Reading Group as part of Praxis-CFUL activities
Working language: English
Organizers: Dr. Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (rcanales [at] letras.ulisboa.pt) & Anna de Martino (demartino.anna01 [at] gmail.com)
Where: Sala Pedro Hispano (Departamento de Filosofia) – School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon
When: Wednesdays (and a Monday), from 15h00 to 17h00 (according to the calendar below)
Open activity. To participate, please send an e-mail to the organizers expressing your interest in taking part in the RG.
Description
The ever-increasing centrality of images within modern media culture, increasingly characterised by the massive digitalisation of society and their free and indiscriminate profusion, allows us to speak — to use Mitchell’s words — of a veritable pictorial turn, which has invested every field of knowledge. In this sense, one could speak of a real crisis in the classic systems of information and communication and of the paradigms of knowledge, a crisis that also leads to the disintegration of modern democratic systems. The link between image and politics, and therefore also between image and desire, has been the subject of profound reflection in many philosophers of the last century (see, for example, the thinking developed within the Frankfurt School): in the age of mass culture, the world is characterised by the capitalisation of the image and the constant spectacularization of society, as well as by the progressive emergence of new forms of social control, assisted by the introduction of new dispositifs (Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben), which capture and incessantly regulate the circulation of desire. If we think of the web as a gigantic body without organs on which desire acts, it seems not so difficult to highlight the profound affinity between visual culture and dispositifs, an affinity that prompts us to reflect on the role, use and ethics of visibility and vision within today’s systems of advanced capitalism. This brings us to reconsider the role that sensitivity, art and desire play in the individual and collective education of the human being, and to rethink new ways to re-educate ourselves against the invisible, massive repression produced by our relationship with images. Along this reading group, we would like to address and reflect upon the following questions: What is an image and what is a device? And how are they interrelated? In the digital age, can the free proliferation of images only serve as a means of coercion and repression, ordo other paths and strategies exist?Can the image still be an act of resistance today? And if so, how can we educate ourselves to make it possible?
Programme
Session 1 | 27 October 2021
Image and Desire
Mitchell, W.J. T. (2005). “What do pictures want?,” in: What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 28-56. [download here]
Session 2 | 10 November 2021
Desire and Dispositifs
Agamben, G. (2009). “What is an apparatus?”. translated by David Kishik and Stafan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press: 1-24.
Deleuze, G. (2006). “What is a dispositif?,” in: Two regimes of madness. Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Los Angeles, Semiotext(e): 338-348.
Session 3 | 17 November 2021
What is a creative act?
Deleuze, G. (2006). “What is the creative act?,” in: Two regimes of madness. Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Los Angeles, Semiotext(e): 312-324.
Session 4 | 24 November 2021
Creation, repression and resistance
Ferreira da Silva, D. (2020) “The future of two presents”. Social Text Online (Journal). Special Issue: “Control Societies @30: Technopolitical Forces and Ontologies of Difference”. Access here.
Bradley, R.; Ferreira da Silva, D. (2021) “Four Theses on Aesthetics”. E-flux Journal # 120 (September). Access here.
Session 5 | 29 November 2021
Art, dispositifs and counter-information
Somaini, A. (2019). “«Unlearning to see like humans»: Trevor Paglen on Machine Vision, Moving Pictures, Living Machines,” in: G. Plaitano, S. Venturini and P. Villa (eds.). Automation, Animation and the Imitation of Life in Cinema and Media. Milan: Mimesis, 63-68.
Somaini, A. (2020). “Qu’est-ce qu’un écran à l’époque de la machine-vision ?” in: J. Bodini, M. Carbone, G. Lingua & G. Serrano (eds.). L’Avenir des ècrans. Milan: Mimesis, 61-78.
Paglen, T. (2016). “Invisible Images (Your pictures are looking at you),” in: The New Inquiry (December 8). Access here.