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Conference G uide

Contradiction Studies: Mapping the Field

Inaugural Conference on Concepts of Contradiction in the Humanities

University of Bremen | February 9–11, 2017

Contradiction Studies: Mapping the Field University of Bremen | February 9–11, 2017

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Contents

Conference program ...................................................................................... 2

Venue, transportation, restaurants, and sights in Bremen ..................... 10

Keynote abstracts ......................................................................................... 13

Regular paper abstracts .............................................................................. 16

Special panel abstracts ............................................................................... 34

Contact information ...................................................................................... 42


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Conference program

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

15.00-18.00 Registration (Foyer)

Thursday, February 9, 2017

08.00-09.00 Registration (Foyer)

09.00-09.45 Opening remarks (room: HS0070)

Prof. Dr. Norbert Schaffeld, Head of the Collaborative Research Initiative Worlds of Contradiction

Prof. Dr. Thomas Althaus, Dean of the Faculty 10: Linguistics and Literary Studies

Prof. Dr. Andreas Breiter, Vice President for Research and Young Academics, University of Bremen

09.45-10.45 Keynote lecture: Prof. Dr. Barbara Schmenk (University of Waterloo): Governmentality and the Autonomous Subject: Persistent Contradictions in Philosophies of (Language) Education (introduction by Prof. Dr. Sabine Doff)

10.45-11.00 Coffee break (Foyer)

11.00-12.30 Parallel sessions

Fields of Contradiction Chair: Prof. Dr. Sabine Doff Room: HS1010

Structures of Contradiction Chair: Prof. Dr. Gisela Febel Room: HS1000

Practices of Contradiction Chair: Prof. Dr. Susanne Schattenberg Room: HS0070

Dr. Liriam Sponholz (Klagenfurt): Tackling Hate Speech with Counter Speech?

Prof. Dr. Elena Ficara (Paderborn): Contradiction as the Norm of Truth

Cristina Douglas (Bucharest): Good Death: The Multiple Contradictions between Discourses and Practices

Dr. Daniel Scott Mayfield (Berlin): Otherwise: Rhetorical Techniques of Contradiction

Prof. Tomonori Okubo (Kansai University): Normative Bias in Irony and Other Types of Speech

Dr. Peter Pichler (Graz): European Union Cultural History: Mapping a Field in Contradiction Studies


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12.30-14.00 Lunch break (Foyer)

14.00-15.00 Keynote lecture: Dr. Stefan Müller (University of Giessen): Contradiction as an Answer (Room: HS0070, introduction by Prof. Dr. Norbert Schaffeld)



Fields of Contradiction Chair: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Knopf Room: HS1010

Structures of Contradiction Chair: Dr. Daniel Schmidt-Brücken Room: HS1000

Practices of Contradiction Chair: Prof. Dr. Julia Lossau Room: HS0070

Dr. Maria Jose Barragan-Paladines & Dr. Ratana Chuenpagdee (Bremen & St. John’s): How is paradise imagined? The conflicting images of Galapagos Marine Reserve

Prof. Dr. Marcus Callies (Bremen): Errors and Innovations in L2 Varieties of English: A Contradiction in Terms

Dr. Kristina Großmann (Passau): Political Ontologies and Eaglewood (gaharu) in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

Lenny Martini (Bonn/Bremen/Bandung): Bandung, a Contradictory Narrative of a Creative City

Dr. Georg Mueller (Fribourg): Three-Valued Modal Logic as a Tool for Analysing Contradictory Institutional Outputs

Michael Kleinod (Bonn): Doing Dualism: False-and-Real Contradictions in Ecotourism Practice


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Friday, February 10, 2017


Fields of Contradiction Chair: Dr. Karin Esders Room: HS1010

Structures of Contradiction Chair: Prof. Dr. Ingo H. Warnke Room: HS1000

Practices of Contradiction Chair: Prof. Dr. Cordula Nolte Room: HS0070

Dr. Julie Abbou (Paris): Contradictions in Gender Semiotics: A Pilot Study about Contradiction as a Method

Griselda Drouet (Rennes): Staging Contradiction in French Oral Speech

Dr. Valentin Jeutner (Oxford/Lund): Contradictions in Law: Their Character and Merit

Guilherme Figueira-Borges (Goias): Contradiction and Foundation of Masculinity (ies)

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Teubert (Birmingham): Paradoxes and What They Have to Tell us in the Zhuangzi

Prof. Dr. Sabine Doff & Prof. Dr. Till-Sebastian Idel (Bremen): (Re-) Creating Difference? Critical Perspectives on a Contradictory Key Concept in the Educational Sciences


11.00-12.00 Keynote lecture: Prof. Dr. Jane Burbank (New York University): Contradiction, Ambiguity, Multiplicity, Duplicity: How to Think about Russian Law (room: HS0070, introduction by Prof. Dr. Susanne Schattenberg)



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Panel “Figurations of Gender: Contradictions and/as Intersections”, Pt. 1 Chair: PD Dr. Natascha Ueckmann Room: HS1010

German-language Panel “Widerspruch und (Kontra-)Argumentation”, Pt. 1 Chair: Prof. Dr. Josef Klein Room: HS1000


Dr. Karin Esders (Bremen): Gender as a Contested Field

Prof. Dr. Walther Kindt (Bielefeld): Grundlagen aus Logik und Topik für die Untersuchung von Kontra-Argumentation

Dr. Jens Kabisch (Heidelberg): The Image and its Ban: A Contradictory Twosome at the Heart of All Symbolic Orders

Irmgard Maassen (Bremen): Collapsing Sexual Dichotomies: Virginia Woolf's Concept of Androgyny

Prof. Dr. Martin Reisigl (Bern): Widersprüchliche Argumentation aus der Perspektive einer normativen Argumentationstheorie

Dr. Michal Tal (Haifa): The Antinomy of Multiplicity versus Unity as Manifested in the Literary Theme of the Double



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Panel “Figurations of Gender: Contradictions and/as Intersections”, Pt. 2 Chair: Dr. Karin Esders Room: HS1010

German-language Panel “Widerspruch und (Kontra-)Argumentation”, Pt. 2 Chair: Prof. Dr. Josef Klein Room: HS1000

Panel “‘Out of joint’. Transdisciplinary Panel on Time and Contradictions” Room: HS0070

Dr. Jennifer Henke (Bremen): Spaces of Knowledge: Gender, Class, and Medicine

Dr. Fabienne Tissot (Zürich): „Gefühlte Realität“: Widersprüchliche Argumentation im mündlichen politischen Diskurs

Alice Lagaay (Performance Philosophy, Friedrichshafen), Sabine Ritter (Sociology, Bremen), Dorle Dracklé (Transcultural Studies, Bremen), Elisabeth Arend (Transnational Literature Studies, Bremen), Christoph Fantini (Pedagogics & Educational Science, Bremen), Jörg Holkenbrink (Centre for Performance Studies, Bremen), Members of the Theater der Versammlung (Theatre of Assemblage) between Education, Academia and the Arts

Christine Müller (Bremen): Gender and Science: An Intersectional Reading of Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures

Prof. Dr. Josef Klein (Berlin): Kontra-Argumentieren Punkt für Punkt und als topisches Gesamtpaket. Beispiel: deutsche Flüchtlingsdiskurse

19.00 Conference dinner (venue: Restaurant “Campus” at the Atlantic Hotel,

Wiener Straße 4; opposite the conference building)


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Saturday, February 11, 2017


Panel “Did Somebody Say Dialectic?” Room: HS1010

Structures of Contradiction Chair: Dr. Maria Jose Barragan Paladines Room: HS1000

Practices of Contradiction Chair: Dr. Olorunshola Adenekan Room: HS0070

Marlon Lieber (Kiel/Frankfurt): Antagonism or Dialectic? From Fanon to Afropessimism

Prof. Dr. Jesse Ramírez (St. Gallen): Negating Latour: Postcritique, Conspiracy, and the Valences of the Dialectic

Dr. Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich (Kiel): Capitalizing Contradiction, Capitalizing the Commons: General Intellect and Neoliberal Capital

Dr. Wolfgang Funk (Mainz): Contradictions of Form, Forms of Contradiction

Dr. Joanna Chojnicka & Tonia Sperling (Bremen): Shaking the Foundations of the Ivory Tower: Politics and the University

Dr. Babatunde Samuel Moruwawon (Ado Ekiti): The Semantics of Nigerian Proper Names: The Translator’s Viewpoint from the Perspective of Onomastic Research

Diana Wagner (Marburg): “Embodied Minds” and Intersubjectivity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works


11.00-12.00 Keynote lecture: Prof. Dr. Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga (EHESS Paris): Crise mondiale de la démocratie représentative. Lectures à partir de l’Afrique (room: HS0070, introduction by Prof. Dr. Gisela Febel)



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Fields of Contradiction Chair: Prof. Dr. Julia Lossau Room: HS1010


Practices of Contradiction Chair: Prof. Dr. Norbert Schaffeld Room: HS0070

Matthias Debald (Frankfurt): On Cultural Logic and Natural Logic. Universal and Cultural Patterns in Dealing with Contradictoriness

Bernadette Raedler (Calgary): Contradictions in Literature

Prof. Dr. Franca d’Agostini (Milan): Conjunctive Paraconsistency and the Law of Non-Dialetheia

Dr. Dominik Schreiber (Mannheim): A Contradiction of Genres? Notions on the Narrative Rhetoric of Climate Change

Prof. Tomislav Zelic (Zadar): Contradictions in Modern History Plays

15.00-16.00 General closing discussion (room: HS0070, chaired by Prof. Dr. Ingo H. Warnke)


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Venue, transportation, restaurants, and sights in Bremen

University campus overview. For the conference venue, see the detailed map on the next page.


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Conference venue:

• All keynote presentations, regular paper sessions, and lunch and coffee breaks will place in the GW1-Hörsaal building (“GW1-HS”, indicated by the arrow) on Wiener Straße.

Important tram/bus stops (see www.bsag.de/en for more details and schedules):

• Hauptbahnhof (main station): tram 1, 4, 6, 10; bus 20, 24, 25, 26/27 • Flughafen (airport): tram 6 • Universität-Süd: tram 6; bus 21, 22, 28 • Wiener Straße: bus 22, 28 • Munte: bus 22 • Domsheide (city center): tram 2, 3, 4, 6; bus 24, 25 • Am Brill: tram 1, 2, 3; bus 26/27 • Humboldtstraße: tram 10 (close to Townside Hostel)

Tickets can be purchased on board, at BSAG offices (city center and Hauptbahnhof), and various shops (2.70€ one way; group tickets and daily/weekly tickets available).

http://www.bsag.de/en


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Restaurants:

• Bremer Ratskeller: German (historic restaurant, city center; reservations required) tram stop Domsheide (+ 3 minute walk): Am Markt 11, 28195 Bremen

• Christie’s: West African tram stop Am Brill (+ 3 minute walk): Hankenstraße 27, 28195 Bremen

• Haus am Walde: German 5 minute walk from GW1 or Hotel Munte: Kuhgrabenweg 2, 28359 Bremen

• La Fattoria: Italian (between the university and city center) tram stop Brahmsstraße: Wachmannstraße 52, 28209 Bremen

• Platzhirsch: German cuisine, Bremen and Bavarian tram stop Domsheide (+ 5 minute walk): Ostertorsteinweg 50, 28203 Bremen

• Ständige Vertretung im Flett: German, Rhenish tram stop Domsheide (+ 5 minute walk): Böttcherstraße 3-5, 28195 Bremen

• Zum Platzhirsch: German (Bremen and Bavarian) tram stop Wiener Straße (+ 10 minute walk): Kuhgrabenweg 30, 28359 Bremen

Sightseeing (see also www.bremen-tourism.de):

• City Center: various historical sites, restaurants, and shopping tram stops Domsheide, Schüsselkorb

• Schlachte: Weser river bank promenade just south of the city center, offering a variety of bars and restaurants (e.g. Feldmann’s Bierhaus, Bodega del Puerto) tram stops Domsheide, Am Brill

• Schnoor quarter: the only Bremen neighborhood that has preserved a medieval character; various shops, cafes, and restaurants (e.g. Beck’s in’n Snoor, Café Tölke) tram stop Domsheide

• Übersee-Museum: natural history and ethnographic museum tram stops Hauptbahnhof

• Universum/Science Center: science museum across the street from GW1 tram stops Universität-Süd, Wiener Straße

• Viertel: neighborhood east of the city center and Schnoor; known for its many shops, cafes, and restaurants Tram lines 2, 3, 10

http://www.bremen-tourism.de/


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Keynote abstracts

(in alphabetical order by last name of presenter)

Prof. Dr. Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, EHESS Paris, France Crise mondiale de la démocratie représentative. Lectures à partir de l’Afrique

Les élections sont au coeur de la démocratie représentative. Cette dernière est présentée, du point de vue de l’instauration et du maintien à la fois de la paix et de l’équilibre mondial, comme modèle à imposer partout sur la terre. Or, depuis une trentaine d’années c’est-à-dire à partir de la fin de la Guerre froide et de la consolidation de la mondialisation, se déroule, dans le cadre de la contradiction des logiques de reproduction de l’ordre impérial(iste) mondial, une crise de ce régime politique. D’un côté, on assiste au spectacle de sa fragilisation dans les Etats occidentaux où il s’était, pourtant, consolidé depuis très longtemps. De l’autre, à partir des années 90, marquées par la fin des partis uniques en Afrique, les élections se répandent de plus en plus sur ce continent. Cependant, ces dernières culminent dans des conflits armés à la suite desquels les vainqueurs se retrouvent adoubés comme gouvernants. A tel enseigne que ces consultations électorales ne sont pas souvent considérées, à la fois par les chercheurs et le sens commun, comme normales et pertinentes pour comprendre la mutation des pratiques démocratiques. Je plaide, au contraire, en faveur de l’idée que des investigations sur ce continent offrent, paradoxalement, des opportunités pour éclairer et comprendre toute la complexités des ressorts de la crise politique globale à travers, à la fois, celles des expériences électorales et de la démocratie représentative.

En effet, pour saisir le fait électoral, les chercheurs mettent surtout en avant des modèles construits principalement à partir des seules expériences occidentales. Les données recueillies viennent essentiellement confirmer des théories élaborées a priori. Ces analyses se révèlent maintenant insatisfaisantes sur quatre points au moins. Elles peinent à expliquer la complexité de la transformation des attitudes et comportements électoraux réels. De plus, leur capacité prédictive est sérieusement remise en question. En outre, elles sont inopérantes quant à la compréhension et l’explication de la crise actuelle de la démocratie représentative. Enfin, leur biais majeur est de commettre une double confusion. Ces analyses ramènent tout le processus électoral à la simple procédure du vote. Ensuite, elles réduisent la question de la légitimation des élus à l’application de la règle numérique majoritaire. Dans mon propos, je poserai comme hypothèse principale que, pour éclairer cette contradiction, il convient d’appréhender le fait électoral, par sa double référence au vote et aux procédures anthropologiques concrètes de légitimation. Il importe, dans ce cas, de développer une approche comparative qui donne plus de poids aux données relatives à l’expérience des acteurs des pays non-occidentaux, issus en particulier du continent africain.


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Prof. Dr. Jane Burbank, New York University, USA Contradiction, Ambiguity, Multiplicity, Duplicity: How to Think about Russian Law

Is there a contradiction in the very conception of Russian law? How do we interpret a legal system that appears not to adhere to qualities we associate with rule of law? I argue that we must consider the fundamental connection of law to varieties of sovereignty and that there are multiple legal “logics.” I consider how Russian law has functioned in every day life over centuries and identify long-term characteristics of this legal system.

Dr. Stefan Müller, University of Giessen, Germany Contradiction as an answer

Contradictions are annoying. They make statements unreliable and arbitrary, suspending notions of right and wrong. This is the concern of the Aristotelian logic, especially of the law of non-contradiction. But at the same time, there are contradictions that are neither unreliable nor arbitrary. Apparently, they somehow circumvent the usual approaches and the law of non-contradiction. Introducing the liar’s paradox and the concept of negative dialectics, I will show how contradictions can be discussed in a non-binary way, how they do (not) circumvent the law of non-contradiction, and, what is more, why they are important for reflexive approaches in social sciences.

Prof. Dr. Barbara Schmenk, University of Waterloo, Canada Governmentality and the autonomous subject: Persistent contradictions in philosophies of (language) education

This paper seeks to investigate how educational debates on the ideal of personal autonomy could benefit from Foucault’s concept of governmentality and his dictum of government as ‘conduct of conduct.’

Taking as a starting point the widespread claim that the goal of education in today’s globalized world is to foster autonomy in the service of e.g. lifelong learning, I first illustrate the contradictions inherent in this and similar claims, focusing in particular on the ideal of the autonomous learner-subject as construed in discourses of language education. Furthermore, the construct of the autonomous learner-subject and its inherently contradictory nature can be traced back to the Enlightenment and finds its most prominent formulation in Kant’s assertion of the educational paradox.


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In the second part of the paper, I reframe the autonomy construct with reference to the notion of governmentality. Reframing autonomy within a governmental framework shows how fostering autonomy in learner-subjects can be regarded as an act of governing others in order to improve their self-government. Instead of attempting to reconcile the contradictory dimensions pertaining to the ideal of autonomy, it is more productive to view them through the lens of governmentality, which offers us new perspectives that help us conceptualize and contextualize the incommensurability of an education for autonomy more precisely.


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Regular paper abstracts

(in alphabetical order by last name of presenter)

Dr. Julie Abbou, Paris 13 University, France Contradictions in Gender Semiotics: A Pilot Study about Contradiction as a Method

Contradiction is fruitful for gender studies, from the Marxist heritage of materialist feminism to the counter-discourses of Black feminism. It is also a powerful concept for understanding gender in a non-essentialist approach: historians, linguists, or anthropologists have explored how the semiotic contents of gender categories –feminine and masculine, are heterogeneous, therefore potentially contradictory.

Sharing such a semiotic approach, I propose to use contradiction as a methodological device to explore the heterogeneity of gender categories, through a pilot study. 46 pictures of human faces, representing various degrees of masculinity and femininity were presented to 6 Hong Kong English speakers. For each picture, the speakers had to propose a label to qualify gender, and then explain on what visual elements their choice was made. Contradiction –induced by the multiplicity of gender identities displayed– provoked troubles, hesitations, stance adjustments, and other negotiations of normative categories of gender.

If, in a rhetorical perspective, the meaning arises through the (conflicting) co-presence of different interpretations, these discourses hence reveal how different semiotic index of gender (clothes, postures, techniques of body, etc.) compete for gender qualification/categorisation, and how this contradictory landscape takes part in the making of gender signification. Contradiction could be a method to work on semiotics negotiations of gender categories.

Dr. Maria Jose Barragan-Paladines, Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research Bremen, Germany, & Dr. Ratana Chuenpagdee, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada How is paradise imagined? The conflicting images of Galapagos Marine Reserve

Perceived as a pristine area with rich biological diversity, the Galapagos Islands are subjected to numerous threats brought about by human migration, urban development, tourism infrastructure, and growing tourist numbers. The stakeholder groups involved in these activities, as well as local residents, have different visions about the place and the future awaits for it. They also perceive the role of the Galapagos Marine Reserve (GMR) in the marine ecosystems conservation, differently. This paper argues that an


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understanding of the underlying contradictory images, how they are created, and how they influence GMR governance is essential to promote sustainability in the Galapagos Islands. Following the interactive governance framework, thirty-nine semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted, with a range of stakeholders in order to explore these images. Our study reveals that the gap between the two opposing paradigms: pro-conservation vs. pro-development, is widening, with more ambivalent viewpoints and meanings of these two coexisting “worlds”. We posit that GMR governability could be improved, first and foremost, by recognizing that the contemporary images of Galapagos diverge from the idealized paramount discourses of wilderness, harmless tourism activities, controlled migration, and the perceived successfully consensus-based participatory process. The overturn of those images in contradiction will ease higher governability of the Galapagos systems via the sustainability of natural- and viability of social-systems.

Prof. Dr. Marcus Callies, University of Bremen, Germany Errors and innovations in L2 varieties of English: A contradiction in terms

Kachru’s Three Circles Model has widely influenced the modelling of Englishes worldwide. In the Inner Circle, English is acquired and used as a native language (ENL); in the Outer Circle it is acquired as a second language (ESL) and used as an official language in former British/American territories; and in the Expanding Circle it is learnt as a foreign language (EFL) in educational settings. Moreover, EFL varieties are norm-dependent and show an exonormative orientation towards one of the Inner Circle varieties, while ESL varieties have an endonormative orientation and develop regional norms. This categorical distinction between the status of ENL, ESL and EFL has resulted in the highly contradictory practice that linguistically very similar forms are considered errors in EFL contexts (= acquisitional deficiency), but innovations in ESL contexts. Although the dividing line between error and innovation is fuzzy (How much deviation from the norm is acceptable?), current practice denies EFL learners’ a status of innovative users. Findings from a comparative corpus-study of lexical innovations suggests that similar types of innovations exist in EFL and ESL which emerge due to several underlying cognitive processes that serve to create/maximise morphological transparency and explicitness of form-meaning relations. Thus, I suggest a process-oriented approach to comparing L2 varieties of English doing away with a fuzzy and possibly overprescriptive categorization of surface forms.


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Dr. Joanna Chojnicka & Tonia Sperling, University of Bremen, Germany Shaking the Foundations of the Ivory Tower: politics and the university

In this paper, a group of scholars from Germany, Latvia, Poland and Russia, representing a variety of fields in humanities and social sciences and brought together by a common interest in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), investigates the contradictions that arise when the emancipatory declarations of CDA are taken literally. CDA embraces social change as the objective of research: by revealing the power structures that are reinforced in discourse to sustain the material oppression of marginalised groups of people, it supports the emancipation of these groups. This principle, however, is idealistic and can even be seen as elitist (“class guilt”): the research is still done in the name of, and not by, the oppressed groups. Taking the claims of CDA literally results in a kind of double bind: we depend on the institutional academic framework for our studies, which may lead us to results that are detrimental to the field of CDA and the elite status of academia in general. To deal with this dilemma, we can continue producing self-legitimating research isolated from the real world, hoping that our accumulative contributions will change something after all. Or we may take a stand for the kind of participant action research that acknowledges the legitimacy of different but equal kinds of knowledge, risking to have our research branded as political or provocative. With our presentation we would like to contribute to the long-overdue interdisciplinary debate on this contradiction.

Presentation co-authored by Joanna Chojnicka and Tonia Sperling, in collaboration with the other members of the working group on politics and the university: Anna Agaltsova, Tamara Drummond, Norman Laws, Łukasz Pakuła, Marija Semjonova and Kārlis Vērdiņš.

Prof. Dr. Franca d’Agostini, University of Milan, Italy Conjunctive Paraconsistency and the Law of Non-Dialetheia

My paper is a brief presentation and defence of the conjunctive conception of contradictions, that is the thesis that there might be some true contradictions, but their contradictory terms cannot be (and cannot be considered) separately true. Such kind of paraconsistency implies the rejection of any dialetheia, intended as a true proposition whose negation is also true, and hence the acceptance of the Law of Non-Contradiction in its alethic-distributed form (‘there is no true-and-false proposition’), which I call the Law of Non-Dialetheia (LND).

The conjunctive approach is symmetrically opposed to non-adjunctive inconsistency, that is the idea that contradictory terms can be true, but their conjunction is not true. While non-adjunctive accounts are fairly shared nowadays (they possibly remount back to Lewis, 1982), alethic conjunctivism is quite rare, in contemporary literature on


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contradictions, though it has been not unusual in the tradition. Hegel was one of the upholders, and possibly Aristotle himself endorsed a similar position.

In the paper, I focus on possible justifications and consequences of conjunctive paraconsistency. I show it presents many advantages for a theory of contradictions, and the benefits in adopting it seem greater than costs, especially for what regards the extra-logical grounds of logic. So I claim that this is the right way of treating the insurgence of contradictions in systems, but also in normal life.

Matthias Debald, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany On Cultural Logic and Natural Logic. Universal and Cultural Patterns in Dealing with Contradictoriness

"Difference does not make opposition, however great". This postulate by C. K. Ogden leads to the question if contradictions are located at an ontological or an epistemological level - if they exist a priori or if they are part of a specific cultural eigenlogik. It reminds us also of the phenomenon that differences come in gradations ranging from an undifferentiated continuum through simple difference to an atomized world of contradictory facts in absolute opposition. In order to shed light onto this question I will explore the range of cultural variations in dealing with contradictions. Debates on differences in thinking styles across cultural fields are situated between the postulate of a basic psychic unity of mankind and the postulate of the existence of deep and elementary differences. This talk is an exploration into the equivalences and differences of thought processes, focusing on a perennial topic of scientific and popular discourses: that between "western" and "eastern" thinking. While the former is usually characterized by the central principles of the so called laws of thought (law of identity, law of the excluded middle, etc.), the latter is characterized by what scientists call "naïve dialecticism" or "holistic thinking" - a thinking style characterized by the avoidance or even the absence of contradiction. This talk will culminate in the question, if both thinking styles are culture-specific, or if both styles can be found in all cultures.

Prof. Dr. Sabine Doff & Prof. Dr. Till-Sebastian Idel, University of Bremen, Germany (Re-)Creating Difference? Critical perspectives on a contradictory key concept in the educational sciences

This paper investigates the hypothesis that difference (with regard to, for example, social, cultural or achievement dimensions) is not only dealt with in school and subject-specific instructional settings, but (re-)created actively in didactic and pedagogic practices used by teachers and learners alike. This point of view reverses the


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perspective most common in the educational sciences that instructional settings simply react to difference which is caused externally; it focusses rather on instruction as a practice of creating difference (and in extreme cases, contradictions). In the introductory section we reconstruct broad lines of argument in the discourse on diversity that has recently been intensified in the educational sciences. Then we discuss research results pertinent to our hypothesis from the theory of school in general as well as subject-specific education in particular. In this way, we aim at a deeper and reflective understanding of how educational research and practice take an active part in corporately (re-)creating difference (and thus contradictions, see above). We argue that such an understanding is particularly important in the contexts of school development and school reform. We conclude by advocating a reflective understanding of educational research on difference which conceptualizes instruction as a subject-focused practice of negotiation.

Cristina Douglas, University of Bucharest, Romania Good Death: The Multiple Contradictions between Discourses and Practices

The concept of good death is not new. Every culture and every historical epoch have their own definition of what it means and how to die well, instituting normative behaviours that surround death for the dying, kin and carers. However, in the last few decades and in direct relation to the medicalization of old age, dying and death, the concept came to be renamed as “dying with dignity”, triggering new discourses and practices of end-of-life and palliative care. Although motivated by very noble intentions, these discourses are inspired from a relatively abstract definition of what it means a good death: the absence of pain, both for the dying and for the soon-to-be-bereaved, according to cultural and ethical standards and reasonably in accord to medical standards. My paper proposes an exploration of the contradictions between the broad and abstract discourses of good death and the difficulties in applying them in practice, by critically explore discuss concepts such as culture, dignity, pain, compassion, grief and death in the context of medical and institutional settings of dying. The presentation is based on approx. 8 months work in a palliative and end-of-life facility from a nursing home from New Zealand. The observations and discussion are based on the results obtained through the methods of participant observation, autoethnography and in-depth discussions with patients and staff.

Griselda Drouet, University of Rennes 2, France Staging Contradiction in French Oral Speech

The notion of contradiction in linguistics has often been rejected to the margins of language research. We generally consider that contradictory speech or structures


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cannot logically serve the effectiveness required by the traditional theories of communication. For this reason, traditional linguistics tends to consider these structures as artificial, serving stylistic or rhetorical goals. Yet, we can observe, in oral speech, numerous utterances presenting marks of contradiction.

This brings us to examine not the prepared structures but the spontaneous ones out of a spoken french corpus, serving communicative goals and having a real pragmatic effect within communication. This study will demonstrate that such utterances do exist in speech, and that the logical aporia they express at first sight reveals in fact a distinctive enunciative posture.

The utterances presenting pragmatic connectors are of as many indications which allow us to take into account these notions and to analyse them under a new light. It is from a corpus established on the recordings of spontaneous oral conversations that we attempt to bring up the morphological forms and the syntax which conveys oral contradiction along with the pragmatic effects which it creates, in order to draw up a possible system of the functioning of these structures.

Prof. Dr. Elena Ficara, University of Paderborn, Germany Contradiction as the Norm of Truth

In this paper I present the idea that contradiction is a norm of thought, and, more precisely, the norm of true thought. It is a view that, despite its contra-intuitive character, has a long tradition in Western (and perhaps also Eastern) thought. It is expressed in this form by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but it is also a common presupposition in ancient theories of dialectic. My paper has two parts. The first is about the history of the idea (I refer in particular to Plato’s late dialogue Parmenides, Aristotle’s view on dialectical arguments in the Topics, and Hegel’s early writings). The second is about its importance for contemporary philosophical logic (in particular for debates on true contradictions and dialetheism).

Dr. Guilherme Figueira-Borges, State University of Goias, Brazil Contradiction and Foundation of Masculinity (ies)

Facebook, notably, evidences social, historical and ideological masculine identities that unveil, for example, gestural and aesthetic patterns, and these can/must be done by subjects in their social practices. In this sense, the present work aims at analyzing the construction of contradictory masculinity (ies) from the visual and linguistic materialities coming from posts from a Facebook community called “Proud to be heterosexual” (Orgulho de ser hetero). In order to do so, we intend to mobilize Foucault´s (1996, 2008, 2011) notions of “subject”, “discourse” and “history”, Pecheux´s (1995) notions of


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“interdiscourse”, “oblivion”, and “contradiction”, and Hall´s (2002) notions of “Identity”. The thinking of identity is a current agenda since the subjects are challenged to (re)think contradictory masculinity (ies) in their daily life regarding some language practices. Facebook is a historical space that delimits the construction of a masculine body that, in a contradictory way, injures the gender roles instituted in a hegemonic heterosexuality (Connell; Messerschmidt, 2013). Therefore, Facebook community “Proud to be heterosexual”, challenges the subject´s identity construction, causing the naturalization of certain practices for the masculine body, such as makeup and fidelity. The assimilation of this masculinity (ies) is in contradiction with a hegemonic masculinity, which can be worsened by the users’ comments in their community posts.

Dr. Wolfgang Funk, University of Mainz, Germany Contradictions of Form, Forms of Contradiction

Based on Angela Leighton’s ground-breaking study on the epistemological properties of literary form (On Form), my paper will first investigate how internal contradictions are an integral part, indeed even perhaps the unique selling point, of that particular kind of knowledge which is recorded, transmitted, stored and communicated in literary form.

The perspective of my paper in this regard will be two-fold. First, I will address the question why and in how far the specifically literary management of knowledge (if this is not itself a contradiction) has been forced into an ever more defensive position by and through the persuasive logic of the late-capitalist commodification of a species seen merely as homo economicus. In a second step, I will propose an alternative scenario, one which may or may not be said to take the human as homo contrarius as its point of departure. I will approach this scenario by way of Leighton’s claim that to “attend to form is to admit some other kind of mental attention, which is not the quick route to a name or the knowledge of an object” (21) as well as Alain Badiou’s notion of poetry (as the quintessential literary register) as “a procedure of truth” (The Age of the Poets 4), which functions through the dual strategy of subtraction (of thinking from any form of material referentiality) and dissemination (of the object of knowledge into multiple layers of metaphorical representation).

Prof. Dr. Kristina Großmann, University of Passau, Germany Contradictory Perceptions, Future Visions and Agency on Environmental Transformations in Indonesia

In Indonesia, environmental change as the increasing exploitation of natural resources leads to far reaching transformations of the environment and local livelihoods. The increasing use of natural resources, such as wood and minerals, is connected to


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diverse and contradicting perceptions, future visions, knowledge, and agency by different involved actors. In my paper, I outline contradictory perceptions, future visions and agency of community members, state officials, company representatives, and representatives of civil society organizations concerning the use and exploitation of natural resources. Critically examining the construction of indigenous people as guardians of the environment, I show in the case of Central-Kalimantan that different knowledge systems and perceptions of the forested environment coupled with contradicting material interests and agency lead to contradictory programs on environmental protection and development. In North-Sulawesi contradictions concerning the legal situation and the enforcement of law as well as contradictory future visions and agency on the exploitation of iron ore lead currently to severe conflicts between community members, company representatives and representatives of civil society organizations.

Dr. Valentin Jeutner, University of Oxford, UK/Lund University, Sweden Contradictions in Law: Their Character and Merit

My paper argues in favour of the possibility and value of legal contradictions – situations in which a given set of norms identifies a specific state of affairs as being both permitted and prohibited. The argument unfolds in four parts. The first part proposes a definition of such legal contradictions and distinguishes them from numerous related concepts. In accordance with this definition the second part evaluates whether legal contradictions can in fact exist. Having established that contemporary law can produce legal contradictions, the third part outlines the proposed method of dealing with legal contradictions. The final part then considers the merits of the proposal and argues that legal contradictions enhance law’s conceptual accuracy, facilitate better substantive decisions reached by more legitimate decision-making processes and maintain law’s ability to respond dynamically to its social environment. The argument will be illustrated with reference to various examples including the legality of nuclear weapons and the shooting down of a hijacked airplane with innocent civilians onboard.

Dr. Jens Kabisch, University of Heidelberg, Germany The Image and its Ban. A Contradictory Twosome at the Heart of All Symbolic Orders

With the rise of Barack Obama and his proposed new politics of authenticity a new type of banning the image materialized. With his proclaimed »truthfulness that goes beyond words« the notion to eliminate the image as such emerged – a seemingly contradictory ideal: is it not Obama himself and his photographer Pete Souza (who apparently takes


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up to 80.000 photos of the 44th president of the United States in a single month) who exploit images to appear authentic, real and freed of the stains of mediality? Yet, it is not this apparent inconsistency that is the true contradiction. While this new ban of image envisions the ban of the images as genus and wants to get rid ideally of all forms of mediacy, it is indifferent to the political nature of images as an agency of liberty and political rights and how this liberty and the foundation of symbolic orders respectively are grounded on another type of banning the image entirely. It thus runs counter to its own proposed revival of democratic institutions.

My contribution to mapping the field of Contradiction Studies wants to take this disaccord implicit within the political ideal to ban the image as such as starting point to discuss the broader nature of other diverging bans of images (namely in the form of various aniconisms) and illustrate their political essence. It wants to show that the image is (a) an agency to negotiate political liberties and thus cannot or at least should not be eradicated from the political realm; a fact ignore by current political motivated iconoclasts who want the eliminate the image as such; that (b) each historic idea of representation is grounded on a symbolic and semantic level on a social practice of banning the image, and, that (c) each image performs, depicts, and, is a manifestation of the underlying ban. My aim is thus to demonstrate that the contemporary comprehension of images in not only self-contradictory and flawed. What I want to show is that at the heart of any symbolic order there is contradictory prefiguration – namely the disposition of the image and its ban – and how the study of this contradictory prefiguration provides the very key to decipher the makeup of symbolic orders and their intrinsic rationality.

Michael Kleinod, University of Bonn, Germany Doing dualism: False-and-real contradictions in ecotourism practice

Contradictions are crucial to conceptually unlocking capitalist society, the very nature of which is antagonistic (Marx, Adorno). False alternatives, such as Nature vs. Society, are realized by the structured-structuring habitus-field dialectic of social practice (Bourdieu). In this paper, ecotourism exemplifies how ideological oppositions inform social action which thereby re-/produces exclusions justified by these oppositions. Drawing from first-hand research in Laos, I argue that gradation of oppositions (“more or less”) is central to rendering them practicable, so that they are experienced – and thereby realized – in concrete locations. Affirming the Nature/Society dualism imposed by nature conservation, ecotourism is centrally structured – and, in fact, largely explained – by the tension between conservation and development of nature as resource: this main tension plays out in various ways on different levels, and is accompanied by the perpetuation of inequalities and domination. After introducing ecotourism as a conservation tool, I sketch its universe of homologous oppositions (Bourdieu) to provide an interpretive grid connecting theory and empirics. Certain


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presets are outlined that constrain further practice. In a third step, I demonstrate how these oppositions, along with the exclusions implied, are enacted and affirmed in Laos specifically. I will conclude with the heuristic value of contradiction as central problem of humanity/-ies in an antagonistic world.

Lenny Martini, University of Bonn & University of Bremen, Germany/School of Business and Management Bandung, Indonesia Bandung, a contradictory narrative of a creative city

Using the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD), the paper tries to answer the questions on how prominent community actors shape the creativity interpretations and actions in Bandung, Indonesia, and to scrutinize the contradictions that happened along the process. Bandung was appointed as the first creative city pilot project in Indonesia by the British Council (2007) and has seriously taken up the concept up until today. The result shows three contradictions. First, the contradiction which is loaded by the creative city concept itself, contrasting ideas and arguments from different scholars that are implemented in Bandung. The second elucidates Giddens (1997) contradiction of modern capitalism which is reflected in the urban life of Bandung. The last contradiction is on the role of creative city that is sought as the identity of Bandung. The findings show different demeanors towards these contradictions. Some parties are carefully covering up the contradictions to sustain their power while some others are aggressively exposing these contradictions to build awareness on the consequence of this creative city label for Bandung. Both parties encounter discourse war in the real and virtual world. Each aim to get more and more supporters to fight for their right to continuously re-create themselves by shaping their environment after their own desires.

Dr. Gideon Mathson, Shiv Nadar University, India The Global and Local narratives of Disaster in Garhwal

Following the disaster of 2013, large tracts of the landscape of Uttarakhand (India), and most particularly of the Rudraprayag district, in Himalayan Garhwal, were re-written (Dhobal et al. 2013b). The event itself was a complex one, involving three days of heavy rainfall, the breaking of a damed lake (at Kedarnath)and the breaking of a landslides along the entire stretch of the the Mandakini river, the scientific and journalistic accounts privilege a description of the disaster as a ‘flood’, a term which simultaneously produces the event as global and establishes Kedarnath as its centre (Rautela.P. 2013, Dhobal et al 2013a, N.C Shah 2013).


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My work, which is based in the Mandakini Valley, in Rudraprayag district, attempts to break up the narrative of this event, and to ‘seriously inconvenience the neatly woven pattern’ (Amin.S. 1995). One way of producing this movement is to break up the disaster in itself, to consider one of its trajectories or occurrences. In this case we will choose to focus on the ‘the avalanche’ or the landslide. This particular trajectory, would emphasise the contradiction that exists between the global and the local, since the landslide occurs along the entire stretch of both the Mandakini and the Bhagirathi rivers, but unlike the breaking of the dam at Kedarnath, produces narratives of loss, and memorials that are never really mourned at a global level, by the national and international media: geologically global, but narratively local.

Dr. Daniel Scott Mayfield, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Otherwise. Rhetorical Techniques of Contradiction

Faced with a tradition dominating each and every aspect of oral and written cultural production for well over two millennia, any theory of contradiction, regardless of its particular emphasis, will have to reckon with the rhetorical téchne—whether as starting point or point of departure. Taking into account its formative practice of habitually reasoning on the other side of the question (›in utramque partem‹)—and including simply for heuristic purposes—the paper at hand makes a point of the fundamental function various practices and devices of contradiction perform within the rhetorical tradition, a decidedly agonistic system of diction from its earliest emergences in Hellenic courts of law, in Sophistic eristic, and throughout its diverse phases of consolidation and (re)appropriation. From among the latter, the specifically Early Modern endorsement and adaptation of rhetorical techniques of contradiction from seminal works of Machiavelli and Gracián will serve as expedient examples.

Dr. Babatunde Samuel Moruwawon, Ekiti State University, Nigeria The Semantics of Nigerian Proper Names: The Translator’s Viewpoint from the Perspective of Onomastic Research

This paper focuses on the translation of Nigerian names. One of the problems in translating Nigerian proper names is found in the differences between cultures. Different cultures have different focus. This is because most languages have terms that are more or less equivalent for the various aspects of their culture. Names and naming are part of the great Nigerian art and forms the foundation of understanding Africa’s raison d’être and the people’s way of life. Much work has been done on naming globally, however, not much research has been done on the translation analysis of Nigerian names thus, making the present study to fill this gap. The study reveals that beyond the portrayal of social values, norms and material culture of the people;


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Nigerian proper names possess semantic components either positive or negative which vary from one culture to the other thus, constituting a problem not only in translation studies but also in onomastic research. It equally reveals convincingly how the Nigerian people apprehend their universe against the background of their daily experience. The research provides insight into the socio-cultural basis of Nigerian names while equally revealing the inter-connectedness of Nigerian names to the thoughts, cultural identity and beliefs of the people. The study presents sufficient grounds to stimulate further research from scholars interested in onomastic research.

Dr. Georg Mueller, University of Fribourg, Switzerland Three-Valued Modal Logic as a Tool for Analysing Contradictory Institutional Outputs

Qualitative comparative analyses (see Ch. Ragin, 1987) of similar political institutions like welfare states or penal systems often lead to contradictory results with regard to their institutional outcomes. Two institutions with the same characteristics C1, C2, C3, ... may transform the same input into contradictory outputs O: Whereas in one case the institutional behaviour may e.g. be described by the Boolean expression

C1 & C2 & C3 & ... --> O

the forecast for a similar other case is perhaps contradictory:

C1 & C2 & C3 & ... --> Non-O

In order to arrive at nomothetic knowledge, it is among social scientists common practice to look for further distinctive characteristics Cx of institutions. This bears however the risk of atomising systematic data into collections of special cases. Thus we propose to use three-valued modal logic (Lukasiewicz, 1920) in order to gain as much nomothetic knowledge as possible. This approach enables to declare the truth of a contradictory outcome as indeterminate, corresponding to the third truth-value of the mentioned logic. Moreover, the modal operators of this logic allow to consider a given outcome O as a necessary, a possible, or an impossible consequence of the mentioned conditional characteristics C1, C2, C3, ... Thus, the use of modal logic enables social scientists to derive from contradictory outcomes not only certain but also fuzzy knowledge about institutional behaviour. The methodological details of these inferences are shown in an exemplary study of the output of health insurance systems under different political conditions.


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Prof. Dr. Tomonori Okubo, Kansai University, Japan Normative bias in irony and other types of speech: semantic mechanism of racialist contradiction by saying Obama as black president

It is a well-known fact that typical cases of irony have an important feature: normative bias. According to Wilson (2014), “the most common use of irony is to criticise or complain when a situation [...] does not live up to some norm-based expectation. Only in special circumstances can irony be used to praise or reassure [...].”

A comparable biased phenomenon can be found also in couples of antonymic terms semantically concerned with desirability put in negation. For example, while the negation of clean (desirable): not clean is very near to dirty (it’s undesirable counterpart), not dirty is far from equivalent to clean.

The aim of the present research, based on the Argumentative polyphony theory (Carel, 2011) as theoretical framework, is to show that these normatively biased phenomena are symptoms indicating the fact that language demands desirable or superior properties to be pure and spotless, which gives rise to obviously contradictory semantic setups. If we can overlook such a contradictory description as “Obama: America’s first black president”, it is not only because we apply the notorious “one-drop rule” to this case, but also because the couple of terms white/black are conceived as ones concerned with desirability and the former is considered to be desirable while the latter is regarded as undesirable, permitting a similar semantic bias to the pair clean/dirty. As a result, not white is equivalent to black, whereas not black is far from equivalent to white.

Dr. Peter Pichler, Graz, Austria European Union Cultural History: Mapping a Field in Contradiction Studies

Contradiction Studies, as a discourse to be established, deals with (cultural) phenomena in whose discourse meaning is produced in contradictory or ‘paradoxical’ terms. It is a new and fresh discourse which sets out to decode the importance of contradiction in cultural texts and narratives – and, thus, in history. Often the ‘paradoxical’, ‘ambivalent’ or ‘ambiguous’ character and features of EU history have been stated – but, still, European integration history, as a distinct field, misses a clear theoretical proposal of how to decode the contradictory character of EU cultural discourse. In his proposal, the author wants to reflect upon recent discussions on the sui generis-qualities of the European Union. He provides a theoretical proposal of theorizing European Union cultural history as a distinct field of research. So far, discourse has not been able to produce a conclusive theory of EU history. In this context, the author provides research with a first theoretical concept of EU cultural history, which keeps a critical distance from EU-biased perspectives, and, at the same


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time, explains its cultural sui generis-qualities, by scrutinizing its distinct cultural constitution in post-1945 decades. This distinct cultural constitution produced an own mode of the production of cultural meaning which can be defined theoretically by a concept of a ‘paradoxical coherence’ – a new mode of decoding contradiction in EU discourse.

Bernadette Raedler, University of Calgary, Canada Contradictions in Literature

This paper will explore by which devices and to which aim contradictions are employed in contemporary German fiction, namely the novel and the graphic novel. Both Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Visitation, and Line Hoven’s graphic novel Love Looks Away, published in 2007, may be regarded as tension art based on contradictions. Both texts delineate the topic of identity by way of content and form based antagonistic structures that contain the potential to become self-reflexive, double narratives that refer back to their respective medium. Ambiguous semiotic signs, double-coded on the semantic or the syntactic level, stylistic devices such as chiasmus or litotes, and spatial metaphors become catalysts for rethinking seemingly stable identity concepts that are closely tied to geographical, historical and political boundaries. Subsequently literary categories such as the distinction between autobiography and biography, fact and fiction, literary studies and historical science / historiography become subject to reflection. The research is based upon previous research on metafiction by Patricia Waugh, Linda Hutcheon, and Ansgar Nünning as well as research on metareferentiality across media by Werner Wolf and will demonstrate how antagonisms are a prerequisite for the metareferential condition that allows to (re)negotiate fixed concepts and to facilitate change.

Dr. Dominik Schreiber, University of Mannheim, Germany A Contradiction of Genres? Notions on the Narrative Rhetoric of Climate Change

Climate change is perceived as one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. It is assumed that the attached discourse has a preference for apocalyptical narratives. Nothing less than the destruction of our environment has been imagined over and over again. A closer look reveals that apocalypse is not the only genre at work here. Surprisingly you can find set pieces of other genres. For instance, the strong calls for sustainability in our everyday life apparently refer to the genre of low mimesis, where ordinary people with ordinary powers solve ordinary problems. Furthermore, the positive undertone typically belongs to romance, which is “marked by the belief that actions can make a difference and that change for the better is in the air” (Smith 2005). Altogether, one can state that the discourse on climate change seems to intertwine a


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set of opposing genre types. I would like to scrutinize this contradiction of genres from a standpoint of cultural sociology. Firstly, I will outline the dimensions of the contradiction with an example: Davis Guggenheim’s groundbreaking documentary An Inconvenient Truth starring former US-Vice President Al Gore in his struggle for climate protection. As methodology Philip Smith’s structural model of genre will be used. Secondly, I will reflect on the reasons for this curious contradiction and evaluate its assets and drawbacks. Is there a need for a “consistency of genre” or does the contradiction represents a suitable solution?

Dr. Liriam Sponholz, University of Klagenfurt, Austria Tackling Hate Speech with Counter Speech? The Role of Contradiction in the Media Controversy surrounding Oriana Fallaci’s “The Rage and the Pride”

Hate Speech consists of conscious, public utterances against groups of people. This public discourse activates antinomy between them and thus triggers the epistemological production of inferiority of human beings. Counter speech, i.e. the utterance of contradiction, has been put forward as the solution to this problem. This study aims to address the question: what role does counter speech play in media controversies surrounding hate speech, by analyzing the case of Italian bestselling author Oriana Fallaci. In 2001, shortly after the terror attack against the Twin Towers, Fallaci sold more than one million copies in several countries of a book in which she asserts that Muslims “breed like rats”. The article rests on the antinomy “Islam” vs. “Western”, which results in a hierarchization of people around the axis of “religion”. Based on the theory of social representations and on the agenda-building approach, all texts about the controversy surrounding “The Rage and the Pride” in Italian, Spanish, German, British and US-American leading newspapers were selected and submitted to content analysis. Outcomes show that counter speech in this case lead neither to consensus nor to refutation of such contents. On the contrary: contradiction was pivotal to keeping the controversy on the public agenda, prolonging the lifespan of the conflict in the media and improving the productivity and effectiveness of exclusionary knowledge.

Dr. Michal Tal, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel The Antinomy of Multiplicity versus Unity as Manifested in the Literary Theme of the Double

The paper focuses on the antinomy of multiplicity vs. unity and its manifestation in literature, particularly, in the literary theme of the double. It will claim that the theme carries such significance, and has such power upon us, because reading such literary


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works compels us to reflect on this antinomy, which is necessary for our consistent and coherent self experience.

In response to Sullivan's claim that the self is not centralized but multiple, and that authentic individual selfhood is an illusion, and uniqueness, accordingly, is non-existent (1950), Frederickson (2000) suggested a theory of "Youeyness", at the heart of which lies the concept of antinomy of unity and multiplicity. He advocates that a polyphonic form of unity should acknowledge both multiplicity and unity, such that none is reducible to its counterpart.

This paper claims that the literary theme of the double (doppelganger)—as exemplified, e.g., in Stevenson (1886), Wilde (1891), Calvino (1952) - may be conceived of as an extreme investigation of the issue at hand. Literary works focusing on this theme present a protagonist who encounters his/her double, or disintegrates into several self-parts. Literary manifestations of doublehood and split may be viewed as examples of the pathologies involved in the reluctance - or inability - to maintain the antinomy of unity vs. multiplicity.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Teubert, University of Birmingham, UK Paradoxes and what they have to tell us in the Zhuangzi

Classical Chinese philosophy can make an eminent contribution to modern discourse analysis. Confucian, Mohist and Daoist texts engage in a rather acrimonious dialogue on the role of discourse in the context of the reality of the natural, spiritual and, in particular, social world. The agenda of the Zhuangzi, a text less known in the western world, is often surprisingly close to constructivist approaches to discourse analysis (e.g. Foucault, Luhmann, Potter, Fairclough). It contains a number of paradoxes dealing with the relationship between discourse, speaker/listener and reality. The Zhuangzi insists that debating controversial standpoints, comparing and evaluating them will give us a plurality of perspectives.

The scepticism of the Zhuangzi ties in well with contemporary hermeneutics. Corpus linguistics, combined with classical philology, extracts, organises and presents the textual evidence concerning the Zhuangzi’s paradoxes as they appear in the text itself and as they have been read to the interpretive community. Each interpreter’s readings is free to permute, recombine and vary what has been said so far, thus merging horizons and placing the paradoxes in a new context. It is the plurality of contradictory perspectives that encourages us to come up with our own ideas regarding the current divisions in discourse linguistics.


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Diana Wagner, University of Marburg, Germany “Embodied Minds” and Intersubjectivity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works

In my paper, I would like to focus on two sets of interactions between such seemingly contradictory phenomena as Body and Mind, and Self and Other, which are central to the work of a contemporary American novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt. Agreeing with phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, she criticizes the famous, yet controversial, Cartesian dualism and argues that our minds, our ideas, feelings, and emotions are embodied (see, e.g., “Embodied Visions”). Furthermore, Hustvedt’s concept of Self does not contradict that of Other but is inseparable from it. Her philosophy of intersubjectivity emphasizes the dialogue between the embodied self and the world (see Marks). “We are born into meanings and ideas that will shape how our embodied minds encounter the world,” contemplates Hustvedt (“Embodied Visions” 345).

Although a number of works published to date has been concerned with Hustvedt’s theory of intersubjectivity (see Marks; Hartmann et al.), there has been no attempt at approaching specifically the interactions indicated above from interdisciplinary perspectives. This article aims at filling in this gap in the criticism, based on the evidence from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and fiction. I argue that Body and Mind, and Self and Other are not in antagonistic relationships but rather in “zones of focused ambiguity,” borrowing Hustvedt’s diction (“Borderlands” 132).

Prof. Dr. Tomislav Zelic, University of Zadar, Croatia Contradictions in Modern History Plays

Modern history plays from the Baroque to the present contain innumerable contradictions in terms of time and place, action and plot, characters, theirs monologues and dialogues, form and content, intended effects and reception history. In most cases, they are simultaneously poetic and tendentious works of art. This paper will base itself on the author's monograph "Machtspiele - Katachresen der gerechten Herrschaft im modernen Geschichtsdrama" published in 2016 with Peter Lang. It will examine constative, performative, and declarative contradictions in historical, political, legal, economic, and social terms etc. as represented in chosen modern history plays from the Baroque to the present. The first part will give a short and general layout of the above-mentioned contradictions following various theories of history, politics, law, economics, and society. The second part will examine in more detail the genre history of the history play which apparently lends itself to representing the above-mentioned contradictions. Based on these examinations, the third part will draw out the conclusion that the contradictions take specific logical and poetic form such as paradox, antinomy, and aporia on the one hand and oxymoron, catachrese, chiasmus, and irony on the other hand. In conclusion, everything indicates that modern history plays from the


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Baroque to the present make an excellent poetic medium for representing historical, political, legal, economic, and social contradictions.


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Special panel abstracts

(in alphabetical order by panel title)

PANEL: Did Somebody Say Dialectic?

There is perhaps no form of contradiction studies richer, more rigorous, or with a deeper intellectual heritage than the dialectic. From Plato to Hegel, Marx to Adorno, Jameson to Žižek, the dialectic has served as a powerful medium through which to represent the contradictions of social life and thought itself. Yet, given the “absolutism” of the Hegelian dialectic, as well as the vulgarities of Stalinist “diamat” (dialectical materialism), the dialectic has also been frequently viewed with suspicion, if not accused outright of “totalitarianism.” While there has been something like a revival of dialectical, and more broadly, Marxist theory in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008 (e.g. Harvey, Kurz, Varoufakis), the current intellectual conjuncture in literary and cultural studies is also characterized by new variations on these and other disavowals of the dialectic and its core concepts of contradiction and negativity. Though essentially a mode of immanent critique, the dialectic is alleged to be a “heroic” discourse of “mastery,” suspiciously seeking out hidden meanings behind the veil of surface phenomena. Conversely, the dialectic’s concern with contradiction and negativity is charged with being too weak: faced with neoliberalism’s financial, technological, ecological, and biogenetic crises, and contemporary forms of biopower, we must create and affirm, not negate. Additionally, dialectical thinking is construed as the product of a European—and hence, it is argued, Eurocentric—tradition of philosophy that fails to address and even negates the specificity of the experiences of racialized populations.

This panel seeks to show, dialectically, that the continuing power of the dialectic as a mode of contradiction studies resides in its confrontation with other theoretical systems and their non or postcontradictory models of social and political analysis. We propose to contribute to the mapping of the theoretical terrain in the following paper presentations:

Paper #1 Antagonism or Dialectic? From Fanon to Afropessimism (Marlon Lieber)

Few 20thcentury thinkers have left a legacy as contested as Martiniqueborn psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon. Antiimperialists, Third Worldist Marxists, poststructuralists, phenomenologists—almost everyone, it seems, has been able to discover their own version of Fanon. My paper proposes to critically interrogate one rather recent appropriation of Fanon’s thought, that is, Frank Wilderson’s “Afropessimism.” In his 2010 study In Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke UP) Wilderson draws on Fanon’s analysis of the colonial


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situation to posit an irreconcilable antagonism according to which blacks are ontologically positioned as “antiHuman” or as that which makes the “coherence” of the human subject possible in the first place. Against the liberal notion of a gradual improvement of “race” relations, Wilderson argues that this antagonistic relation cannot be overcome dialectically, but only through the “obliteration of one of the positions.” Of course, Wilderson is not the first to disavow the role of the dialectic in Fanon, but his stress on the irreconcilability of antagonism remains decidedly more radical than, for instance, Homi Bhabha’s emphasis on cultural hybridity. Still, I want to argue, we need the dialectic to be able to assess both the strengths and limits of Wilderson—and of Fanon, too. Drawing on a 1976 text by Peter Schmitt Egner that has remained largely unknown, especially in the Anglophone reception of Fanon, I will argue that Marx’s dialectical critique of the capitalist mode of production is necessary to sketch an account of racialized forms of domination that does not stop at a reductive understanding of “antiblackness.”

Paper #2 Negating Latour: Postcritique, Conspiracy, and the Valences of the Dialectic (Jesse Ramírez)

One thinker appears again and again in contemporary skirmishes with Marxist literary and cultural theory: Bruno Latour. This “prince of networks” (Graham Harmon) offers a range of conceptual tools to a formation of scholars who prefer to affirm rather than critique, “assemble” rather than negate, describe surfaces rather than interpret symptoms, read closely but not deeply. Since Latour’s essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” ( Critical Inquiry, 2004) has been particularly influential to this formation, I propose a close analysis of the text that will model the very critical dialectical method that Latour disavows. My aim is to show that dialectical thinking is a mode of immanent critique that, far from mastering its object, as Latour and others contend, immerses itself in contradictions. Only by profoundly underplaying the contradictory nature of contemporary social reality, I argue, can Latourian “postcritique” have any purchase as an analytical framework. Moreover, I pay particular attention to the contradictions within Latour’s figuration of conspiracy theory, for it is his inflated charge that critical theory is conspiratorial, suspicious, and violent that enables Latour to represent his own thought as a kind of neutral, benign respect for objects and agents within a “flat ontology.” In contrast, this paper offers a dialectical engagement with conspiracy that seeks to recover the utopian kernel within even this—often reactionary—form of thought.

Paper #3 Capitalizing Contradiction, Capitalizing the Commons: General Intellect and Neoliberal Capital (Dennis BüscherUlbrich)

Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly drawn our attention to the inappropriateness of private property for the socalled “intellectual property.” In fact, for the unabashed dialectician, it should be understood as one of four key antagonisms of the present neoliberal constellation (next to ecological crisis, biogenetics, and new forms of apartheid or


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“surplus humanity”—all of which are tied to the contradictions of capital accumulation) and can be formulated as such: “How to maintain the form of (private) property, within which only the logic of capital accumulation can be maintained?” For Žižek, a crucial moment in the history of cyberspace is Bill Gates’s publication of the (in)famous “Open Letter to Hobbyists,” the assertion of private property in the software domain: “As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. [...] Most directly, the thing you do is theft” (Gates 1976). What in Marxian terms can be considered a partial shift from “profit“ to “surplus profit” or “rent,” especially relevant to the shift from industrial to post industrial (“cognitive” and “biopolitical”) capitalism, has serious political implications as rentseeking essentially operates on the premise that certain assets cannot be replicated, and that a monopoly rent can therefore be charged for their use. While Gates has built his entire empire and reputation on his views about knowledge being treated as if it were tangible property and thus helped trigger the battle for the “enclosure” of the common domain of software, we are dealing today with a more comprehensive enclosure and privatization of knowledge, technology, and culture. Analogous to the “legal complications in biogenetics,” where “phenomena are emerging [...] which bring the notion of property to weird paradoxes” (Žižek 2007), the domain of socalled intellectual property should be properly politicized and posited as a site where the ideological “naturalization” of neoliberal capital can be effectively contested. What holds true for the biogenetic patenting of parts of our own genetic makeup, certainly holds true for the development of the “general intellect” (Marx 1857, Virno 1996, Vercellone 2007), or the intellectual “commons” (Hardt/Negri 2009), and the properly politicoeconomic contradictions between exchange value and use value, capital and labor. However, over and against a virulent cyberoptimism and neo anarchism too often spellbound by neoliberalism, the paper also takes its cues from Jodi Dean’s Lacanian Marxist critique of “communicative capitalism” (2010) to explore the ways in which new media practices like posting, blogging, and texting embed their users—by way of affects and emotions—in reflexive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Accordingly, the paper concludes with a dialectical reading of the recent Microsoft Cybercrime Center campaign and its typically “post ideological” disavowal of contradiction.

PANEL: Figurations of Gender: Contradictions and/as Intersections

The practical and academic productivity of gender as an analytical category results not least from its aptitude to critically engage with contradictions--be they social, political, cultural, historical or disciplinary. In consequence of the intersectional turn, gender has contested boundaries of sex, class, race, religion, or nation, shedding light on the multifaceted interrelations of these categories. Employing the potential of an intersectional approach our panel will investigate particular figurations of gender in


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history, science and literature and examine inherent structures of oppression and empowerment.

Dr. Karin Esders: Gender as a Contested Field

Karin Esders will introduce gender as a contested field, briefly sketching the contradictions gender studies have both faced from the outside and generated within. Intersectional interventions into these contradictions have opened the field to more inclusive and more differentiated examination.

Irmgard Maassen: Collapsing Sexual Dichotomies: Virginia Woolf’s Concept of Androgyny

Irmgard Maassen will investigate a cultural-historical instance of subverting the strict dichotomy of sexual difference by analysing Virginia Woolf’s construct of ‘androgyny’ in the context of the modernist discourse of homosexuality and queerness. By intersecting sexuality with gender Woolf aims to dissolve a binary opposition, paradoxically drawing on two mutually incompatible figures of thought: ‘fusion’ and ‘dispersion’.

Dr. Jennifer Henke: Contesting Spaces of Knowledge: Gender, Class, and Medicine

Jennifer Henke will explore contested spaces of knowledge in the sphere of a particular medical practice – obstetrics – against the backdrop of selected literary artefacts of the long eighteenth century in Britain. Examined from a medical-historical perspective, art forms such as novels and graphic satires reveal that the realm of science is traversed by both gender- as well as class-specific power structures. These intersections thus demonstrate the status of science as a cultural practice.

Christine Müller: Gender and Science: An Intersectional Reading of Chevalier’s Remarkable

Christine Müller will provide an intersectional reading of Tracy Chevalier’s historical novel Remarkable Creatures that tells the story of two English women who venture into the male-dominated field of science at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is their gender, but also their class and age that leads to their experiences of discrimination, exclusion, and disregard from the scientific community. It is the intersection of these three categories that will be the focus of this paper.


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PANEL: Out of Joint: Well-Timed Untimely Observations and Performative Acts between Academia and Art. A Transdisciplinary Panel on Time and Contradictions (in German & English)

In this experimental panel, five academics from different disciplines in the humanities will join forces with performing artists to explore and question the boundaries between the worlds of academia and art. Insights from various disciplinary perspectives will be confronted and brought into playful dialogue with aesthetic investigations presented by performers from the Theater der Versammlung (Theatre of Assemblage). This unusual format is the conceptual birth child of the Centre for Performance Studies at Bremen University. At the same time the collaborative WoC working group “Performativity and boundary transgressions” will present its research project on “Time and Contradictions”, all the while drawing attention to, and negotiating, the contradictions inherent within different disciplinary approaches to the theme.

Contributors: Alice Lagaay (Performance Philosophy, Friedrichshafen), Sabine Ritter (Sociology, Bremen), Dorle Dracklé (Transcultural Studies, Bremen), Elisabeth Arend (Transnational Literature Studies, Bremen), Christoph Fantini (Pedagogics & Educational Science, Bremen), Jörg Holkenbrink (Centre for Performance Studies, Bremen), Members of the Theater der Versammlung (Theatre of Assemblage) between Education, Academia and the Arts

PANEL: Widerspruch und (Kontra-)Argumentation (German-language panel)

Prof. Dr. Walther Kindt (Bielefeld, Germany): Grundlagen aus Logik und Topik für die Untersuchung von Contra-Argumentationen

Wenn man darüber nachdenkt, was die wichtigsten Erkenntnisse von Logik und Topik sind, dann kann man den Eindruck haben, dass man in beiden Disziplinen nur wenig über Contra-Argumentationen erfährt. Bei genauerer Betrachtung erweist sich aber, dass dieser Eindruck falsch ist. In der Logik geht es zwar zentral um Ableitungen, in denen sich mit Hilfe von Schlussregeln Behauptungen nachweisen lassen. Implizit besagen diese Regeln aber auch, mit welchen Argumenten man Behauptungen anzweifeln oder widerlegen kann. Welche Argumente das sind, wird in der Logik in der Theorie der Dialogspiele gemacht. Ähnlich verhält es sich in der Topik. Wenn man sich z.B. die Liste der Topoi in der Rhetorik von Aristoteles anschaut, dann ist einerseits den Schlussregeltopoi zu entnehmen, mit welchen Argumenten man evtl. gegen ihre Anwendung vorgehen kann. Andererseits werden dort und in späteren Darstellungen auch einige Gegenargumente selbst als Topoi angeführt. Folglich muss man die Liste dieser Argumenttopoi nur systematisch ergänzen. Dabei stellt sich heraus, dass es neben Argumenten gegen die Anwendung einer Schlussregel auch


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metakommunikative Argumenttopoi gibt, die die prinzipielle Korrektheit von Schlussregelanwendungen thematisieren.

Nach Darstellung der grundsätzlichen Überlegungen soll in dem Panel-Beitrag auch an einem geeigneten Argumentationsbeispiel einige der thematisierten Aspekte von Contra-Argumentationen illustriert werden.

Prof. Dr. Josef Klein (Berlin & Koblenz-Landau, Germany): Kontra-Argumentieren Punkt für Punkt und als topisches Gesamtpaket. Beispiel: deutsche Flüchtlingsdiskurse

Für politische Diskurse ist typisch, dass politisches Handeln durch eine Anzahl von Argumenten gerechtfertigt wird, die sich auf eine ziemlich feste Konstellation von Topoi verteilen – Minimalbesatz: Datentopos, Valuationstopos, Prinzipientopos, Finaltopos.

Gegendiskurse können ein solches Argumentationsgebäude attackieren, indem sie ihm ein eigenes komplexes Argumentationsgebilde entgegenstellen und/oder indem sie sich auf die Destruktion einzelner, möglichst zentraler Argumente konzentrieren, um so das Gebäude der Gegenseite zum Wanken oder gar zum Einsturz zu bringen. Vor allem wenn es um grundlegende gesellschaftliche Fragen geht, lässt sich eine Kombination aus beidem beobachten, so in der Kontroverse um die deutsche Flüchtlingspolitik insbesondere des Jahres 2015. Primär an diesem Beispiel soll gezeigt werden

1. dass Gegendiskurse, sofern sie alternatives politisches Handeln favorisieren, dem gleichen komplexen topischen Argumentationsmuster folgen wie der angegriffene Diskurs - allerdings mit gänzlich anderem argumentativen Besatz. (Frametheoretisch reformuliert: dieselben Slots, aber unterschiedliche Fillers),

2. dass Angriffe auf Einzelargumente unter dem Aspekt grundlegender Kommunikationsnormen Gricescher und Habermasscher Provenienz (Relevanz, Informativität, Wahrheit, Wahrhaftigkeit, Richtigkeit) erfolgen,

3. dass sich darauf die These stützen lässt, der Vorwurf des Verstoßes gegen die Kommunikationsnormen generiere spezifische Topoi des Kontra-Argumentierens.

Prof. Dr. Martin Reisigl (Bern): Widersprüchliche Argumentation aus der Perspektive einer normativen Argumentationstheorie

Rein deskriptiv orientierte Argumentationsanalysen haben zu widersprüchlicher Argumentation nichts zu sagen. Die Bewertungsabstinenz, die sie sich auferlegen, macht sie unempfänglich für die Frage nach etwaigen Verstößen gegen Regeln der Logik oder des vernünftigen Argumentierens durch die Verstrickung in Widersprüche.


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Dabei läge es in der Natur der Sache, dass die Beschäftigung mit argumentativen Widersprüchen nach einer normativen Perspektive verlangt.

Im Unterschied zu deskriptiven Zugängen wird sich eine normative Argumentationstheorie, über die formale Struktur, den Ablauf und den Inhalt von Argumentationen hinaus, auch für die Qualität des Argumentierens interessieren. Diese Qualität lediglich an den abstrakten sektoralen Regeln der formalen Logik zu messen (Stichworte: Satz vom Widerspruch, Antinomie, Paradoxie), wäre allerdings eine Engführung, die dem Gegenstand von alltäglicher Argumentation in verschiedenen sozialen Handlungsfeldern nicht gerecht zu werden vermöchte. Die im Vortrag zu umreißende normative Argumentationstheorie hat vielmehr auch zu berücksichtigen, dass auf eine von Widersprüchen durchzogene historische Wirklichkeit oft aus gutem Grund mit widersprüchlichen Argumentationen geantwortet wird und dass widersprüchliches Argumentieren seinerseits widersprüchliche Realitäten mitkonstituiert. Ziel einer normativen Argumentationstheorie sollte es daher nicht lediglich sein, Widersprüche unter Rekurs auf kontextabstrakte Regeln der Logik als Trugschlüsse zu demaskieren und zu kritisieren. Vielmehr sollte sie – historisch kontextualisierend – auch die Genese der Widersprüche zu rekonstruieren versuchen. Sie sollte also nicht nur mangelnde kognitive Stringenz und Kohärenz ahnden, sondern auch erklärend nachvollziehen, wie sich Widersprüche oft als Kompromissbildungen formieren und wie sie z. B. als kalkulierte oder unbewusste Ambivalenzen aus Interessenkonflikten, Mehrfachadressierungen, multiplen Autor*innenschaften und der Gleichzeitigkeit von Ungleichzeitigkeiten hervorgehen.

All dies gilt es im Vortrag am Beispiel der politischen Kommunikation zu erörtern – insgesamt in drei Schritten. Im ersten Teil meiner Ausführungen werden bisherige Versuche der einschlägigen Literatur vorgestellt und diskutiert, mit argumentativen Widersprüchen theoretisch und analytisch zu Rande zu kommen. Im zweiten Teil betrachte ich einige empirische Phänomene aus dem Bereich der politischen Außenkommunikation. Im dritten Teil fasse ich die Konturen einer politolinguistisch informierten normativen Argumentationstheorie zusammen.

Dr. Fabienne Tissot (Zürich, Switzerland): «Felt Reality» and contradictory argumentation in verbal political discourse

«Das, was man fühlt, ist auch Realität», said the leading candidate of the AfD in Berlin in the late summer 2016. This sentence mutated in the media to the slogan «Gefühlte Realität», and a buzzword was found in the subsequent discussion about the rise of the «Alternative für Deutschland»-party in Germany.

In Switzerland, the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), the nationalist right-wing populist party currently holds 29.4% of the seats in the Swiss parliament. In February 2014, the SVP won the people’s initiative «Against Mass Immigration». What was seen


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by a large part of the voters as an initiative against immigration policy was in fact a referendum against the bilateral agreements between Switzerland and the EU.

After this decision, Gentinetta*Scholten led discussions in different parts of Switzerland with citizens and local stakeholders about Europe and migration in Switzerland and analysed this political discourse. In the arguments of those participants who supported the SVP initiative, basic contradictions concerning facts could be seen regularly. When analysing the structures of such arguments using categories as topoi and frames (see e.g. Klein 2014, 2016, Wengeler 2003) it can be shown, that data topoi (Klein 2016) are not supported by statistical data e.g., but by the well-known flood or container frame – the so-called «felt reality»?

In this paper I will present empirical, verbal data outlining how topoi and frames interact together to support the argumentation in the special case of Switzerland and discuss the question, how «felt realities» could be faced in practical policy advice.


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Contact information

“Contradiction Studies: Mapping the Field” is an event of the Collaborative Research Initiative Worlds of Contradiction at the University of Bremen. You can contact the WoC co-ordination team

by mail: University of Bremen Worlds of Contradiction GW2 B3150 Universitäts-Boulevard 13 D-28359 Bremen

online: www.woc.uni-bremen.de

by e-mail: [email protected]

by phone: +49 421 218 68499

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