4.640
Advancd Study in Critical Theory of Architecutre - Organicism: Life in the Differend
Instructor: Arindam Dutta
Telephone: 617-253-1432
Office:
3-305F
Send e-mail: adutt@mit.edu
Units: 3-0-6, 3-0-9
Level: H
Prerequisites: Permission of instructor
Assume that you are not now, or ever were, living. Think that your conforming to this term, “life”, is contingent on your amenability to a series of procedures, mechanisms, legacies, formalities. How life begins, how it is sustained, how it ends in the modern context are not intuitive questions primarily as they are objects of institutionalized, corporate queries. Indeed, on the power over their resolution turns the historical vicissitudes of the modern state. “Life”, then, is available to us only as defined by a certain disciplinarity: aesthetics, biology, economics, governmental policy, commodity chains, military ethics, pharmacological chemistry and so on and so forth.
Phrases like “get a life”, “pro-life”, “the right to life” – ironically enunciated, without exception, by the already living – must be seen as contestations within these frames of the discipline and the authority of the state. As such, they constitute the fraught terms of a relentless agon, the stage for disputes, torts, over the responsibilities and impunities of the state and its proxies.
Today, this older staging of state responsibility, the political frame of dispute might be said to have undergone a drastic, qualitative transformation in contemporary transnationality. With the state receding from certain kinds of controls over the orchestration of life, the concept of life itself has undergone key, transnational transmutations: Kyoto, mines, epidemiological and industrial risk, discourses of comparative livelihood, “sustainability” of commerce, all these terminologies seek to recenter accountability in an era when accountability is seen to be dispersed, dissolute. “Life” is the name for such a recentering ethos.
The course uses the term “organicism” – traveling from aesthetic philosophy to science – as precisely one describing life as a unifying substrate in a decentered field. Readings in the course encompass the beginnings of this eidos in the aesthetic and scientific writing of Goethe, moving forward into the postwar recuperation of eighteenth and nineteenth century science and ethics in the work of theorists such as Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-François Lyotard, Maurice Blanchot, Bruno Latour, and Veena Das. The “analytical” strain of positing the elements of life as measurable entities – in the writing of thinkers such as Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum – will also be addressed. Key to the latter part of the course will be the concepts of “risk” and “injury”, developed through the long legal, forensic and political aftermath of the gas disaster in the city of Bhopal, India.
Two renowned scholars in the field, Prof. Sheila Jasanoff and Prof. Thomas Keenan, will serve as guest discussants within the course.
The course is expected to be of use to student interested in planning theory, history and anthropology of the sciences, philosophies of government, continental and post-structuralist thought, and critical legal studies.
Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies. She has held academic positions at Cornell, Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, and Kyoto. At Cornell, she founded and chaired the Department of Science and Technology Studies. She has been Karl Deutsch Guest Professor at the Science Center Berlin and Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. Her research concerns the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and public policy of modern democracies, with particular focus on the regulation of biotechnology and the environment in the United States, Europe, and India. Her books include Controlling Chemicals, The Fifth Branch, Science at the Bar, and Designs on Nature. Jasanoff has served on the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science. She holds AB, JD, and PhD degrees from Harvard University and an honorary doctorate from the University of Twente.
Thomas Keenan teaches media theory, literature, and human rights at Bard College, where he is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and directs the Human Rights Project. He is author of Fables of Responsibility (1997), and editor of books on the museum and on the wartime journalism of Paul de Man. His current manuscript is called Live Feed: Crisis, Intervention, Media, and is about the news media and contemporary conflicts. B.A., Amherst College; M. Phil., Ph.D., Yale University. Recipient: fellowship, Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers (1991?92); Shorenstein Fellow, Joan Shorenstein Center for Press and Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard (1998). Author, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (1997); articles in PMLA, New York Times, Wired, Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, others. Editor, The End(s) of the Museum (1996); coeditor, New Media, Old Media (2005); (1988). Editorial and advisory board member, Journal of Human Rights, Grey Room, WITNESS, Scholars at Risk Network.
Arindam Dutta is Associate Professor in the History and Theory of Architecture at MIT, where he also holds the Clarence H. Blackall Career Development Chair in Architectural History. Dutta has been the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the Getty Fellowship, in addition to numerous research grants and awards. He is the author of The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility, (New York: Routledge, 2006), a wide-ranging work of cultural theory that connects literary studies, postcoloniality, the history of architecture and design, and the history and present of empire. His current manuscript is titled Transnational HaHas: Totality and Architecture. In this work, Dutta tracks the beginning of a new global worldview - called "economic" - in the eighteenth century, and posits the dispersed manner in which this new organizational sensibility recalibrated the texture of dwelling and its infrastructures in the ensuing periods and history of nations.
