Henning Trüper (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies)
5 Feb 2019
Lecture: Media Theory, Philology, and the History of Disciplines
Abstract:
The talk discusses strange interferences of older humanities paradigms, Particularly philology, in the history of the theorization of media. I will argue that philology, in its nineteenth-century manifestation, was above all a project of rendering the explication of linguistic meanings scientific. Post-WW2 media theorists’ project of understanding what mediated meanings with “reality” can be regarded as oddly, indirectly communicating with this older project. I will move on to discussing the broader picture of how disciplinary differentiation has historically worked in the humanities.
Bio: Henning Trüper’s research revisits European Orientalism as philology and explores the fragmentation of the ontological commitments of philology in regard to its objects of research (natural languages, grammars, texts, scripts, histories, antiquities). This perspective entails abandoning the unity of Orientalism and opens novel ways of understanding its role for European modernity.