This seminar addresses some of the questions raised by what is called 'the
spatial problematic'. While it may be true to say that space is both
socially produced and produces the social, it is also true that it has
become so complex and enigmatic that it cannot be described directly. We
perceive it only in the effects it engenders, effects that we call
'architecture', 'cinema', 'new media' and so on. Each meeting of the
seminar will focus on a text or a series of texts that relate space,
architecture, and cinema to one another in provocative ways, and
reconfigure each as 'symptomatic' of the other. Texts and issues discussed
will include : seminal work by Poe, Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin on city
life; Lefebvre on 'the production of space'; Bataille, Barthes, and
Foucault on 'erotic spaces' and 'heterotopias'; Debord and Virilio on
'psychogeography' and 'speed'; Castells's 'network society'; the films of
David Lynch, Wong Kar Wai, and Jia Zhangke; the 'delirious New York' and
'junk spaces' of Rem Koolhaas; queer space and the cyborgs of Donna
Haraway. One major aim of this seminar is to make the theoretical issues
discussed relevant to the individual research of each student.
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