Speculative Non-Buddhism
Aesthetics: Toward a Radical Historyruins of the buddhist real
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This seminar will explore some of the most vexing questions in the history of aesthetics: What is art? How does it relate to the ‘real’ world of politics and society? How has it developed and changed over time? It will examine some of the responses given to these questions by major thinkers like Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Susan Sontag and Jacques Rancière. This will lead to a broader interrogation into the very presuppositions that structure these types of questions, as well as their answers, thereby opening space for a tectonic shift in our understanding of aesthetics, its social roles, and its history.
In its broadest sense, this shift will lead from an understanding of aesthetics as having a more or less fixed nature to one in which it is radically historicized by being recognized as a dynamic social product of certain cultures. Examining the networks of production, circulation and reception operative in what is called art in the modern ‘Western’ world, with an eye to its variations across time, space and social strata, this course inspects how the European world has developed—and then attempted to universalize—a very unique concept and practice of aesthetics, which is bound up in various ways with colonial expansion and the capitalist exhibition of symbolic goods.
Facilitator: Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher, cultural critic and activist. He is the Founder and Director of the Critical Theory Workshop, as well as Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Counter-History of the Present, Radical History & the Politics of Art and Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics. In addition to his scholarly work, he has been actively engaged in extra-academic activities in the art and activist worlds, as well as a regular contributor to public cultural and political debate.
Reading: Gabriel Rockhill, Radical History & the Politics of Art 
Recommended Film: Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Statues also Die
Cost: Pay-what-you-can, up to $90
We are committed to making our offerings of knowledge, dialogue, and community available to anyone who feels they can benefit from them, regardless of ability to pay. We trust you to pay what you can currently afford. If you can not afford to pay anything, but feel you can benefit from our seminars, we wholeheartedly encourage you to register for free. For others, please bear in mind that a seminar costs nearly $1000 in labor and expenses to run.
Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Susan Sontag and Jacques Rancière…none of them were artists. They were all philosophers. Why don’t you get some actual, practicing artists or art historians in there to talk about art? How about Kalle Lasn who actually produces cutting edge visual art + politics bi-monthly at Adbusters magazine? Why is everything about fucking philosophy? Does anybody on this site study anything else? History? Sociology? Earth Science? Art?
My apologies for ‘fucking’ philosophy; just ‘philosophy’ is fine. My frustration is that even the most critical philosophers and Buddhist scholars fail to incorporate empiricism in their work. Where are the facts? Where is the evidence? Historical facts, statistics, economic data, scientific data, social science. I’m prepared for the argument that ‘facts’ are socially constructed, but they also reveal what is otherwise difficult to observe; they reveal the obscure and the counter-intuitive. If you want to know what artists do and why, ask an artist. Otherwise, it’s just an argument about whether you agree or disagree with someone else’s second-hand opinion. If we want to get to the ‘real’ in our discussions about art, or Buddhism, or any other subject, we have to get to the materiality of the real, i.e. the facts, the first-hand observations. It’s time for a materialist revolt in both Buddhism and philosophy.
Hey Shaun. “Fucking philosophy” is fine with me. I’m not sure what you mean by “empiricism” though. After reading Bhaskar I think the notion is deeply flawed (as is “transcendental idealism,” i.e., constructivism, or what I think you are referring to as “the argument that ‘facts’ are socially constructed”). So, I’m not sure how you and I proceed in our discussion. Maybe I can use the language of empiricism and answer you like this: Where are the facts? In the x-buddhist material (texts, rituals, dharma talks, concepts, magazine articles, etc.). Where is the evidence? In the social production of this material.
As a sociologist, you might know AK Thompson’s work. He offered a seminar last week. We have hosted lots of people working outside of philosophy. And as a reader of this blog, you must see that I am uninterested in preserving what one defender of the liberal-conservative status quo has called the “bounded fields” of x-discipline, say art. That aesthetics seminar is not on “art” in any normative sense. It’s on ideology, coercion, subjectification, power, violence, politics, and more, all being perpetuated via the image. Incite Seminars is a living practice of colliding fields, of superpositioning them to one another, of creating monstrous mutations that, at first blush, arouse disgust.
I just learned of Gabriel Rockhill here in the blog, and began listening/watching him in various YouTubes, e.g., “Radicalizing Critical Theory” https://youtu.be/8bYJof8l7FU (Good stuff!)
Wow! He’s amazing. Thanks for bringing him to my attention.
Shaun: “Why is everything about fucking philosophy? Does anybody on this site study anything else? History? Sociology? Earth Science? Art?”
My studies have had the consequence of transforming me into a very radical holist with a distaste for “disciplinary” boundaries of all kinds. I can therefore only “do” science, philosophy, history, etc…, as facets of one ever shifting kaleidoscopic inquiry. If forced to identify one of my principal areas of inquiry, in any case, I’d say I’m a philosophical human ecologist … and therefore also a social critic who dabbles in anthropology, economics, history…, well you get the picture. My principal focal point in this wildly dynamic kaleidoscope — as not to be overly chaotic — is ecological design theory. But as soon as one puts that to real work it becomes apparent that what the dominant culture regards as “normal” and “practical” is in fact simply an hallucination. What are we to do with/about this living within the field of a collective hallucination is the only truly interesting question for me now. Can we break its spell? How?