Seminars
Seminar with Elena Tzelepis_Aesthetics in the Political: Antigone as a Stranger in the Polis
Sophocles’ Antigone offers us a way to reflect the underpinnings of dissent, critique, and ethical responsibility. Through Antigone, we will think the social conditions that determine whom we should love and remember, whom we can consider our intimate and how we should love and mourn our beloved ones. We will also think why critical public speech can be threatening to state authorities and/or authoritarian constructions of the law. We intend to go beyond the heroic formulations of Antigone and pose the question of collective civic responsibility and action. Exploring such questions, we are confronted with the perennial question of who belongs to the polis and who does not; who is included and at what price; who is constructed as a pariah, a public enemy, a foreign body; and what the gender, sexual, racial implications of this foreclosure of the public sphere are. Thus, we examine the workings of the ancient Greek polis as well as their resonances with contemporary politics of the democratic polity.
Reading:
Seminar with Pamila Gupta_Critical Oceanic Studies
The rise of ocean levels has become a sign of climate change and the Anthropocene. These rising water levels have created a new awareness of the ocean—as one of the last universal commons— and opened up exploration—what is now being called ‘critical oceanic studies’ (Hofmeyr and Bystrom, 2017). While rich traditions of maritime scholarship on human history at sea have traced ‘crossings’ of people, ideas and objects (Chambers, 2008), critical ocean studies ask us to engage with both human and non-human aspects of the ocean, where surface and depth and the materiality and ‘seaness’ of the sea become central points of reflection. This workshop takes recent writings and art from this emerging area of scholarship to think anew and comparatively about oceanic bodies (Mediterranean, Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific).
Readings:
Iain Chambers, Chapter 1: “Many Voices” in Mediterranean Crossings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
Seminar with Dimitris Vardoulakis_Why do we “fight for our servitude as if it were our salvation”? Spinoza and La Boetie on Democracy
I am interested to situate La Boétie and Spinoza within the materialist tradition. In particular, I want to show how they both use a concept of phronesis to make their political point. I will start with a quick account of phronesis from Book VI of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and then the Epicurus fragments in Diogenes Laertius, so as to situate La Boétie and Spinoza’s position. I want to note in particular how phronesis is associated with instrumental thinking. It is a kind of judgment that takes into account means and ends relations. At the same time, as La Boétie and Spinoza well recognize, phronesis, or instrumental rationality, also requires a concept of power. The most difficult question here is, why do people fail to think instrumentally? Or, differently put, why do people fail to use their phronesis? Without tackling this question, a materialist politics can never hope to aspire to democracy.
Readings:
Seminar with Alexandros Kioupkiolis_The Commons as an Alternative Paradigm of Collective Life
The idea of the 'commons' has emerged in the last two decades as an alternative to both state governance and the competitive, profit-driven logics of the market. The commons refer to self-governed communities which create or manage a collective good on ecologically sustainable, fair and democratic terms. In reading the two texts, your objective should be to understand the problems which the commons can address and the alternative logics they embody in politics, the economy, our relation to the environment, and the city.
Readings:
Seminar with Athena Athanasiou_States of Emergency and Agonistic Politics: Toward a ‘Not Yet’ of Democratic Imagination
Like Marx and Engels, who began their Communist Manifesto (1848) by invoking a spectre haunting Europe, which they called communism, Jacques Derrida started off his Specters of Marx by conjuring ghosts – in the plural. He also cited a revolutionary Marxist: Walter Benjamin’s “weak messianic force” (the 2nd thesis On the Concept of History) was enlisted to instantiate radical possibility: one that has not been actualized and yet remains with us. The term “weak” indicates the contingent character of the messianic: messianic force is intimately related to messianic unforce (the incomplete, the failed, the defeated). The unanticipated possibility for the politics of agonism becomes the site of what Judith Butler calls “opening up the possibility of agency” (1997: 15). Agency, however, does not indicate the restoration of a sovereign individual subject of speech and action, but rather the aporia of subjectivation.
Reading:
Seminar with Patricia Dailey_Disruptive Performances: Fred Moten and the Black Radical Tradition
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons is a kind of poetic manifesto, a reflection both philosophical and social on forms of living and resistance that stem from the black radical tradition. This seminar will aim to further our understanding of the movement this book engages by means of its references to music, flight, negation, Fanon, Deleuze, Marx, and the haptic. We will try to parse out the ways in which Moten and Harney are both offering a critique of and a trajectory for radical social action. Our seminar will simply try to work out what is being asked of us, in relation to thought, feeling, sound, and action, and how it understands the legacy of the black radical tradition today.
Reading:
Sophocles’ Antigone offers us a way to reflect the underpinnings of dissent, critique, and ethical responsibility. Through Antigone, we will think the social conditions that determine whom we should love and remember, whom we can consider our intimate and how we should love and mourn our beloved ones. We will also think why critical public speech can be threatening to state authorities and/or authoritarian constructions of the law. We intend to go beyond the heroic formulations of Antigone and pose the question of collective civic responsibility and action. Exploring such questions, we are confronted with the perennial question of who belongs to the polis and who does not; who is included and at what price; who is constructed as a pariah, a public enemy, a foreign body; and what the gender, sexual, racial implications of this foreclosure of the public sphere are. Thus, we examine the workings of the ancient Greek polis as well as their resonances with contemporary politics of the democratic polity.
Reading:
- Butler, Judith. Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Seminar with Pamila Gupta_Critical Oceanic Studies
The rise of ocean levels has become a sign of climate change and the Anthropocene. These rising water levels have created a new awareness of the ocean—as one of the last universal commons— and opened up exploration—what is now being called ‘critical oceanic studies’ (Hofmeyr and Bystrom, 2017). While rich traditions of maritime scholarship on human history at sea have traced ‘crossings’ of people, ideas and objects (Chambers, 2008), critical ocean studies ask us to engage with both human and non-human aspects of the ocean, where surface and depth and the materiality and ‘seaness’ of the sea become central points of reflection. This workshop takes recent writings and art from this emerging area of scholarship to think anew and comparatively about oceanic bodies (Mediterranean, Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific).
Readings:
- Kerry Bystrom and Isabel Hofmeyr, “Oceanic Routes: (Post-it) Notes on Hydro-Colonialism,” Comparative Literature (2017), 69(1): 1-6.
- Elizabeth Deloughrey, “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene,” Comparative Literature (2017), 69(1): 32-44.
- Rachel Price, “Afterword: The Last Universal Commons,” Comparative Literature (2017), 69(1): 45-53.
Iain Chambers, Chapter 1: “Many Voices” in Mediterranean Crossings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
Seminar with Dimitris Vardoulakis_Why do we “fight for our servitude as if it were our salvation”? Spinoza and La Boetie on Democracy
I am interested to situate La Boétie and Spinoza within the materialist tradition. In particular, I want to show how they both use a concept of phronesis to make their political point. I will start with a quick account of phronesis from Book VI of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and then the Epicurus fragments in Diogenes Laertius, so as to situate La Boétie and Spinoza’s position. I want to note in particular how phronesis is associated with instrumental thinking. It is a kind of judgment that takes into account means and ends relations. At the same time, as La Boétie and Spinoza well recognize, phronesis, or instrumental rationality, also requires a concept of power. The most difficult question here is, why do people fail to think instrumentally? Or, differently put, why do people fail to use their phronesis? Without tackling this question, a materialist politics can never hope to aspire to democracy.
Readings:
- De La Boétie, Étienne. Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2012 (1735).
- Spinoza, Baruch. Preface. Theological-Political Treatise, Gebhart ed., 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991 (1670)
Seminar with Alexandros Kioupkiolis_The Commons as an Alternative Paradigm of Collective Life
The idea of the 'commons' has emerged in the last two decades as an alternative to both state governance and the competitive, profit-driven logics of the market. The commons refer to self-governed communities which create or manage a collective good on ecologically sustainable, fair and democratic terms. In reading the two texts, your objective should be to understand the problems which the commons can address and the alternative logics they embody in politics, the economy, our relation to the environment, and the city.
Readings:
- Ostrom, Elinor, “Tragedy of the commons,” in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics Online, 2008.
- “On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides,” flux journal # 17, 2010.
Seminar with Athena Athanasiou_States of Emergency and Agonistic Politics: Toward a ‘Not Yet’ of Democratic Imagination
Like Marx and Engels, who began their Communist Manifesto (1848) by invoking a spectre haunting Europe, which they called communism, Jacques Derrida started off his Specters of Marx by conjuring ghosts – in the plural. He also cited a revolutionary Marxist: Walter Benjamin’s “weak messianic force” (the 2nd thesis On the Concept of History) was enlisted to instantiate radical possibility: one that has not been actualized and yet remains with us. The term “weak” indicates the contingent character of the messianic: messianic force is intimately related to messianic unforce (the incomplete, the failed, the defeated). The unanticipated possibility for the politics of agonism becomes the site of what Judith Butler calls “opening up the possibility of agency” (1997: 15). Agency, however, does not indicate the restoration of a sovereign individual subject of speech and action, but rather the aporia of subjectivation.
Reading:
- Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Seminar with Patricia Dailey_Disruptive Performances: Fred Moten and the Black Radical Tradition
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons is a kind of poetic manifesto, a reflection both philosophical and social on forms of living and resistance that stem from the black radical tradition. This seminar will aim to further our understanding of the movement this book engages by means of its references to music, flight, negation, Fanon, Deleuze, Marx, and the haptic. We will try to parse out the ways in which Moten and Harney are both offering a critique of and a trajectory for radical social action. Our seminar will simply try to work out what is being asked of us, in relation to thought, feeling, sound, and action, and how it understands the legacy of the black radical tradition today.
Reading:
- Harney, Stefano & Moten, Fred. The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Winenhoe/New York/Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013.
Methodological Workshops
Methodological Workshop with Petros Petridis_Machinima as Experimental Ethnographic Medium
The workshop focuses on the genre of machinima (machine + cinema), videos and movies produced through the capturing and editing of audiovisual material from the virtual worlds of video games.
During the workshop:
Methodological Workshop with Juan Orrantia_Expanded Documentary
An overview of experimental documentary/ethnography and contemporary photography works that question the canons and engage problems of traditional documentary.Through them we will discuss the political possibilities and uses of fiction, appropriation, ambiguity and non-linearity for engaging “the real”. Emphasis will be on the interplay between form and content.
If participants are working on a project involving photography, audio, film/video or multimedia we can devote a section of the workshop in the form of a crit session to go over the material.
Readings:
In preparation also look at these works/artists:
The workshop focuses on the genre of machinima (machine + cinema), videos and movies produced through the capturing and editing of audiovisual material from the virtual worlds of video games.
During the workshop:
- We will focus on the political aspects of the practice of machinima creation. We will examine the conflicts that have taken place related to intellectual property rights and the free fan labor involved in producing this material.
- We will learn how to create a machinima.
- We will examine the potential methodological implications of machinima as a cultural archiving technique and as a medium of ethnographic representation.
- Lowood, Henry and Michael Nitsche. “Video Capture : Machinima, Documentation, and the History of Virtual Worlds” (ch. 1) and “Tangible Narratives: Emerging Interfaces for Digital Storytelling and Machinima” (ch. 6) in The Machinima Reader. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Methodological Workshop with Juan Orrantia_Expanded Documentary
An overview of experimental documentary/ethnography and contemporary photography works that question the canons and engage problems of traditional documentary.Through them we will discuss the political possibilities and uses of fiction, appropriation, ambiguity and non-linearity for engaging “the real”. Emphasis will be on the interplay between form and content.
If participants are working on a project involving photography, audio, film/video or multimedia we can devote a section of the workshop in the form of a crit session to go over the material.
Readings:
- Azoulay, Ariella. Introduction. The Civil Contract of Photography. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.
- Lind, Maria and Hito Steyerl. The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art. Introduction.
- Levi Strauss, David. “Nikons and Icons. Is the aestheticization-of-suffering critique still valid?”, Book Forum, 2007 http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_02/258
- Demos, T. J. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press. (Recommended)
In preparation also look at these works/artists:
- Sensate Journal (http://sensatejournal.com/)
- The Atlas Group Archives by, Walid Raad (www.theatlasgroup.org)
- Taryn Simon // Diana Matar (Evidence)
- Richard Mosse (Infra) https://witness.worldpressphoto.org/incoming-the-collateral-damage-of-conceptual-documentary-a3a389acf8be
- Maya Goded (Plaza de la Soledad)
- Zanele Muholi
