What the course and culture is all about?
There is no one definition
or approach to what culture is. This is why I did not begin from one,
this is why I am ”walking” through different texts and theories which
try to grasp what it is.
That culture is not a specific field of
human activity, but the human being’s natural habitat – and it is not
natural in the sense that the world around is natural, but it is always
something that we make and produce; thus making and producing ourselves.
Wherefore
”culture” is not a nice little thing to keep in one’s living-room but
an object of struggle reflecting social divisions, differences,
relations of power.
And as it is the world we make and by making we
make ourselves, we can never step outside culture and society and regard
it from an objective vantage-point. We have to jump in in the middle,
and literally try to grasp our world in motion, alive.
Which is why I
am not giving you a list of textbook definitions about cultural
phenomena, but introducing to you thinkers and theories, concepts and
approaches that try to grasp what culture is and how it is made. And I
am introducing original thinkers and their texts, because in their texts
the thing we want to understand – culture, ourselves, the world –
remain alive, and not severed into meaningless lists of words that bear
no resemblance to true concepts.
And that we jump into this thinking
and the texts in the middle as well – that these texts have hundred and
thousands of years of discussion behind them, embedded into them.
This
is also why I think it is good to read and discuss them in smaller
groups, because thinking is not done alone and is not a one-way street.
It is also something that is made and that in turn makes us.
The program for this year:
24.9.
1. Karl Marx
2. Guy Debord
25.9.
1. Friedrich Nietzsche
2. Michel Foucault
1.10.
1. Walter Benjamin
2. Giorgio Agamben
8.10.
1. Michel De Certeau
2. Michel Serres
22.10.
Presentations and discussions.
What you will be doing:
Think and form a group.
Be present at lectures. Questions are welcome, in fact, I will ask you some if you won't ask me any.
I
will try to give you a sample of a text before each lecture - discuss
this, think of questions you would like to ask or that it arises.
You
will also get lectures about thinkers and their texts, and lists of
texts. Choose one as a group. Everybody reads the text. And then you
discuss it.
22.10 come and present to us your discussion - what you
found, what gave you answers, ideas, pissed you off, made you think,
made you ask questions.
