NBP: Inaugural Workshop – UCLA Livescu Initiative on Neuro, Narrrative, and AI

This workshop gathers a group of scholars working broadly in eighteenth-century studies under the heading of what we are calling “The No-Body Problem,” the long history of thinking about the yields of—and yieldings to—disembodied media. The eighteenth century is a natural moment to launch these questions, since it witnessed the emergence of modern media (including print), new collectivities in so-called republics of letters, the epistolary novel, widespread literacy, theories of information and social complexity, and forms of being attending on communication at a distance. That age is rich in reflections upon, and responses to, innovations in communication media, since it was encountering modes of disembodied relationality which anticipate our own.

Our goal is to think collectively, in person, about the long history of thought about the relationship between embodiment and modern media; we aim to unearth the roots of modern patterns of thought in early experiments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering a historical counterweight to arguments over virtuality which are anything but novel.

A number of concerns inform the rationale for the workshop that we outline here. We are responding to the increasing pressure that academic work, including scholarship, archival research, and even teaching, “go fully remote”: a kind of going which is actually a staying. We share the sense that an impoverished view of the humanities informs both the perceived benefits arising from meeting online as well as the acknowledged drawbacks.

Advocates for meeting virtually emphasize how a remote format increases access to “content,” but we know, with a wider historical view, that the very idea that knowledge, especially humanistic knowledge, can be reduced to deliverable output is itself a historical artifact dating to the development of modern media—and coeval therefore with eighteenth-century innovations in media like print. And we know also that even then counternarratives were emerging, that even then it was observed that such descriptions fail to acknowledge the occasional nature of certain forms, the contingencies of performance, the sorts of knowledge that evade exchanges from a distance, and the relationship between speaker and addressee—all factors to which we, as scholars of literature and history, are (or should be!) especially attuned.

Participants in the workshop will arrive Thursday May 1, to prepare for two days of collaboration, culminating in a group session at the end of the day on Saturday in which we will ponder and plan a subsequent event (or other collaborative endeavor) that emerges from our collective thinking over these two days. We are counting, then, on participants in the workshop to help us think about further directions and forms these ideas might take. Otherwise, the only constraint is that each participant lead a session about virtuality and presence that could not be done remotely.

The line-up for the workshop is as follows:

Friday May 2^nd:

Lynn Festa on eighteenth-century how-to poems, including John Gay’s Trivia (1716)—and the project of following the directions contained in such ars technica.

Crystal Lake on the history and construction of magic lantern shows and how such media connect to other kinds of absorptive aesthetic experiences.

Cailey Hall on William Buchan’s medical self-help manual, Domestic Medicine (1769) and the question of what sort of recommendations, in 2025, are conducive to meeting in person in ways that preserve people’s health.

Saturday May 3^rd:

Davide Panagia on “The No-Body Politic,” a locution that names how the political liberalism of John Rawls and others revises David Hume’s sentimental empiricism in order to imagine the possibility of sympathy without bodies.

Brad Pasanek on the Humean and Kantian ideas about contingency that inform the philosopher Quentin Meillasoux’s investigation of ontology in After Finitude (2006), ideas which also find expression in the video game, “Baba is You,” in which players manipulate the game’s rules to alter the constitutive laws that govern its reality.

Sandra Macpherson on how attending to tickling—a kind of touching we cannot perform on ourselves—might help us think about the kinds of injuries that, as an ontological matter, require the presence of others, and the shifting of the criteria, in rape and sexual assault law, from an emphasis on the fear of imminent harm to violations of consent.