Suchergebnisse

Course Description: As that which we call "technology" continues to evolve as both concept and practice, we discover ever more inventive ways to answer its call, and science fiction seems to serve as a universal standpoint from which global societies manage to confront, question, and reimagine the nature of our shared humanity as a radically technical relation. While the growing social pervasiveness of artificial intelligence and the attendant encoded transformations of "the human" appear, together, to form a relatively absolute horizon of political thinking, social agency, and aesthetic experience, it seems certain that our current crisis also offers us possibilities to create more open and egalitarian interpersonal, intercultural, international, and interspecies modes of existence. Our task this semester will be to imagine, think, and explore such possibilities and prepare to activate them within our current and future historical present.

Course Description: Or a conjuncture of three moments in the dialectic of television as technical apparatus and cultural practice. In this course, we will read George Orwell's 1984, view Michael Radford's filmic adaptation of the novel, and consider a number of critical texts in order to think the psychological and social implications of television as an instrument of control, manipulation, and knowledge production. What, we ask, are the implications, in both 1984 and concrete experience, of light-speed communication capabilities for sense perception, consciousness, language, and awareness? In its dissemination of images and information, how does television impede and/or facilitate politics of identity formation, resistance, and social revolution? How does it inform and/or intersect with rhetorical and aesthetic experience? Or, again, how does it structure time, space, production and consumption? How does it determine practices of producing and consuming goods and services? Alluding to McLuhan, what is the status of subjects, objects, and things in the context of television as 'medium' and 'message'? How does television construct and/or deconstruct memory and history.?

Course description: Optics is central to the arts of producing human subjects and governing our spatiotemporal deployment of vital forces. Yet, in the transition of societies from industrial to post-industrial modes of production, there seems to have occurred a parallel shift in governmental focus from merely producing and disciplining subjects at the material level to controlling them at the ideological. In this discussion-driven course, we will turn to works of theory and fiction in order to examine the basic tenets of discipline and control and consider the extent to which these social practices diverge and converge in our present era.