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INSTRUCTOR: Cécile Malaspina
PROGRAM: Art & Curatorial Practice, Critical Philosophy.
CREDIT(S): 2
DATE: Oct 29, Nov 5, 12, 19, Dec 3 , Dec 10, Dec 17, Jan 7.
TIME: 14:00-16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: This Seminar offers multiple lines of inquiry, addressing a commonplace whereby the crafts are frequently presented as uniquely nurturing and preserving local and even national cultural individuality, in contrast with the monoculture brought about by the standardization of modern global capitalist technologies. It questions the intuitive opposition between crafts and technology on at least two fronts. On the one hand, the often promoted idea of crafts as preserving local or national identity belies the complex international networks that have historically enabled not only the exchange of ideas but the provision of specialized materials and tools–recall, for instance, Levi-Strauss’s remark that this is characteristic of humanity, that in its very essence, human and social progress can only exist insofar as different centers of human culture are in contact, that isolated societies are inert societies and that only societies in contact with each other progress (Montaigne après Montaigne, Paris: Ehess, 2016). On the other hand, it is of the utmost urgency today to question also the grounds on which technoscientific rationality is commonly reduced to or held accountable for what Herbert Marcuse called the performance principle of capitalism. One could also argue that this is a facile critique of techno-scientific rationality that concedes too critical a part of human inventiveness to the logic of capitalism.

This Survey Seminar will unite highly original thinkers from fields as diverse as philosophy, engineering, design, political theory, developmental psychology, and aesthetics to reformulate the following problem in line with their own research: (how) can we can rethink and ultimately emancipate the sprawling of contemporary technē from capitalist monoculture and from the inanity of its performance principle, without relying on national particularities as an imagined panacea against alienation?


IMAGE: Malgorzata Mirga-Tas, Phuter o Jakha (Open your eyes), 2020.

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