How this course is about what it is about.

The course is organized loosely into four sections. These are not named on the syllabus, since this organization doesn't feel quite strong enough to formalize it quite that much. (But each section does get its own page, which is kind of intentional.) The progression between sections is meant to feel natural, and not "and now for something completely different!"

Part 1: Introduction. Weeks 1–3. This is pretty straightforward. The two weeks are called "What is aesthetics?" and "What is theory?" These are designed to give us a set of common problems (if not common terms) for the rest of the course. And also to give you a sense of where I'm coming from, before we get into the thick of the material.

Part 2: Technology. Weeks 4–7. These four weeks are an exploration of modern technology and its relationship to, and effect on, aesthetics and perception. A traditional notion of techne (which Mumford calls technics) is that it is opposed to art: art is purposeless, techne is suffused with purpose, defined by it. Techne is the manipulation of the world to suit humanity's ends. We will work to progressively complicate this notion, in part by focusing on technology which takes up human perception as its object (or, even in the case of Foucault, human life). Mostly, however, in weeks 5–7, we're concerned to ask after the changes modern technology brings in perception and aesthetics by changing the world, the changes technology brings without explicitly aiming at (the milquetoast version of what we're studying here would be "the law of unintended consequences").

Part 3: Embodiment. Weeks 8–11. These four weeks are dedicated primarily to asking questions around how aesthetics are embodied (a theme broached particularly strongly in Benjamin's work in the section on technology, and continuing in his presence in this section). Here we will move from highly abstract, scientistic notions of the body (in Freud and Bergson) to deeply personal notions of the body (in Barthes). To a large degree, in this section, questions of modernity and modern technology get progressively attenuated here (even if we end with a book on photography), and instead start asking after sexuality, life as it is lived, what aesthetics feels like.

Part 4: Politics. Weeks 12–15. These four weeks ask after what Rancière calls "the distribution of the sensible," the notion that sensibility—here, what can be thought, said, and felt—is the domain of politics, and that aesthetics (in the form of art, or architecture, or new media technologies) can alter this distribution. Aesthetics is politics, literally. The emphasis here shifts to more contemporary theory, and the problem is something like ways of inventing new forms of life (in Wittgenstein's beautifully enigmatic phrase). For all of the thinkers here, a "new form of life" would not be materially, or materiallistically (or whatever the adverbial form of materialist is; I mean to imply Marxism here) new. Rather, it would be more like a change in the atmosphere.

This progression, from technology through embodiment and into politics is something that will, I think, begin to make more sense from the inside. Of course, we will spend an awful lot of time talking about all three topics in all four parts of the course. We will talk more about this in our first session. For now, I wanted to give you a sense of what topics we'll be covering, and, very briefly, how we're going to move through them.