Blogging Requirements

As part of this course, we will be using a blog, in the place of something like a discussion board on a Blackboard site. In part, this is because it was easier for me as visiting faculty to use free web tools (cf drop.io); and in part, because I really do want what we do to be public. (We can have a discussion about this, however. If folks want our discussions to be more intimate, I can probably be convinced. This will not change the requirement to post/comment, however.) Blog requirements are as follows:

• Every week, you will be required to post something, or comment substantively. "Substantively" here means more than pasting a link, but need not be an essay. Posting can look like an object for our consideration (with some consideration), reactions to the reading, engaged questions, descriptions of your confusions, requests for clarification of said confusions.
• The blog will also serve as a place to post things which might be interesting/provocative/amusing for the rest of us.
• Also, I'll request that when you give your presentation, you'll post related materials (images, clips, text, &c.) about 24 hours ahead of time, so the rest of us can formulate (or at least have) an initial response before arriving in class to discuss your curation.
• Of course, you are also required to follow the blog. This is a communitarian enterprise (or it aspires to be). Make sure
  

(Of course, you will have to have a blogger account for this. I have a list of email addresses of registered students. I will add this list of email addresses as authors to the blog before the first class, but the email addresses I have are all @uic.edu addresses. If you have your own blogger account, or a different email address you'd like me to use instead, let me know and we'll work it out.)

Course Overview

I'll admit up front that, given the circumstances of my being hired to teach this course, the description was written before I knew what I was going to teach. Think of it as artless underdescription. So, I thought I'd give you the high-altitude description of the course (now that the syllabus is complete). Moreover, since I'm going to be out of town on the first day, this also substitutes for the spiel I'd give y'all while you were shopping the course.

There are two parts to this not-spiel:
What this course is about.
How this course is about what it is about.

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.

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.

About Scott

So I'm Scott Richmond, your instructor for the semester. I'm a Ph.D. candidate in the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. My dissertation is called something like, The Exorbitant Lightness of Bodies: Cinema, Phenomenology, and the Illusion of Bodily Movement. At least for the moment. Titles are always moving targets, sometimes even after the fact.

My expertise is primarily in the areas of film theory, sexuality theory, and phenomenology. This means, basically, I spend most of my life figuring out how to pay really close attention to visual pleasure in the cinema, and how to write about it. The simple way of saying this is that I've spent the last eight or so years thinking about how people watch movies. I should perhaps say that listing areas of "expertise" is a bit of a strange exercise for me. I've never been comfortable with disciplines or disciplinary boundaries, and the way I think about the world is incredibly interdisciplinary (some would say dilettantish; I'm not sure I'd disagree). I'm equally uncomfortable in the disciplines of cinema studies, gender & sexuality studies, philosophy, and perceptual psychology.

Relevant, too, for this setting are my backgrounds in a few domains of aesthetic production. Although never particularly good in any of these, I've spent a fair amount of time with graphic design, multimedia installation, and classical voice and music composition. I also have training as a computer scientist & programmer. These knowledges are varying degrees of rusty.

I am very excited to be teaching you this quarter.

For spam/privacy reasons, I have left my contact information off the blog. However, they are on the syllabus. Please don't hesitate to contact me about anything.