The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were replete with large-scale projects and interests: the rise of the most colossal modern literary form, the novel; the craze for panorama; the pursuit of imperial ambitions by both European and American powers. At the same time, however, interest in minutiae proliferated on both sides of the Atlantic, as histories of the microscope and the micrological have revealed. The molecular and infinitesimal gained new importance in philosophy, mathematics, the natural sciences, medicine, and literature, as new technologies gradually rendered the ‘invisible world’ available to human observation. In tandem with this development, the notion of milieu became increasingly prevalent, as instantiated most prominently by the concept of the ecological niche in evolutionary biology. The question of how organisms interact with their milieus emerged as a new area of inquiry across a range of fields; the minuscule beings and objects that had hitherto attracted interest mainly because of their newly discovered individuality were now scrutinized with growing intensity in their environmental context. 

This conference brings together scholarly work that addresses these two cultural-epistemological developments: first, the role of minutiae, as manifested in all kinds of diminutive units or categories (for instance: the animalcula, the infinitesimal, the minor, the particular, the seemingly irrelevant, the typographic detail, the cellular, the clue); and, secondly, the interaction between these tiny phenomena and their surroundings. Milieus of Minutiae explores the ways in which what is subvisible or easily overlooked is situated in philosophy, cultural production, and scientific experimentation from early modernity through the twentieth century, with a view toward the contemporary moment. Medieval thought granted discrete being to that which is otherwise considered negligible and only relational—a status later held by both the minor and the milieu—and this conference constellates approaches that restore ontological viability to both of these categories between premodern and contemporary thought. At the same time, it explores the historical dimensions of a micrology of knowledge and aesthetics, reflecting on the objectivity, supra-metonymy, and epistemological value of these units across a wide range of cultural, intellectual, environmental, social, and material milieus.

With Elizabeth Brogden, Natalia Cecire, Tita Chico, Anne Eusterschulte, Christiane Frey, Amelia Groom, Daniel Liu, Roger Maioli, Marlon Miguel, Nikolai Preuschoff, Malte Fabian Rauch, Pauline Selbig, John H. Smith, Elisa Tamarkin, Michelle Ty, Elena Vogman, and Cynthia Wall

Keynotes by Marianne Schuller and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger 

PROGRAM

Thursday, May 23rd

10:00-10:30. Introduction

Elizabeth Brogden, Christiane Frey, Ulla Haselstein

10:30-12:45. Looking Closely

Chair. Ulla Haselstein

  • Tita Chico. Thinking Small: Or, a Literary History of Scrutiny
  • Elizabeth Brogden. Clew-less Fiction: Narrative Detail Beyond Realism
  • Elisa Tamarkin. Regarding Irrelevance

14:00-16:15. Diminutive Aesthetics 

Chair. Mareike Schildmann

  • Pauline Selbig. Minor Milieus: Benjamin's Mode of Writing
  • Nikolai Preuschoff. The Minute in Robert Walser’s Novel The Tanners
  • M. Miguel & E. Vogman. Le Moindre Geste: Cinema and Milieu after Fernand Deligny

16:45-18:15. Trivia{l} Matter{s}

Chair. Christiane Frey

Cynthia Wall. “of a Parenthesis”

Roger Maioli. The Rise of the Novel and the Knowledge of Particulars
19:00. Evening Lecture 

Marianne Schuller. Nanoästhetik: Zur imaginativen Kraft des Kleinen / Nanoaesthetics: On the Imaginative Power of the Small

Friday, May 24th

10:00-12:15. Mere Milieus 

Chair. Claudia Peppel

  • Amelia Groom. Partially Submerged Ruins
  • Malte Rauch. Counter Cartography: Agamben – Debord – On Kawara
  • Michelle Ty. Umwelt and the Color Line 

13:45-16:00. Minimal Relations 

Chair. Arnd Wedemeyer

  • John H. Smith. The Calculus of the Psycho-Physical Difference
  • Anne Eusterschulte. Interactions between Metaphysical, Physical and Literary Minutiae: From Giordano Bruno to James Joyce
  • Christiane Frey. Encapsulated Minima: Duns Scotus, Leibniz, Ruyer

16:30-18:00. Micro-Worlds Magnified 

Chair. Elizabeth Brogden

  • Natalia Cecire. Shelled Life: Sexuality and Subjectivity at the Level of the Cell
  • Daniel Liu. Positivism vs. Molecular Imagination after the Abbe Diffraction Limit, 1874–1939

19:00. Evening Lecture 

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Experimental Environments: ‘Micrologies of Knowledge’