The Crisis in the Humanities The Crisis in the Humanities : Transdisciplinary Solutions Edited by Žarko Cvejić, Andrija Filipović and Ana Petrov The Crisis in the Humanities: Transdisciplinary Solutions Edited by Žarko Cvejić, Andrija Filipović and Ana Petrov This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Žarko Cvejić, Andrija Filipović, Ana Petrov and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9782-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9782-2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Žarko Cveji(cid:252), Andrija Filipovi(cid:252) and Ana Petrov Part I General Discussions: The Crisis in the Humanities Censoring Emotional Discourse: Marx on Seriousness and Laughter ........ 8 Rachel Aumiller The Crisis in Musicology: Transdisciplinary Solutions ............................. 15 Žarko Cveji(cid:252) Toward a Critique of the Philosophy of the Event ..................................... 25 Nikola Dedi(cid:252) From Literary to Visual Culture and Aesthetics ........................................ 30 Aleš Erjavec Necropolitics and Global Capitalism ........................................................ 39 Marina Gržini(cid:252) Toward a Marxist Aesthetics ..................................................................... 46 Lev Kreft The Aesthetic Dimension: Between Humanist and Anti-humanist Aesthetics ................................................................................................... 61 Bojana Mateji(cid:252) Art in the Context of Crisis ........................................................................ 68 Maja Stankovi(cid:252) Contemporary Aesthetics of Architecture: How Transdisciplinarity Ends up in Phenomenology ................................................................................ 73 Vladimir Stevanovi(cid:252) vi Table of Contents A New School in the Gray Zones of Crisis: Self-organisation and Self- education in the Arts .................................................................................. 82 Miško Šuvakovi(cid:252) Musicology and the Measure of Transdisciplinarity ................................. 92 Mirjana Veselinovi(cid:252) Hofman Part II Specific Issues: Tackling the Crisis Beyond the Crisis of the Avant-garde in Music: The Potentials of Wolfgang Welsch's Concept of Transculturality in Musicological Studies ..................................................................................................... 102 Marija Maglov Discursive Construction of the Body and the Bodily Potential for Creating New Narratives ................................................................... 110 Aleksa Milanovi(cid:252) Overcoming the Traditional Humanities: The Case of Tel Quel Semanalysis ............................................................................................. 115 Sanela Nikoli(cid:252) Globalisation and World Literature: Pascale Casanova’s World Literary Republic and Franco Moretti’s Literary World System .......................... 123 Dubravka (cid:264)uri(cid:252) Between Utopia and Activism: Pop Music Concerts in the Post-Yugoslav Space ....................................................................................................... 131 Ana Petrov Knowledge and its Stability in and out of Academia ............................... 137 Lada Stevanovi(cid:252) Part III Artists, Audiences, and the Crisis in Contemporary Art and Media Disagency: Toward a Community of Passive Subjects ............................ 148 Andrija Filipovi(cid:252) The Crisis in the Humanities: Transdisciplinary Solutions vii Aesthetics and Machine Learning: The Representation of User Preferences in Movie Recommender Systems .......................................... 154 Oleg Jekni(cid:252) Sound Art as a Transdisciplinary Practice: A Musicological Perspective .............................................................................................. 161 Biljana Lekovi(cid:252) The Playful Face of the Performing Object: The Perplexed Relations of the Artist and the Audience in the Presence of an Artificial Body ....... 169 Dragana Stojanovi(cid:252) Live or Living Dead: (Un)Setting the Stage for the Hologram Performer ................................................................................................ 174 Aneta Stojni(cid:252) Bio Art from the Other Europe ................................................................ 183 Polona Tratnik Editors and Contributors .......................................................................... 192 Index of Names........................................................................................ 196 INTRODUCTION ŽARKO CVEJI(cid:251), ANDRIJA FILIPOVI(cid:251) AND ANA PETROV In April 2015, the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade, Serbia, hosted a major international conference to address the long- standing crisis in the humanities and reflect together on possible ways of transcending it. The conference saw presentations by some 50 scholars working in the humanities and related fields, both young, still in the early stages of their academic careers, and senior, more established thinkers from across Europe. The latter included Miško Šuvakovi(cid:252) and Rastko Mo(cid:254)nik, both from the Faculty of Media and Communications, as well as Marina Gržini(cid:252) and Aleš Erjavec from the Institute of Philosophy in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The keynote speakers were Marina Gržini(cid:252) and Lev Kreft (Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana) and the closing remarks were given by Terry Smith, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. In addition to Serbia, Australia, Slovenia, and the United States, the conference also gathered participants from Austria, Great Britain, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Israel, Norway, and Romania. This book is a result of that conference, comprising a selection of essays about the crisis in the humanities and possible ways out of it by most of the scholars mentioned above, as well as a selection of the most provocative papers presented at the conference by younger and less established thinkers. The resulting collection of essays will interest all students of the humanities, especially those interested in its ongoing crisis, not only from Southeast Europe, but globally. Since the early 1960s, there has been a heated debate about the alleged crisis in the humanities. The emergence of cultural studies opened not only new perspectives, but also posed many new problems. The so-called “long crisis in the humanities” has revolved, on the one hand, around the theoretical issue of the “crisis of the subject” and, on the other hand, the practical issue of the position of the humanities as a field of research in the 2 Introduction academia. This book examines the position of the humanities in contemporary society and challenges the ways the issues that form the foci of our disciplines have been addressed in recent theoretical discourses. Our intention was to reflect on the status of the disciplines in the humanities and probe the links between history, culture, media, and art. The crucial question addressed here is the following: are the humanities really in crisis and, if yes, what are the features, causes, and possible outcomes of that crisis? The book discusses the characteristics and relevance of certain alternative contemporary transdisciplinary approaches that cut across traditional disciplines, such as, for example, neo- and post-Marxism, and their potential contributions to various theoretical paradigms of the 21st century. Furthermore, since many have argued that we live at a time when the humanities have been reduced to a passive historical segment of the academia, treated as playthings for closed academic circles, we want to point out possible ways of opening the closed “high art” circles of the academia and reflecting critically on the perspectives of engaged art and scholarship. We want to examine the relevance of art practices in contemporary society, to define engaged art and establish its consequences. Finally, some of the papers address the issues of producing individualities, collectivities, identities, and positions in the consumerist age and the position(s) of art in transdisciplinary transformations. Seeking to encourage contemporary theoretical approaches, we want to discuss the potentials of contemporary research of the audience’s body, the artist’s body, and the public sphere body in the context of new materialist studies, text/discourse studies, and other theoretical approaches in the humanities. In line with the issues discussed above, the book is divided in three parts: 1) general discussions of the (purported) crisis in the humanities as a whole, as well as in individual disciplines; 2) more specific discussions of individual issues related to the crisis; and 3) discussions of the respective positions of the artist and the audience in contemporary art and media. Part I begins with Rachel Aumiller’s critique of the privileging of seriousness in modern scholarship and particularly in the humanities, on account of its purported neutrality and objectivity, the resulting foreclosing of all other emotions and insights, and the potentially subversive and enriching potential of laughter, as discussed in Karl Marx’s dichotomy of laughter and seriousness. Then, Žarko Cveji(cid:252) discusses the (still ongoing) crisis that swept (positivist) musicology in the 1980s, following the general breakdown of positivism in the 1970s, and transdisciplinarity as a possible way out. Nikola Dedi(cid:252) pursues a critique of the philosophy of the