CFP: "Sense/Nonsense: Unmaking Language" (Columbia U, April 14-15, 2001)

[Serguei Alex. Oushakine]

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York, NY
invites submissions for the 2001 Boas-Benedict Conference, entitled
"Sense/Nonsense: Unmaking Language"
April 14-15, 2001

Deadline for the submission of abstracts is March 20, 2001

Since the "linguistic turn" in anthropology, a linguistic or symbolic model
has emerged as a prevalent model for understanding "culture" and the social
writ large.  This conference proposes to explore the borders of this model
for knowledge, the guarded line struck between sense and nonsense that makes
our knowledge tenable.   The point is not to debunk the implications that
anthropology's "linguistic turn" has generated for our knowledge, in as much
as it is to adequately come to terms with the ontological implications that
the recourse to language, broadly understood, might entail, indeed might be
made possible by.

The conference is an invitation to think the nature of the sovereignty of
language/the symbolic in the constitution of our "sense" of the world.  What
are the limitations of what we generally understand by a linguistic or
symbolic construction of the world?  What problems plague this particular
understanding in the social sciences?  In other words, notwithstanding the
political and ethical relevance and purchase of this approach to knowledge,
what are the issues with which it cannot necessarily engage?  Crucially, is
it possible that the very materiality of our existence relates to us, or
communicates with us, in a manner that is not reducible to what the terms of
an analytic of language/symbolic make available for us?  How do we make
sense of that "murmur" (in Foucualt's sense of the word) that is not the
putative language of language?

What, then, does it mean to have a "sense" of something otherwise than
linguistic/symbolic?  Is such a sense "always already" linguistically
constructed or is it ever given over to us with an immediacy that does not
necessarily call upon language? If so, what is the nature of this immediacy?
Further, in this scheme, what is the status of what might tentatively be
called nonsense (non-sense)? That is to say, how can we think, talk, imagine
a 'sense' and/or 'non-sense' not already locatable within - that might even
challenge - linguistic, symbolic, cultural structures and structurings of
meanings?

Topics to consider for this conference include:
· the ways in which sense and nonsense interrupt the play of signification
in instances of shock, trauma, and mental illness, for example;
· what relationships attain between the linguistic/symbolic and the
corporeal/visceral/material;
· what do we mean when we use "experience" as a category;
· translation and un-translatability;
· the relationship between sensory perception and representation;
· the role of sense and nonsense in performances (ritual, theatre, music,
etc.);
· the analysis of  "habit," "commonsense," "the everyday," and "discipline";
· the limits of language and language of limits;
· are anthropology and other social sciences in any way equipped to enable
us to engage with this problematic?

Please send 250 word abstracts by March 20, 2001 to:

ATTN: Boas Benedict Conference
Department of Anthropology
Columbia University
452 Schermerhorn Ext.
New York, NY  10027

Or, email abstracts as attachments to gg97 at columbia.edu.

Please direct all questions to Goutam Gajula (gg97 at columbia.edu) or
Vishnupad Mishra (mv208 at columbia.edu).

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