Courses

Patricia Ticineto Clough (Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York, USA):

Lecture 1: Post-Phenomenological Subjectivity and the Other than Human: Experimental Writing

Drawing on recent works in critical theory, philosophy and media studies, Clough considers the proposition that digital media and computational technologies are initiating a rethinking of subjectivity in other-than-human terms. Bringing this subjectivity together with human subjectivity, she proposes, requires experimental forms of writing. Clough will present her own experimental writing as example.

Lecture 2: Post-Phenomenological Subjectivity and The User Unconscious

Clough explores the meaning of subjectivity in these times of digital media and computational technologies. Taking up their impact on human consciousness and human perception, Clough addresses the pre-affectivity or liveliness of the environment-itself, or what has been referred to as a “worldly sensibility.”

Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK):

Ahuman Theory: Queer Posthuman Ecosophy

This series of sessions will look at ahuman theory, a theory developed to address the ethical problems and implications of the technofetishism and humanist impulses of post and transhumanism. Utilising queer navigation of identity, artistic practices in relation with activism and grounded in a deeply ecological ideology, ahuman theory asks how can we forsake the privilege inherent in human dominance and domination without fetishising or further co-opting and thus destroying nature? Issues covered include theorising identity beyond gender and sexuality; what constitutes activism; practices of abolitionism (the extreme of animal rights) and antinatalism (human extinction as well as euthanasia) as two forms of anti-identity and anti-capitalism; artistic practices as world changing forms of thinking and thus acting differently. Theorists utilised include Guattari, Serres, Irigaray and Bataille.

Iris van der Tuin (Utrecht University, Netherlands):

The Generative Curriculum

The starting point of this course is the concept of ‘generation’ in both feminist and indigenous theory and in continental philosophy, all of them broadly and inclusively seen, and always in relation to educational practice. The theoretical movements addressed in the lectures and workshops pertain to generational feminism (what would be a feminism grounded in generativity?), teaching with Freire’s generative themes and with/in the transversal relations proposed by indigenous curriculum studies, and the ‘student body,’ ethico-onto- epistemologically conceived. As such, the course brings several theorists and discussions together, not only conceptually, but also practically, as it is understood that engaging with generative curricula cannot be done without classroom experiments or without experimentation with the classroom as other than a linear and enclosed institutional space governed by clock time. First, we will go back to the futures of ‘women’s studies’ in order to explore the necessity of research and teaching entanglement, i.e., of students asking the questions. Second, we will systematically discuss ‘the generative curriculum’ as an indigenous praxis, while leaping out of early childhood bias (Pence et al. 1993) and into the realm of higher education. Thirdly, we will be inspired by conceptualizations of the city as classroom. Where McLuhan (1977) asks, “Let us begin by wondering just what you are doing sitting there at your desk,” Serres ([2012] 2015) observes that students “can no longer sit still in their seats.” These three topics culminate in the following question posed by the philosopher last mentioned: “Who, today, is enrolling in our schools, colleges and universities?” This question will be addressed descriptively, normatively, and visionarily, as well as in relation to feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist didactic innovations such as safe spaces and trigger warnings, and the question will also be put to work so as to collectively work through everyday intersectional subjection and subjectification, and critique and creativity.

Jelena Petrovič (Red Mined – Curatorial Collective) (Serbia):

The Politics of Error

What could today’s art offer for understanding and radicalizing the meaning of freedom beyond the existing society, or more precisely beyond the neoliberal state? For sure, great potential to produce a social glitch that opens a space for political imagination of radically different future, for emancipatory reconceptualization of community, as well for political (re)situating of art production. In other words, today’s art practices could offer the politics of error that interrupts our social reality with a counter-historical emergency, shifting in- between unspoken history and utopian/dystopian future. Dealing with an impossibility to break through artistic, academic or cultural institutional structures, with rare exceptions, the politics of error appears as a symptom of the expiring contemporary arts, whose (post)ideological participatory practices and politicality paradoxically adjust to the system instead to confront it by all means. Such error indicates: dislocation and new location, freedom of experimentation, possibility of failures and many other transgressive promises. Following this symptomatic relation between art and politics through some recent artworks, the lecture will focus on social glitches and political affects that will be contextualized as another turn: the error turn. It is about possible affective ruptures of politically engaged art today, especially when it comes to a syncretic experience (aesthesis) of art in practice.

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