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Copy to Clipboard. Add italics as necessaryCite as: Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, and Claudia Peppel, ‘Introduction’, in Breaking and Making Models, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, and Claudia Peppel, Cultural Inquiry, 33 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 1–17 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.37050/​ci-33_00>
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IntroductionChristoph F. E. HolzheyORCID, Marietta KestingORCID, and Claudia PeppelORCID

A model can be an object of admiration, a miniature or prototype, an abstracted phenomenon or applied theory, a literary text — practically anything, from a human body on a catwalk to a mathematical description of a system. It can elicit desire, provide understanding, guide action or thought. Despite the polysemy of the term, models across disciplines and fields share a fundamental characteristic: their effect depends on a specific relational quality. A model is always a model of or for something else, and the relation is reductive insofar as it is selective and considers only certain aspects of both object and model. The literary examples of maps made to the scale of a territory, described by Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges, humorously point to the absurdity of thinking that models keep improving by becoming less reductive until they eventually coincide with their target.1

Critical discussions of models often revolve around their restrictive function. Such critiques can draw on the notion of scientific paradigms, referring to accepted models that cohere in totalizing,Beginning of page[p. 2] self-reinforcing worldviews, presenting models of reality and at the same time serving as models for the development of further models.2 Paradigms articulate problems and solutions deemed exemplary by a community of scientists, thereby rendering alternative approaches increasingly implausible and marginal. Feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches have put forth powerful critiques of the oppressive function of identity models. In recent debates about the wider consequences of data-driven technologies, artificial intelligence is again and again found to reproduce entrenched biases, and its predictive models are said to flatten history into a pre-stabilized present.

And yet models are less prescriptive or definitive and more ambiguous than codified rules or norms. In the sciences, they are usually considered more modest, tentative, and local than theories, which are more expansive and aspire to universality.3 Models can indeed be considered as intermediaries between theories and the worlds they help constitute — as creative, partially autonomous tools for understanding and as media of theorizing and worlding.4 Toy models in physics and Beginning of page[p. 3] economics form an intriguing extreme in their deliberately simplistic and arguably non-representational character. At the other end of the spectrum, some models are so complex and messy that they cannot be understood, do not even aim at explanation, and instead promise accurate prediction through (computer) simulation. Somewhere in between are models coordinating several heterogeneous, even mutually incompatible theories in a pragmatically efficacious manner.

What is the role of reduction in modelling practices, and what are its critical potentials? When artists emulate other artists, for example, they do not copy works so much as they model the aesthetic principle that generated those works. This process is by necessity selective and introduces a divergence in the artists’ own artistic output. At least since modernity, the tendency has been not to correct but to amplify this divergence in work after work, thus differentiating an ‘individual style’. In view of histories of camp or drag and associated theories of performativity, one could ask whether oppressive norms based on gender or race can similarly be seen as the basis for divergence. At the same time, such performative practices highlight the precarity of such balancing acts between ironic distancing and affirmation, and raise the question of how subversive or transformative they can ultimately be.

The reductiveness of models facilitates their travelling across historical, disciplinary, cultural, and other boundaries. This may encourage homogenization but can also generate new perspectives, unpredictable transformations, and complex entanglements. One can trace the transfer of evolutionary and morphological models between biology and art history, and one could even extend this analysis to the discourse on memes. If abstract painting has long been discredited for its universalist claims, this stance has recently been re-evaluated with regard to Black abstraction, queer abstraction, and Indigenous abstraction, which may be seen to counter the pressure to represent otherness within an art market that is still largely dominated by the West.5 Technical media such as the phonograph and the telephone Beginning of page[p. 4] provided models of the ‘psychic apparatus’ and its functioning that were foundational to psychoanalysis.

Donna J. Haraway’s cyborgs and feminist science fictions demonstrate how models change with their transposition to different domains and transform these fields in turn, giving rise to new questions and approaches. Such transformations are far from uncontroversial. The digital humanities, for example, have often claimed to do away with the humanities’ reductive focus on canons by importing computational models that allow for scaling up the analysis to encompass discourses in their entire breadth. Conversely, this purely quantitative ‘fix’ to the problem of reduction has in turn been criticized as the ultimate reductionism — one that replaces theoretical models, aesthetic categories, and deliberate prioritizations with mere statistics, providing excessively detailed answers to simplistic questions. Eschewing such reciprocal accusations of reduction, one may rather highlight the wide spectrum of possible reductions and their specific affordances and generative potentials. From big data to the moves towards inclusivity encapsulated in terms such as LGBTQIA2S+, attempts to counter the reductiveness of models through an accumulation of details, cases, and data abound. Debates over theoretical turns or the notion of conceptual personae in philosophy may provide examples at the deliberately reduced end of the spectrum, while diffractive or intersectional models that coordinate the cooperation of different or even mutually exclusive approaches lie somewhere in the middle.Beginning of page[p. 5]

What is the critical purchase of models and how does their generative potential relate to their constitutive reduction? What are the stakes in decreasing, increasing, altering, or proliferating the reductiveness of models? How can one work with and on models in a creative, productive manner without disavowing power asymmetries and their exclusionary or limiting effects?

Model Focus at the ICI Berlin

These questions concluded the project description that the ICI Berlin circulated in the call for its 2022–24 fellowship programme.6 Eleven fellows were appointed across several disciplines, including anthropology; creative writing and poetry; history of science; literary, film, and media studies; law and critical race theory; psychoanalytic theory; sociology; economics; philosophy; and queer and gender studies. During the two years of their fellowship, they dedicated themselves not only to their individual projects, but also to a joint research project, which took shape through a weekly research colloquium and a lecture series, as well as numerous workshops, symposia, and conferences usually conceptualized by smaller subgroups of fellows.

The project description formed the starting point for the common project, and discussion of the rich literature on models in the philosophy and history of science helped develop a common vocabulary for the multidisciplinary group.7 Questions of representation — the roles of idealization and abstraction, analogy and fiction, etc. — have resonated for most contributors, and so have propositions to move beyond a focus on representation towards a more performative dimension. Mary S. Morgan and Margaret Morrison, for instance, regard models as ‘autonomous agents’ and ‘mediators’, and Tarja Knuuttila’s artefactual account considers models as ‘tools’.8 However, the performative dimension of models here remains limited to ‘tools of understanding’Beginning of page[p. 6] or other ‘cognitive functions’.9 Philosophers of science indeed tend to take it for granted that models have an ‘epistemic value’ and worry about its possibility when modelling involves deliberate simplifications and distortions. By contrast, while adopting quite quickly the shift of emphasis from what and how models represent to what they do and enable, the fellowship cohort organized their discussions in three clusters focused on three other kinds of values or functions, namely the political and aesthetic values of models as well as their worldmaking function.

The political value of modelling was explored in contexts ranging from the politics of recognition to the right-wing instrumentalization of genetic studies, and the aesthetic value in contexts ranging from the philosophy of science and language to architecture, installation art, and music therapy. The third cluster explored manifold models of worldmaking in relation to image operations, practices of extraction and archiving, and conditions of war, surveillance, and environmental violence. In a sense, the first two strands came together in the exploration of the worldmaking value or function of models insofar as the politics cluster already involved discussion of how a discipline like economics ‘makes its world’,10 and the aesthetic cluster included an excerpt from José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.11 Muñoz’s take on Nelson Goodman’s classic, Ways of Worldmaking, proved particularly inspiring in giving the notion of worldmaking a ‘performative as opposed to epistemological energy’, that is, in shifting, again, the emphasis from representation and cognition to a more material sense of worldmaking — of making inhabitable worlds, especially for ‘minoritarian people’.12 With such Beginning of page[p. 7] a performative and situated take, the function of ‘worldmaking’ furthermore approaches the notion of ‘worlding’ that the initial project description evoked, especially when it is understood along the lines of the transnational Worlding Public Cultures (WPC) project.13

The Models lecture series provided further inspiration for the collective project.14 It included philosophers of science Knuuttila and Morgan but also explored non-epistemic values and non-cognitive functions of models. Teresa Fankhänel, for instance, presented models in architecture as a powerful tool for testing, constructing, and selling novel architectural ideas. Leigh Raiford showcased how Black Panther Party communications secretary Kathleen Neal Cleaver used photography to make ‘home’ abroad. Nadia Yala Kisukidi’s talk dealt with questions of the Black archive and dreams as necessary to arrive at a model for independence in Congo. These and other topics in the lecture series have not all found their way into this volume; some were dealt with in separate workshops or symposia,15 others are echoed as tacit knowledge, but they all inspired the individual contributions as well as the entire project.

In autumn 2023, the fellowship cohort held a workshop titled ‘Making and Breaking Models’, which focused on how the meaning of models changes as it travels between different domains, and on how a given model is constructed and broken depending on how tightly it Beginning of page[p. 8] is bound to its reference. Opposing the idea that models are mere representations, contributions inquired into their generative properties: to make a model involves abstractions and idealizations that can have very real effects on the target system. Likewise, to break a model often leads to novel theoretical insights, revealing hidden presuppositions and opening up the possibility of making, and breaking, again.16 In the workshop, each paper was followed by a short response from the preceding presenter, creating a circle of interlaced calls and responses — a form meant to evoke, in an experimental and playful manner, the endless iteration of making and breaking, over and over and over again.17

Emerging from this workshop as the second publication within the core project ‘Reduction’,18 the present volume inverts the title to become Breaking and Making Models in order to highlight that ‘breaking’ is part of any process of model building insofar as one always already lives, works, and thinks with models not of one’s own making. In a sense, it thereby extends to modelling Muñoz’s emphasis on ‘disidentification’ and ‘reiteration’,19 which in turn gives performative energy to Goodman’s insistence that ‘worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking’.20 It also resonates with WPC’s emphasis on the ongoing processuality of worlding and of continuous world-opening through deworlding and Beginning of page[p. 9] reworlding.21 The volume furthermore retains the workshop’s circular form and has longer papers interrupted by short responses that are intended to be experimental and associative, bridging topics or acting as new starting points, in order to invite readers to explore new ways of thinking about, and with, models. Further openings and interventions are provided by Marietta Kesting, the research coordinator; Orit Halpern, who took part in the lecture series; and ICI associate member Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, who was a keynote speaker at the conference ‘Models’, organized by World Picture in cooperation with the ICI Berlin.22

Transferring Models Between the Arts and the Sciences

The volume opens with a contribution by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky that reads the initial project description of the ICI Berlin together with one of its implicit references, the distinction between ‘model of’ and ‘model for’ in Clifford Geertz’s ‘Religion as a Cultural System’. It does so in order to distinguish different models of modelling, worlding, or worldmaking: one where models belong to symbol systems that are totalizing and self-reinforcing, and in which ‘the model’s being for and of coincide’; and one where models are ‘deliberately reductive, experimental, playful, and modest’, and function as media for non-exclusive worlding. Moving to concrete examples, the essay ‘Models as Media of Worlding in Sadie Benning and Fernand Deligny’ explores how this tension between different concepts of models informs practices of worlding in two very different cases: Sadie Benning’s artistic and experimental video practice and Fernand Deligny’s extended cinematic life-art experiments with ‘autistic’ children. Both make use of the camera as a tool for (self-)investigation, both aim ‘to change the existing worldviews, which are emotionally and affectively firmly anchored in certain normalizing models’, but neither is against the use of models as such. On the contrary, ‘models play a crucial role for both in their explorations of different forms of worlding’, as Deuber-Mankowsky Beginning of page[p. 10] shows in her analysis of their practices, which are very different but equally reliant on forms of reduction and abstraction: Benning’s Fisher-Price PixelVision camera, for instance, recorded a reduced black-and-white image and was meant to be a toy for children, whereas Deligny and his colleagues used a 16 mm camera — sometimes even without film — that became a silent companion and presence in their daily practice of living together in the mountains.

Julia Sánchez-Dorado proposes ‘Abstraction as Strategy for Worldmaking’ in practices of scientific modelling as much as in aesthetic practices. Her essay begins with the common emphasis on the epistemic and representational function of scientific models and the dilemma of misrepresentation — of how scientific models can be trusted to guide actions if they are known to simplify and distort. It then questions the way in which contemporary philosophy of science typically characterizes abstraction by contrasting it to idealization, understanding it as the epistemologically uninteresting and innocuous ‘omission’ of irrelevant features of a phenomenon represented, rather than as the addition of idealized, deliberately false features. Taking an example from oceanography — Marie Tharp’s map of the ocean floor showing mountainous rifts but no water — and drawing on theorizations of abstract art, Sánchez-Dorado unsettles the opposition between abstraction and idealization and emphasizes the worldmaking potential of abstraction, insofar as it involves — notwithstanding its reductiveness — a creative act of ordering and establishing previously unseen connections between relevant features of the world.

Ross Shields’s contribution moves in the opposite direction, from scientific models to the possibility and challenges of making their insights experienceable through literature. Titled ‘From Climate Model to Climate Fiction’, it focuses on Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, which narrates global warming over the next thirty-odd years. Referencing the theoretical work and interpretive schemas of Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson, Shields argues that Robinson’s novel exerts an ‘operative function’ by means of its formal treatment of three themes taken from climate science and climate politics: the feedback loop between climate scenarios and human behaviour, the impossibility of perceiving global warming as a unified phenomenon, and the difficulty of speaking for non-human actors. Climate fiction Beginning of page[p. 11] not only draws from but extends the work of climate models, inasmuch as it bridges the gap between statistical abstraction and concrete reality via the fictional representation of a hypothetical world.

Questions of understanding and learning from non-human actors — taking them as models and modelling them upon humans — are likewise key to Maria Dębińska’s essay. Further intertwining scientific and aesthetic modelling practices, it evokes the dizzying possibilities of reciprocal modelling. Dębińska focuses on the slime mould Physarum polycephalum as a model organism whose networks have been the object of interdisciplinary studies and artistic interventions for more than two decades. Using Tim Ingold’s typology of lines, she considers different experimental and speculative practices of abstracting and modelling lines of movement traced by humans and slime moulds into networks. She thereby investigates how Physarum is used to model and explore human patterns of movement and vice versa. Exploring how Physarum has functioned as ‘a catalyst for new narratives and imaginaries of the social’, Dębińska argues that, far from anthropomorphizing the slime mould, the effect of these experiments is instead a slimy rendering of the human. This striking reversal draws attention to what the previous two chapters together already suggested, namely the difficulty of fixing what, in a modelling relationship, functions as a model for, or of, what.

Performing Models

The relationality that is essential to modelling is arguably inherently unstable and requires a narrative framing in order to make intelligible both the terms of the relationship and the sense in which they are related. This means in particular that the normative power that is often attributed to models and that is of central concern in the following contributions has less to do with the models themselves than with the narratives in which they are embedded. Model narratives, in turn, succeed in setting norms — or unsettling them — to the extent that they are able to mobilize established narrative models.

In their chapter ‘Persistence: Model Asylum Narratives and a Recognizable “Transgenderness”’, B Camminga engages with the persistent narrative model of the ‘trans travel narrative’. This model, which Beginning of page[p. 12] involves the trope of ‘being trapped in the wrong body’ — a journey on which the body gets ‘corrected’, marking a ‘safe return’ home in both a metaphorical and geographic sense — was established in early trans autobiographical writings in order to make trans existence culturally intelligible, recognizable, and respectable. There have been concerted efforts to break with this model on account of its perpetuation of a pathologizing perspective and normative gender binary, which forecloses other possibilities, such as taking the risk of non-teleological experiments with indeterminacy. Yet, Camminga shows its partial resurgence in recent autobiographical narratives by transgender migrants and refugees from Africa, such as Farah Abdi’s Never Arrive (Somalia/Kenya), Neo L. Sandja’s Right Mind, Wrong Body (Democratic Republic of Congo), and Rizi Xavier Timane’s An Unspoken Compromise (Nigeria). Adhering to the more recent model of the asylum narrative, these texts cannot dispense with the recognizability, legibility, and intelligibility of the wrong body narrative as their protagonists seek to convince refugee determination officers of their asylum claims. At the same time, they break with the ‘safe return’ model to produce what Camminga terms the ‘unsafe return’: highlighting ‘home in exile’, this model is structured on indeterminacy and is only made possible through the risky exploit, the daring journey to freedom, that undergirds trans becoming.

Shifting to the role of anthropological race-making in the history of biology, Ben Woodard explores the complex ways in which competing modelling schemes in biology align with different politics and ethics. More specifically, he asks to what extent the importation of statistical modelling into biology in the 1930s, where it contributed to establishing the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory while shifting focus from the study of model organisms to populations, remains tethered to the then-pervasive eugenical thinking. Titled ‘The Statistical Cloud of Race: Lancelot Hogben’s Anti-Eugenics between Populations and Organisms’, this essay interlaces an account of Hogben’s scientific work with biographical elements of his political fight against eugenics in the first half of the twentieth century, showing how the kind of knowledge that he mobilized has become even more relevant in recent efforts to decolonize biological and statistical knowledge. While Woodard notes that statistical models are neither useless Beginning of page[p. 13] nor inherently normative, malicious, and politically bankrupt, he stresses that their use in a racist science cannot be reduced to personal bias or an ideological misappropriation. Rather, he highlights how Hogben mistrusts scientific claims to neutrality while retaining it as a goal, and how he sought to ‘clean’ statistical concepts and research through careful distinctions and attention to their subtle functions, such as their use in justifying political authority by helping to confirm preconceptions, cloaking them in apparent neutrality, and making them immune to revision.

Alina-Sandra Cucu highlights the performativity of statistical models that fail to describe reality but help bring about the conditions of their applicability. Providing a case study on ‘Articulations of the Romanian Labour Market in the Long 1990s’, her essay ‘Crises in Modelling’ shows how labour market models were rather useless in illustrating what was happening during the transition in post-socialist Romania from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, but nonetheless succeeded in working performatively, as promissory utterances, insofar as they were instrumental in bringing about the reality they were supposed to depict. While Western econometrics takes the timeless figure of Homo economicus — the self-interested, fully informed, rational agent of neoclassical economics — as its reference point, Cucu amplifies the views of economists who have highlighted that such agents can only emerge in relation to a fully functional market and that such a market, in turn, far from being a natural order of things, is a historically contingent, institutionally created arrangement. While one might speak of normativity inhering in neoclassical economic models, Cucu concludes by stressing that models are not performative by themselves but come with their own stories and are ‘narrative in nature’. Their success relies on a number of actors — which in her case study includes the surprising role of trade unions in pushing for privatization — and ‘depends upon the outcome of political struggles’ that include ‘the politics of knowledge production within the field of economics’.

That models do not merely represent the world but create it, and, more specifically, that ‘models make markets’ is also stressed in Orit Halpern’s contribution. Moving to New York City, the world’s financial centre, her essay ‘Models, Markets, and Artificial Intelligence’ sketches Beginning of page[p. 14]‘A Brief History of our Speculative Present’. It also emphasizes the push towards free market models against any form of state planning but characterizes the model agent rather differently. The reconfiguration of human agency and decision-making that Halpern identifies and associates with a longer neoliberal tradition involves breaking with the model of the conscious, well-informed, rational agent privileged since the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century and — we might add — underlying neoclassical economics. The new model reimagines human intelligence as machinic and networked, takes for granted that any individual has limited information and is incapable of making reasoned, objective decisions, and relies instead on the rationality and self-regulation of algorithms and markets to coordinate dispersed information and embody a superior networked intelligence. Halpern’s essay traces this development to the neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek, who inherited his idea of environmental intelligence from psychologist Donald O. Hebb’s neural network model, and links it, by way of a joint background in cybernetics and engagement with the learning models of psychologist Frank Rosenblatt, to the development of machine learning and AI. It concludes by highlighting the disavowal of the possibility of representation and the work it takes to maintain a belief in markets as quasi-divine forces of nature with unlimited possibilities of evolution through chance and emergence, provided that they are not constrained by consciousness, planning, or calls for justice and equity.

Marietta Kesting’s essay discusses some aspects of large language models (LLMs) in 2023 that use a type of machine learning called ‘deep learning’, and that model human speech and text in English. Her essay problematizes operations of learning, ‘parroting’, and mimicry. Kesting points out analogies and differences between modelling language in current AI applications and learning processes in children, as they play out in discussions of human versus machine intelligence and creativity and their translation into popular discourses. LLMs were often described by human authors in 2023 as comparable to human intelligence, but only to that of a small child. These descriptions were evidence of the human commentators projecting qualities of human understanding and learning into the language models. Kesting suggests that the anthropomorphizing perspective often employed in these debates Beginning of page[p. 15] is the legacy of Turing’s model of machine intelligence, which had suggested that the simulation of human intelligence by a machine is key and sufficient for it to pass as intelligent, as described in his well-known ‘Turing Test’. Current debates about AI creativity and learning are haunted by these reductive models of education and schooling, as well as postcolonial power asymmetries and the question of ‘proper’ language use versus local variations or accents, the written versus the oral, and the notion that animals, formerly colonized people, and machines supposedly only imitate ‘correct’ language.

Modelling at the Margins

While problematizing the normative performativity of models that have become dominant, the preceding contributions already imply the possibility of making alternative models that break with the dominant ones. The final contributions are more focused on the possibilities of creative and precarious processes of minor modelling at the margins of normative models. They analyse unique instances of the remaking of models that thereby challenge pre-existing standards or the status quo. While each contribution draws from a specific and separate field, they share an insistence on disturbing dominant models, especially heteronormative and anthropocentric ones, as well as an attention to the ambiguous power of language and an emphasis on the worldmaking performativity of non-hegemonic models, whether in judicial institutions, the literary canon, psychoanalytic theory and art, or in the (re)naming of queer identities in South Africa.

Natascia Tosel’s contribution focuses on the possibility of remaking normative models within institutions. Titled ‘Modelling Institutions, Instituting Models: The Juridification of Politics and the Performative Power of Naming’, it starts from Gilles Deleuze’s claim that institutions perform a social activity of constituting and imposing models of conduct on both bodies and minds. The essay analyses three main paradigms in which this modelling activity has been conceptualized in political theory. The first is a ‘sovereign’ performativity that attributes the efficacy of institutional language entirely to the authority and legitimacy of the speaking subject. The second is a ‘subversive’ performativity that, drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of the iterability of Beginning of page[p. 16] speech acts, opens legal and institutional discourse to the possibility of resignification, namely a reclaiming of the name through which a group is traditionally stigmatized or excluded from power. The third is a properly ‘instituting’ performativity that, following Pierre Bourdieu’s analyses in The Force of Law, identifies the power of naming with a power of form. This entails a ‘calling into being’ of both a name and the vision of the world that it implies. Tosel argues that this instituting performativity, wherein models are construed as previsions of the world, enables a better understanding of the current relationship between law and politics. Indeed, she interprets the increasing use of legal language to address political issues — referred to as the ‘juridification of politics’ — as a symptom of intensified worldmaking activity within institutions, rather than its neutralization.

The ambiguous position of language in relation to repressive models of the human is the subject of Marta Aleksandrowicz’s essay, titled ‘Aesthetic Modelling at the Limit of the Human Montage’. Exploring the psychoanalytic work of Willy Apollon and the creative work of the artist Lygia Clark and the writer Clarice Lispector to rethink the human through an aesthetic lens, Aleksandrowicz shows how all three oppose the dominant anthropocentric, individualistic, and self-enclosed model of the human established by what Apollon and Lispector respectively call the ‘cultural montage’ and ‘human montage’. While Apollon locates the human outside the cultural montage that controls and represses unconscious desire and creativity, Clark’s sculpture series Bichos and Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. model the human as a different, transindividual kind of montage. This transindividual montage is supported through the aesthetic practice of breaking prevailing models of language, subjectivity, and sculpture; it not only disrupts the anthropocentric, individualistic model of the human, but also problematizes other models that risk arresting the human on either side of the historically, culturally, socially, or economically predetermined subject/object, oppressor/victim binary. Aleksandrowicz concludes by noting that the two kinds of montages discussed — the cultural/human and the transindividual — correspond to different conceptions not only of the human but also of the model, and suggests that the transindividual model of modelling would not be possible without the aesthetic.Beginning of page[p. 17]

Mark Anthony Cayanan’s contribution engages with Jahan Ramazani’s contemporary model of the lyric, which is ‘intergeneric, transnational, [and] translingual’. Situating the discussion within the context of the author’s own creative practice and, more broadly, Philippine anglophone literary production, the essay analyses how Ramazani’s model accommodates — and is indeed affirmed by — exophony, that is, the practice of literature written in a language that is not the author’s native tongue. The intergeneric and transnational qualities of the contemporary lyric emerge in its exophonic iteration through the communion of various traditions: the transplanted tradition of the lyric and one drawn from vernacular poetics. Scrutiny of Cayanan’s own creative production also exhibits how the ‘compressed heteroglossia’ located within the lyric — the paradoxical fusion of multiple voices and registers into an ostensibly singular enunciatory phenomenon — may be deployed to signify cultural irreconcilabilities. Finally, sample poems from the author’s work in progress supplement the essay’s preoccupation with articulating a poetics of the exophonic lyric.

The volume’s final chapter, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse’s ‘Towards a Genealogy of Moffie: Troubling the Binary Model of Understanding either Homosexuality or Homophobia as Un-African’, historicizes the Southern African word moffie, which was customarily used as a pejorative marker for individuals read as effeminate men. Over the past few decades, the term has been somewhat reclaimed as a defiant self-descriptor. Foregrounding the word’s predominance in relation to communities that were legally classified ‘coloured’ under apartheid, Ramsden-Karelse begins to advance an alternate genealogy of moffie, sketched in relation to two ‘scenes’: first, moffie’s use in the 1990s by academic researchers seeking historical precedent for newly articulated claims to gay rights; second, print media’s mid-twentieth-century constitution of ‘Cape Moffies’ as a distinct social class onto which political anxieties were projected. Considered together, these scenes reveal complex and non-linear formational processes of descent and emergence that importantly underscore the misleading nature of the debate about what is ‘un-African’. While the terms of this debate have limited the possible answers to the alternative of homosexuality or homophobia, a critical genealogy of moffie points to an underlying sexualization of racialization and highlights its specific contingencies.Beginning of page[p. 18] The chapter thereby presents one more example of the many ways in which inherited models of representation and understanding may be broken and the possibility opened to make them — and thus the world — anew.

Notes

  1. See Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), pp. 509–749 (pp. 616–17); and Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Of Exactitude in Science’, in Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, trans. by Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 139. ↵
  2. The allusions here are to Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, intro. by Ian Hacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), for the association of models, paradigms, and self-reinforcing worldviews; and to Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 87–125 (especially pp. 93–94), for the influential distinction between ‘model of’ and ‘model for’. ↵
  3. See, for example, Roman Frigg and Stephan Hartmann, ‘Models in Science’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/models-science/> [accessed 10 December 2024]. The fourth section, titled ‘Models and Theory’, notes that philosophers of science have found it difficult to systematize such a distinction and outlines the various ways in which the relationship between theory and models has been conceptualized. At one end of the spectrum the encyclopedia entry places the ‘syntactic view’ of theories as axiomatic systems, which models merely interpret, and at the other end the ‘semantic view’ of theories as ‘families of models’. ↵
  4. Borrowing from Models as Mediators: Perspectives on Natural and Social Sciences, ed. by Mary S. Morgan and Margaret Morrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1017/​CBO9780511660108>, this sentence already gestures beyond a purely cognitive approach to models — focused on representing and learning about theories and the world — towards their role in making not only theories but also worlds. The vocabulary of ‘worlding’ is partially inspired by the ICI Berlin’s collaboration with the transnational project Worlding Public Cultures (WPC, see https://www.worldingcultures.org/). This collaboration, which is still ongoing through the WPC chapbook series published by ICI Berlin Press, included a workshop examining the multiple understandings of the concept of ‘worlding’. Organized by Birgit Hopfener and Ming Tiampo in collaboration with Annette Bhagwati and Alexandra Chang, the workshop took place within the symposium ‘Co-Constituting the Global: Ethical Challenges and Implications’ at the ICI Berlin on 22 June 2018 as part of GAX 2018 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e180622>. ↵
  5. David J. Getsy contributed to the first instantiation of the core project ‘Reduction’ with the talk ‘Reduction as Expansion: The Queer Capacities of Abstract Art’, ICI Berlin, 1 February 2021. The video recording is available at <https://doi.org/10.25620/e210201>. See also his book Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); and his essay ‘Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction’, in Queer Abstraction, ed. by Jared Ledesma (Des Moines, IA: Des Moines Art Center, 2019), pp. 65–75. On Black abstraction, see, for example, Margo Natalie Crawford, ‘The Politics of Abstraction’, in Crawford, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017), pp. 42–81 <https://doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252041006.003.0003>; and on Indigenous abstraction, see Jason Baerg, ‘Indigenous Abstraction: A Vehicle for Visioning’, in The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada, ed. by Heather Igloliorte and Carla Taunton (New York: Routledge, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003014256>; and the exhibition Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1945–1975 at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, 26 February–28 May 2023 <https://thewestmoreland.org/blog/action-abstraction-redefined-modern-native-art-1945-1975> [accessed 10 December 2024]. ↵
  6. ‘Models: ICI Focus 2022–24 of the Core Project “Reduction”’, ICI Berlin, 13 November 2021 <https:/​/​www.ici-berlin.org/​projects/​models/​> [accessed 20 August 2024]. Special thanks go to Jakob Schillinger, who was then research coordinator of the ICI Core Project Reduction, for significantly contributing to the project description. ↵
  7. See Frigg and Hartmann, ‘Models in Science’, and references therein. ↵
  8. Models as Mediators, ed. by Morgan and Morrison; Tarja Knuuttila, ‘Modelling and Representing: An Artefactual Approach to Model-Based Representation’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 42.2 (2011), pp. 262–71 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2010.11.034>. ↵
  9. See the section ‘Epistemology: The Cognitive Functions of Models’ in Frigg and Hartmann, ‘Models in Science’. ↵
  10. Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes its World’, European Journal of Sociology, 46.2 (2005), pp. 297–320 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S000397560500010X>. ↵
  11. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity [2009], 10th anniversary edn (New York: New York University Press, 2019). ↵
  12. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 195–96. ↵
  13. The WPC project draws on Martin Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ [1950], in Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins Modern Classics, 2001), pp. 15–86; but also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives’, History and Theory, 24.3 (1985), pp. 247–72 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.2307/​2505169>; Sarah Hunt, ‘Ontologies of Indigeneity: The Politics of Embodying a Concept’, Cultural Geographies, 21.1 (2014), pp. 27–34 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1177/​1474474013500226>; and Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1515/​9780822374534>. See Birgit Hopfener and Ming Tiampo, ‘Worlding Global Art Histories’, Texte zur Kunst, 128 (2022), pp. 146–51; as well as their introduction to Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization, and the volume Worlding Concepts, ed. by Paul Goodwin and Ming Tiampo, both forthcoming within the WPC book series at ICI Berlin Press. ↵
  14. All the talks in the Models lecture series are available as video recordings. They are listed and linked on the ICI Berlin website at <https://www.ici-berlin.org/series/models-lecture-series-2022-23/> and <https://www.ici-berlin.org/series/models-lecture-series-2023-24/>. ↵
  15. See the ICI Berlin website for an overview of events related to the Models focus: <https://www.ici-berlin.org/projects/models/>. ↵
  16. See ‘Making and Breaking Models’, workshop, ICI Berlin, 16–17 October 2023 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e231016>. ↵
  17. In this sense the workshop and its form resonate with those leading to the publications of Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-15>; and Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-21>. ↵
  18. See the ICI Website for the description of the core project ‘Reduction’ <https://www.ici-berlin.org/projects/reduction/>. See also The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25>. ↵
  19. Cf. Muñoz, Disidentifications, p. 196: ‘Disidentificatory performance’s performativity is manifest through strategies of iteration and reiteration. Disidentificatory performances are performative acts of conjuring that deform and re-form the world. This reiteration builds worlds’ (emphasis in the original). ↵
  20. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1978), pp. 6 and 7 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.5040/​9781350928558>. ↵
  21. See Hopfener and Tiampo, ‘Introduction’, in Worlding the Global. ↵
  22. See ‘Models: World Picture Conference’, ICI Berlin, 17–18 November 2023 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e231117>. ↵

Bibliography

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  2. Baldacci, Cristina, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, eds, Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-21>
  3. Borges, Jorge Luis, ‘Of Exactitude in Science’, in Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, trans. by Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 139
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  7. Fankhänel, Teresa, ‘Analog World-Modelling: Anticipating a Post-War World Through Architectural Models’, lecture, ICI Berlin, 8 January 2024, Models lecture series <https://doi.org/10.25620/e240108>
  8. Frigg, Roman, and Stephan Hartmann, ‘Models in Science’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/models-science/> [accessed 10 December 2024]
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  17. Holzhey, Christoph F. E., and Jakob Schillinger, eds, The Case for Reduction, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25>
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