Place and Event
We are working with the proceedings from the last conferenence (below). It will be posted here as soon as it is finished. Keep looking!
Place and Event: Exploring Methods of Transformative Research
International conference and workshop Foldsae, Norway, May 21st - 24th 2010
Arranged by: Rudolf Steiner University College, Oslo, and Friends of Foldsae
Can the room in which the work is performed and the work itself really be considered as separate? When a significant event has taken place: Is the place still the same after having housed this event?
This second conference is an invitation to explore a particular connection: the connection between the event and the place where the event takes place. The frame will be a workshop where we explore the interplay of place and event in different formats. In doing so we will also harvest a reflection on the process writing texts where the aim is to deepen our understanding of methods of transformative research. We will work together in workshop groups with different approaches
Contributors
I. Sue Reed and David Crouch: Artistic/walking II. Rigmor Haugen Jensen: Philosophy workshop
III. Eli Beate Hestnes and Torbjørn Eftestøl: Sound and images - performance
Aksel Hugo: Writing workshop
The groups will share their work with each other, and we will see the different approaches in relation. On Monday 24th we will work with writing short texts that describe the methods we have been exploring.
The aim and problem for this last session is to be able to get something living into a clear written form without destroying it.
Download: Description Programme Sign up The Place How to get there
The conference “Doors to Dialogue” August 2008 in Fyresdal
Saturday afternoon conversations in the herb garden
The conference was by many of the participants experineced as particularly rich in human meetings and dialogue, not at least in the breaks.
Conference proceedings
In this download all the papers from the conference are put together as a publication, edited by Bo Dahlin. Below you will find each of the papers posted one by one. However Bo Dahlin’s introduction is not to be found elsewhere. FROM THE INTRODUCTION: In this preface to Jonael Schickler’s (2005) dissertation on philosophical theology (…) George Pattison touches upon the question of how to understand the position of Steiner’s teachings as compared to the present streams of thought within academic philosophy. He then finds a particularely interesting possibility of dialogue, or conversation, between so called postmodern philosophy on the on hand, and anthroposophy on the other:
[T]here is at least a conversation to be had between those who see the transcendence of philosophy as leading to acts of unknowing beyond the limits of all possible cognition and discourse, and those, like Steiner, who, at the point where others find the beginning of unknowing, claim the stirrings of new cognitive capacities. (Pattison, 2005, p. xv)
Download pdf: Conference proceedings
To read/sing hymns with a postmodern imagination of God - by Synnøve Sakura Heggem
ABSTRACT: In this presentation, I try to make visible parts of the unending imaginative cosmos of the poet Grundtvig. Then I compare it with a presentation and criticism of present philosophical thinking about the concept of God (as other, self, it, gift, circumstances etc). I give some examples from Grundtvig’s texts, to show how and perhaps why they reflect a more flexible, deconstructive and reconstructive view on “God and human being in the world” than postmodern thinkers like E. Levinas, J. Derrida and J-L. Marion. Finally I am summing up some thoughts about what it can mean to sing or read hymns as mirrors of existential possibilities today.
Download paper: To read/sing hymns with a postmodern imagination of God
Countering contradiction: steps to an ecology of knowing - by Aksel Hugo
Pre- and post-modern voices: the Dream song of Olav Åsteson in dialog with Jacques Derrida - by Jenny Steinnes
FROM THE ABSTRACT: This paper will circle around some questions on teaching, but that is teaching which in more than one way will challenge both the more traditional understanding of educational institutions, schools and universities – and a principle of institutionalization. (…) Between the pre and the post, between the before and the after, these concepts that I have used for a title in this paper, we find the word “modern” – and the modernity. Schools, as we know them, have been some of the most grounding elements in this modern modernity, a modernity which has made them into elements for education as building of nations, for educating a working force and, more recently, for a global market.
“Olav down on the porch he sits, and tells his dreams out there.” From the Dream song.
“There is no neutral or natural place in teaching. Here, for example, is not an indifferent place.” Jacques Derrida.
Download paper: Pre- and postmodern voices - the dream song of Olav Åsteson in dialogue with Jacques Derrida
The Poetic Challenge - by Eli Beate Hestnes
About the process of making the short film ”Three tenses for thinking” (”Tre tider til ettertanke”)
ABSTRACT: Five years ago, when I studied video-production and film theory at the University of Trondheim, Norway, I ended my studies by making two short documentary films. I would like to talk about the process of making one of these films, the challenges I come up against in meeting the reality, in collecting the material, in receiving response from others and the transformations I went through during the process.
Download paper: The poetic challenge
The broken neck: the Wound and the Other - by Rigmor Haugen Jensen
FROM THE ABSTRACT: The point of departure is the split between the intellect and the rest of our life world, which seem to have permeated the whole of western culture. This “vertical” split causes what I consider a soul and spirit “disease” in the individual, which affects the relation between individuals, and thus also becomes a “horizontal” split or wound. (…)However, through a heart felt relation to the other, which shifts my attention from my own wound and recognises the wound in the world outside me, my thinking and willing are connected and I have an impulse to action.
“Where I am helpless, where I decide what I cannot fail to decide, freely, necessarily, receiving my very life from the heartbeat of the other.” Jacques Derrida
Download paper: The broken neck
Art and Cognition - By Torbjørn Eftestøl
ABSTRACT: In this paper I investigate some aspects of Rudolf Steiner’s and Gilles Deleuze’s work. In doing this I focus on art as a form of cognition and relate artistic creativity to Steiner’s philosophical conception of truth. I then try to see art and philosophy in relation to the creation of truth and how this relates to Steiner’s method as it is presented by Jesaiah Ben-Aharon in the book The New Experience of the Supersensible. On this background I find some interesting similarities between Steiner’s and Deleuze’s conception of artistic creation. Deleuze is seen as investigating the function of art in a way parallel to that of Steiner, and to develop a view of the artistic endeavor as what he calls «a higher empiricism» which is comparable to the method of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science.
Download paper: Art and Cognition, an Attempt to Map some Relations between the Work of Rudolf Steiner and Gilles Deleuze
From positivism to postmodernism or from Ahriman to Lucifer: the epistemic space of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science - By Marek B. Majorek
FROM THE ABSTRACT: Looked at from the perspective of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science, these developments seem to constitute a movement from the primarily ahrimanically inspired tight corset of deeply materialistic logical positivism striving for absolute certainty of cognition devoid of any human element, to the primarily luciferically inspired subjectivism and relativism fashionable towards the end of the 20th century. Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science was and is clearly a form of scientific discipline which treads the middle path between these two unhealthy extremes. It is deeply Christian in its inspiration and signifies a radical rejection of materialism while at the same time overcoming any subjectivism and relativism in the cognitive process through a strict inner discipline of transformation of consciousness and thus attainment of new forms of cognition freed from the influence of the physical body.Individuating the Postmodern Imagination - By Kenneth L. Wilson
FROM THE ABSTRACT: This paper attempts to respond to Ben-Aharons call, in his Colmar lecture, for developement of individuation in knowledge. (… ) In its three forms American character is not only economic entrepreneurship, but legal and scientific entrepreneurship as well. This means that Ben-Aharons individuation cannot be understood in it’s usual psychodynamic sense (Jung, Erickson …), because in this form, individuation does not yet have the capacity to penetrate and individuate the third sector, scientific thinking, which is assumed to be necessarily universal and therefore appropriately un-individuated. (…) One can feel as if Western intellectualism freed humans from the tyrant of religious dogmatism only to seize the throne for itself and to demand even greater allegiance from its subjects.
Download paper: Individuating the Postmodern Imagination