Saturday 13th of September at 16:45
Jan Verwoert Ways to exit the dialectics of dis- and re-enchantment 2014 Jan Verwoert (G) is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory, based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor of Frieze Magazine, his writings have appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and the de Appel curatorial programme. He is the author of Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, the essay collection Tell Me What You Want What You Really, Really Want, together with Michael Stevenson, Animal Spirits — Fables in the Parlance of Our Times and a second collection of his essays, Cookie!. In his talk, Jan Verwoert will address the following questions: Are dis- and re-enchantment the only options the history of modernity and its discounts offer us? If this was a false alternative, how do we exit the given set of choices? Weber advocates scientific self-discipline and reserve. But he also speaks of ‘hazard’, the moment of chance, intuition, the unknowable at the heart of knowledge production. And he acknowledges that the modern scientific method was born out practices of torture, when he writes that giving primacy to concept and method is to ‘put screws on’ the world of experience. What can be gained from studying the (self-)critical reflections of a modern man of science on the modern world? And when do we need to flank this type of reflection with a reconstruction of the knowledge deemed unknowable, enchanted and magical, in order to be eradicated through torture and genocide, at the outset of scientific modernity?
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