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Feminist Studies Presents Dr. Vicki Kirby

Vicki Kirby teaches in the School of Social Sciences and International Studies at The University of New South Wales, Sydney. She has published widely in the areas of post-structural and feminist theory, posthumanism and science studies. She was Guest Editor of a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies on “the two cultures” problem in 2008. The motivating question behind her research concerns the nature/culture, body/mind, matter/form divisions. Books include TELLING FLESH: THE SUBSTANCE OF THE CORPOREAL (Routledge 1997); JUDITH BUTLER: LIVE THEORY (Continuum 2006); and QUANTUM ANTHROPOLOGIES: LIFE AT LARGE (Duke forthcoming).

“Language, Models, Mediation: “the two cultures” revisited”

Presented in collaboration with the Science and Justice Working Group

The human condition is often defined in terms of unique intellectual and creative capacities, evident in the ability to use language and represent a world in symbolic or abstract form. The “two cultures problem” draws its energy from this assumption, finding the aims and methods of the humanities incommensurable with those practiced in the sciences. In the former, the meaning of the referent changes because it is deemed a cultural product, an ideational or socially inflected entity that, inasmuch as it mediates reality, is constructed or invented. In the latter, the pragmatism of scientific research demands the referent’s relative stability, concrete endurance and accessibility, and to this end, proof of the referent is thought to be discovered. What is important here is that the humanities tend to circumscribe knowledge, emphasize its contingency, and define the human condition in terms of hermeneutic enclosure. In the main, the project of the sciences is very different: science strives for access to a universal truth that, inasmuch as it pre-exists interpretation, cannot be constituted by it. Although this representation is something of a cartoon, with “both sides” acknowledging that things are more complex and messy, foundational questions about the nature of language (models, representations) persist. This talk will explore the ontological dimensions of the language question that pertain to material facticity, scientific truth, and a rather challenging re-routing of how we define politics and justice.

“Human Nature: or, what if Culture was really Nature all along?”

Thursday, November 12th, 4:00 – 6:00 PM
Humanities 1, room 210

The notion of “cultural construction” carries such important interventionary significance that it has transformed the terms of political analysis by dispatching explanatory appeals to an unmediated Nature. Such identifying categories as sex, sexuality, gender, ethnic and racial identity and so on, become provisional attributes or properties, illusional or performative truths whose lived experience is no less real for that. Deconstruction’s aphorism, “no outside of text,” has been interpreted as further theoretical grist for the erasure of Nature and the complete rejection of foundational arguments. And yet despite this, Judith Butler has recently conceded that her approach to Nature/biology, an approach that draws on the deconstructive legacy, is an inadequate response to the question of biology. This talk will explore this impasse (the two cultures problem) by suggesting a more rigorous reading of the deconstructive legacy that equates “text” and “language” with Nature.

The colloquia are generously co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies, History of Consciousness Department, Philosophy Department, and Science and Justice Working Group.

For further information please call 459-4324.