Description of the Conference
Time: April 12-15, 2007
*Welcome Reception—Evening of April 12th
*Working Sessions—All day 13th & 14th, ends midday 15th
*Conference Banquet—Evening of Friday the 13th
Place: Lester Pollack Room, Furman Hall, NYU School of Law
*Hotels—Club Quarters Midtown and Rockefeller Center
*Banquet—Presidential Penthouse, Washington Square
Our purpose is to map the intersections of "media(tion)" and "Enlightenment" and to use that map as a guide to rethinking the past and, perhaps, fostering a future. Do the media, as we know and use them, have a prehistory in Enlightenment? Does Enlightenment have a future in new media?
These directions for discussion arise, in part, from the peculiar utility of the concepts we are crossing. Each one can itself cross categories. Enlightenment, that is, refers both to a historical period and to a particular way of knowing: the assumption that the World is a System whose parts can be known. Similarly, the study of media and mediation not only materializes ways of knowing (Newton's System of the World as written for print in the language of mathematics); it also re-periodizes history itself according to a present-down chronology of "new" media.
Throughout the conference, then, we expect to find history and knowledge interrogating each other in new ways, challenging both our knowledge of history and our histories of knowledge. To maximize those encounters, we understand our central concepts broadly, taking
- Media and Mediation as not only the post-telegraphy "modern media" of the past two centuries, but as a historical array of (once) new genres and, to borrow a phrase from our Norwegian colleagues, new technologies of transfer. Those genres include the newspaper, encyclopedia, novel, diagram, bank note, lecture, library catalogue, and grading system. Transfer embraces the channels and tools for collecting, representing, storing and distributing knowledge, from roads to postal systems. Mediation, then, signifies the work performed by all of these media.
- Enlightenment will enter our discussions not only in its "period" guise but also in the "knowledge" version. And our understanding of both versions is also broad: the former in its long sense—from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—and the latter as the ongoing project of organizing knowledge into the curricular disciplines.
The invitation list, though very selective, is also somewhat adventuresome in regard to period and discipline. We have reached out beyond obviously relevant categories to secure scholars whose expertise can help us to frame our focus on "Mediating Enlightenment." These include scholars in Early Modern and Postcolonial studies, as well as a specially-targeted group in the sciences and social sciences: representatives of the current media- and technology-driven turn to "complexity" and "emergence" as a possible alternative paradigm to Enlightenment epistemology.
Since this is a working conference, presentation material will be precirculated. We are very interested in facilitating collaborative contributions—three pairs have already formed. All sessions will be plenary discussions. Most sessions will feature three participants, each of whom will have 10-15 minutes for an opening statement. In a twist toward real conversation, those statements will not only be summaries and/or extensions of the precirculated material; they will also relate that material to at least one other person's contribution to the conference.