BEST SPARKLER

Below the fold is the title and description of a course that I’ll teach next fall. It is on the commons, which I’ve decided to introduce to my students in as elliptical a manner as possible. I figure this approach is preferable to one that defines a discrete set of objects or practices as properly the commons, even though it also risks another semester that ends with a round of complaints that the course lacks an object. Originally I thought the entire course would sit between the themes of antagonism and collaboration, the tension between which — I suspect anyway — the commons emerge: that is, emerge not as a precise substance but a politicized and dynamic articulation between dissent and organization, opposition and collective mobilization (no, I won’t explain that any further; go read Raymond Williams’ “Structures of Feelings”). This seemed a bit narrow for an entire semester, so I broadened the frame a bit. We’ll read a lot of affect theory. We’ll read a lot of co-researched, co-written, and collectively produced works (like, by actual collectives), and with any luck I’ll get a few of them to collaborate with each other on final projects. The emphasis will be on producing and trying on methods rather than defining objects. I realized while working on this that, at some point, I started to work out the first course I ever thought to teach: one on manifestoes.

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[Entanglements] in the affective or aesthetic form of capture and captivation […] tend to be experiences of becoming sensorially overtaken and overpowered that bear the persistent constitutive markings of hierarchical distinctions (such as domination and submission). When politically progressive intellectuals think the democratization, indistinction, and liberalization of social boundaries, in a kind of conceptual fluidity between art and the everyday, between the modern and the primitive, between the West and the East, and so forth, they typically run up against some populations embodied states of captivity, including the intangible but phenomenologically registered effects of enchantment, subordination, unevenness, vulnerability, desperation, servitude, and deprivation of existential autonomy — in short, all  the basic issues of terror and freedm, and (often sadomasochistic) pleasure and pain that, in refracted manners, surface in art and fiction. […]

Entanglements: the linkages and enmeshments that keep things apart; the voidings and uncoverings that hold things together. […So] many scenes of entanglments […] in which perhaps even the roughest crossings can be approached with a sense of innovation and creativity, and the most painful entanglements understood, if somewhat counterintuitively, as evolving states of freedom.

Don’t hurt ‘em: Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking About Capture (Durham: Duke, 2012), 11-12. Emphasis in the original.