appLIED CULTURAL THEORY

ANIMALITIES OF/IN VISUAL CULTURE

Mindful of the spectral question at stake in the TUW’s Visual Culture module this year, this course opens up the dramatic break named by Derrida’s ‘hauntology,’ a break in thinking that impacts all around us in the world we have otherwise learned to order through a primary opposition between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal.’  Ironically, given our present situation in the face of AI, this Cartesian opposition also sought to contain ‘the machine’ on the same side as ‘the animal.’ Crossing out the presence of being posited by ‘ontology’ this haunting cannot be contained or predicted or stabilised or even identified as such.

When Derrida famously asked himself who he was – and who he was following – when naked one morning before his cat, he recognised that that encounter could not shut out its history. He was constitutively open to the possibility of not knowing himself, or of having that sense shaded by the feline other whose gaze he met. Through considering what he relatedly called ‘the animal question’ we will explore how ‘visual culture’ is intimately informed by ‘animalities,’ figuratively, materially, conceptually. Animalities are construed as both the multifarious ‘ties’ between humans and other animals (disavowed, fetishized or cultivated), and as an insistent plurality of ‘living creatures’ non-reducible to the conceptual ‘corral’ of ‘the animal’.

What happens when that corral – or lecture theatre, or abattoir, or zoo, or museum, is dismantled? Can the structure of ‘sacrifice’ which it enables actually be dismantled? The themes and problems detailed in the weekly readings will be explored with specific artworks and films. We will foreground habits of reading, differences in method, and the problem of how to recognise or to form argument by aesthetic or poetic means.

Applied Cultural Theory
Univ.Lekt. Dr. Lynn Turner

Start: tba
Location: Seminarraum AC0440

For further details please see link below