Supported by CEMS KCL, the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King's (CESK) is delighted to announce its first event of 2022 — an experimental 'salon' exploring the meaning of the Enlightenment public sphere for us today.
2022 will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the original German publication of Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). This book, particularly since its translation into English in 1989, has had a huge interdisciplinary influence on our thinking about the public sphere, and on the significance of the Enlightenment-era emergence of a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ in these contemporary debates. The current academic year seems to be a very apposite time to revisit this seminal book and its multidimensional impact. The Covid pandemic has led to an unprecedented shift from public to private spaces, and from embodied to online interactions. Are we living through another ’structural transformation of the public sphere’? If so, what pertinent insights might reflecting on the eighteenth-century public sphere - and its spaces, institutions, conventions, preoccupations and exclusions - have to offer us?
CESK plans to focus its 2022 programming on these questions. To initiate this exploration of the meaning of the Enlightenment public sphere for us today, CEMS and CESK would like to invite you to an experimental ‘salon’ on this subject, which will be both an intellectual and a social event, combining two ten-minute presentations designed to stimulate our reflections with an opportunity for social mingling among academics, students and cultural sector professionals interested in these questions. It is our hope that the further agenda for a consideration of the legacy of Habermas’s book will be informed by the ideas and responses that emerge at this event.
Our two speakers are:
Frances Carey, an independent curator and academic advisor, and formerly Head of National Programmes and Deputy Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, on ‘Back to the Future: 1751, 1962 and 2022: Enlightenment, Habermas and the Public Sphere’.
Marie Kolkenbrock, Branco Weiss Fellow in the Department of German at KCL, and a scholar of Viennese Modernism and of post-1900 cultural history and theory, on ‘The Conflicting Cultural Politics of Distance: Stabilising and Challenging the Public Sphere’.
The event will take place at the rescheduled time of 6pm to 8pm on Thursday 17 March, in the River Room on the second floor of the King’s Building, King’s College London. All those with interests in this area are welcome. Wine and other refreshments will be provided. The presentations from Frances and Marie, preceded by a few words from CESK co-director Adam Sutcliffe on the CESK ‘public sphere project’, will be at about 6.30 pm, and will not last more than 30 minutes in total.
In tandem with the project, CESK will also be running a new interdisciplinary reading group, which will look at Habermas’s book and at other texts related to the public sphere theme. An initial organisational meeting is taking place on Wednesday 23 March, from 2 to 3 pm, on MS Teams. Please come along if you are interested in taking part in the group, and would like to have a voice in shaping the format, timing, and readings for the group. Click here to attend the meeting.
If you have any questions, whether about the event or the reading group, please do get in touch via either the CEMS or CESK email address (enlightenment@kcl.ac.uk).