Thomas Hobbes. Leviatán, 1651

Critical Practices Seminar

Reversible Modernities

14 may 2011
5:26
Photography
Latin América
History
Theory
Technology

This conversation forms part of one of three seminars on critical practices held in 2010-11 under the aegis of the Museum’s Master’s program in History of Art.

Here, Albert Corsín, research anthropologist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the leading professor in the seminar, and his guest, Rane Willerslev, ethnologist and anthropologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, suggest that three principles liken the Baroque, its philosophical forms and anthropological knowledge to contemporary social and critical theory: the analysis of the mass media, the analysis of emotions and the analysis of machines.

This is why a soundtrack is playing in the background of the conversation with recordings of machines, clocks and music boxes – musical machines – from the 17th century, the beginnings of a technological aurality. This dialogue discusses the particular features and reflections of Baroque thinking discernible today from the point of view of anthropology, which involves looking at animism, one of the first forms of religion and spirituality on which Satanism, among other things, is based.

This presentation of an anthropology of emotions illustrates how scientistic, rationalist analysis omits essential political and social nexuses. The seminar uses this idea to demonstrate the fallibility of central modernity and empiricism, developing its opposite – a modernity linked to other forms of thinking like animism, and thus steering clear of narratives that are fixed and stagnant.

Production

José Luis Espejo

Locution

Luis Mata

License
Creative Commons by-nc-sa 4.0

Critical Practices Seminar

Reversible Modernities

Reversible Modernities. Critical practices seminar, 31 March - 4 April 2011 at the Museo Reina Sofía

Alberto Corsín, Anthropologist and researcher at the CSIC: The timeless relevance of Baroque thought for social theory. With this seminar I wanted to clear up the conceptual and theoretical space to understand why the Baroque is in fashion now.

Both The Potosí Principle and The Baroque Effect served as ways to access contemporary social theory in the seminar: how social theory and critical theory are being looked at today. What we saw, generally speaking, is that the historical Baroque, the philosophical forms of the Baroque and even its anthropology deal with some themes like emotions, what may be the first theorising about the media, what aspects of the media are found in the theatre and painting, and machines.
In the 17th century, machines and thinking about the media and emotions shaped a way of understanding society and sociability.

We are looking at the Baroque from less common angles, for example anthropological theory, cosmologies, world views and so-called indigenous ontologies that generate theoretical thinking that seems to have a lot in common with neo-Baroque critical theory.
This is what Rane, who is an anthropological specialist in hunter-gatherer societies and especially animism, has done.

Rane Willerslev, Ethnologist and Anthropologist from the Aarhus University in Denmark: Animism is one of the earliest concepts in anthropology. Animism is the earliest form of religion or perhaps even better, the very core of religious beliefs. It’s the belief that the world is endowed with spiritual beings or souls. Regarding animals and even inanimate objects such as stones as endowed with soul and personhood has troubled anthropology throughout its history.
It implies a lot of things, but among other things, it implies moving away from a naïve, realist commitment by the natural sciences, and a realisation that you get to the core of social life and what a social being is by somehow disrupting social reality as we see it. It’s not only a question of going out into the field and living among indigenous people, recording in detail how they do things and live their lives and what they believe in, but it’s also about actually almost violating or disrupting that knowledge in order to rewrite it in a way that allows our conceptual world that we understand – it’s not just about (as we thought it was) translating various native terms into the word ‘soul’, for instance, and reducing it to something that we know about. It’s actually about disrupting our own vocabulary in a way that allows us to include their cosmological view within our own western world.