{"id":3351,"date":"2018-04-01T22:35:09","date_gmt":"2018-04-01T22:35:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rifkindcenter.ccny.cuny.edu\/?p=3351"},"modified":"2018-10-06T22:36:27","modified_gmt":"2018-10-06T22:36:27","slug":"2018-2019-seminar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rifkindcenter.ccny.cuny.edu\/?p=3351","title":{"rendered":"2018-2019 SEMINAR"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

THEME: Communicating with Objects\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joshua Wilner, English<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In terms that anticipate Marx on commodity fetishism or Adorno on the culture industry, Wordsworth\u2019s 1800 preface to\u00a0Lyrical Ballads<\/em>\u00a0inveighs against a \u201ccraving for extraordinary incident\u201d produced by \u201cthe increasing accumulation of men in cities\u201d and gratified by \u201cthe rapid communication of intelligence.\u201d\u00a0 To this situation he opposes the conditions of \u201chumble and rustic life,\u201c where the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature\u201d and \u201cmen hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We may smile at Wordsworth\u2019s idealizations of rural life, but his expansive attention to the different ways in which people may \u201ccommunicate with objects\u201d \u2013 to the problematic, we might say, of object relations \u2013 is as prescient and instructive as his critique of an urban culture coming to be dominated by the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities and mass media. The 2018-19 Rifkind Center faculty invites its participants to reflect on and discuss the changing role of objects \u2013 natural, fabricated, historical, conceptual – in their fields of study and cultural production. Historical study arguably awards more attention to material culture than ever before; our former colleague David Jaffee\u2019s last book,\u00a0The New Nation of Goods: Artisans, Consumers, and Commodities in Early America, 1790\u20131860\u00a0<\/em>(2010), may serve as one example among many. Bill Brown\u2019s influential 2001 essay, \u201cThing Theory,\u201d is a well-known instance of a related turn in literary studies, which he places in the context of \u201ca new materialism within which the thingness of an object cannot be abstracted from the field of culture.\u201d (See the online description (http:\/\/ccct.uchicago.edu\/object-cultures)<\/a>\u00a0of the \u201cObjects Culture Project\u201d which he currently directs for a suggestive overview.) More broadly, concerns with the materiality of language and the history of print have been central to literary studies now for decades. The relations of works of art to both natural objects and other man-made ones have long preoccupied both the working artist and the art historian and assume a new urgency and complexity in the de-materializing context of digitalization. The ways in which objects and representations circulate in modern society is obviously central to the work of MCA, and the very distinction between objects and representations is a long-standing problem in philosophy, whether from the analytic or the continental sides. I hesitate to venture a generalization about music, but would imagine that the question of the relationship of music to the objects through which it is produced and recorded has been made more acute with the ascendancy of digitalization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Readings for the group will be largely shaped by the interests and backgrounds of the participants, but could include works by Marx, Luk\u00e1cs, Adorno, Benjamin, Debord, Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Bowlby.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THEME: Communicating with Objects\u00a0 Joshua Wilner, English In terms that anticipate Marx on commodity fetishism or Adorno on the culture industry, Wordsworth\u2019s 1800 preface to\u00a0Lyrical Ballads\u00a0inveighs against a \u201ccraving for extraordinary incident\u201d produced by \u201cthe increasing accumulation of men in cities\u201d and gratified by \u201cthe rapid communication of intelligence.\u201d\u00a0 To this situation he opposes the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rifkindcenter.ccny.cuny.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3351"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rifkindcenter.ccny.cuny.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rifkindcenter.ccny.cuny.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rifkindcenter.ccny.cuny.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rifkindcenter.ccny.cuny.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rifkindcenter.ccny.cuny.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3352,"href":"https:\/\/rifkindcenter.ccny.cuny.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3351\/revisions\/3352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rifkindcenter.ccny.cuny.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rifkindcenter.ccny.cuny.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rifkindcenter.ccny.cuny.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}