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Prof. Stephen Duncombe
New York University


Mediated Imagination in a Digital Age

Imagination is an essential human practice. Because of this, its study
ranges across academic disciplines: art history, literature, philosophy,
political science, psychology, and even neuroscience can all lay legitimate
claim to imagination. Consequently, thinking about imagination remains, at
best, a fragmented study. No single seminar can rectify this problem, but
by making media our entry point we can establish a singular portal for
entering into what is essentially a trans-disciplinary project. Beginning
with the Bible and moving through utopian literature, photography, avant-
garde art, science fiction novels, video games, social networking sites and
user-generated encyclopedias, we will explore how imagination is
facilitated and constrained, articulated and communicated. Because we are
in the middle of a media sea-change, moving from page to screen and
broadcast to web, this seminar will pay special attention to how
imagination is constituted and communities are imagined within and through
our present digital age.


Session One:
The Necessity of Imagination: Imagination is the prerequisite for creation.
It is by imagining what is not but what might be that people make history.
In the past, the written word has played an essential role in both staging
and communicating acts of imagination and so it is here we start. Yet the
study of imagination today raises some critical questions: Can we, should
we, imagine on a grand scale after the disasters of modern imagination:
Fascism, Communism and now globalized Capitalism? Given that the most grand
cultural-political imaginings today are the property of religious
fundamentalists, is there hope for a secular, libratory imagination? In
brief: what is the case for imagination?

Possible texts might include:
. Duncombe, Dream
. Bakhtin: Rabelais and His World
. More, Utopia
. Winstanley, "True Levellers Standard"
. The Bible

Session Two:
The Problem of Totality: To imagine is to create an image of a real that
transcends what we currently understand to be reality. Imagination allows
us to go beyond the limits - physical, mental, artistic, political - that
compose and give order to our current reality; it frees us from the tyranny
of the present. But is such a radical break really possible? One always
sees the future from the vantage point of the present, and it is difficult
to imagine what you haven't already seen. This is the problem of totality:
the difficulty of creating a space - from which to judge or to which to
move -- outside the given system. From Descartes on theorists have worried
this conundrum, but the problem takes on increasing importance in our
times, within a global consumer culture that depends upon novelty and
fantasy for its propagation and maintenance and where imagination is a
critical component of its hegemony.

. Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture"
. Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Culture Industry"
. Debord, Society of the Spectacle
. Marx, German Ideology
. Benjamin, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
. Hardt and Negri, Empire
. Las Vegas

Session Three:
Distribution of the Sensible: So how does one escape totality? How can
imagination prefigure a new world instead of bolstering the old? How does
one imagine the unimaginable? Enter the avant-garde, issuing manifestos
and creating artworks to provide a mental path through the present and into
a new future, while at the same time erecting new vistas from which to look
back on and reconsider the past and present. Through their acts of
imagination, these artists and revolutionaries are engaged - consciously or
not - in the "distribution of the sensible," that is: providing us with new
coordinates with which to orient our senses and imagine what is possible,
indeed, what is sensible. Using the writing of Jacques RanciХre as a
starting point we will explore different strategies to escape totality,
from the artistic avant-garde to popular print science fiction.

. RanciХre, The Politics of Aesthetics
. Breton et al., Surrealist writings
. Rodchenko, Stepanova, Tatlin, Mayakovsky, et al., Constructivist art and
design
. Gibson, Nueromancer
. Strugatsky brothers, Definitely Maybe, It's Hard To Be a God, or
Roadside Picnic

Session Four:
Mediated Imagination: Page to Screen. As the computer had revolutionized
media it has revolutionized the spaces through which we imagine. Here we
will think about computer mediated communication primarily as a new place --
a Utopian no-place - in which we can exercise our imaginations. These acts
of imagination, however, occur within an architectural space delimited by
digital codes invisible to most of us and created by very few of us. For
this it is instructive to look at video games as a form of inscripted
imagination.

. McLuhan, Understanding Media
. Lessig, Code
. Turkle, Life on the Screen
. Haraway, "Cyborg Manifesto"
. Duncombe, Dream
. Salen and Zimmerman, Game Design Reader
. Grand Theft Auto


Session Five:
Mediated Imagination: The Network. A computer terminal or mobile phone,
unlike a book or newspaper, is not an object as much as it is a node. It is
part of a network of flows. This characteristic encourages the
construction of self-generated communities based around, and through,
mediated imaginaries. It facilitates the amateur, bottom-up construction
and distribution of new acts of imagination and redefinitions of old and
established ones (e.g. the encyclopedia). But what is the fate of national
and linguistic cultures, primarily built around literature, that are caught
between the web's twin poles of micro-community and (English dominated)
global culture?

. Anderson: Imagined Communities
. Jenkins, Convergence Culture
. Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
. Wark, Hacker Manifesto
. Facebook
. Wikipedia


Biography:

Stephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of New
York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is
the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy
and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture,
and the editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader, among other books. He
also writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of
scholarly and popular publications, including the New York Times, The
Nation and Playboy, and is a Research Associate at the Eyebeam Center for
Art and Technology in New York City. Duncombe is a life-long political
activist.