1 Prof. Allen Feldman Department of Media, Culture and Communication 739 Greene Street af31@nyu.edu tel: 212 998-5096 Office hours Tuesdays 2:30-4:30 pm The Politics of the Gaze: Sensory Formations of Modernity E58.2112 Mondays 04:55pm - 07:05pm Silver 407 The seminar will conduct a multi-site exploration of "the gaze as an everyday life structure, as the sensorial formation of modern experience and personhood, as a material culture of simulation, as geography, as historical memory, as trans-cultural signification and as the production of political scenography and violence. The mediatization and technological development of vision and its dominance over the human sensorium is integral to the emergence of the modern, including experiences of urbanism, consumer desire, spatial experience, gender/sexual identities, race and ethnicity, trans-cultural image systems, aesthetic production and the making of power and political truth claims. This seminar will focus on introducing participants to the core theories and analytic methods of visual culture, and the socio-political history of the human sensorium in a variety of disciplines, including ethnography, social history, urban studies, cinema studies social geography, material culture studies and media studies. Seminar Requirements and Grading: Consistent attendance and participation in class discussion: 10% Mid-Term: 25% End Term Take Home Essay Exam 2 Questions 65% Course Resource Materials: Course Documents Section Blackboard Course Site. Learning Outcomes: Students who successfully complete the course will be able to demonstrate: advanced understanding of research methodologies, vocabularies and procedures appropriate to M.A.-PhD level work in Media Studies and Visual Culture advanced skills in the application of critical and interpretive vocabularies Learn to write a critical literature review developed research, writing and communication skills
2 self-reflexivity as a research practitioner developed ability in identifying and addressing research objectives knowledge of a range of specific critical vocabularies, debates and concerns focused on visual communication, visual culture, media, technology, and cultural studies. 9/8-9/15 Defamiliarizing Media/ Mediating the Gaze Jacques Derrida, 2002 9/9/08 In Negotiations, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Jacques Derrida, 2005 Paper or Me. In Paper Machine, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Recommended Reading Bennet, Tony Grossberg, Larry, Morris Meaghan (2005)The New Keywords Blackwell Publishing, Read all entries before first class 9/22 The Theater of Perception Brighenti, Andrea, (2007) Visibility: A Category for the Social Sciences, Current Sociology: 55: 323-342. Crary Jonathan, 1988 Techniques of the Observer, October 45 Summer pp 3-35 Barthes, Roland, 1977. Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein. In Image Music Text. Hill and Wang. Martin Hiedegger 1976 The Age of the World View Boundary 2 Vol. 4 No.2 340-455. 9/29 The Apparatus Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 1986. Panoramic Travel, The Compartment In the Railway Journey: University of California Press Unbinding Vision October Spring pp 21-44. Crary Jonathan 1994 Unbinding Vision October Spring pp 21-44. Harvey, David, 1989 The Time and Space of the Enlightenment Project.. In Conditions of Postmodernity Basil Blackwell
3 10/6 Piercing and Cutting the Body Junger. Ernst 1993. War and Photography New German Critique No 59, Summer: pp 24-26. Blackboard Document Kaes Anton, (1993). The Cold Gaze: Notes on Mobilization and Modernity. New German Critique No 59, Summer. Tagg John. (1988). Evidence, Truth and Order: Photographic Evidence and the Growth of the State. In The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. University of Minnesota Press. Michel, Foucault 1985 Michel Foucault, 1985 The Spectacle of the Scaffold, Docile Bodies, Panopticism In Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault Vintage Books, Random House. Weizman, Eyal, 2003. The Politics of Verticality."), Open Democracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=2&debateid=45&articleid=801 (Blackboard Documents Section) 10/13-10/14/School Holiday- No Class! 10/20-10/27 Mimetic Circuits 10/20: Midterm Due Walter, Benjamin, 1968. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Shocken Books. Rainer Nagele, 1991 Puppet Play and Traurspiel, The Marquis de Sade Watches the Scene, From Aesthetics to Poetics: Benjamin, Brecht and the Poetics of Caesura. In Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity, Baltimore Johns Von Kleist, Heinrich, 1989 On the Marionette Theater. In Fragments for the History of the Human Body, Part One, New York, Zone Books Bolz Nobert 1999 Farewell to the Gutenberg Galaxy, New German Critique, vol. 78, pp 109-131. 11/3- Reading the City Benjamin, Walter, 1969. Paris Capital of the Nineteenth Century, Perspecta Vol. 12.
4 Buck, Morss, Susan, 1989. Mythic Nature: Wish Image, Dialectics of Seeing, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, MIT Press: 111-158. Hansen Miriam, 1992 Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida Kracauer, New German Critique, no.56 Spring-Summer Bolz, Nobert, van Reign, Willem. (1995) Anthropological Materialism, Media Aesthetics. In Walter Benjamin, New Jersey, Humanities Press. 11/10-11/17 The Othering/ Embodying Gaze Lacan, Jacques 1977. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I. In Ecrits. W.W. Norton and Company. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel 1991. The Statue Man in Lacan: the Absolute Master, Stanford University Press. Hopkins University Press. Bunn, David, 1999. Morbid Curiosities, Mutilation, Exhumation and the Fate of Colonial Painting. Transforming Anthropology. Volume 8 Numbers 1 & 2. Feldman, Allen, 1994. On Cultural Anesthesia From Desert Storm to Rodney King:. American Ethnologist, 21/2. May. Warner,Michael, 2002 The Mass Public and the Mass Subject. In Publics and Counter Publics. Cambridge, Zone Books. 11/24 Violence and Visuality Doherty, Brigid 1997. We are All Neurasthenics or, The Trauma of Dada Montage" Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn. Feldman, Allen,. 1997. Violence and Vision: the Prosthetics, Aesthetics of Terror in Northern Ireland. Public Culture,. Volume 10, No. 1, Fall Foster, Hal, 1996. Death in America: Shocked Subjectivity and Compulsive Visual Repetition." October, Vol. 75 Feldman, Allen, 2005. On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, Cultural Studies Vol. 19, No. 2 March. 12/1-12/8 History s Faces
5 Agamben, Giorgio, 2000 Notes on Gesture, Face. In Means Without Ends, Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press. Richter, Gerhard, 2000 Benjamin s Face: Defacing Fascism. In Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography. Detroit Wayne State University Prtess. Cadava, Eduardo, 1998 Words of Light Thesis on the Photography of History Princeton University Press 12/15 Final Exam Due