10.30.2009

Ideas for free

We need some DJ to juggle Greg Nice vs Barack Obama going "ah oui oui" vs. "ah wee wee". Barack says it at 0:52, Greg Nice says it at 0:49.


10.29.2009

Comm 842 Seminar in Performance and Cultural Studies: Surveillance, Simulation, Spectacle

In this course we will be studying surveillance, simulation, and spectacle as modalities of performance. While Foucault defined disciplinary society in opposition to Debord's society of the spectacle: "Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance," and Baudrillard famously told us to "forget Foucault," how might we think these as three distinct but intertwined elements of a performance assemblage? If we are, as Deleuze suggests, in a "society of control," then what can we make of how we are differently positioned as (not) performers: in surveillance, where we are cast as the coerced performer, in a society of the spectacle where are positioned as the entranced audience, and in the culture of simulation where there is only the second order of reality of the theatrical occasion? In addition to the core texts by Baudrillard, Debord, and Foucault, we will look at a broad range of sites where these technologies operate as fundamental elements of daily life, as well as how performance as a mode of "rupture" provides a possibility of thinking their destabilization as operations of power.

Required Readings to Include:
Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control
Hartman, Scenes of Subject: Slavery and Self-making in 19th Century America
Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched
Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
Ngai, Made In China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International (selections)
Levin, Frohne, and Weibel, CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (selections)
Duncombe, Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy


Tony Perucci, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

10.19.2009

Work

"Constant, unabiding consistency in approach and patience and firmness in the utmost."

10.17.2009

Basquiat

"The charmed life is about finding feelings where you thought they didn't exist, and religions among the godless. The charmed life is about reflecting on the meaning of 'french sevens'."

10.12.2009

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC




Anne Truitt























Alberto Giacometti





















Also a grid by Agnes Martin that I couldn't get a photo of.

10.07.2009

WS 240 Critical Genealogies: US Studies After American Exceptionalism
Spring 2010
Professor Robyn Wiegman
M 10:05 am- 12:35 pm

In recent years, there has been a conscious effort to redefine "American Studies" in global perspective, leading many scholars to focus not on the mythic over-reach of "America" but on the undertheorized nation-state form figured as the "United States." Much of this work has set itself against Cold War exceptionalist paradigms, repositioning the place of US Studies in relation to both area and identity knowledges on one hand and comparative nationalisms on the other. This course will focus its attention on the challenge of forging an internationalized approach to the US an object of study through four points of intervention. The first concerns resituating the history of the formation of the US outside national narratives of self-becoming. One important way to do this is to consider European colonial contestations over "New World" lands, resources, and people as the eviscerated global history in which the US as a specific entity emerged. The second intervention arises in the comparative reframing of nation-state formation, such that we interrogate the strange ways in which the study of the US in the US university has come to be posed against, even opposite to the "international." The third entails analyzing the various emergent paradigms that seek to turn the study of the US outside of itself, including the post-national, transnational, trans-Atlantic, diasporic, bordered, hemispheric, international, and global. And the fourth requires returning to the "origins" of American Studies in the U.S. university to consider the condition of post-nationality as, paradoxically, the precondition from which "American American Studies" was organized. Throughout the course we will specify what is now called "American American Studies" by paying attention to scholarly discourses and critical projects that arise in studies of the US from around the world.
The Center for Global Studies and the Humanities presents:

De-colonial Aesthesis: A Workshop

The Thesaurus Dictionary offers these definitions of Aesthesis:

aesthesis - an unelaborated elementary awareness of stimulation; "a sensation of touch"esthesis - sensation, sense datum, sense experience, sense impressionperception - the process of perceiving

limen, threshold - the smallest detectable sensation
masking - the blocking of one sensation resulting from the presence of another sensation; "he studied auditory masking by pure tones"

visual sensation, vision - the perceptual experience of seeing; "the runners emerged from the trees into his clear vision"; "he had a visual sensation of intense light"
odour, olfactory perception, olfactory sensation, smell, odor - the sensation that results when olfactory receptors in the nose are stimulated by particular chemicals in gaseous form; "she loved the smell of roses"

gustatory perception, gustatory sensation, taste, taste perception, taste sensation - the sensation that results when taste buds in the tongue and throat convey information about the chemical composition of a soluble stimulus; "the candy left him with a bad taste"; "the melon had a delicious taste"

auditory sensation, sound - the subjective sensation of hearing something; "he strained to hear the faint sounds"

synaesthesia, synesthesia - a sensation that normally occurs in one sense modality occurs when another modality is stimulated

Since the eighteenth century, in Europe, the meaning of the word became associated with “the sensation of the beautiful” and with artistic labor. Art and sensation of the beautiful became synonymous.

From the perspective of the colonies, both concepts and practices were on the one hand alien and on the other hand were instruments for the management of subjectivity (e.g., coloniality of being). These “feelings” never died and today they are erupting in both artistic expressions and in art/literary criticism and history.

(Light dinner will be served)

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Cash Money Millionaires






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