Image

This talk examines the concept of aesthetic perfection against the backdrop of today’s digital mediascape, where the latest screen technologies promise sharp, pristine images with lossless compression and a lifelike appearance. While, in Hito Steyerl’s account, the circulation of “poor” or “imperfect” images can disrupt hegemonic media logics, I demonstrate that the very ideal of perfection is an engine of semantic instability in the modern age. Intervening in contemporary debates about “rich” and “poor” images, and “high” and “low” definition, my lecture offers a differentiated and historically dynamic understanding of perfection as a limit concept in global film and media theory. I argue that moving images played a crucial role in the redefinition of perfection, as classical conceptions of the term gradually and unevenly gave way to perfectionism, perfectibility, and an aesthetics of imperfection. Integrating Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history into the study of moving images, my talk reconceives the history of global film and media theory as one of semantic persistence, change, and radical novelty of meaning.

Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Film & Media, Critical Theory, and Jewish Studies. He is author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) and co-editor of three volumes: The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (University of California Press, 2016), Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and Technics: Media in the Digital Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).

This event is hosted by the Stanford Humanities Center and co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Another turn to the right or more of the same?

Voters in the twenty-seven member states of the European Union head to the polls in early June to elect a new European Parliament for the next five years. Can we expect another victory for the populist right, as we have witnessed in so many recent elections throughout the world? In this talk we discuss the balance of power and policy achievements of the outgoing Parliament, and look ahead at the results we can expect in June. We further consider the implications of the widely expected sharp turn to the right for the functioning of the Parliament and EU policy making. 

Christophe Crombez is a political economist who specializes in European Union (EU) politics and business-government relations in Europe. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, lobbying, party politics, and parliamentary government. 

Crombez is Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (since 1999). He is also Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium (since 1994). Crombez obtained a B.A. in Applied Economics, Finance, from KU Leuven, and a Ph.D. in Business, Political Economics, from Stanford University.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by May 2, 2024.

How do parliamentary norms break down?

How does the presence of extremist parties in parliaments modify parliamentary norms? In this talk, I draw on two recent papers to examine the responses of mainstream politicians to the disruptive strategies of extremist legislators. A first study will examine the dynamics of parliamentary erosion during the Weimar parliament. Using a novel dataset of all calls-to-order, I document the existence of a cycle of provocation-counter provocation that led to the erosion of parliamentary norms in the last years of the Weimar Republic. 

A second paper (co-authored with Qixuan Yang) studies informal interactions in the contemporary German Bundestag during the period between 2017 and 2021. Using a novel dataset of over 25,000 parliamentary speeches, we document a significant erosion of parliamentary norms, as measured by an increase in the number of verbal and nonverbal interruptions. Both legislators from mainstream and extremist parties contribute to this erosion of parliamentary norms. We argue that legislators from mainstream parties use informal attacks on legislators from non-proximate extremist parties to appeal to voters on their extremes and signal a more extreme policy position. We show that the incentives of legislators from mainstream parties to engage in these informal attacks on extremist legislators can be explained by partisan and district-level conditions.

Isabela Mares is the Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She specializes in the comparative politics of Europe. Professor Mares has written extensively on labor market and social policy reforms, the political economy of taxation, electoral clientelism, reforms limiting electoral corruption. Her current research examines the political responses to antiparliamentarism in both contemporary and historical settings.

Professor Mares is the author of five books. These include The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003), Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006), From Open Secrets to Secret Voting (New York: Cambridge University Press 2015), Conditionality and Coercion: Electoral clientelism in Eastern Europe (co-authored with Lauren Young, Oxford University Press 2018) and Protecting the Ballot: How First Wave Democracies Ended Electoral Corruption (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2022)."

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by May 16, 2024.