Here is info about the upcoming symposium on climbing and life taking place at NYU on 11 November.
Climbing: From Bios to Zoe and Beyond
Life wants to climb and in climbing overcome itself.
– Nietzsche
Climbing is at once mysteriously universal and specifically human, a general praxis of life and a markedly anthropocentric pursuit. The still accelerating and expanding sphere of climbing as a specific post-medieval human practice begs the question of its relation, not only to historical modernity and its corporeal-kinetic formations, but to life itself. Accordingly, this symposium proposes to follow the question of climbing and the problematicity of its concept as a unique opportunity for reflection on the question of life.
What climbing is, its being and becoming, is unthinkable without reference to the plurality of evolutionary, metaphysical, cultural, and political forms climbing takes, of which alpinism’s classic notion of ascending a mountain “because it’s there” is both a significant and a woefully insufficient index. To consider climbing in its situation vis-à-vis life, affords not only the possibility of new critical perspectives on climbing but the generation of novel orientations within it. As life is a problem in which life is caught, so climbing proceeds through pursuit of its own difficulties. The contemplation of climbing in connection with life thus calls not only for critique but for more immersed theorizations, for vexed or cruxological discursive climbs of climbing. The historically problematic attachment of mountaineering to colonialism, nationalism, and androcentrism, for instance, is legible (not to mention livable) as a permutation of climbing’s wayward reflexivity, its creative and perverse will to be both heroically more than and a pure end unto itself. Like life, climbing requires an overcoming-by-intensifying of its own problematic. In short, the very movement of climbing calls for progressively recursive and self-problematizing reflections upon its own nature and its relation to the greater movement and nature—life—of which it is a part.
Is climbing the means by which life overcomes itself or only a term through which it wants to? If climbing is the medium whereby life wants to and/or does overcome itself, will life ever overcome climbing? How does death, from the corpses of climbers to environmental loss, animate climbing? What bodies and subjectivities, gestures and technologies, substances and imaginations, desires and economies are produced, performed, and assembled as climbing emerges as a form of social and anti-social life? What ecologies become possible as we come to understand climbing as taking place in environments, both natural and built, as a form of post-human and ante-human engagement with a living, dying planet?
11 November 2016
Department of Performance Studies
New York University
Organizers: Margret Grebowicz (Goucher College), Ed Keller (Parsons, The New School), André Lepecki (Tisch School of the Arts, NYU), Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College, CUNY)
Intro and Panel 1: Life / Death / Camera
10.00 Am - 11.45 AM
Speakers:
Margret Grebowicz, “Detumescence: Life and the Aesthetics of Descent”
Young Soon Oh: “Deaths of the Sherpa and Korean Mountaineers: a Cultural Anthropological Perspective”
Nicole Masciandaro: “Because It’s Not There: Climbing and the Cameral I"
Panel 2: Monument / Environment / Route
12.00pm-1.30pm
Speakers:
Sally Ann Ness: “Traditional Climbing in Yosemite National Park: Tracking Rhetorical Emergences in Space of Monumentality”
Ed Keller: “Anabasis and the Fall: Deep Ecologies of the Upstream Mind”
Mark Sanders: “Climbing by the Book"
LUNCH BREAK
1.30pm - 2.15pm
Panel 3: Dance / Limit / Support
2.15pm - 3.45pm
Speakers:
Bo Earle: “Climbing without Ascent: Overcoming as Parodic Dance”
Jacqui Lowman: “Going BEYOND LIMITS”
André Lepecki: “Rope"
3.45pm - 4.00pm Concluding remarks
4.00pm End of Symposium
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Bo Earle is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He has published on modern poetics and ethics in Philosophy and Literature, ELH, MLN, Oxford Literary Review, New German Critique, and elsewhere. His first book, Post-Personal Romanticism: Democratic Terror, Prosthetic Poetics and the Comedy of Modern Ethical Life, is forthcoming.
Margret Grebowicz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Goucher College in Baltimore. She is the author of The National Park to Come (2015), Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway (2015, with Helen Merrick), Why Internet Porn Matters (2013), and the editor of Gender After Lyotard (2007). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Philosophy of Science, Hypatia Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Environmental Humanities, Studies in Practical Philosophy, and Peace Review, and her poetry translations (from her native Polish) have appeared in literary magazines like Agni, Guernica, Two Lines, World Literature Today, and Field. She has also worked for years as a jazz vocalist, and her last CD was accused by one reviewer of "eliciting the most unusual feelings." Current projects include a forthcoming book, Whale Song, new work on recreation culture and mobility impairment, and wilderness in contemporary Eastern Europe. She and her cat live in Brooklyn and long to visit Antarctica.
Ed Keller is Director of the Center for Transformative Media at The New School and Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design. Designer, professor, writer, musician and multimedia artist. Prior to joining Parsons, he taught at Columbia Univ. GSAPP [1998-2010] and SCIArc [2004-09]. With Carla Leitao he co-founded AUM Studio, an architecture and new media firm that has produced residential projects, competitions, and new media installations in Europe and the US. His work and writing have appeared widely, in venues including Punctum, Praxis, ANY, AD, Arquine, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Architecture, Precis, Wired, Metropolis, Assemblage, Ottagono, and Progressive Architecture. He has spoken on architecture, film, technology, and ecology internationally. Ongoing courses at Parsons include Design for this Century, Post-Planetary Design and The Radical Future of Guitar. Ed has been an avid rock climber for over 35 years.
Jacqui Lowman has been a professional communicator most of her life. She has worked in a broad range of areas, including newspapers, journals, publishing houses, and the academy. In 2008 she created the University of Maine at Presque Isle’s professional communication and journalism program, in which she is principal instructor. In 2012 Lowman suffered a catastrophic, near fatal bleeding incident that left her unable to move or speak. During the long process of recovery, she formed the ideas that led to the creation of BEYOND LIMITS: Awaken Your Potential, a 501C3 that views challenge as an opportunity and asserts that the only thing that ultimately holds us back is the “CAN’T” inside our heads. Through education and recreation, BEYOND LIMITS builds teams in which, through teamwork, all members transcend their perceived limits. In 2015 a team with Lowman, the non-walking member, climbed Mt. Katahdin. Spurred on by that success, BEYOND LIMITS looked for a new challenge that could involve more people over a longer time span. So in 2017 a team will thru hike the Appalachian Trail. Team members will flow in and out over the seven-month hike. The constants will be Lowman, the non-walking member, and her service dog, Saint. The team will document this and do outreach all along the hike as an educational tool, an expression of hope, and to demonstrate that NOTHING is impossible.
Nicola Masciandaro is Professor of English at Brooklyn College (CUNY), a specialist in medieval literature, editor of the journal Glossator (Open Humanities Press), and a rock climber. His non-pseudonymous works include: The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature (Notre Dame, 2007), Event of Oneself (2010), Sufficient Unto the Day: Sermones Contra Solicitudinem (Schism, 2014), Ocean Seeping Eyes (2015), Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory (Mimesis, 2015), and pNEuMenOn (2016).
Sally Ann Ness is a Certified Movement Analyst from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York City and holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Washington. In July 2016, she became Professor and Chair of the Department of Dance at Temple University. She specializes in the study of symbolic action and has conducted research on various forms of dance, sport, and tourism. Her publications on rock climbing have appeared in American Anthropologist, Performance Research, and About Performance, among other journals. She is co-editor with Carrie Noland of Migrations of Gesture (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Her recent book, "Choreographies of Landscape; Signs of Performance in Yosemite National Park" (Berghahn Press, 2016), focuses on the semiotics of energetic forms visitor cultural performance in ecotourism destinations.
Young Hoon Oh is a research associate in Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside. He earned an MA in anthropology at Seoul National University with the thesis, “Symbolic Politics in Himalayan Mountaineering: An Anthropological Perspective.” He earned his doctorate in anthropology at UC Riverside with his dissertation entitled Sherpa Intercultural Experiences in Himalayan Mountaineering: A Pragmatic Phenomenological Perspective (2016). He is also a mountaineer, instructor, and journalist. He has extensively climbed across the world, including four times on Mt. Everest. He is also an associate delegate representing the Korean Alpine Federation. He is an editorial member at the Korean Alpine Federation and at Monthly Magazine Mountain based in Seoul.
Mark Sanders is Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU. His most recent book is Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa.
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