Photograph of the Center for Humanities building

2011-2012 Center for the Humanities Themes:

Fact and Artifact (Fall 2011)

To what extent has the modern fact been redefined as artifact, as an entity shaped by human hands? Scholars have at once recognized the production of facts about the empirical world as a central achievement of modernity and redefined facts not as paragons of objectivity but as markers of human intervention. Facts thus are alternately seen as a triumph of knowing or as products of social processes shaped by tools of witness, communities of inquiry, and methods of narration. Scholars of language, art, narrative, historical epistemology, philosophy, and archaeology have contributed to our understanding of how people fashion facts, which may in turn be accepted as veridical statements about reality or called into question as the conceptions of interested and historically situated human beings. They have explored, for instance, the practices and technologies used in apprehending the natural world: e.g. those used when collecting plants for herbaria and gene banks, or when tagging nutrients with radioisotopes. They have considered, too, the epistemological claims of aesthetic realism, the implication of historical facts in rhetorically constructed narratives, and the very possibility of establishing objects of knowledge in the humanities as facts in the sense in which that term has been used in the sciences. These investigations draw and redraw the lines between fact and artifact and fact and fiction – that is, not what we know to be true or false, but rather how we think we know it.

Under what conditions can facts be created? How do efforts to pin down empirical reality gain access to the material world? How do they depend upon symbolic or aesthetic logics of representation or produce such representations? What is at stake in the legal and moral order of facts? Does new knowledge change people’s aesthetic or moral sensibilities or alter their understandings of their first-hand experiences? What light can the study of artifacts shed on the status and function of facts in our world?

Visceral States: Affect and Civic Life (Spring 2012)

The term “affect” encompasses a range of bodily and social experiences that has traditionally been defined in contradistinction to rationality: visceral reactions, feelings, emotional attachments, and states of mood. Recent studies across the disciplines, from literature to political theory to neuroscience, have complicated this definition by according a foundational role to affect in human behavior and cognition. These inquiries destabilize the grounds on which affect has been excluded from rationalist discourses in both academic and public realms. This “affective turn” thus affords new possibilities for understanding aesthetics, reasoning, art, personal experience, power and the civic sphere, posing as well new problems for the conceptualization of feelings, emotion, and mood.

Our inquiry is organized around a broad scope of intra- and interdisciplinary questions, including: can the deployment or solicitation of affect in civil life be understood as complementary to—or even partially constitutive of—reasoned debate? How might fields such as moral philosophy, social theory, and psychology adjudicate between canonical rationalist frameworks and those proposing constitutive dynamics of affect? To what extent do aesthetic representations and practices provide grounds for new approaches to the interplay of affect, subjectivity, and sentiment in social life?