ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

A phenomenon in the Renaissance that proliferated Europe throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, the cabinet of curiosities was in essence a personal collection of rare, unknown and marvelous objects. Popular, visual and encyclopedic in their approach, these cabinets, or Wunderkammern, included a diversity of specimens from both known and newly discovered worlds–from unicorn tails to monkey teeth, Indian canoes to phosphorescent minerals, carrots to pinned insects. These collections of curious objects that are seemingly not human in nature require the idea or application of human characteristics and traits to describe their inhuman state. In this act of collecting, categorizing, displaying and recording, the idea of a Natural Order and what it meant to be human were thrown into question by philosophers, scientists, theologians, and poets alike. Taking a broad view of this cabinet of curiosities, the seminar’s aim is: 1) to investigate the varied, changing, and possible forms of the cabinet itself (e.g. personal collections, Natural History museums, aquariums, zoos, circuses, scientific notebooks, anatomy halls, libraries and scriptoriums); 2) to examine the curiosities that were/are collected (e.g. artifacts, fossils, internal organs, organisms both rare and common, maps, cultural objects, literary texts, art); and 3) to evaluate and reflect upon the manner, instruments, and results of such collecting (e.g. use of the microscope, surgical instruments, optics, and galvanism, as well as the creation of museum guide books, specified taxonomies, and rubrics of Science and Religion).

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This seminar takes up the intersections between poetics and choreography. In the context of the ACLA conference on “The Human and Its Others,” we will think about the ways in which the human body can become a figure for issues in poetics, as well as the ways in which various ideas of poetry often invoke the human body: as metaphor, as referent, as audience, as performance. Our papers will range in historical period and literary field, though most will take up issues in modern performance studies. Our conversation will attempt to offer wide-ranging definitions of both poetry and choreography. Dance performances as well as theories of dance, poetic texts as well as theories of poetry will be our subjects. We hope to end our seminar with a workshop performance of a piece by Jonathan Appels, performed by dancers from the American Ballet./p>

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Is the “primitive” human, pre-human, inhuman, superhuman? For whom and in what circumstances? The notions that the alleged “civilized” world has produced about its cultural “other” in different periods and contexts can be said to oscillate between the image of a disturbing savage —an irrational, beastly creature who can only in some cases attain an acceptable level of humanity through exposure to “progress”— and that of an innocent, non-speculative, hence nobler and more powerful model able to offset the discontents of a secularized and alienated modernity that has subordinated its humaneness to material advancement. The purpose of this seminar is to engage with various definitions and uses of the “primitive” in both Western and non-Western contexts. We will explore the relationships (tension? coexistence? partial overlapping?) between apparently contrasting visions that the West has generated about other cultures (chronologically or spatially distant from Western modernity). But we will also compare Western perspectives on “civilization” and the “primitive” to the discourses produced by non-Western cultures on those issues. How and why did the construction of the civilized-vs-primitive dichotomy become production of values? Is it possible to conceive a critique of civilization and of its notion of humanity from a primitivist perspective? What role does the aesthetic play in the consolidation or the problematization of such categories as “civilized”, “primitive”, “savage”? The seminar welcomes papers addressing those and other related questions through texts from various disciplines (literature, critical theory, cultural studies, anthropology, visual arts, film studies, etc.).

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Creativity is often cited as a privileged defining trait of human beings. This seminar seeks to explore the relationship between creativity and the human as expressed through literature and the arts. Encouraging a wide variety of interpretations and approaches, possible papers might focus on the creation of Humankind, human creativity and creations, and the role of creativity itself in creating the human. The seminar, while exploring the edges of creativity’s possible defining presence in the human, might raise questions such as: Is creativity specific to the human? Does creativity bridge the human to the divine? Can creativity exist in the absence of the human? Can the human exist in the absence of creativity? Is the human at risk in creativity? If creativity has an opposite, what would be its implications for the human?

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This panel will consider the concept of the cyborg not merely as the actual augmentation of the body with machinery, but rather as an acknowledgement that the organic is inherently mechanical. Today it is impossible to separate technology from biology, as new interventions in the body take the form of cloning and chimerical hybrids of human and animal genetic material. This development seems to signal a new victory over our natural limitations as we strive to become what Freud called a “prosthetic god,” following the path toward a technological utopia already manifest in Robert Hooke’s seventeenth century paean to the microscope. Every technology, however, functions through a tacit acceptance of our integration into nature, blending the human, the mechanical, and the animal. This constellation is not original to the present, but recurs at times that coincide with a crisis in our definition of the human. It is no accident that La Mettrie theorized the human as a machine at the same moment that Linnaeus created a classification system that made humans full members of the primate order in the animal kingdom. We seek original papers that examine the current crisis of what it means to be human without losing sight of the past. Is the “cyborg” still a useful term or has it become so ubiquitous today as to have lost its “proper” (i.e. hybrid) meaning? Are terms like the “post-human” (K. Hayles) or the “symbiont” (G. Longo) any better?

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