ENG 5049 Spring 2019 Jaffe

This seminar will try to open up a dialogue between critical theory and new media theory. Why is modernity - so often posed as a kind of apex of human activity, an event of “peak human” import - also a force field for all matter of thinking without humans? Registering the implications of several recent critical and philosophical trends, the pay-off of this course is weirder and longer accounts of the human and its on-going legacies. The word weird in the course title not only stands for the otherworldly but also what’s to come. The course syllabus converges on four theoretical preoccupations - each belated in different ways. One might imagine them as overlapping circles in a Venn diagram: A. Ontology, the surprising return of, drawing back from the linguistic turn and considering the strange ontologies of assorted hybrids, pseudo-things, quasi- and hyper-objects, and the possibility of critical or epistemological environments; B. Affect, what affects affect. Inspired by Deleuze, this question moves away from interiority, and, connects to modernity via a “distribution of the sensible,” to cite Rancière; C. New Media, how media determine our situations, modulating them in affective/aesthetic terms, to modify Kittler somewhat, as well as rerouting our spatial and temporal positionings; D. Matter, making matter matter, living, dead or un-dead, borrowing from the “semi-fictitious” International Necronautical Society. The middle part of the diagram - the suddenly detectable weird mediator - is the critical problem of the course, namely, marking a critical zone for inhuman cruft, matter, objects, affect, bodies, media, organs, intensities, orientations and gestures within literary-aesthetic (post)modernity. Furthermore, a fifth concern - too complex to diagram, perhaps - aligns with a second look at Posthumanism, as anatomized by Cary Wolfe, that leaves aside the crypto-transcendentalism of earlier iterations. Indeed, the Interzone shuttles between affective optimism and pessimism, tergiversating between gestures of apathetic quiescence and cosmic grandeur, modernist inhumanism simultaneously, “hails the negation of an old cult” and heralds "a terrible trajectory, not towards emancipation, but survival." There's a strong dose of pessimism in the non-anthropocentric survival kit, a weird fourfold of nihilism, molecularity, technophilia and animality and a nerdy gusto for quarreling about obsolescent worthies in assorted forgotten cul-de-sacs of the humanist university.