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CANCELLED! Iris van der Tuin: “I am part of all that I have known”: Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) in the Algorithmic Condition

Aesthetic Seminar

Info about event

Time

Thursday 26 November 2020,  at 14:15 - 17:00

This talk analyzes the current rising interest in the philosophy of art (and life) of Susanne K. Langer. The talk starts where Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin’s recent monograph The Philosophy of Susanne Langer: Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling ends. Dengerink Chaplin convincingly argues how “Langer saw the world and human life both in its intricate connectedness and in its dynamic openness to multiple meaningful interpretations, each of them disclosing a different aspect of the world” (2020: 256) and how this holistic vision leads to a pluralistic epistemology, a take on symbolic forms as firmly “rooted in the reciprocal engagement between the body-subject and its environment” (ibid.), and the capacity to build bridges between the humanities and the natural sciences, philosophy and science, analytic and continental philosophy, Western and non-Western philosophy, and so-called higher and lower arts. In the talk I position Langer’s work in the ‘algorithmic condition’ (Colman et al. 2018) of procedural thought in order to push Dengerink Chaplin’s analysis to including Langer’s referencing of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “I am part of all that I have known”. I do this by bringing in insights and images from the card index system that Langer kept for almost 70 years.   

The seminar is public, and we welcome everybody.