This seminar introduces Édouard Glissant’s Discours Antillais (Caribbean Discourse) as a post-Negritude theory of decolonial art in the Caribbean and beyond. Caribbean Discourse consolidates the critique of continental thinking as Eurocentric and colonialist, with a monolithic vision of world history, philosophy, and language. It repositions the meaning of Difference, not as oppositional, contradictory or “othering,” but as that which animates the world and guarantees creativity, beauty, and diversity. Caribbean Discourse as a theory of art and decolonial thinking introduces first the theme of Creolization, defined as a re-assembling of differences, with unpredictable outcomes. As Glissant states in Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of Relation) Creolization is the “Other of theory,” or that which escapes theorizing in the “theory of the Other.” We will argue in the seminar that, from Frantz Fanon to the present, much of our theorizing has emphasized the theory of the Other and remained blind to the Other of theory, which is less oppositional and more sensitive to art, the theory of the marvelous, the environment, humans, and our planetary survival. Some of the writers and artists discussed in Caribbean Discourse include: Kamau Brathwaite, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Agustín Cárdenas, and Hector Hyppolite.

Our three-day seminar proposes first to examine Glissant’s theory of art in the Caribbean, after the manifesto of Légitime défense, Tropiques magazine, and the Negritude movement. What does Glissant mean by new arts and new humanities that he calls the New Baroque World (also known as Tout-monde or Chaos-monde) in Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation? We will discuss the work and thought of modern and contemporary artists affiliated with and inspired by Glissant’s theories. Finally, we will look at the persisting challenges ahead and prophesized by Suzanne Césaire (“The Great Camouflage”), Sylvia Wynter (Rodney King and the concept of “No Humans Involved,”) and Angela Davis (on Black Lives Matter).

Will today’s immersive media change the way we view art? Will they change art itself? Artists have always embraced new technologies. And yet one cannot say that the artworld’s dominant attitude towards has been one of enthusiasm, even if the last century saw moments of techno-optimism, from Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism to the 1960s movements Experiments in Art and Technology and more recent visionaries like Nam June Paik or Laurie Andersson. But key voices of critical theory, such as the Frankfurt School’s Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, established an attitude of techno-scepticism so fundamental that any form of affirmation, let alone enthusiasm, had to appear as at best naive. To get a better understanding of today’s promises and challenges, we will look at the art & technology complex through the prisms of a number of key documents from the 20^th as well as the 21^st century.

This course will consider whether Kafka’s short works carry a theory of law, focusing on parables, fragments, and stories in relation to the idealization of law and legal violence.  We will also look at selected writings by Walter Benjamin, including an exchange between Benjamin on Scholem, on the relationship between law and life. We will ask whether Kafka’s writings can give rise to a theoretical understanding of law that does not override their figural and fragmented character. Further, we will ask why Kafka became the center of debates about the status of the law in 1934-38 as Scholem and others sought to understand whether law had abandoned human history or become irreversibly profane.

The biological agents of pandemic, the atmospheric agents of climate change or the ingrained insanities of racism confound the vestigial modern Enlightenment mind—a mind that maintains the myth of solutions, newness, freedom, universals or political ultimates. Without respect for nationalities, legal jurisdictions, or homo economicus, a tangle of problems strays across political, legal, and disciplinary boundaries. There is no redemptive revolution, and there are no equations of certainty expressed in any of the anointed digital or econometric languages.

The problems cannot be disentangled and segregated. Instead, the cultural forms to address them may be about further entangling them. As the word form moves through disciplines, it can describe everything from shapes and outlines to conceptual markers. Here, interplay is itself the form. A protocol of interplay is a different from a solution. It is different from designing a single object or building. It is a verb rather than a noun. It mixes different species of information from the scale of microns to the scale of territories. It mixes heavy physical spatial information with digital, quantitative, econometric expressions. It mixes epidemiological, ethnographic, demographic, economic, social, and cultural evidence. Beyond buildings and master plans, these lumpy and time-released organs of interplay are like bargains and chain reactions that inflect populations of objects or set up relative potentials within them.

Each session will feature protocols of interplay that deal with, among many other things, activism, automation, migration, police defunding, gentrification, cooperative land tenure, coastal retreat, reforestation, and compounding reparations. The course readings will also move through a discontinuous tradition of medium design. Beyond associations with communication technologies, medium, in this context means middle or milieu. Considering ground instead of figure, or field instead of object, medium design inverts some dominant cultural logics and offers additional aesthetic and political capacities for addressing intractable dilemmas.

Medium design is related to the focus on disposition/dispositif /disposition that fascinates Michele Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, or Gilbert Ryle. It refers to the tacit knowledge about which Michael Polanyi writes. It learns from the non-modern thinking that according to Bruno Latour steps away from hierarchies and ultimates. It is attuned to reverberations of aesthetic practices in cultural networks about which Jacques Rancière speculates. From J.J. Gibson, there is a sense of the affordances of things. From Gregory Bateson, there is a sense of temperament in the interplay of things. Media theorist John Durham Peters, literary critics Caroline Levine, or political scientist Jane Bennet are especially synthetic thinkers in this relay.