Die Goethe-Universität lädt ein zu den 9. Dagmar-Westberg-Lectures

Stefano Harney & Fred Moten
Four Turns from Felicity Street

Stefano Harney (Professor für Transversale Ästhetik, Kunsthochschule für Medien, Köln) und Fred Moten (Professor für Performance Studies, New York University) arbeiten seit Jahrzehnten an Fragen der Ästhetik von Kunst, Musik und Sprache, Black Studies und Kritischer Theorie. In gemeinsam verfassten Büchern wie All Incomplete (2021) und The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) erneuern sie einen kritischen Diskurs über Gemeinschaft und das darin verortete Subjekt und imaginieren alternative Formen für die Universität und das Lernen. In Ihrer Vorlesungsreihe knüpfen sie an ihre einzigartige Methodik, die Philosophie und Poesie miteinander verbindet, an, um Themen wie Widerstand, Solidarität und die Rolle der Kunst zu erörtern.

Die Vorträge finden auf Englisch und in Präsenz statt.

Einladender Fachbereich/Institut: FB 09 | Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften, Kunstgeschichtliches Institut.

Termine:

17.05., 19:00 – 21:00 Uhr (s.t.), Campus Westend (Casino 823, Festsaal)
First Turn

The first question is: why Felicity Street? Why do we keep turning back (on)to Felicity Street? Are we lost? Or is it that, as Fahima Ife says (Nate Mackey says), “no way where we were was there?”
This is the question we asked: how can we feel wealth there amongst imposed deprivation and privatization? In what way are those who live there, and who tend to the austere but unlonely offices of social existence, the keepers, the stewards, the collectors, the initiates, the sisters and monks of this treasure?
How are deprivation and privatization visited upon them because they are keepers and how is it in some way necessary to their keeping or rather to the protection of this wealth they hold (for us who cannot or who refuse to hold it, having been “nurtured and sacrificed to power,” as Andaiye puts it.)
What is the relationship between the access they have to this wealth, the access they grant to others to this wealth, and the access they suffer in violent violation of the access they must keep open?
How will we all be involved such that this is not anthropology or romance? How does Le Mardi Gras involve us? What is the opposite of extracting music (and food)? Can we know what it means to miss New Orleans?

With help from Le Mardi Gras, Fahima Ife, Tom Dent, Wendell Pierce, Louis Armstrong…

Moderation: Prof.’in Dr. Antje Krause-Wahl (Heisenberg-Professur für Gegenwartskunstgeschichte, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)

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18.05., 19:00 – 20:30 Uhr (s.t.), MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main
Second Turn

The second question is the organizing question (the organizing that is already done, where done means both done and done). How are the tables and chairs set up? A kind of north Caribbean hardbound, publication of the kitchen table. To keep the wealth in public is to hold it out, to put your shit in the street. To put the nothing you have out in the streets. To share the plenty of nothing you got, in an insight Pops, say, steals back from the Gershwin’s and Heyard’s wrong copying of it. The danger of seeing something in the way of things. Can we see nothing in the way of things?
What if this done organizing/organizing done is in the first instance a disorganizing and reorganizing and disorganizing of the senses? And what if this is theory work? Is this done organizing/organizing done of the senses the basis for the practice of what LBH calls the aesthetic sociality of blackness?
What’s the relation between the dis/re-organizing of the senses, the riot or the feast or the symposium of the senses, and feeling wealth? Aretha calls soul “feeling depth.” The disorganization that attends feeling wealth in poverty: what does this do to or mean for the poem, which cannot, at the moment of feeling, when the senses become theoreticians in their practice, be reduced to an expression of feeling, or a play in or on meaning, though meaning and expression are irreducible in feeling? Is the poem a thing made out of words or does that particle fade in a field of feel in which poetry, as sensual practice, is the setting up of tables and chairs?
In other words, how can we pay attention to what we love? How can we learn to want what we have? This is another place to speak of how we were taught to love. Of B Jenkins and Bob Harney, Kilson and Bill, Tonika and Laura, Arkansas and the Caribbean. But mainly about study as love and as love of in the first instance the aesthetics of black sociality, a love in which we share and are shared.

What if involvement is disorganization and political organizing is betrayal?

Moderation: Prof.’in Dr. Mechthild Fend, (Professur für Kunstgeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)

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19.05., 19 Uhr, 19:00 – 20:30 Uhr (s.t.), Campus Westend (Casino 823, Festsaal)
Third Turn

How is this done organizing/organizing done in opposition to any emergence or imposition of the politics or of organizing for political purposes?
But then how can liberation, or self-defense, be pursued without politics – such as the well-known politics of resistance or refusal?
Or to put it another way, how can we deal with ‘our’ own problems without incarceration? Because this is a poorly posed question, the question of our own problems but it is not an idle question in the face of abuse, trauma, and meanness.
This is the question of violence, of the thin line between love and hate, and also, of the alternative to development, improvement, and completion. The violence of incompleteness, the opening of access, and an alternative to morality housed in the individual and the institution.
When we suffer abuse, trauma, or violation how can we not double this injury by recourse to the subject reaction? But instead practice something akin to what you described when you went to the village outside Oaxaca? Or perhaps this is also the active Jesus?
This seems to be where the Damned can teach us and also the children of the Damned.

And an aside: Ericka Huggins tells a story of doing breathing in her classes, meditation really, with kids. One day she goes into a school full of Mexican and Central American kids and she perceives the meditation is not working, so she brings in her Latinx comrade, ‘who looks like them,’ and she makes the meditation work. Today all higher education teaching in the arts and humanities seems to be part breathing exercise, or sometimes all breathing exercise.

Moderation: Prof. Dr. Martin Saar (Professur für Sozialphilosophie, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)

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20.05., 12:00 – 14:00 Uhr (s.t.), Campus Westend (SH 3.108)
Fourth Turn
(Dies ist ein Workshop, um vorherige Anmeldung wird gebeten bei Dennis Brzek, M.A.: brzekkunst.uni-frankfurt.de)

The fourth turn, which is the workshop’s reflection on what has come before, but which is also a kind of preface to the first turn, or is its retrospective preparation, is how to talk about any of this at all without assuming the role of the poet, or the critic or the leader?
Or to put it in terms of what we want: how to speak not as if involved but as involved. How not to use morality to avoid betrayal, but instead how to slip individual morality long enough not to betray.
And how does this look, this general antagonism of the call to disorder, when the organizing is done and done already? What would it look like not only without the lectern and the lecture, but the auditorium and the audience? What if this monopoly on how we gather could be broken? What if the embargo on gathering how we want could be breached?

Who are we to say? And are we not reproducing something too familiar or maybe not familiar enough? Are we the women who were loved but had to be sent away? Is this Martin Carter’s cry? Are we in the way of things or are we “Something in the Way of Things?” Is Olson’s drunken open field another hard row to hoe?