MA in Aesthetics and Politics

 
The School of Critical Studies at CalArts invites applications for a new Master’s Degree program in Aesthetics and Politics. This program embraces an approach that includes many perspectives to the different points at which the aesthetic and the political intersect. First, the MA focuses on what is normally understood as political art – i.e. art-making that chooses to become critical discourse in the public sphere. Second, the program addresses the reverse phenomenon – the famous “aestheticization of politics” that so troubled critical theorists during the twentieth century and that continues to invite further reflection.  Finally, the program aims to become a pole of attraction for students, artists, and scholars interested in the type of theorizing – characteristic of continental thought – that contextualizes aesthetic and political phenomena within a dynamic space in which social meanings are generated, renewed and contested.  Applicants interested in these fascinating crossroads and increasingly burgeoning fields of study will have the unique opportunity of enjoying the artistic environment and interdisciplinary dialogue offered by CalArts.

The MA is a one-year, full-time year program of study. It will be of particular interest to artists seeking to deepen the theoretical and political elements of their art, and to BA/BFA/MFA graduates who may be considering combining their artistic practice with a scholarly career.

Core courses in the MA in Aesthetics and Politics are taught by distinguished faculty from the School of Critical Studies; students may also take electives taught by faculty from the Schools of Art, Dance, Film/Video, Music and Theater.

Curriculum

A total of 30 credits is required for the completion of the degree.  These include:

• 12 Core Course Credits
• 12 Elective Credits
• 3 Contemporary Critique Credits
• 3 Thesis Credits

Core Courses:

1. Contemporary Political Thought
2. Critical Discourse in the Arts
3. Contemporary Critical Theory
4. Thesis Workshop

The pool of Elective Courses will emphasize three fields of study:

1. Critical Theory (aesthetic theory, theories of language and discourse, social and political thought, feminist and cultural theory)
2. Global Societies and Politics (global, cultural and postcolonial studies, comparative politics, American studies)
3. Critical Discourse in the Arts and Media (social and political critique in the arts, criticism of and in new technologies and new media)

Contemporary Critique Lecture Series

Students will attend monthly lectures by prominent critics and theorists; these will take place at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in downtown Los Angeles –CalArts’ theater and gallery space located in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex.

Thesis

The MA thesis may assume a plurality of forms, from a traditional 15,000 word/50 page scholarly work to a series of investigative pieces on a relevant topic, a combination of three re-worked and articulated term papers, or a theoretically informed, comprehensive rationale for a work of art.

MA in Aesthetics and Politics: Course Descriptions

 
Core Courses:

Contemporary Political Thought (Martín Plot)
This course will outline some of the ways in which contemporary political thought has intertwined with aesthetic and cultural theories and thus show the potentially common ontological foundation of their fields of study. As a guiding example, we will start with Hannah Arendt, whose late, unfinished work concentrated on the political reading of Immanuel Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment. We will thus first reconstruct Arendt’s interpretation of Kant’s aesthetics and then continue by articulating her late concepts with her earlier theory of action. The course will then move, first, to the disagreement between decisionist and deliberative theories and their implicit and explicit understanding of language, aesthetic critique, and political authority; and, second, to the debate between discourse-ethics and post-structuralism on the questions of agency, communication, and conflict. Readings in this second section will include Carl Schmitt, Jürgen Habermas, Jean Cohen, Andrew Arato, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe. During the third part of the semester we will focus on original ways of studying the convergence between the aesthetic and the political by engaging Alain Badiou, Claude Lefort, Judith Butler, and Jacques Rancière’s work.

Critical Discourse in the Arts (James Wiltgen)
In the current visually saturated world how do images function? In what ways do they create densely articulated assemblages with political and ontological impact? How has the poststructuralist critique of representation created new theoretical approaches, and in what ways can a critical reading of the visual be addressed and enhanced? These issues will provide the principle questions for the course, a template for interrogating the construction and interpretation of the image. Beginning with Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory and his analysis of the culture industry, the course will then examine Gilles Deleuze’s time-image and Jacques Rancière’s subsequent critique of Deleuze. This will be followed by Elizabeth Grosz’s analysis of Bergson, with an emphasis on his concept of the pure past and the image. Finally, the work of N. Katherine Hayles will be used to analyze the transition from the analogue to the digital and the implications for political, aesthetic, and ontological issues. The second element of the course will be to focus on the image in contemporary culture, principally through film, and to address the manner in which these images have political frisson: among the filmmakers addressed will be Oscar Micheaux, Stanley Kubrick, Wong Kar-Wai, Claire Denis, and Carlos Reygadas.

Contemporary Critical Theory (Sande Cohen)
This course is a graduate level introduction to some key issues where language is analyzed in relation to aesthetic and philosophical problems. Special emphasis is devoted to art and its discursive treatments-involving such basics as power, representation, and truth.  Language is said to be the primary medium of representation, communication, and signification or exchange; it is, today, rivaled by art, which is said to enrich sensory or aesthetic experience. There is a contest between discourse and art. This course will examine their relations and discuss critical models of the dominant Western thinking about language and art. Readings during the semester will include authors such as Tzvetan Todorov, Gerard Genette, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Juila Kristeva, Paul de Man, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault.

Thesis Workshop (Nancy Wood)
This course will be devoted to developing and advancing final thesis projects through a workshop format.  Over the course of the semester, each student will have opportunities to present work-in-progress for comment and feedback by the course instructor, the student's mentor and fellow students.  The aim will be to produce a detailed thesis outline by the end of the semester.

Sample of Recommended Elective Courses:

1) Critical Theory

Theories of History & Criticism (Sande Cohen)
This course introduces contemporary ideas of how senses of history and criticism are drawn into the workings of institutions and subjects. Ideas of progress and decline, breakthrough and breakdown straddle our uses (and abuses) of history and criticism. The specific focus this semester is an analysis of the L.A. art-world-we will discuss and analyze how institutions (Getty, LACMA, L.A. Times) make criteria for selecting what to show, to memorialize, to give a boost to and how subjective roles are emphasized, such as the artist as critic, as historian, as visionary.

The Visible and the Invisible (Martin Plot)
The Visible and the Invisible is the title of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's famous, posthumously published masterpiece.  Merleau-Ponty died in 1961, when he was in the process of developing his notions of flesh, chiasm, and reversibility.  Since then, these concepts have stimulated the imagination of some important contemporary aesthetic and political theorists.  In the last years though, there has been a much stronger revival of the interest in Merleau-Ponty's late thought and this has generated the publication first in French and more recently in English of several previously unpublished texts and series of notes.  This course is inscribed in this revival of Merleau-Ponty's scholarship and its goal it to analyze this author's contribution to the typically phenomenological intermingling of aesthetic and political theory.  In particular, the course will start by reviewing a few of Merleau-Ponty's early writings on perception, language, and expression, together with some of the essays by his most influential contemporaries (such as Sartre) and interpreters (such as Lefort) in order to prepar the field for a close reading of later texts such as Adventures of the Dialectic, Eye and Mind, The Visible and the Invisible, and his unfinished works and lecture notes.

Critical Reading (Michael Pisaro)
This class will focus on a series of assigned readings as a way of developing a set of concepts for critically discussing music. These concepts will (and should) be different from the technical vocabulary (mostly deriving from traditional Music Theory) with which we normally analyze music. The first part of the course will be devoted to assigned readings and discussion. Towards the end of the semester we will work on some strategy for critique and for the creation of a manifesto of some kind. Readings in previous semesters have included the work of Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Henri Lefebvre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

2) Global Societies and Politics

Graduate Seminar: Globalization (Allan Sekula)
Course will begin with consideration of the contemporary implications of the historian Michael Nerlich’s idea of a premodern and precapitalist “ideology this context, we will consider medieval tests such as Chretien de Troyes Perceval Eric Rohmer’s film adaptation of this early romance) in relation to the recent Kings. Photographic works discussed will include Ed van der Elsken’s Sweet Duncan’s Yankee Nomad, Edward Steichen’s Family of Man, and other works Patzsch, Tacita Dean, Fischli and Weiss, and Armin Linke. These works all the global. Additional theoretical readings will include excerpts from Hengel’s History, and from Adam Smith, Marx, Heidegger and Buckminster Fuller.

Chinese Cinema at the Crossroads (Berenice Reynaud)
Cinema was introduced in China in 1898, in a situation of symbolic and actual violence, as “The Middle Empire” was facing the imperialist designs of the West. It developed in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, and was a major vector to convey the tropes of modernity during the Republican era (1911-1949). After 1949, it was used as an ideological tool to implement socialism. With the Fifth Generation of filmmakers (graduating after the Cultural Revolution in 1978) and mostly the Sixth Generation (graduating after June 4th, 1989), the age of “post-politics” was reached-with a return to some of the aesthetic concerns of the “Golden Age” of the Shanghai studios. Moreover, the opening to market economy (re)creates new conditions of film production. By comparing the themes, aesthetics, censorship problems and modes of production of the films produced in 1913-1949 and in the “post-Tiananmen era” we will analyze the relationship between the history of Chinese cinema and China’s struggle with modernity and post-modernity. Requirements: one short paper (4-5 pages mid-semester), one long paper (10-12 pages) at the end of the semester.

Remixing Jemima: Aesthetics, Myth and African Americana (Douglas Kearney)
Considering myth as both a formalized structure and raucous collective belief, we will investigate how artists have adapted, revisited and subverted myths of and about African Americans to address socio-political and cultural issues. Myth provides a readymade source for allusion, we will explore mechanisms for “creating belief” including mass media’s role in contemporary mythmaking (from racial profiling to superheroes). The course will focus on social myth, mythologized spaces, the mythologized self and discuss myth via critical theorists and the popular imagination. The semester culminates with a detailed project proposal demonstrating a synthesis of the concepts. Materials will include poetry by Cornelius Eady and Nathaniel Mackey, artwork by Kara Walker and Betye Saar, music by the Wu Tang Clan and Parliament, plays by Suzan Lori Parks and others.

Writing the Colonial Dilemma: Camus and his Critics (Nancy Wood)
The course will look at the role Algeria played in Camus’ fiction (The Stranger, Exile  and the Kingdom, The First Man); Camus’ own evolving political sensibility as articulated in his fiction and non-fiction; the approach of Camus’ most trenchant critics (Albert Memmi, Sartre, Edward Said), and the stakes of his contemporary “rehabilitation” (Olivier Roy’s biography, recent historiographical work, David Carroll’s recent book “Albert Camus, the Algerian” The emphasis will be on close textual readings of his writing on the one hand, and the “situated-ness” of these on the other.

3) Critical Discourse in the Arts and the Media

Film and Politics (Thom Andersen)
Mao Tse-tung once said, “Not being politically correct is like having no soul.” In a society that values “political incorrectness” above all—even after the irony that briefly invigorated that phrase has completely vanished—it may be hard to understand what he had in mind, but we will propose that the recent revival of political film-making, particularly in documentaries intended for theatrical release, has suffered from both a lack of political correctness and a lack of soul. That is, these films lack a utopian vision, an ideal of a better social order and a sense of how it might come about. So a bit of political theory is necessary. And a bit of history. How did conservatism turn into neoliberalism? How did utopian socialism turn into scientific socialism? We can blame Karl Marx for the latter transformation, but we need to consider what can be saved from this mode of thinking Marx was so eager to jettison.  More concretely, the course will explore the relations between journalism and film-making, beginning from Kieslowski’s theory of description: it is necessary to describe what has not yet been described or acknowledged because without description, it doesn’t officially exist and thus we can’t refer to it, we can’t speculate about it, and we can’t alter it. This necessity applies to ideas as well as to situations. Written texts will include Kieslowski on Kieslowski, The Need for Roots by Simone Weil, The Cultural Front by Michael Denning, To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson, and The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard. Screenings will include works by Kieslowski, Emile de Antonio, Jon Jost, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Adam Curtis.

Memory, Media and the City (Norman Klein)
After five weeks studying memory theory and its relationship to literature and cinema, students develop their own stories, or film scripts, essays, plays, installations where the subtleties of memory (and forgetting) are essential. For example, we will study techniques for “unreliable narrators,” or how the ambient, expressionist setting is developed, various tricks for interviewing, researching, cannibalizing from the newspaper or from one’s own diary entries, building drafts where the ironies of memory are essential.

Parallel Worlds: Fiction & Imaginary Futures, 1850-Present (Norman Klein)
A workshop and discussion class on how to use tools broadly related to science fiction: parallel worlds, myopias, grotesquerie, steam punk, the boy as machine, engineering of memory and identity, electricity and the x-ray, etc. A journey through the “misremembering of the future,” not only in science fiction, but also in “utopian” literature, urban planning, caricature, animation, cinema, industrial design, entertainment; in architecture, in social movements, in painting, theater; digital media. From 1850 onward, the impulse to grasp an imaginary twentieth century was particularly fierce and complex. This contrasts oddly with our century. The culture of “imaginary futures” has taken a very unusual turn since the collapse of postmodernism, essentially after 1989, more about a hollowing out of identity, about a horizontal mapping of globalization.

Special Topics in Art and Politics: Artists and War (Nancy Buchanan and Sam Durant)
Many cultural works confronting the issue of war demonstrate that art is far more than fashion, decoration, or entertainment. This will be a studio class for artists with strong feelings about the issue of war, open to those working in all media. We will investigate how artists have responded to conflicts, from World War I to the present. Special emphasis will be placed on researching the early sixties Los Angeles based anti-war artist group that built the Peace Tower on La Cienega and later fed the Art Workers Coalition in New York.† We will look at the recent history of Picasso's Guernica; from its role in the AWC protests against Museum of Modern Art to Colin Powell’s infamous United Nations speech attempting to justify the invasion of Iraq.† Nelson Rockefeller had an enormous tapestry made of the painting, which was installed in the United Nations, the White House had the tapestry covered up for Powell’s 2003 address. Maureen Dowd commented in the New York Times, "Mr. Powell can't very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, children, bulls and horses." Students will research and present representative works and projects by individual makers and collective or collaborative groups, such as Paul Chan, John Heartfield, Alfredo Jaar, Martha Rosler, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Hans Haacke, The Art Workers Coalition and Artists Call (organized to oppose US intervention in Central America in the 1980s). We will create a collective zine as well as an exhibition. We will also consider project ideas appropriate for the contemporary organization of Artists against War. Film and videotapes to be screened include works by 1970s collectives, Paper Tiger and Deep Dish TV, Jon Alpert and DTVC, Bruce Connor, Carolee Schneeman, Nam June Paik, Woody Vasulka, b.h. Yael, Walid Ra'ad, Andrew Johnson, and others.

Testimony, Magical Realism, and the Carnivalesque (Mady Schutzman)
This seminar focuses on three aesthetic literary strategies that challenge dominant discourses of power (e.g., political propaganda, media-speak, advertising, “heroic” and romantic narrative.)  Each of the three engage very different forms and measures of logic, reportage, narration, symbolism, and metaphor toward putting alternative versions of experience into popular circulation. Broadly speaking, testimony privileges coherency and identity politics; magical realism refuses distinctions between metaphor and fact; the carnivalesque celebrates instability and grotesquery. We will look at specific works (literary, filmic, performative) that exemplify the above genres and investigate how they each reconfigure cultural memory and challenge institutionalized versions of truth.  Readings include works by several Latin American writers (e.g., Menchu, Asturias, Cortazar, Valenzuela), Bakhtin, Black Elk, Lenny Bruce, and Angela Carter.  Students will be required to write in all three genres.

Cinémathéque
0.5 unit / Semester I, II
Screenings and discussions of classic films, introduced by graduate students. Two semester sequence: fall semester focuses on narrative work; spring semester is concerned with experimental film.