General Information
Course Description
9559 - The Rhythmic Suspension of Disaster - The Spaces and Politics of Modernity - Recently, critical theory has been paying greater attention to the problems of space; for decades, it seemed that the conceptual and political fascination with Time and History had worked to configure Space as somehow "old-fashioned," or "pre-Modern." Indeed, for many thinkers, Space had simply become the empty receptacle for Time. Of course, any cursory investigation into Modernity reveals that the enigmatic, elusive qualities of Space was always already part of the discussion, and that contemporary thinkers have taken up its problematics in any number of different, provocative ways. For example, if space is not a "given," then how is it produced? How does space change our relationship to the world as it is perceived, conceived, and lived? What happens to our ideas of the body? Of the body politic? Of Culture? Of Modernity, Postmodernity, and Globalization? We will work to situate these questions in texts by such thinkers as Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Henri Lefebvre, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Edward Soja, Homi Bhabha, Jameson, and Hardt and Negri.
