ICI Edition

The models of scientists – to be found in their diagrams, equations, maps, and even machines – can be understood as their representations of phenomena in the world. But when we look back into how scientists created those models, we often find processes of narrative-making: scientists, in seeking to understand their part of the world, create narratives about how it might work. And then, in usage, we find those model-representations becoming tools: tools of exploration, explanation and reasoning, activities that often involve scientists telling narratives with their models. So narrative resources come into two processes of scientists’ modelling: first in spinning narratives to help fashion their models of the world, and second in using narrative accounts to reason with and explore their ‘world in the model’. Models and narratives seem odd bed-fellows, but are often conjoined in the creative work of science. Mary S. Morgan is the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics; an elected Fellow of the British Academy; and an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published on social scientists’ practices of modelling, observing, measuring and making case studies; and is especially interested in how ideas, numbers and facts are used in projects designed to change the world. Her most recent books are How Well Do Facts Travel? (2011) and The World in the Model (2012); and the outcome of a major ERC grant: Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800 (edited with Kim M. Hajek and Dominic J. Berry, 2022). The talk will be followed by a discussion moderated by Alina-Sandra Cucu and Julia Sánchez-Dorado

This event will engage with the debates surrounding Slow cinema as both an aesthetic movement and a political intervention. The discussion will focus on how extended duration and dead time in film have been seen as challenging capitalist temporalities while simultaneously risking recuperation by the very systems they purportedly resist. Works by directors like Chantal Akerman, Albert Serra, Emmanuelle Demoris, and Michelangelo Frammartino will be analysed to consider how Slow cinema’s radical engagement with the everyday — its focus on dead time and quotidian rhythms — may open up alternative ways of experiencing time and attention, yet often remains confined to exclusive art-house circuits. Slow cinema’s long takes and durational emphasis have been interpreted as producing profound shifts in spectatorial consciousness — ranging from boredom to deeper attunement with more-than-human temporalities. The event will explore what the style’s potential significance might be in our contemporary moment, and considers the possibility that such potential lies less in on-screen choices but, rather, in the urgent need to expand these alternative temporal valuations into new modes of production, distribution, and collective reception. Rosa Barotsi is a researcher at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Principal Investigator of the NextGeneration EU-funded project IMFilm. Her research and curatorial work explores the intersections of film, gender, and labour. She is a co-founder of the Feminist Frames network and the In Front of the Factory collective. She recently co-edited the special issue ‘Gender and Labour in the Italian Screen Industries’ in Comunicazioni Sociali (2023). She was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and a Fellow at ICI Berlin. James Burton is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Cultural History at Goldsmiths. A former Fellow of the ICI, he publishes work in the areas of cultural theory, process philosophy and science fiction studies, with particular interests in the cultural roles of fabulation/storytelling, critical ecology, and animism.

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.

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’.

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/