What this course is about.

The completely uninformative answer to this question is "aesthetic theory."

For me, humanistic theory is a way of questioning concerning a topic which takes the basic form, what is x? This questioning requires at its foundation an ability to be surprised by your investigations, or a willingness to find out you didn't know what x is. And not knowing in advance what your object is means also not knowing what the form of your answer will be. Theory is a way of paying attention to a small part of the world, of cultivating wonder at it, and then of attempting to be articulate about what you discover. (Another way of saying this is that in my view, all theory is phenomenology. Which would make me some enemies here and there. Including some of the thinkers I've assigned this semester.) In this I take it the distance between humanistic theory and artistic practice is not that great. The rules for what counts as "articulate" are different, but the attitude of wonder and a willingness to be surprised—it seems to me these are a sort of common ground.

But that's not really what this course is about; that's how I see what I do as a theorist. But the point of the course is not to train you to do theory (something I'm not remotely sure I could begin to do)—you aren't in (art, design) school to be theorists. (Although you are in school, in part, to learn how to be articulate about your varying practices.) What we'll be doing is encountering what other people have found out when they attempted to ask this question (or something like it) and to be articulate about it.

In curating these texts, I have worked to bring together mostly theorists and philosophers, and a few historians, artists, and revolutionaries, whose way of proceeding with the question what is aesthetics? looks more like, what do aesthetics do?, or even, what is the field of action that the term 'aesthetics' names? To the extent that this is a course in critical aesthetic theory, this is theory which believes that aesthetics matters, that it has effects in the world. And that, therefore, there is both an ethics and a politics to such aesthetics.

I'm being frustratingly obscure, I know. What do I mean by aesthetics? Well, that's what I mean to find out this semester with you. I'll be a wee bit irresponsible and tell you what I think, at least as a baseline position, as the background for the course. My position is that aesthetics names the part of perception which is left over once you finish accounting for every possible functionalist description of perception, action, being-in-the-world. Kant says (more or less) that art is purposive purposelessness. Which you could rewrite as "the intentional manipulation of that part of perception which cannot be reduced to function." (Of course, what Kant says and means is both simpler and more complicated than that. We'll get into that.) Art is of course not the only thing that meets that you could describe that way: perfumery, and cuisine, and masturbation. (We'll end up talking about masturbation this semester, but not perfume. Sorry.)

So what we'll end up studying this semester is the manipulation of perception in ways that are not describable in terms of means-ends, or function, or purpose.

That's incredibly compressed. Apologies. What that means will hopefully become at once much clearer and more complicated as the semester progresses.

Part II: How this course is about what it is about.