Mannerist Compositions: Vital Gestures in Contemporary Practices

The twentieth century has already seen three major attempts at rescuing mannerism from its stigmatization as ‘degenerate art,’ the first allied with expressionism, the second with surrealism, and the third with postmodernism. Today we are witnessing a new reappraisal, one closely tied up with shifting boundaries between nature and culture, but also with the multiple crises of very late capitalism. In learning to perceive the world not in terms of essences or identities but of modal consistencies, we regain awareness of both the wealth of intersecting life forms, and the cosmopolitical need for adequate manners of coexistence.

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While mannerism occurs in the sixteenth century qua historical style, it is not limited to art. Rather, it is the name of a problematic field that also includes tics and neurasthenic behavior in psychiatry, gestures and conventions in diplomacy and pandemic ethics, the modular existence of new technologies and recombinant capitalism, and intersectional and interspecies com-positioning. Setting out from Sjoerd van Tuinen’s The Philosophy of Mannerism: From Aesthetics to Modal Metaphysics (Bloomsbury, 2022), the aim of this roundtable discussion is to explore and explode mannerism’s scope of current transdisciplinary resonances.

Programme:
19:00 pm Sjoerd van Tuinen (philosopher) – Introduction: Political Mannerism and Form-of-Life
19:10 pm Erik Bordeleau (fugitive planner) – Capitalist Manners and Soulful Asset Formation
Discussion
19:40 pm Christoph Brunner (media theorist) – Affective Manners and Ethico-Aesthetic Transvaluation
19:55 pm Ksenia Federova (media and art researcher) – Sensing Across the Human and Nonhuman Divides
Discussion
20:30 pm Andrej Radman (architecture theorist) – Matter and Manner: The Lure of the Virtual
Discussion

Free admission

Language: English