Power and Technoaesthetics

This advanced interdisciplinary seminar brings anthropological perspectives into conversation with those from political theory, literary criticism, and art history, to consider the ways in which political power and especially rulership is produced, mediated, concentrated and/or dispersed. It is especially concerned with the cultural/aesthetic forms in which the rule of the one is valorized, and granted legitimacy. The course is subtended by three main themes, which include: 1) monarchy, tyranny and/or the rule of one; 2) mediation, including the space of the court and practices of the media; 3) the force of massification as regression. These topics are woven together, rather than treated chronologically, and will be addressed with respect to three several sites of inquiry: Europe, the US, Latin America and Africa. The historical range of material runs from the early modern era to the present, and the rise of what some have called a “new Medievalism.”