Sapient Cinema

Instructor: Laurence Kent Date & Time: February 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd 14:00-16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: From anthropogenic climate change to the recent global pandemic, the necessity to think through the pitfalls and possibilities of human action on the world stage has never been more pressing. This Seminar will explore how contemporary popular cinema has already been engaged in the task of world-making that rethinks the potentials of human agency. Doing so requires reassessing the ability to think universally and properly defining the role of reason in theoretical and political analysis; as the feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks states, “global complexity opens us to urgent cognitive and ethical demands” such that emancipatory politics “hinges on a profound reworking of the universal.” Since the rise of computer science and the engineering of machine life, this has become the question of intelligence, as seen in films such as; those dealing with cognitive drug enhancement, including Lucy (Besson, 2014) and Limitless (Burger, 2011); the recent spate of cinematic explorations of Artificial Intelligence, from Transcendence (Pfister, 2014) and The Wandering Earth (Gwo, 2019), to Ex Machina (Garland, 2014) and 2.0 (Shankar, 2018); as well as the tradition of cinema concerned with the hacking of consciousness, from Paprika (Kon, 2006) and Possessor (Cronenberg, 2020) to Neptune Frost (Williams & Uzeyman, 2021). Catherine Malabou opines that “the return of ‘intelligence’” is “one of the most important theoretical issues of the early twenty-first century,” and contemporary popular cinema, especially science fiction, is reflecting these concerns. Popular films provide contradictory and often surprising objects of study for an analysis of contemporary perspectives on rationality, revealing the insidious common-sense assumptions that the concept of reason has historically accrued – its gendered, ableist, and racist portrayals – whilst also providing spaces where constellations of ideas around autonomy, agency, politics and community are being perpetually renegotiated. These films offer valuable insights into the contemporary task of rethinking rationality and designing the future, figuring ways out of an often-misplaced pessimism surrounding theoretical appraisals of human action.

Session 1: Transcendence (Pfister, 2014). AI Drives and the Body
Session 2: Lucy (Besson, 2014). Post/Trans/In-humanism
Session 3: The Wandering Earth (Gwo, 2019). Collective Intelligence and the Politics of Space
Session 4: Neptune Frost (Williams & Uzeyman, 2021). Anti-colonial Hacking

IMAGE: Edward Hopper, New York Movie, 1939

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