Instructor: N. Tadiar
Since the modern recognition of the historicity of arrangements of collective existence, scholars have sought to understand different kinds of social formation and their underlying laws of organization and cohesion. “Cultures,” as ‘whole ways of life,’ has been an abiding concept for thinking not only about the complexity, variability and dynamic movement of the material social relations comprising distinct communities but also about symbolic, communicative, representational and performative practices (art, literature, photography, film) and their production of an ‘inner,’ immaterial life of shared meanings and experiences.
This course explores theories of forms of life, human and social, which have been seen to develop in the course of a global history of contemporary modernity, with an attention to the role of aesthetics and affect, communication technology and built form in shaping and expressing dominant as well as marginalized and/or alternative forms of sociality, subjectivity and collective being and experience. We will examine several scholarly literatures that deal with issues of beauty, embodiment, sensory experience, pleasure, pain, subjectivity and structures of feeling, and their relations to questions of gender and power, social order and struggle, and historical change. We will also look at questions of biopolitics, violence and the limits and possibilities of different humanist and post-humanist conceptions of “life” for understanding politics in contemporary contexts.
Readings include Marx, Benjamin, Buck-Morss, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Rancière, Esposito, as well as contemporary feminist ethnography of Southeast Asia.
