologies.

 

Mauro Carbone: Thematizing the “Arche-Screen” through its Variation 

This talk aims at thematizing the notion of “arche-screen,” meant as the ensemble of the conditions of possibility of “monstration [showing]” which in the history of our culture have gradually been opened by the rupestrian wall, the veil, the curtain, the templum, the window, as well as pre-cinema, cinema, and post-cinema screens. This list, however, does not mean to be exhaustive. Therefore, in order to explore at least some of the conditions of possibility of “monstration [showing]” that are implicit in the notion of “arche-screen,” we shall go back through history. Nevertheless, once we got so far as the Chauvet Cave, in France, we would have to turn to the mythical Cave that Plato conceived in The Republic, Book VII.

 

Paolo Vignola: What is Symptomatology?

Symptomatology is neither a traditional discipline of philosophy, nor a possible application of psychoanalysis. It is rather an interdisciplinary necessity – and as such a concrete strategy - for thinking our present and elaborating a diagnosis which reflects it. Starting from these preliminary indications, the aim of the talk is to give an insight on such an interdisciplinary strategy conceived as a diagnose for detecting both the illness of contemporary social life and the decadence of the last century’s philosophical concepts. On the one hand – drawing from Deleuze’s literary theory and from Stoic philosophy – the talk analyzes the concept of symptom and its ambiguity. On the other hand, it points towards Stiegler’s contemporary reading of the Greek notion of pharmakon both as source of “exosomatic intelligence” and the cause of proletarianization – conceived by Stiegler as the loss of knowledge (know-how-to-live, know-how, theoretical and conceptual knowledge). Finally, the talk presents concrete examples of the ambiguous relation between symptoms and pharmakon in relation to creativity, sociability and social networking, and politics.

The seminar is public, and we welcome everybody. 

Programme: Aesthetic Seminar Autumn 2019