Thinking with Images (Q3178)

John David Rhodes

Spring 2014

Contact Information

Office: Arts B 272

Office hours:Tuesday, 3-4pm; Friday, 12-1pm(or by appointment)

Email:

Required Texts

Course Reader: available on Study Direct. Please arrange to have a hard copy printed for you at the Print Unit.

You should purchase your own copies of the following:

  • Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. (New York: Zone Books, 1995 [originally published 1967]).
  • Jacques Rancière,The Politics of Aesthetics, Gabriel Rockhill, trans. (London: Continuum, 2004).
  • Jacques Rancière,The Emancipated Spectator(London: Verso, 2009).
  • Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Eric Prenowitz, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Weekly Lectures/Seminars/Screenings:

  • Modern and Contemporary Symposia: Tuesdays, 4-6pm, Arts A2
  • Screening: Tuesdays, 6-9pm, Arts A2
  • Seminars: 2-4pm and 4-6pm, Arundel 210

The Modern and Contemporary Symposia are compulsory. Each symposium will address a key dimension of contemporary (post WWII-present) thought and literary and/or cultural production. Your unseen examination will be based on the material covered in the symposia, so you are strongly encouraged to attend them all. A list of all symposia and readings associated with them is included at the end of this document.

Assessments:

There are three assessments for this module:

1) There will be a 3000-word course work essay, to be submitted on Thursday of week 6. See list of essay topics below.

2) There will be an unseen examination, in the summer assessment period. This will be three hours long, and consist of three questions. The first question will address issues raised by the symposia. The other two questions will address material covered in the Thinking with Images seminars.

3) There will be an assessed presentation, date to be arranged between student and tutor. You will be signed up for presentations in pairs. You must make time to come see me together in my office hours in the week prior to the week of the presentation in order to discuss the presentation. You are also expected to make available to the group, via the forum on Study Direct, at least one short supplementary reading on the subject of your presentation and a bibliography of no fewer than four other critical works on the subject.

Reading:

Apart from texts you should purchase on your own, all are in the Course Reader. The Rancière reading for week 11 will be made available to you on Study Direct. There are a number of items for futher reading/screening listed on the Library’s reading list for the module.

NB: The bibliographic information for all readings is found on the syllabus.

Seminar preparation:

You should attend all screenings and have completed all readings before seminar meetings. You should have prepared at least two questions or interventions for seminar discussion. Always bring hard copies of the readings to seminar (whenever possible), as well as something to write with and on.

Office hours and email:

Whenever possible prefer to discuss all matters related to your progress in the course during my weekly office hours. I expect everyone to visit my office hours at least once during term, apart from the consultation regarding your presentations. Given that there are four different times during the week during which you can see me in person (symposium+screening, office hours, seminar), I would prefer that you refrain from emailing me unless it is an absolute emergency.

Essay Topics for Essay due Week 6:

Please choose one of these topics and develop an essay in relation to it.

1. How does Deleuze’s notion of the ‘time-image’ (Deleuze) manifest itself formally? Does the ‘time-image’ have a political or ethical force or agency that the ‘movement-image’ lacks? Frame your response in relation to two films we have studied.

2. How might notions of cinematic specificity and indexicality (Bazin and Cavell) inflect, inform, or complicate Nancy’s account of the image? Frame your response in relation to two films we have studied.

3. How are bodies like images? Frame your response with reference to Nancy’s writing and at least one other philosopher we have studied so far, and with reference to two films we have studied.

4. Do contemporary philosophies of the image and contemporary filmmaking practices offer a means of reconceptualizing or overcoming Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ or Heidegger’s ‘world picture’? Engage at least one other philosopher we have studied together (in addition to Debord and Heidegger) and frame your response in relation to two films we have studied.

5. Place Kant’s notion of the art work’s purposive purposeless in conversation with Nancy’s notion that the image is ‘distinct’. Are images good, or good for anything? Or is their value in not having any prescribed use? Frame your response with reference, as well, to two films we have studied.

Essay Requirements:

  • You must give the title an ORIGINAL TITLE of your own devising. DO NOT restate the given essay topic you have chosen.
  • Your essay should engage substantively and critically with both required readings and required screenings. Superior essays will show evidence of independent reading and screening.
  • Please make sure all essays are double-spaced and employ correct and consistent bibliographic formatting.

Presentations

All students will sign up for presentations in pairs (or occasionally groups of three).

Requirements:

  • You and your presentation partner(s) will need to meet with JDRin office hours a full week before your presentation.
  • You must assign to the seminar one article—a work of criticism or theory—that deals directly with the film (or at least the director of the film) screened that week. This reading should be made available to the seminar via a pdf or link and put on Study Direct, via the forum. Please advertise which seminar group (2pm or 4pm) your reading is intended for, since both groups share the same forum. You must make this available by the Monday of the week of your presentation.
  • As presenters you are expected not just to read out to the seminar, but to lead a seminar discussion for approximately thirty minutes. Your presentation should also include close analysis of film clips.
  • The presentation should endeavour to make strong connections between the film(s) screened and the readings.
  • You must bring to seminar a handout with a bibliography for further reading. The handout may also include other information.

Screenings: Thinking with Images

6pm

Arts A2

21 January / Benny’s Video (Michael Haneke, 1992)
28 January / The Seventh Continent (Michael Haneke, 1989)
4 February / Empire (Andy Warhol, 1964)
(nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai ming-liang, 2003)
11 February / Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
February 18 / L’intrus (The Intruder, Claire Denis, 2004)
25 February / The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)
11 March / Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006)
18 March / Histoires du Cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998)
1 April / Audience (Barbara Hammer, 1982)
Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985)
8 April / The Turin Horse (Bèla Tarr, 2011)

Week by week syllabus

Week 1
(Seminar: 24 January) / Interest (Plato and Kant)
Reading /
  • Plato, The Republic, Benjamin Jowett, trans. (New York: Vintage Classics, 1991). selections
  • Immanuel Kant, The Critique of the power of judgment, Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000 [1790]), pp. 89-127; pp. 182-87.

Screening
(21 January) / Benny’s Video (Michael Haneke, 1992)
Presentations / N/A
Week 2
(Seminar: 31 January) / Alienation (Heidegger and Debord)
Reading /
  • Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. New York: Zone Books, 1995 (originally published 1967).
  • Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, William Lovitt, trans. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), 115-154.
  • Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, William Lovitt, trans. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), 3-35.
Suggested Reading:
Brian Price and John David Rhodes, eds., On Michael Haneke (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2010)
Screening
(28 January) / The Seventh Continent (Michael Haneke, 1989)
Presentations / N/A
Week 3
(Seminar: 7 February) / Ontology (Bazin, Cavell, Nancy)
Reading /
  • Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The image—the Distinct.” In Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Ground of the Image. Jeff Fort, trans. 1-14. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.
  • Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In What is Cinema?. Volume I. Hugh Gray, ed. and trans. 9-16. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
  • Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979. (pp. 10-25; 118-133)
  • Alexander Garcìa Düttmann,‘Why Burn a Photograph?’, World Picture 8 (Summer 2013)

Screening
(4 February) /
  • Empire (Andy Warhol, 1964)
  • (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)
  • Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai ming-liang, 2003)

Presentations
Week 4
(seminar: 14 February) / Movement/Time (Deleuze)
Reading /
  • Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Dramaturgy of Film Form.” (1929) In The Eisenstein Reader. Richard Taylor, ed. and trans. 93-110. London: British Film Institute, 1998.
  • Bazin, Andrè. “An Aesthetic of Reality.” In Bazin, Andrè. What is Cinema? Volume II. Hugh Gray, ed. and trans. 16-40. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
  • Gilles Deleuze, ‘Having an Idea in Cinema’, Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture, Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller, eds. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 14-19.
  • Gregory Flaxman, ‘Introduction’, in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Gregory Flaxman, ed. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1-57.
  • Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze’, The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Gregory Flaxman, ed. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 365-373.
  • Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Hugh Tomlins and Barbara Habberjam, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. (pp. 1-28)
  • Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 2000 [1989]). (pp. 1-24)

Screening
(11 February) /
  • Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weeresethakul, 2004)
  • L’eclisse (The eclipse, Michelangelo Antonioni) excerpton Study Direct
  • Paisan (Paisà, Roberto Rossellin, 1946) excerptOn Study Direct

Presentations
Week 5
(seminar: 21 February) / Body (Nancy)
Reading / Nancy, Jean Luc. Corpus. Richard A. Rand, trans. (New York: Fordham Univesity Press, 2008), 150-170(‘Fifty-eight Indices on the Body’; ‘The Intruder’)
Screening
(February 18) / L’intrus (The Intruder, Claire Denis, 2004)
Presentations
Week 6
(seminar: 28 February) / Evidence (Nancy)
Reading / Jean Luc Nancy, L’Évidence du film: Abbas Kiarostami. Brussels: Yves Gevaert Èditeur, 2001.(pp. 8-56; 80-95)
Screening
(25 February) / The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)
Presentations

**WEEK 7: No Meeting/No Screening**

Week 8
(seminar: 14 March) / Politics (Rancière)
Reading /
  • Jacques Rancière,The Politics of Aesthetics, Gabriel Rockhill, trans. (London: Continuum, 2004).
  • Jacques Rancière, ‘Uses of Democracy’, from On the Shores of Politics, Liz Heron, trans. (London: Verso, 1995), 39-61.
  • Jacques Rancière, ‘What Aesthetics Can Mean’, From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Sciences (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 13-33.
  • Scott Durham, ‘“The Center of the World is Everywhere”: Bamako and the Scene of the Political’, World Picture 2 (Autumn 2008)

Screening
(11 March) / Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006)
Presentations
Week 9
(seminar: 21 March) / Emancipation (Rancière)
Read /
  • Jacques Rancière,The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2009.
  • Jacques Rancière, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’, Dissensus, Steve Corcoran, ed. and trans. (London: Contiuum, 2010), 134-151.
  • Jacques Rancière,Film Fables, Emiliano Battista, trans. (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 1-20; 171-187.

Screening
(18 March) / Histoires du Cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998)
Presentations

**NB: Seminar for Week 10 will be held, for everyone, from 2-6 (venue TBC), and take place as a symposium featuring a talk by Dr. Katherin Groo from Aberdeen University. Please make arrangements in advance to attend this event if your seminar does not ordinarily begin at 2pm.**

Week 10
(seminar: 28 March) / The Archive and the Digital (Derrida and others)
Reading /
  • Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Eric Prenowitz, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
  • Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Underway to the Dual System: Classical Archives and Digital Memory’, Digital Memory and the Archive, Jussi Parikka, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) 81-94on Study Direct
  • Wendy Hui Kyon Chun, ‘The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future is a Memory’, Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008), 148-171.on Study Direct
  • Friedrich A. Kittle, ‘Forgetting’, Discourse3, (1981), 88-121.on Study Direct

Screening
(25 March) /
  • selections of user-generated re-mixes from the Dutch Film Archives
  • Decasia (Bill Morrison, 2002)

Presentations / N/A
Week 11
(seminar: 4 April) / Actions and Judgements (Arendt, Zerilli)
Reading /
  • Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998 (1958). (pp. 175-247)
  • Zerilli, Linda M.G. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. (pp. 1-31; 125-163)
Recommended reading:
  • Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Screen 16:3 (1975): pp. 6-18. (available via electronic journals/Oxford Journals online)
  • Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004. (pp. 1-31) (in library)

Screening
(1 April) /
  • Audience (Barbara Hammer, 1982)
  • Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985)

Presentations
Week 12
(seminar: 11 April) / Endings(Rancière, encore)
Reading / Jacques Rancière, Bèla Tarr, The Time After, Erik Beranek, trans. (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013)on Study Direct
Screening
(8 April) / The Turin Horse (Bèla Tarr, 2011)
Presentations / N/A

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY SYMPOSIA

WEEK 1

Round table discussion: What is the contemporary?

Peter Boxall, Alistair Davies, JD Rhodes, Nicholas Royle, Michael Jonik, John Masterson

Reading:

Giorgio Agamben, 'What is the Contemporary'

This round table discussion will turn around the question of how we focus on the contemporary, and what we mean by 'modern'. Supported by a reading of Giorgio Agamben's short essay 'What is the Contemporary', colleagues will ask what is at stake in thinking about the present, the near past and the near future. What elements define our own specific contemporaneity? What are the problems involved in thinking about contemporaneity more generally? What do we mean by the concept of modernity, and is our own period entering into a new era in the history of the modern? The answers to these questions, and the questions themselves, will offer a framework for the symposia to follow.

WEEK 2

Post-war Europe and the Culture of Ruins

Alistair Davies. Respondent, Peter Boxall

Reading:

Alun Lewis, 'Raiders Dawn'

David Jones, 'Prothalamion'

T.S. Eliot, 'Little Gidding'

Virginia Woolf, 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid'

The mass bombing by the Germans of British cities and the mass bombing of German cities by the British destroyed a large number of lives and laid waste large tracts of cities, destroying public buildings and architecture of great historic importance and leaving the historic centres of cities in ruin. Great medieval centres – in Britain as well as in Germany - were reduced to rubble. The symposium will explore, through a reading of the poetry of T.S.Eliot, David Jones (who both endured the blitz in London) and W.H.Auden (who was sent to Germany after the war as a member of the American army to assess the psychological effects of mass bombing on the civilian population), some of the moral and ethical questions raised then – and now – by mass bombing. Did mass bombing serve strategic purposes or was it an instrument of terror? Did it become – for the British as for the Germans - an act of the deliberate destruction of the symbolic structures of the enemy’s national identity? The English philosopher A.C.Grayling and the German-born writer W.G.Sebald have recently argued that the British bombing of German cities amounted to a war crime (as does the German historian Jorg Friedrich in The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945). The discussion will be concerned with the ways in which the mass killing of civilian populations and the mutual self-destruction of the historical sites and legacies of European nations raised questions – and continues to raise questions – about the nature and legitimacy of European culture. We will track the ways in which such self-questioning was an important aspect of the cultural regeneration of Europe in the post-war period. The British cities most affected by mass bombing – London, Swansea, Southampton, Coventry, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Bristol – have been regenerated but to what extent do we still live ethically and imaginatively in a culture of ruins?

WEEK 3

Modernism, Late modernism and the Contemporary

Peter Boxall and Sara Crangle

Reading:

Samuel Beckett, 'Imagination Dead Imagine' and 'Stirrings Still'

This discussion between Peter Boxall and Sara Crangle will turn around our understanding of the historical limits of modernism, and its presence as a shaping force in the contemporary literary imagination. The symposium will depart from a reading of Samuel Beckett's short later pieces, particularly 'Imagination dead Imagine', and 'Stirrings Still'. These pieces, it will be suggested, might be thought of as the last throes of a modernist imagination, the exhaustion of a movement that defined the aesthetics of the first half of the twentieth century. But it is also the case that these works of exhaustion and termination witness the birth of a new set of aesthetic possibilities, that have come to fuller expression in other contemporary works, often influenced by Becket's writing. The discussion will ask how the kinds of novelty and aesthetic energy that emerge from Beckett's late work, and that move through a wide range of contemporary forms of expression, shape our understanding of the ends of modernism. Does Beckett's legacy suggest a new way of thinking about the afterlives of modernism? Is there a strain of late modernist writing still apparent in the contemporary, that would cause us to rethink our understanding of the historical character of postmodernism?

Week 4

The Image.

JD Rhodes. Respondent, Bethan Stevens

Reading:

JL Nancy's 'The image, the Distinct' in The Ground of the Image

From Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed.

Contemporary thought has consistently used the image as a term under which to diagnose the ills of postwar culture. From Adorno and Horkheimer’s excoriating account of ‘the culture industry’ to Guy Debord’s critique of the ‘spectacle’, the image has frequently been instrumentalised as both the literal embodiment of and a potent metaphor for the abuses of consumer capitalism. Without discounting these important critiques, can we consider the contemporary’s image saturation in terms that are somewhat more elastic? What does the image-as-image propose or make possible? Do images neutralize our participation in the world, or do they enable a taking-part in the world’s complexity?