HAWAII PROGRAM 2008 – 2009

January 3 – 20, 2009

Place: Turtle Bay Resort Oahu
Online counseling: September 1 – December 31, 2008

Registration (admission and enrollment) begins February 1, 2008.

• Professors:
• Judith Butler
• Donna Haraway
• Wong Kar-Wai*
• Avital Ronell
• Wolfgang Schirmacher
• Gregory Ulmer
• *confirmation pending

The Hawaii program brings together leading thinkers and an outstanding filmmaker for an intensive discussion with a group of accomplished adult students, a true international mix of artists, filmmakers, writers, philosophers, musicians, and media creators. It is designed for MA and PhD students of the European Graduate School as substitute for one Saas-Fee summer (first or second year). We accept applications from new and current EGS students.

Call for papers: Our wise friend is dead but will live on in our thinking

"I am already a simulacrum of myself; I have sent a clone in my place," so teased Jean Baudrillard students and fellow faculty members at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. We welcomed him as a sage with quirky humor, fiercely curious about current affairs, unconcerned about his academic reputation, a keen observer with an off-center perspective and fearless commentator who took to task the critical cliches of his contemporaries. Trained as a German language scholar, Baudrillard read German philosophers, foremost Karl Marx, with ease. The student revolt of May '68 found him ready to take on the role of an anti-establishment sociologist, and he became renowned as one of the great French thinkers awakened by this event. Together with Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Paul Virilio he deconstructed capitalism and its media reality and provided unexpected traces of the world to come. His death notice from March 6, 2007, contains just a photograph of himself in the mirror and a last insight: "Reality is not everything. In truth, it is the least of all things." With the authorization of his widow, Marine Baudrillard, I am publishing a book with the transcriptions of Jean Baudrillard's Saas-Fee seminars and lectures, including the lively discussions, and would like to add to this tribute contributions from EGS faculty and students as well as other Baudrillard friends and experts. Selected articles will also appear in POIESIS 2008.

Wolfgang Schirmacher, Program Director, Media & Communications Division, European Graduate School EGS, schirmaw@egs.edu.

Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard are conducting workshops at EGS in Spring, 2007

Both EGS workshops will begin in the morning and last until the evening (exact schedule and assigned readings will be distributed to the pareticipants):

Paul Virilio, March 30 – 31, 2007, La Rochelle
Moderated by Hubertus von Amelunxen and Wolfgang Schirmacher

Jean Baudrillard, April 2, Paris
Moderated by Wolfgang Schirmacher and Hendrik Speck

Division of Media & Communications: Dean's Report 2005

Dean Wolfgang Schirmacher with film director Clare Denis and philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, Summer 2005.

Professor Claude Lanzmann with Dean Wolfgang Schirmacher, Summer 2005.

Professor Michael Hardt with Dean Wolfgang Schirmacher, Summer 2005.

Writer & filmmaker Pierre Alferi.

Professor Larry Rickels (Santa Barbara- Berlin).

French philosopher Pierre Aubenque Graduation speaker, August 2005.

The second year of our full operation with six groups — four in June, two in August. The returning professors were pleased yet again with the quality of our diverse student body. The majority still comes from the United States and Canada but many other countries were represented as well: Australia, Austria, Colombia, Croatia, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Israel, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, and Switzerland. Our program is especially suited for professionals, not geared however toward business people. Most of our students are artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, journalists; 70 % have teaching experience (primarily university level) and, yes, are able to easily multitask according to their multi-giftedness. The students worked closely and enthusiastically with our faculty members who, in return, were full of praise for the students' performance. The philosopher and writer Jean-Luc Nancy expressed a common feeling among the professors: "The best students I ever had." The secret of our program is not the prominence of our faculty alone (this can be gathered from our website www.egs.edu), but more precisely that they meet students suited specifically for them: fearless in their creativity, exciting in their singularity, bold in their expectations of the kind of world in which they'd like to live.

The core faculty members guarantee the profile of the Media and Communications program, however, each year we ask newcomers to join us. In the spirit of Media Philosophy they introduce their work in progress and are eager to get feedback from other minds as powerful and inventive as their own. This happens not only in the classroom but also during the evening events where all students and professors are present and magic moments ("Sternstunden") of unprecedented exchange occur.

In 2005 our program welcomed new additions who surprised and challenged us. During the June session, literary theorist and psychoanalyst Larry Rickels (Santa Barbara / Berlin) who kept his schnautzer Elli nearby made a strong case to bring Freud back into the contemporary mix. Michael Hardt discussed the political philosophy of "Empire" (developed with Toni Negri) and introduced 'multitude' as a paradigm. The writer Nicholson Baker and the poet and filmmaker Pierre Alferi demonstrated each in his own way how 'multitude' is personalized, not an abstract concept. Both the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman and his Canadian colleague Atom Egoyan displayed their philosophical mind frame and its impact on their cinematic work. Suleiman deconstructed his 2003 Cannes award-winning film "Divine Intervention," while Egoyan treated the students to his newest work "Where the Truth Lies," previously shown only during the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, and engaged in a lively exchange of aesthetical and ethical views. The August groups had the pleasure of hearing the imperial sound of Mandarin when the exiled Chinese poet Lian Yang read his poetry, immediately followed by a translation, read with equal emphasis by our student Brian Willems, American writer and university lecturer at Split University. The French photographer Suzanne Doppelt demanded a close viewing of her work, renowned for its minimalist style, and incited an in-depth debate on the medium itself. Overall, students and professors alike share a basic interdisciplinary attitude and keen transdisciplinary intention.

The eminent philosopher and secretary general of the Institut International de Philosophie Paris, Pierre Aubenque, delivered the Graduation Speech — in German, translated into English by Virginia Cutrufelli, Assistant Dean of our Division. Comparing the different ethical attitudes of Aristotle and Kant and their implications for the practical life today, Aubenque favored the 'categorical imperative' of Kantian Ethics over the common-sense Aristotelian prudence when it comes to tough moral decisions, especially when our integrity is at stake. This lesson was not lost on the 12 graduates who received their Master of Arts diploma and the three PhDs (hailing from Germany, Canada, and Spain). As always, the Venice Workshop with its trip to the Art Biennale turned out to be an inspirational highlight.

Professor Dr. Wolfgang Schirmacher
Dean, Media & Communications Division

EGS Experience

EGS students Alfred Wu and Jeremy Fernando (both Singapore), Pablo Utin (Israel) and Tombie Rautenbach (South Africa) relaxing after the Venice Biennale Workshop.

PhD students Connie Tan (Singapore), Elizabeth Theiler (Australia), Sheridan Phillips (New Mexico).

PhD students Jonathan Peter Jackson (Baltimore) and Chris Drohan (Canada).

Students Alexia Hannis & Seumas Coutts with Assistant Dean Virginia Cutrufelli.

In reflecting on the Saas Fee seminar experience, several words come to mind: proximity, intensity, and inspiration.

At first I wondered why I was going to have to travel to a center of alpine tourism in order to gain perspective on media, philosophy and communication. I generally dislike inclines and avoid mountains, where possible. But when I arrived, I realized that the natural surroundings and acute separation from life as I knew it were going to be good for my concentration. Also apparent was a proximity between students, faculty and staff that was ensured by the setting.

When a person goes through 21 days or so of two three-hour seminar sessions during the day and 2-3 hours of lectures or presentations in the evenings, some kind of intensity is pretty much obligatory. However, the intensity at Saas Fee wasn't just volume and it was not a mere consumption of knowledge. There was a constant flow of input-output characterized by acute concentration on continually shifting areas of thought.

For one thing, it was obvious that the intensive seminar context and the constant proximity resulted in high energy levels in faculty as well as students. The sheer diversity of the student body, made up of professionals, academics and artists from diverse disciplines or fields, presents a challenge for the most seasoned expert because it is never clear from what perspective a question or challenge may come. The fact that each student has a different area of interest or expertise and that the faculty member and his or her work is momentarily the unifying factor in this body of thought makes for interesting and sometimes unexpected discussions.

Having experienced these small group discussions with EGS faculty and fellow students, I can attest to its potential for inspiring a self-motivated student to new areas of research, interests or thought.

As far as the student-to-student contact was concerned, I found EGS to be full of friendly, communicative and ambitious students. The dynamic was definitely dynamic. We ate meals at the Hotel Allalin, where much of what one needs to survive a day in Saas Fee was available: breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee or a glass of wine, depending on the state of one's psyche and the level of one's energy, as well as a comfortable hot-spot lobby, where everyone seemed to end up at one point in the day to do some work. There was a lot of networking, exchanging of information on projects, ideas, or interests, late night or early morning discussions or debates on just about everything.

And there was even a day off to take a hike, do some wash, and get some sleep.

Deborah Griggs, MA Comparative Literature San Francisco State U, writer & assistant professor English & Communication, University of  Maryland, German Campus (Goslar).
dgriggs@faculty.ed.umuc.edu

My First Summer in Saas-Fee
Brian Willems

Writer Nicholson Baker with PhD student Kathleen Ruiz.

Professor Michael Hardt with PhD student Mark Hemphill.

Filmmaker Barbara Hammer with PhD student Jason Hammonds.

Professor Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky with Dean Schirmacher.

Professor Manuel DeLanda with students Christian Haenggi (Zurich), Linda Lewitt (New York), Sarah Nind (Toronto).

I was lucky enough to be a TA last year for the class Poetry and Philosophy run by Judith Balso with guest poet Yang Lian. Lian really opened up to the students, spending quite a lot of time with them outside of class, and in class you could feel that his life was his poetry and vice versa, that he is a sort of natural philosopher, perhaps the kind of philosopher that Heidegger imagines built the temples at Paestum, meaning a philosopher before the word philosophy was born. That sounds rather grandiose, and it is, but it fits the vocabulary, and the rather Imperial voice Lian has at his command, and perhaps it also fits some of his attempts at poetry to inhabit a space of timelessness, a postnational space of exile, in which none of us have a home. Lian's presence as much as his poetry contributed to our understanding and awareness of some of the directions he was trying to take us.

I also found out that there is a lot of reading connected with the school (I have about two hours of reading a day while the online sessions are going on). I was first exposed to this kind of schedule of intense reading with short, high energy bursts of classes with my first EGS seminar on Heidegger held at NYU for three weeks in the fall of 2004. There we had an even more intense reading schedule (about six hours a day) with one three-hour class per week. At first I wasn't sure how it would work (I teach literature at a university in Croatia and they had sent me to New York for the seminar, how would they feel about sending me across the ocean for that kind of a schedule, just one day a week?) but I found that it fit the material quite well. You were prepared, energized almost, for the sessions, and the discussion was at its peak (helped in no small part by Professor Schirmacher who led the seminar) throughout the time we spent together. It was how my next year was going to go but in miniature, for in the summer, instead of spending one week reading for one seminar, I would now, with the online preparation sessions, spend a month reading for a week of seminar classes. And it does work if you put in the work, something which is encouraged by the online discussions and writing assignments.

The main thrust of the school seems to be to enable the students to work closely with some of the greatest thinkers of our time, and it does work, and it is an incredible experience. I found most of the professors open to talking with students in and out of class, including meal times where they sit with students providing a good chance to get to know them beyond the classroom. Having breakfast with Volker Schlöndorff or lunch with Peter Greenaway is quite a different experience than what I originally imagined, and the difference is, their genuine openness and interest.. What I mean by this is that the professors are genuinely interested in finding things of interest, and when they do, you are lead into quite a discussion.

The time in Saas-Fee is very intense. Three weeks you are in a very small skiing village, surrounded by mountains, and doing 'theory camp'. But it is an essential facet of the study, perhaps even of the work being studied. For to study some of the most intense contemporary thinkers in an atmosphere which at times borders not only on the isolated but the claustrophobic (despite opportunities for summer snowboarding and pit-pat), one is turned constantly back upon oneself and the work, and in this way it is experienced in a way not possible in a conventional university setting.

Brian Willems, BA Hamline U Minnesota, fiction writer & lecturer English Split University, based in Split (Croatia)
willemscz@yahoo.com

Lyn Hagan

MA students Lyn Hagan (London) and Sarah Kamnz (New York).

Film director Atom Egoyan (Toronto).

Dean Wolfgang Schirmacher congratulates MA graduate Sarah Hannis from Canada.

Dean Wolfgang Schirmacher congratulates MA graduate Simon Glass from Canada.

Film director Claire Denis with MA students Peter Price (Philadelpha), Sue Salinger (Colorado), Juliana Restropo (Colombia).

Dean Wolfgang Schirmacher with MA student Diana Ford (Australia).

Philosopher Fred Ulfers with MA graduate & PhD student Michelle Cartier (Los Angeles).

Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and fellow professor Victor Vitanza with students during a break.

I am an artist and writer studying for her Masters at the European Graduate School and took my first classes there in Saas-Fee this June. As an artist working to set up projects with Space Agencies, I have organised a parabolic flight for myself and others which will take place in Moscow at the end of 2006. A parabolic flight is a modified aircraft which, by flying in parabolas, gives an artist 7 minutes of zero gravity or weightlessness in which to make work. My piece for the flight is to release a cat and mouse to establish the effect of sudden disequilibrium upon predator-prey relationships. The inflatable container in which they will be placed is being designed by a space engineer who has worked previously for the European Space Agency.

I had been working on arranging this for three years before I wrote to Professor Carl Mitcham (taking his name from the diverse list of the EGS faculty after downloading his video from the site and being impressed by what he said) and began writing an article with him for an Encyclopaedia of Science, Technology and Ethics of which he is the Editor. Although, due to the late invitation, the finished article did not make it to print, we are now working on it together and seeking to publish it. Carl Mitcham also invited me to speak at a conference at Lancaster University on my work as it fitted in with the scope of the talks there which were on the integration of the Humanities and Sciences. All this took place before I had even enrolled at EGS which made me very optimistic about the program and the dedication of the teachers.

The second project I am attempting to set up is with the European Space Agency as part of the Aurora mission which will see robots (ExoMars Rovers) collecting dust samples from its surface. I didn't see what relevance this would have for most people and thought that art might engage them more. I contacted the project scientist and told him this (in trying to realise the 0g project I had initially tried emailing personnel at NASA, getting their names and details and then emailing lower personnel saying that the others had said the project could go ahead so I was used to emailing space agencies).

This time the reaction was positive and the more straight forward technique worked. I am now working on the presentation of an idea I have to direct the robot on Mars using co-ordinates derived from the vibrations of a butterfly in flight on Earth. Whether or not this does go ahead is open to debate, but I have now talked at conferences, some ran by artists, engineers, ESA officials and others by people like Carl and discussed why I think it should take place, along with what the possibilities are.

Along with the interest of the EGS faculty, the projects have also inspired other students to become involved. MA student Adam Kleinman is a curator working at Sotheby's in New York and organising independent shows who I met through the EGS network. He will now be arranging not only the show in New York of the finished pieces and the documentary that is being made, but is advising on all distribution aspects which of course affect the production. Another EGS student Seumas Coutts may also become involved as our curator in Berlin.

Due to the nature of my work, I needed an unorthodox school. On my Fine Art degree at Chelsea School of Art in London, I had come up against a block in getting my work graded as I had produced a novel whilst studying there called 'There's no place like home' about the last day in an asylum for Antonin Artaud and at the last moment they had decided that a novel wasn't art and asked me to submit something else. I eventually took them through their own judicial process in which they would have had to give written reasons why it wasn't and they agreed not only to read and award the novel but gave me a higher degree. Within the first week at Saas-Fee, I met another professor there called Martin Hielscher a publisher of fiction at Beck Verlag in Munich who, again even though I wasn't taking his class, has agreed to read over my first novel and also my second which is in progress and give me his opinion on them.

The range of classes is so diverse at EGS that one of the classes I did take was by a documentary film-maker called Claude Lanzmann who made SHOAH. After three days of watching this 9 hour film about the Holocaust and having already produced writing with Carl Mitcham about the differences between the aesthetics and ethics of art and science, I told Lanzmann of my interest in the medical experiments carried out then in the camps and he asked to read this writing. I am now working on an article (and translating it into French) which is looking into the aesthetics, theatricality, transcendence and silence which he has agreed to critique. This will necessitate a trip to the Fortunoff Archive at Yale University to research original documents and they have agreed to my doing temporary research there.

As to why I intend to complete my MA and PhD there, the reasons given above should suffice. It is an experimental school that encourages, rather than blocks, a diverse approach and interests. Given my work, I would either have to subordinate the writing I do for a Fine Art masters or the artwork I make for an MA in Literature which I would not be willing to do.

Lyn Hagan, BFA University of Arts London, writer & space artist

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