Dualist Techniques For Materialist Imaginaries: Matter and Mind in the 1951 Festival of Britain
| Dates: | 24 November 2015 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Faculty of Life Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Dr Stephen T. Casper |
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This seminar is part of the CHSTM Seminars Series Sept-Dec 2015. CHSTM seminars will be held fortnightly on Tuesdays at 4pm in Room 2.57 Simon Building, Brunswick Street, Manchester, M13 9PL https://goo.gl/maps/RTFk4 with tea and biscuits from 3.30pm. All are welcome and please feel free pass this list on to interested colleagues. The Festival of Britain corresponded to the centenary celebration of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Imagined by the newly-elected government of Clement Atlee as an opportunity to renew national pride and foster patriotism, the Festival sought to celebrate a long history of the British people. At the Festival, exhibits on science, technology, and medicine were especially prominent. On London’s South Bank, the organizers constructed a “Dome of Discovery” focused on the practical benefits of the progress of science in Britain. That gigantic exhibit was augmented by an equally impressive exhibit at the Science Museum in South Kensington. In hindsight, the Science Museum’s exhibit appears to have propounded an unusually materialistic and mechanistic understanding of the world for 1950s Britain. The reductionist metanarrative that organized the overall exhibit invoked in the minds of the audience a simplifying unitary conception of nature, one that built from a sub-atomic universe a whole world of living creatures. Yet in a fascinating way invisible and unacknowledged dualisms haunted the imaginary and evocative world of knowledge engineered within the confines of the Museum’s exhibit. In particular the techniques of persuasion the organizers used to convey their materialistic and mechanistic story to the public ironically relied upon intentionally engineered psychotechnic illusions in assembling the physical space of the exhibit. In this way would a technical dualism ultimately haunt the audience’s materialist and mechanistic experience of matter, life and the nature of the universe.
Speaker
Dr Stephen T. Casper
Organisation: Clarkson University, New York
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
2.57
Simon Building
Manchester
