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[ecrea] 'The Experimental Society' conference
Mon Feb 08 11:37:55 GMT 2010
International conference: The Experimental
Society, Lancaster University, 7-9 July 2010
Deadline 12 March
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/experimentality
Experimentation, with its distinctive way of
joining action and knowledge, has played a
crucial role in the culture and politics of
modern society, but one that has a number of
contradictory strands. In one strand,
experimentation is associated with the opening
up of the closed medieval universe into an open
world of endless possibility. This story would
include the development of the arts as an
autonomous space for free exploration, and
practices of social, cultural and political
experimentation that invent new ways of
living. It had perhaps its leading advocate in
Friedrich Nietzsche, with his notion of life as
a continuous experiment, but in the contemporary
world it is also manifested in the everyday
creativity (de Certeau) with which people
experiment 'casually' with new forms of
humanity, technology, space, economic exchange
and political participation (Hayles, Stelarc, Soja, Ghosh, Rheingold, Lury).
Yet the dominant strand to the modern experiment
has surely been that of experimental science,
which from the 17th century offered to solve the
problem of social dissensus by putting all truth
claims to public test, thereby replacing the
received certainties of traditional society with
the new certainties of objective facts and
natural laws (Shapin, Schaffer, Toulmin). In
performing the split between nature and culture
that Bruno Latour calls the 'modern
constitution', the experiment thus started its
long relationship with social ordering,
technology and power, which has helped to
legitimise the instrumental paradigm of modern
political action (Ezrahi), drive forward the
grand projects of 20th century high-modernist
statecraft (Scott), and shape the contemporary
world of evidence-based policy, clinical trials
and audits. Critiques of this development
include early warnings about the iron cage of
instrumental rationality (Weber), twentieth
century unease about technocracy and the
scientisation of politics (the Frankfurt school)
and autonomous technology (Ellul, Winner), and
contemporary concern about the proliferation of
states of exception in which experimental
subjection and the reduction of the human to
'bare life' becomes the norm (Agamben).
It is time to ask whether the experiment is now
too complicit with power to act as a carrier of
the hopes of (post)modernity, or whether its
emancipatory potential can be renewed through a
sustained inquiry into the different forms that
it takes in science and technology, in the arts
and in wider culture. If experimentation and
innovation have become too integrated with
imaginaries of technological control, and
thereby with consequent externalisations (Wynne
and Felt), then further large questions arise
not only for politics, but also for environmental sustainability.
However, any such project also needs to be
sensitive to ways in which the key role played
by experimentation in the ordering of society
seems to be shifting away from the special to
the general experiment - from the experiment as
a bounded episode situated in time and space, to
a generalised, performative
experimentality. Driven by pervasive
informationalisation, we can observe a number of
interlinked trends, including: the acceleration
and proliferation of feedback loops between
action and reaction; the displacement of fixed
structures by networks and dissipative
structures; the abandonment of fixed goals for
continuous repositioning; and the carrying out
of knowledge-work in the context of
application. Such trends can be observed in
domains as disparate as science and innovation,
network-centric digital warfare, finance
capitalism, product design, software
engineering, new media and popular culture. Do
these add up to a systemic transformation of how
society is being ordered? Are humans no longer
in control of their experimental 'projects', and
what does this mean for our conceptualisation of
the human and of politics? Does this create the
conditions in which a new kind of experimental
society might be possible? How might we imagine
this, and perhaps influence its form?
This three-day international conference is the
culmination of Lancaster's year-long research
programme Experimentality, which in six two-day
workshops and a range of arts events in the
North West has been exploring the varieties and
transformations of experimentation. It will
draw on the inquiries held in these events: into
experimentation and eventality, into the forms
of subject and object implicated in
experimentation, into the experimentality of
matter itself and into the social and spatial
organisation of experimentation in urban
life. It will draw on recent work on
experimentation as having its own logic
(Hacking), as being shaped into experimental
systems which produce novelty and surprise
(Rheinberger), as involving pervasive everyday
improvisation (Ingold), as brought to closure in
different ways (Galison) and as enacted in
different experimental spaces or 'truth-spots'
(Gieryn). It will bring together scholars from
a range of disciplines, and practitioners from
different spheres of social life, to set out and
debate different diagnoses and visions of the
experimental society. It will be an
interdisciplinary, collaborative exploration of
the power of experimentation to shape the future.
Questions to be pursued in the conference will include the following:
* Is experimentality becoming a key trope
of contemporary society? Is it taking new
forms, and if so with what implications?
* How can we learn from the differences
between the modes of experimentality operating
within science, the arts and wider culture?
* How do notions of experimentality
intersect with other dominant notions of social
change, such as societal reflexivity, liquidity,
knowing capitalism, cosmopolitanism, mobility and complexity?
* What dangers to human freedom are posed
by new, experimental forms of power?
* If a shift is occurring in modern
society's ontology, so that 'society' is itself
becoming self-interrogating, what does this mean for the social sciences?
* How can the power to shape our
socio-technical future be distributed more
evenly in society? Can people and publics
appropriate 'the experiment' so that it operates
as an engine of human freedom harnessed to the
task of building a common world, rather than as a tool of power?
* If modern society is implicated in,
perhaps dependent upon, forms of uncontrolled,
unintended or blind experiment, what forms of
regulatory ordering might be required?
Plenary speakers will include:
Ulrich Beck (London School of Economics)
Bülent Diken (Lancaster University)
Josephine Green (Social Innovation, Philips Design)
Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen)
Scott Lash (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Helga Nowotny (European Research Council)
Gísli Pálsson (University of Iceland)
James Wilsdon (Royal Society)
To submit a paper presentation to the conference
in response to this first call, please send an
abstract (200-400 words) by 12 March 2010 to
Anne-Marie Mumford. We also encourage proposals
for sessions of three papers.
We also welcome proposals from creative
practitioners, researchers and postgraduates
whose practice engages with the conference
themes. Proposals could involve a range of art
forms including performance, dance, film or
video, painting, drawing and sculpture. For
more guidance on creative submissions, go to: http://bit.ly/cresub.
For submission of all proposals, or further
details and queries, please contact:
Anne-Marie Mumford
Institute for Advanced Studies
County South
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YD, UK
Email: (a.mumford /at/ lancaster.ac.uk)
Tel: +44 (0) 1524 510816
Fax: +44 (0) 1524 510857
'The Experimental Society' is being organised by
the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) in
collaboration with the ESRC Centre for the
Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics
(Cesagen) and Lancaster Institute for the
Contemporary Arts (LICA). It forms part of the
2009-2010 Annual Research Programme of the IAS,
Experimentality, which is directed by Bronislaw
Szerszynski and co-directed by Stephanie Koerner
(University of Manchester) and Brian Wynne.
Experimentality is being delivered in
collaboration with the School of Arts, Histories
and Cultures, University of Manchester; the ESRC
Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of
Genomics, Lancaster University;
FutureEverything; the Centre for the History of
Science, Technology and Medicine, University of
Manchester; the Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science, Berlin; the AHRC Research
Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its
Legacies, University of Manchester; The Centre
for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University;
Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster; Lancaster
International Concert Series; Peter Scott
Gallery, Lancaster; Storey Gallery, Lancaster;
Lancaster Literature Festival; Folly Arts; AND Festival; and CUBE, Manchester.
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/experimentality
<https://exchange.lancs.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.lancs.ac.uk/experimentality>
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Nico Carpentier (Phd)
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Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.56
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.36.84
Office: 5B.401a
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European Communication Research and Education Association
Web: http://www.ecrea.eu
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E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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