ICI Edition

• Ben Nichols: What Is a ‘Single-axis Analysis’?

  The concept of ‘intersectionality’ has completely transformed a wide range of disciplines over the last few decades. From literary study to sociology, intersectional approaches—approaches that demand that scholars and activists look at the interplay of multiple social identities and locations in order to understand social life—have importantly become routine. But much less attention has been given to what intersectionality was introduced to help correct: the idea of a ‘single-axis analysis’, or an approach that putatively focuses on a single dimension of social life. Instead scholars have tended to take it for granted that they know what this means: that is, a ruinous distortion of the complexity of the social world and something that should be avoided. At the same time, and in some instances departing from intersectionality, influential scholars in recent years have again deployed ideas about the singularity of foundational social formations, particularly in order to understand Blackness and Indigeneity. Focusing on Euro-American scholarly frameworks for studying gender and sexuality, this talk will turn attention to the many functions and purposes of single axis analyses in order to complicate understanding of such frameworks and to develop literacies around their various meanings. Ben Nichols is a lecturer in gender and sexuality studies at the University of Manchester since 2021. Before this, he held a fellowship at the ICI Berlin and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his PhD in English at King’s College London. His research focuses on the intellectual histories of feminist, queer and trans studies. His monograph – Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature, and the Politics of Sameness (2020) – rethinks the deeply embedded aversion to categories of ‘sameness’ across queer studies.

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• Elisabeth Strowick: Ambiguity of Scale. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain — an Anthropocene Novel?

  Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is obsessed with questions of scale. Whether in its incessant reflection on days, weeks, months, years, minutes, or depths of fathoms and meters of altitude, the novel is driven by questions of the measurability of time and space. At the same time, one would hardly want to speak of measurability with regard to The Magic Mountain, either in terms of time or space. What, then, is this obsession with scale? The Magic Mountain, Strowick will argue, generates literary scales beyond measurability that address what the novel calls the ‘dual nature’ [Zwienatur] of time and space. The talk will explore this ambiguity of scale and its consequences for the question of narrative and the form of the novel. About 100 years after the publication of Thomas Mann’s novel, questions of scale are often discussed in theories of the Anthropocene. In fact, ‘scale critique’ is one of the most promising ways to analyse the Anthropocene. Is The Magic Mountain a setting for ‘scale critique’, an Anthropocene novel avant la lettre? Elisabeth Strowick is a Professor of German in the Department of German at New York University. Before joining NYU, she was Professor of German and Humanities, Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, and Co-Director of the Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought at Johns Hopkins University. Elisabeth Strowick has held numerous academic positions, including visiting professorships, at universities in the United States, Germany (FU Berlin, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, University of Hamburg), and Switzerland (University of Zurich, University of Basel). She was awarded a Feodor Lynen Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Yale, Johns Hopkins, 2004-2006). Her areas of expertise are German literature, culture, and thought from the 19th century to the present, with special emphasis on literary theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, the poetics of knowledge, and ecocriticism. She is the author of Passagen der Wiederholung: Kierkegaard — Lacan — Freud (Metzler, 1999), Sprechende Körper — Poetik der Ansteckung (Fink, 2009), Gespenster des Realismus. Zur literarischen Wahrnehmung von Wirklichkeit (Fink, 2019) and has (co-)edited numerous volumes and special issues of peer-reviewed journals. Elisabeth Strowick is currently working on a book on ‘Literary Scale Critique: The Anthropocene as Deep War Time’.

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• Joanna Masó: Instituting Care - Psychotherapy and Materialism

  What is the relationship between social and mental alienation? How can one envision care and cure practices that counter the homogenizing policies of institutions and go beyond the neoliberal economy of individual well-being? The evening explores the legacies of institutional psychotherapy, a psychiatric reform and resistance movement that emerged in France in response to the fascist extermination of patients with mental and physical disabilities. Initiated at Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital by a collective of Marxist psychiatrists, activists, philosophers, and nuns from the Saint-Régis community, Jewish refugees and surrealist artists (among them Georges Canguilhem, Tristan Tzara, Jacques Matarasso, Paul Éluard, and Nusch Éluard), the movement embraced group therapies and patient-run cooperatives. The publication of Psychotherapy and Materialism (ICI Berlin Press, 2024) edited by Marlon Miguel and Elena Vogman, offers the first English translation of two seminal texts by institutional psychotherapy co-inventors François Tosquelles, a Catalan psychiatrist and anarcho-syndicalist, and Jean Oury, founder of the La Borde clinic. Their materialist and ‘disalienationist’ approach was further developed in Frantz Fanon’s decolonial psychiatry and Félix Guattari’s schizoanalysis. It led to a radical rethinking of psychoanalysis, education, and social work promoted by figures like Gisela Pankow, Anne Querrien, and Ginette Michaud. Joana Masó is a professor of French literature at the University of Barcelona. She is a researcher with the UNESCO Chair on Women, Development, and Cultures, and works at the intersection of literature, critical thinking, contemporary art, and curating exhibitions. She has coedited Hélène Cixous’s essays dedicated to art, Poetry in Painting: Writings on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Since 2017, she has led the research project ‘The Forgotten Legacy of Tosquelles’ at the University of Barcelona, under the ADHUC — Research Center for Theory, Gender, Sexuality. She has published Nusch Eluard: Sous le surréalisme, les femmes (Seghers, Paris, 2024), the exhibition catalogue Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry, Radical Politics and Art, co-edited with Carles Guerra et al for the American Folk Art Museum in New York (2024), and the forthcoming title Tosquelles: Curing the Institutions (Semiotext(e), 2025). She is currently working on different modalities of restitution of Dubuffet’s art brut through Tosquelles’ critical legacy. Marlon Miguel is Co-Principal Investigator of the project ‘Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe’ at the Media Faculty of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and a Visiting Fellow at ICI Berlin. He holds a double PhD in Fine Arts and Philosophy. His current research proposes to critically inquire into the notion of ‘disorder’ and to de-essentialize it, looking at the use of artistic media in critical psychiatric practices such as those of François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Fernand Deligny, and Nise da Silveira. Christian Scheerhorn studied philosophy and comparative literature in Paris and Berlin. He is currently completing a Master’s degree at Freie Universität Berlin with a research focus on the intersections of literature, media, and French philosophy. As a Student Research Assistant, he contributes to the project ‘Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe’ at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, exploring the history of institutional psychotherapy and its media and milieu practices. Elena Vogman is a media theorist, Principal Investigator of the research project ‘Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe’ at the Media Faculty of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and a Visiting Fellow at ICI Berlin... Full video: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/instituting-care_psychotherapy-and-materialism/

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• Daniel S. Brooks: Scale Ranges - The Variety of Matter’s Forms, and Levels of Organization as Local Maxima

  Originally applied to preserve a materialist worldview that extends beyond physics and chemistry, the notion of levels of organization is one of the most recognizable ideas in biology. Although sometimes (erroneously) used interchangeably, the relationship between ‘levels’ and ‘scale’ presents an exciting (and relatively unexplored) area in theoretical biology and the history and philosophy of science. Here, Brooks will address this lacuna by clarifying how the two notions can inform and enhance one another. To this effect, he links up the idea of levels of organization with the insight that putative levels (e.g., cells, tissue, and ecosystems) exhibit distributed clustering that extends across scale ranges rather than particular part-whole demarcations. This ‘local maxima’ approach suggests that levels should be seen as a spectrum, where attributing discrete identity (as a particular type of, e.g., cell, tissue, ecosystem) is distributed across distinct and moderately localized or regional resolutions in time and space. Daniel S. Brooks is a professor for theoretical philosophy at the University of Wuppertal. His research interests span the history and philosophy of the life sciences (particularly developmental biology, ecology, and neuroscience), concept usage in science, naturalized epistemology, methodology in philosophy of science, and existentialism. He has held multiple research fellowships, including at the Konrad Lorenz Institute, Ruhr-University Bochum, and the University of Minnesota. His current project focuses on a systematic investigation and analysis of the concept of levels of organization in contemporary and historical biological thought. His edited volume on levels, titled Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences and co-edited with James DiFrisco and William C. Wimsatt, appeared in 2021 at MIT Press. More info can be found at www.danielsbrooks.com. Full video: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/daniel-s-brooks/

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• Gibson Ncube: The Filmed Body as a Model of Understanding African Queer Lived Experiences

  In Africa, a combination of cultural and religious practices, repressive laws instituted during the colonial period, and homophobic nationalisms have ensured that individuals who identify as queer experience their difference in private spaces and at the margins of societies. African people who identify as queer navigate different forms of social silence and this has an important impact on how they toggle between invisibility and visibility and ultimately how they experience embodiment and relationality. Given such a situation, Gibson Ncube explores queer lived experiences in Africa through the lens of the body in films. The body in films is a powerful model for understanding the complexities of identity, desire, and gender within diverse African communities. By examining how queer individuals navigate their physical selves in relation to societal norms, it is possible to gain insight into the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and cultural contexts. Drawing mainly on the work Ncube did in the book Queer Bodies in African Films (2022), he contends that the filmed body as a model serves as a canvas upon which societal expectations and personal expressions of gender and sexual identities collide. By zooming in on the body, Ncube is interested in how the filmed queer body is invested with multiple and often intersecting discourses and narratives. It is inscribed with more than just desire, eroticism, and sexuality. It is as a disruptive figure whose materiality calls for a rethinking not just of how gender and sexual identities are performed and staged but also how they are constructed and embodied. Thus, considering the body as a model allows for a rich understanding of the multifaceted tapestry of queer lived experiences in Africa. Gibson Ncube lectures at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). He has held fellowships supported by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center (USA) and Leeds University Centre for African Studies (UK). He is currently an AfOx Visiting Fellow at Oxford University. He has published widely in the fields of comparative literature, gender and queer studies as well as cultural studies. He co-convened the Queer African Studies Association (2020-2022) and was the 2021 Mary Kingsley Zochonis Distinguished Lecturer (African Studies Association, UK). He currently sits on the Editorial Boards of the following journals: Journal of Literary Studies, the Canadian Journal of African Studies, and the Nordic Journal of African Studies. He is currently the Assistant Editor of the South African Journal of African Languages and the French Book Review Editor for the Canadian Journal of African Studies. Full video: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/gibson-ncube/

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