Being There and Not There

Instructor: Will Scarlett
Program: Transdisciplinary Studies
Credit(s): 1
Date: May 11th, 18th, 25th, June 1st.
Time: 14:00-16:30 ET

Enroll – 225 USD

DESCRIPTION: Amid what Roberto Bolaño calls the melancholy folklore of exile, he evokes the phantom experience preceding an apocalypse that may never arrive: “I had practically no friends, and all I did was write and go for long walks, starting at seven in the evening, just after getting up, with a feeling like jet lag – an odd sensation of fragility, of being there and not there, somehow distant from my surroundings.”

Here, the perpetual state of being there and not there corresponds with a sense of profound alienation from the world. But there is a wider range of alternative formulations for this suspension between presence and absence, flickering across the boundaries separating the here and now from some kind of elsewhere. This Seminar explores concepts, experiences, and techniques of being there and not there through the lens of the immaterial, elemental, synaesthetic, and multiple.

We will do so through various written and multimedia works that blur between the philosophical, poetic, and hallucinatory. We will analyze their qualities and potentials to develop our practices for cultivating phantom states of being there and not there, somewhere between and beyond the categories of material and immaterial, embodied and disembodied, reality and illusion.

Session 1. Immaterial
– Roberto Calasso, “Distant Beings”
– Vilém Flusser, Immaterialism

Session 2. Elemental
– László Krasznahorkai, “Kamo Hunter”
– Remedios Varo, “A Recipe”

Session 3. Synaesthetic
– Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics”
– Ernst Jünger, “Sicilian Letter to the Man in the Moon”

Session 4. Multiple
– The final Session is reserved for in-depth discussion of Seminar participants’ work.

Group Assignment: For the second or third week, find an example or technique of being there and not there and share it with us.

Final Assignment: For the last week, students present their exploration of being there and not there using the medium of their choice.

IMAGE: Julio Le Parc, Primeras Modulaciones, 7, 2018.

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Enroll – 225 USD