EXPRESSION / PERFORMANCE / BEHAVIOR
Rethinking the Humanities
The 2010-11 Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar

Co-Convened by Paul Griffiths & Toril Moi

Questions about language, meaning and interpretation, and about the relationship between individual acts of expression (performances, behaviors) and their social, political and institutional contexts are fundamental to the humanities. Humanists analyze, historicize, and theorize the records and traces of human expressions, performances and behaviors. Traditionally we have worked with records of the way human beings talk and act, above all with documents and texts. Yet every kind of expression is important to the humanities: our field of interest ranges from voice, language, gesture, and movement to every form of art (painting, literature, theater, film, music, etc.) and philosophy. What we humanists do and make — our words, our texts, our own performances, behaviors and expressions — also belong to what we study. Thus the university, and its humanistic disciplines, must themselves be inquired into by humanists.

The 2010-11 Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar proposes to gather a group of scholars interested in reconsidering fundamental paradigms of meaning and practice in the humanities. While the co-conveners’ own starting point is inspired by Wittgenstein’s question of how one knows how to go on, to perform the next move, to behave in the appropriate way, to express what needs to be expressed as it ought to be expressed, the seminar will not be limited to one philosophical project. Rather, we want to make space for three kinds of work: work on fundamental theoretical issues concerning meaning and language; work that connects questions of meaning, language, expression (etc.) to fundamental questions of art and aesthetics (what painting, literature, theater, film, music and other art forms are; what these art forms can do); and work attempting to analyze and theorize the expressions, behaviors, and performances of humanists themselves.

To give the work of the seminar a coherent frame, we suggest focusing on three terms: performance, behavior, and expression. Each of these refracts attention to what humanists study differently; together they embrace the linguistic (literature, texts), the gestural, visual and non-visual artifacts, disciplines, and institutions.

Each of these three terms of art has accrued a large theoretical literature of its own, and each has a broad semantic range in ordinary language. Performance and performativity range from the theatrical to the musical to the political, and also include the notion of performative utterance (Austin), which has in turn been applied to spheres of discourse as varied as the economic, the political, and the gender-constituting. Behavior’s resonances may sound more immediately empiricist: entomologists talk of ant behavior, rational-choice theorists of economic behavior, and studies of academic behavior have been undertaken by sociologists (Bourdieu). Yet Wittgenstein and Freud thought that human behavior reveals (or conceals) our innermost thoughts. While critics of literature and other arts often consider a work of art a form of expression, poststructuralist thinkers have claimed that expression carries with it dubious overtones of an inner-outer dichotomy. Others (Wittgenstein, Cavell, Freud) think that human beings are “doomed to expression.”

The seminar will meet weekly throughout the academic year 2010-2011. Some meetings will be devoted to presentations by participants, some to discussion of shared readings, and some to visits by non-participants, whether from Duke or beyond.

The 2010-11 FHI Seminar will be comprised of: (a) up to eight faculty fellows from the College of Arts & Sciences, including the co-conveners; (b) one faculty member from Duke’s professional schools; (c) a professional librarian from the Duke libraries; (d) up to two Duke graduate fellows; and (f) a fellow from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Please click on the links above for more information on each fellowship category, or write to christina.chia@duke.edu.

For more information on the FHI Annual Seminar, including previous seminar themes, co-conveners, and fellows, please visit the Seminar’s main page here and explore the links.

If you have questions about this call for proposals, or if you need additional information, please write to christina.chia@duke.edu or call (919) 668-1902.