Daniel Colucciello Barber (USA) Fellow 12/13

Discipline(s): Religious Studies / Cultural Studies / Philosophy
ICI-Project: Conversion Remains: Genealogy, Contemporaneity, and Intermattering

When we think of conversion, we think of a past marked by Christianity and colonization. Less frequently addressed is the way that conversion remains—no longer as explicit Christian colonialism, but more precisely as a logic. This project examines the afterlife of the logic of conversion, one that plays itself out at various sites: the affective, embodied registers of gender and race, the demand set forth by new media for interactive flexibility, and the tendency to see our existence as secular rather than religious. I seek to unveil the disseminated modalities in which the logic of conversion remains, and to pose against them a logic of intermattering: one that articulates how co-existing descriptions of the material universe immanently and endlessly undermine, relay, or superpose each other. I do so by drawing on the concept of diaspora, the insights of queer theory, the quantum physics-based philosophy of François Laruelle, and the religio-racial politics of Malcolm X.

Vita: Daniel Colucciello Barber received his PhD from Duke University, where he worked in Religious Studies and the Program in Literature. He has been based in New York for several years, where he has taught at New York University, Marymount Manhattan College, and The City University of New York. His recently published book, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Cascade), addresses the intersection between differential ontology, critiques of the secular, and genealogies of religion. The manuscript of another book, The Future of Immanence: Metaphilosophy and the Fabulation of Icons, is presently under review. His writing has appeared in various publications, including SubStance, The Brooklyn Rail, Symposium, Southern Journal of Philosophy, and The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.

Alice Gavin (UK) Fellow 12/13

Discipline(s): Literature / Film / Philosophy / Linguistics / Spatial Theory
ICI-Project: Complementary Dispositions: Being Free Indirect in Literature and Film

The free indirect disposition -- a mode of being observable both in literature and in film -- describes a form of intimacy that is also a distancing, or a position in the world that is simultaneously a dispositioning. In the case of literature, the text’s entry into free indirect style produces a flush of subjectivity that nonetheless fuzzes the definite location of any subject, attaching a detached or ‘unoccupied’ perspective to thoughts that still feel intensely ‘first personal’. In other words, as soon as we become intimate with a character’s most intimate innervations, we find that character to be no longer quite herself – no longer quite alone nor quite ‘all one’ with her thoughts. On the other hand, it is at times precisely because a character is physically alone that we feel sure the represented thought sutures to them at all. In placing the free indirect disposition in dialogue with the ICI focus, this research intends to reveal its wider political and ethical possibilities, and to explore further its important inferences for our understanding of how we as humans inhabit both ourselves and our environment, our position in the world and our disposition towards it.

Vita: Born in Birmingham, UK, Alice Gavin studied English Literature and History at the University of Oxford and received a Masters in European Culture from University College London. Her PhD was completed at the London Consortium, where her thesis was titled An Architecture of Modernism: Literature, Film, and the Free Indirect Disposition. Being free indirect, her research argues, entails the emergence in the world of a consciousness-not-quite-anybody’s, and so, potentially, of a disposition, tendency or temperament that is energetic and creative yet never conventionally locatable. She has lectured on Samuel Beckett at London Metropolitan University’s Department of Architecture and on Henri Lefebvre at the Science Museum, London, and has taught at both Birkbeck, University of London and the UCL Centre for European Studies. In early 2012 she undertook a short research residency at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Her work has been published in journals such as Textual Practice and Critical Quarterly as well as in zines including The Modernist and All That Is Common.

Robert Meunier (Germany) Fellow 12/13

Discipline(s): History and Philosophy of the Life-Sciences
ICI-Project: The historical dynamics of plurality in the life sciences - Perspectives of practice and the parts and properties of organisms

The proposed project is part of an ongoing investigation in the genealogy and structure of the plurality of disciplinary perspectives in the life sciences. The method employed is to compare from a historical point of view the role parts and properties of organisms play in different disciplines and the ways they are individuated through representational practices. The comparative character of the larger project allows showing how the relevant categories in a discipline result from specific practices, how different perspectives within the life-sciences interact and change, and how they are embedded into cultural practices in a broader sense. Following previous work that focused on anatomy, embryology, genetics and medicine, the partial project pursued at the ICI focuses on the reconfiguration of taxonomic and functional interpretations of parts and properties of organisms through evolutionary theory. By tracking this process from the eighteenth century through its interaction with the emergence of the concepts and practices of genetics, the study will contribute to a reconstruction of today ́s configuration of perspectives.

Vita: Robert Meunier studied Philosophy and Linguistics at the Technical University Berlin. From 2008-2011 he held a fellowship in the programme „Foundations & Ethics of the Life Sciences“ at the European School of Molecular Medicine (Milan, Italy). He was awarded his PhD from the University of Milan for a thesis titled „Thick and Thin Characters: Organismal Form and Representational Practice in Embryology and Genetics.” In 2010 Robert spend eight month as a visiting researcher at the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society at the University of Exter, UK. In 2012 he worked as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) in a group dedicated to “Historicizing Knowledge about Human Biological Diversity in the 20th Century” on a project on the relation of genetics and medicine around 1900.

Nahal Naficy (Iran) Fellow 12/13

Discipline(s): Anthropology / Creative Writing
ICI-Project: Persian Miniatures as Figures of a Whole: Ethnographic Reflections on Iranian-ness Inside and Outside Iran

My goal in this project is to argue for an alternative way of fashioning a whole in ethnography that does not shift the center of gravity too far from the beating heart of the experience itself and the mixed and sometimes conflicting sensual, moral, practical, geographical, political, and other spaces through which it is simultaneously lived. I propose one way to do this is by borrowing modalities of observation, imagination, and articulation from certain artistic traditions and appropriating them as ethnographic modalities, or to use certain aesthetic forms as metaphors for conceptualizing social and cultural phenomena. The project builds upon my doctoral research which combined an ethnographic study of Iranian political, cultural, scholarly, and civic organizations in Washington DC with a close study of Persian manuscript illustrations of circa 14th-18th c. (commonly known as Persian Miniatures) during a internship at the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art. At ICI Berlin, I plan to develop my ideas into a manuscript that will be a contribution to ethnographic theory as well as a novel account of Iranian contemporary experiences at a time of internal and international conflict.

Vita: Nahal Naficy studied English Literature in Tehran and Cultural Anthropology in Texas. Rice Anthropology Department, where she received her Ph.D. from in 2007, had a reputation for fostering cross-disciplinary conversations and intellectual discussions and experiments concerning both ethnographic fieldwork and writing. Her dissertation, "Persian Miniature Writing: An Ethnography of Iranian Organizations in Washington DC" was the culmination of her experiments with combining her anthropological training and literary sensibilities. Upon the completion of her Ph.D., she was nominated for a fellowship at the Harvard Society of Junior Fellows and part of her dissertation was published in "Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be" (Cornell University Press, 2009). She also presented a number of papers on her use of Persian Miniatures in conferences across the US and wrote a piece on the topic for the journal of the Museum der Weltkulturen in Frankfurt. In 2008, she returned to Iran after nearly a decade and has been teaching courses on the Anthropology of Science and Technology, Anthropology of America, and Art and Social Theory among others in universities across Tehran since then.

Stefano Osnaghi (Italy) Fellow 12/13

Discipline(s): Epistemology / Philosophy of Physics
ICI-Project: Bohr's semantic holism and its paradoxes

Bohr’s complementarity was devised to address the tension arising between the formal meaning of concepts and the conditions for their valid use in quantum physics. In my project, I argue that such a tension is not peculiar to atomic phenomena and reflects instead the inadequacy of our notions of meaning. As an alternative to the standard reconstruction of Bohr’s doctrine of complementarity, I will sketch a general theory of meaning, which aims at generalizing Bohr’s instrumentalist interpretation of the quantum symbolism. Because of its radical holism, such a theory is faced with severe issues, which can be viewed as a version of the quantum measurement problem. I will address those issues by combining the insight of neo Kantian structuralist epistemology with the pragmatic transcendental approaches in the philosophy of language. I will also investigate the notion of probability and its fundamental relation to complementarity in this context.

Vita: Stefano Osnaghi was born in Milan, where he studied theoretical physics before moving to Paris and receiving his PhD in quantum physics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure and a MA in philosophy from the Sorbonne. As a postdoc researcher he worked at the Federal Universities of Salvador da Bahia and Florianopolis in Brazil, at the Ecole Polytechnique of Paris, and at the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften of Vienna. From 2009 to 2011 he has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where he undertook his ongoing project on Niels Bohr and semantic holism. Besides working on quantum entanglement as an experimental physicist, he has published papers on the history and the philosophy of quantum mechanics, most of which deal with the so-called measurement problem. In these works, the measurement problem is not regarded as an issue to be addressed by physics, but rather as a paradigmatic example of a class of semantic and epistemological puzzles whose dissolution has occupied philosophers of the transcendental and pragmatic tradition since Kant and Wittgenstein.

Trebor Scholz (Germany) Guest Fellow 12/13

Discipline(s): Culture and Media
ICI-Project: Digital Labor. The Internet as Playground and Factory

Arnd Wedemeyer (Germany) Fellow 12/13

Discipline(s): German Studies, Theater Studies, Intellectual History, Critical Theory
ICI-Project: 1977 in Two Germanies: A Counter-History of the Non-Event

The year 1977 was marked by the struggle between the RAF and the state in the Federal Republic and by the expulsion of Wolf Biermann and subsequently many others from the GDR. These disparate events, however, were immediately understood as mere instantiations of state repression, a phenomenon that can only be understood if the cultural production that seems to react to these crises is simultaneously interpreted as part of their configuration. The project stipulates that the synchronizing effect this constellation had on the intellectual life of the two German states has to be related to an experience of a non-event. Its ultimate ambition is a recuperation of history as exceeding mere narrative, patchwork, or assemblage, that is, of history as a whole that is not one. The one-year study is uniquely positioned to reflect on the possibility of a historicizing universalism as the foundation of radical cultural practices and non-traditional revolutionary politics. In particular, I would like to show that such a historiography has to reckon with the irresolvable complementarity of fact and event, structure and process, without which history would revert to familiar modes of totalization.