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LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE Literary Festival 2013: EUROPP Special Edition Preview Podcast
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This past February and early March, the London School of Economics held its fifth annual Space for Thought Literary Festival under the theme of branching out. The Literary festival commemorated the 300th anniversary of the French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot, who is best known for co founding and editing the Encyclopede. In celebration of the five day event, the LSE's European Politics and Policy talked to Dr. Paul Stock, specialist in 18th and 19th century intellectual history at the LSE. Dr. Stock chaired the festival's main event on the life and work of Denis Diderot. And we also speak to Elke Kresny, curator, urbanist and senior lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Elke spoke to us as part of the event between Curatorial and Urban Practice, which explored how curation evolves amidst new urban contexts.
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It seemed very appropriate to me to have an event at the Literary Festival focusing on Diderot, because obviously this is the 300th anniversary of his birthday and the festival has taken its inspiration, if you like, from different aspects of his career. And so it seemed entirely appropriate that we should gather together a panel of experts to talk a little bit more about the man and what his achievements were. I'm Paul Stock, lecturer in Early Modern International History at lse, and I'll be chairing a discussion called Branching the Life and Work of Denis Diderot. What we've done with this particular event is gather together a disparate group of experts who all have quite particular specialisms that relate to Diderot. So, for example, we've got Professor Russell Goldborn at the University of Leeds, who's a translator of Diderot, and he's interested very much in Diderot's literary works, what he was like as a man of letters, the kind of text that he produced as a novelist, as a dramatist and as an art critic. Another panelist as part of this event is Dr. Tim Hochstrasser, who is at LSE in the International History department, and he's a specialist in the history of political thought, very much interested in how philosophers from this period were able to frame their ideas with a view to putting them into action. And I know that Tim's very keen to talk about the Encyclopedie, which was Diderot's main kind of project, if you like. That's the thing he's best known for today, a project to summarise, in a sense, the sum of human knowledge and then to present it to a wider public. And Tim wants to talk a little bit about what impact the that project had and what its influences have been. And then our Last panelist is Dr. Paul Keenan, who is a specialist in the history of 18th century Russia. And one of the curious things about Diderot's career was that he had the opportunity to go and visit Catherine the Great of Russia and to talk to her about philosophy and about politics. And it sets off a very interesting episode where you've got an intellectual who's meeting an absolutist ruler, essentially, and what do they talk about? Do they have anything in common? What kind of things are they trying to bring bring to a reality? And so Paul will be telling us a little bit about Diderot's later career and whether or not his ideas as a philosopher were put into practice within a specific context. The sort of symbol for the festival is one of the sort of a tree, where you've got the kind of different branches of knowledge flowing out from one another. And Diderot's encyclopedit project is a key part of the way that in the modern period, we now conceptualise knowledge, the idea that particular branches of learning lead to other sub disciplines and then subfields. And in fact, that was graphically represented in the encyclopae itself, with a sort of diagram which showed the different facets of knowledge emanating from different facets of the human mind. So Diderot and his collaborator d' Alembert envisaged different kinds of human knowledge structured around memory, for instance, which leads to the study of history, and around imagination, which leads to the study of poetry and other kinds of creative arts. And so, in that sense, I think the festival is recognizing that what Diderot and d' Alembert did in conceptualising knowledge in that way is actually do something that was quite sophisticated and quite modern, and something which has subsequently directed a lot of the ways that we now, in the contemporary world, think about knowledge and subspecialism and the best ways of investigating and finding out more about the world.
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What I'm interested in in curatorial practice is how to deal with urban transformation processes and in whose interest, from whose perspective stories are being told, respectively collected when it comes to museums. And not only stories, but also all types of mediatization which actually represent urban transformation processes. My name is Elke Krasny and I teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and work as an independent curator on architecture and urbanism. And the of the talk I'm part of is between curatorial and urban practice with regard to a historic constellation of the European city, late 19th century. And I will speak a little bit about Vienna, where I come from. It was driven by major entrepreneurial urbanism on one hand, and city development Fund for urbanization. So we talk about 1860, when all the fortifications came down. And this actually led to the fact that the Museum of History of the City of Vienna was founded. And they collected stones, so they founded a lapidarium to have a memory of the city physically. And taking my starting point from this, I'm not interested in collecting stones, but I'm interested in underrepresented stories of people who try to have agency, political agency within urbanization processes today. And one of the curatorial projects I will talk about is a work I did as artist in residence at the o' Dayne Gallery of the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, together with the downtown east side Women's center and the downtown Eastside in Vancouver is like a pressure cooker of gentrification. And the women in the self organized Women's center that has been established in 1973 are mostly first Nation women, Cree, but also Chinese women. And what I did together with them is unearthing their history. Read through the lens of demands. What were the demands, the manifestations, the demonstrations they brought forward onto the society around them, but also in their ongoing struggle to maintain the shelter in this, as I said before, pressure cooker of gentrification. And the other project I will speak about has to do with the surface of cities and the informal messages one finds there. And this is an ongoing collection I started in roughly 10 years ago. And what I do is I look at. Not graffiti, I'm not interested in that. I mean, it's very interesting, but I'm not pursuing that. But I look at informal messages like labor market manifestations, housing market, all types of things. You would find stickers, A4 notes that are taped with glue or other means of making them stick in order to try to read the surface of the city like a body of collective writing, treating it as the message that speaks through the citizens itself. What I find challenging at this point in time is how to address transformationality itself. How can you actually capture it? And how can you create scenarios, intellectual scenarios, that make it possible for others to. To share what the anxieties are, but also the potentialities. So I'm not about stories that are either or stories, but if you will, how can one capture the heterogeneity or multifacetedness of today's multi ethnic European cities, but also many other global cities that undergo the pressure of accelerated urbanization processes, often at the expanse of the space speed of biographic change. I think the biographies come under pressure because the cities are under pressure. There is a tie in between my curatorial work and my teaching practice at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where I work with students on issues of public space and how to think public space rather as the public realm or the public sphere bringing together the physical space. I spoke about the Stones at the very beginning, so so how does one address what is actually physical there? The scale of the built environment, the orientations, the changes with the changes that are a lot more immaterial but impact on how urban space is actually reshaped or reformed?
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All literary festival events have been podcasted in full. You can find them on the LSE's main podcast page. For more podcasts, interviews and articles on European topics, visit the LSE's Europe blog at Europ EU that's EUR opp EU posting twice daily. UROP covers European governance, economics, politics, culture and society, both at the European Union and national levels. This podcast was produced by Cheryl Bromley and the music used throughout is Camden park by SuperFlower via freemusicarchive.org I'm Chris Gilson. Thanks for listening.