Dr. Toni Hildebrandt
After receiving his PhD in Art History at the University of Basel in 2014, for which he received the “Wolfgang-Ratjen award”, Toni Hildebrandt has been working at the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art History at University of Bern since 2014. He was a guest lecturer at University of Basel, the University of the Arts in Bern, the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel and New York University, and he held fellowships at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome (2013-2017), the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich (2019) and the Walter Benjamin Kolleg (2020/21) at University of Bern. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg and working on his second book “Art in the Atomic Age, 1945-2011”.
Reading Course: "Paradigm, Dispositif, Denkstil: Methods and Practices in the Arts and Humanities"
The reading course will focus on methods and practices in the arts and humanities, especially insofar as the historicity, materiality and mediality is crucial for research in both fields. On the first day, we will therefore follow the transition of the concept of “paradigm”, as coined by Thomas S. Kuhn in 1962, from an epistemological (Kuhn) into a strictly historical category (Agamben). We will discuss examples for the exigency of that transition in the history of the atomic age, the cold war and the Anthropocene debate (in art, film, literature, theory), as well as in comparable case studies in the work of the participants.
On the second day, we will discuss Foucault’s concept of “dispositif”, and his recently discovered work Le discours philosophique (1966, published 2023), as well as his later concept of “heterotopia”. We will have a look at different iterations of this concept (in contemporary arts, literature, architecture, theatre, music), and discuss the common ground as well as the differences between historical materialism, deconstruction, and discourse analysis. At the end of both days, we will examine two important voices for contemporary debates in the arts and humanities, namely methods and approaches to study the “black radical tradition” (Fred Moten) and the proposal of an urgent “infrastructural critique” (Vishmidt) of the arts and the humanities.
Possible Readings:
Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1962.
Michel Foucault, Le discours philosophique [1966], Paris: Seuil 2023.
Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003.
Marina Vishmidt, “Only as Self-Relating Negativity”: Infrastructure and Critique, in: Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts 13, 3, pp. 13–24.
ECTS
2 (Pflicht- oder Wahlpflichtbereich ICS / Wahlpflichtbereich GS, SLS, SINTA)
Language
English
Registration
From now on until 28 February via KSL und E-Mail to michael.toggweiler@unibe.ch
