Alternative Culture Beyond Borders
Summer Session 2008

WEEK ONE: 2-10 August

Saturday, 2 August - Arrivals

Sunday, 3 August

9:30-17:30 • Art and Resistance Colloquium

Program

Monday, 4 August

9:00–9:15 • Welcoming Comments / Imre Szeman, Olga Zaslavskaya

9:30-12:30 • Opening Talk: On "Posts-" / Viktor Misiano, Alexei Penzin, Imre Szeman

13:00-14:00 • Lunch

14:00-15:30 • Meetings in small groups I (A)

Borders and Blockades: The Spaces and Places of Culture: Topic: Ways, Channels & Strategies of Contemporary Alternative Culture / Mikhail Uvarov, Sergey Chebanov
1. Is alternative culture only a phenomenon of the 20th-21st centuries?
2. Can we identify any national channels and pathways of contemporary alternative culture?
3. Can we construct several models of alternative culture?

Presentations:

Svetlana Chaschina, Radical design / Anti-design in the context of 60-ties culture

Anna G Piotrowska, Representation of Gypsy culture in European art and culture -problems and issues

Literature:

Deleuze and Guattari, "What is Philosophy?"

Uvarov M. Counterculture and Postmodernism.

Collectivity in Contemporary Culture: Topic: Class / Jonathan Flatley, Imre Szeman
On this first day we will examine the concept of class, looking at some of Marx's writings on class struggle, with particular attention to Marx's understanding not only of how classes are formed, but also of the conditions of possibility for a class to act or exert agency on the historical stage.  E.P. Thompson's clarification of the distinction between a class 'in itself' and a class 'for itself' should be helpful here, as will some of Gramsci's writings on the intellectual (are intellectuals a class?).

Literature:

Karl Marx, "Alienation and Social Classes"; "The Coming Upheaval"; The Class Struggles in France (excerpts); 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (excerpts)

E.P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class ("Introduction")

Antonio Gramsci, "The Intellectuals" "The Modern Prince" (excerpts)

Politics of Cultural Memory: Topic: Trauma Time (and Art) / Petra Rethmann
“Trauma discourse” has emerged as a major preoccupation in contemporary thinking about culture, art, and time. The texts chosen for this section - one by ethnographer Kathleen Stewart, one by art critic Hal Foster – reflect concerns with memory, aesthetics, and the historicity of art. Kathleen Stewart, for example, asks what happens if we look at culture as a “still life,” an “arrested image” suspended between half-forgotten memories and futures. In this section I am interested in probing the limits of “trauma discourse,” especially in relation to the possibility of agency and art.

Literature:

Kathleen Stewart, "Trauma Time: A Still Life"

Hal Foster, "The Return of the Real"

16:00-17:30 • Meeting in small groups I (B)

Histories of Alternative Culture: Topic: Stratergies of Domination and Resistance, Seminar 1: Regulation / Libora Oates-Indruchova, Barbara Falk, Olga Zaslavskaya
Issues of cultural regulation/censorship have mostly revolved around aspects of preventive censorship (i.e. the functioning and effects of censoring institutions). However, the range of silencing mechanisms extends beyond the appointed censor's office: self-censorship, constitutive censorship (i.e. censorship that is an intrinsic part of any discussion) and structural censorship (i.e. obstacles to the freedom of expression built into institutional structures themselves) all participate in the preservation and avoidance of political, religious, moral and other taboos. The multiple relations between the factors and participants in an act of expression generate numerous"grey zones"--spaces between repression and self-censorship, collaboration and negotiation, self-censorship and self-restraint, censorship and political correctness--that merit perhaps particular attention in the state-socialist and post-state-socialist environment.

1. On the basis of your own case studies, would you say that oppression is a precondition to critical thought/alternative culture (following Leo Strauss)? Or do you agree with Haraszti's argument that if oppression persists and becomes  normalized, the "space between the lines" no longer contains an alternative, but only that which is a part of the mainstream? In either case, what would be the specific circumstances (as suggested by your case studies) in favour of your position on this issue?

2. If self-censorship is a response to censoring structures and practices (regulative, constitutive or structural), what place and function does it have within alternative and dissident cultures?

3. On the mainstream-alternative axis, where would you place the "grey zone" intellectuals? In an oppressive environment, where on the victims-perpetrators axis would you place alternative modes of expression?

4. In the context of your case studies, how do you see the participation in the "grey zone" and the development of alternative cultures and/or communities in terms of exercising agency and collaborating with oppressive structures?

5. Any strategies of "text coding" presume the existence of "interpretive communities" (Stanley Fish) capable of reading "the code". How does this relate to the alternative cultures in your case studies? Can a text contain intelligible "code" if created by an individual in relative isolation (i.e. if there isn't any discernible "interpretive community")? What happens to "the code" when the conditions that necessitated its production disappear? What is the significance of "the code" in terms of aesthetic/intellectual aspects of the texts?

Presentations:

Camelia Cracuin, ”Sources of Trust / Broadcasting Dissent. The case of Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe”

Andrew Pendakis, “The Strange Engine of the Militant”

Anna Eremeeva, “Soviet Scientists and Alternative Culture”

Literature:

Post, Robert C. 1998. Censorship and Silencing. In Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, edited by R. C. Post. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. Pp. 1-5.

Vianu, Lidia.1998. Censorship in Romania. Budapest: Central European University Press. Pp. 169-88 (Dan Verona: The Nightmare).

Strauss, Leo. 1952. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Glencoe, Il: Free Press. Pp. 22-37.

Recommended Reading:

Jansen, Sue Curry. 1991. Censorship: The Knot That Binds Power and Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford UP. Pp. 6-25.

Smejkalová-Strickland, J. 1994. Censoring Canons: Transitions and Prospects of Literary Institutions in Czechoslovakia. In Richard Burt, ed. The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism
and the Public Sphere. Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press. Pp. 195-215.

The Global Infrastructure of Culture: Creative Industries, Elites and Audiences: Topic: The Paths of Critical Theory / Jessie Labov, Imre Szeman
The idea of this opening session would be (citing Alexei Penzin) to "generate a genealogy of relations between 'western' and 'eastern' intellectuals," and in particular to give some accounting of how "western" theory began to circulate in Eastern Europe and the paths it has taken since. We will start with a question left unanswered from last summer: which systems of knowledge are we interrogating with the word alternative? From here, we will take on a more historical approach: the longue durée of so-called "western theory" in the 20th century is marked by a series of intellectual migrations from the East. To bring the genealogy closer to the present, we will use Susan Buck-Morss’s description of the encounter of Western theorists with their counterparts in Moscow at the Institute of Philosophy in the late 1980s and early 1990s (our own Helen Petrovsky was an important participant-observer / translator during these events).

Presentations:

Gyorgy Tury "Alternative"

Literature:

Perry Anderson, “The Advent of Western Marxism,” “Formal Innovations,” Contrasts & Conclusions,” “Afterward,” Considerations on Western Marxism (London: NLB, 1976).

Göran Therborn, “Dialectics of Modernity: On critical theory and the legacy...” New Left Review 215 (Jan-Feb 1996).

Susan Buck-Morss, "Afterward," Dreamworlds and Catastrophes (London: MIT, 2000).

Göran Therborn, “After Dialectics: Radical Social Theory in a Post-Communist World,” New Left Review 43 (Jan-Feb 2007).

Visual Culture and Globalization: Topic: Document: Fact and Fiction / Jonathan Flatley, Helen Petrovsky, Maria Whiteman
The session addresses the problem of testimony and evidence first of all with respect to catastrophic (uncanny) historical events. Who is the survivor? Can he or she testify at all? Does the survivor in doing so invent some sort of idiom? The discussion will focus on media such as film and photography that seem to provide the most “truthful” account of events. What is the status of these “documents” in legal proceedings? Are they “unique” or structurally “repetitive”? Finally, what do we understand by (historical) truth? The session will also investigate the concept of spectatorship.

Presentations:

Nina Sosna "Document and its alternative multiples"

Literature:

Jacques Derrida, "The Archive Market: Truth, Testimony, Evidence"

Giorgio Agamben, "The Witness"

Tuesday, August 5

9:00–9:15 • Daily Intro comments

9:15-10:30 • Lecture I: "Animals, Drugs, Science, Sex, Crime, Decline, Paedophilia: Chris Morris Re-reads the News" / Benjamin Halligan
Ken Tynan observed that the satirical comedy of the Beyond the Fringe group of the early 1960s (Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook) was anti-establishment without being politically progressive. Tynan’s formulation anticipates the way in which British comedy, and political satire in particular, was to find a niche from which it rarely ventured once comedy became a fashionable (that is, “more than” just for the working class) interest. The figure of Margaret Thatcher, whose period in office as Prime Minister coincided with the years during which “alternative comedy” broke surface, drew so much fire that a wider questioning or problematisation of this nominally anti-establishment comedic discourse rarely occurred. Looking back, one could go further and posit that, pace Bakhtin’s theorising of the safety valve role of carnival, comedy was never more useful than in this respect: salving the “realpolitik” apologetics with which Thatcher’s liberal supporters, then and now, tempered a dislike of her with the acknowledgement that she oversaw the necessary task of a neo-liberal deregulation of the market. The self-referential, Brechtian experimentation that many such alternative comics brought to television in the early/mid 1980s readily accommodated a postmodern sensibility, resulting in a neo-formalism that only further entrenched comedy into its allotted position on the margins. Thus comedy fell into a trope typical of dissent in other art forms in the UK: the critique of society mounted from within society, limited and neutralised, and naturally lending itself to reformism or even (or eventually), in the manner of Evelyn Waugh’s early satires, a celebration of gilded eccentricity.
Chris Morris’s satire was predicated from a different position in respect to the objects of its scorn; to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, Morris understood the use of being inside the tent and pissing out rather than (as with the historical tendency outlined above) outside and pissing in. For this reason, Morris’s comedic engagements with broadcast news, first for BBC radio (On The Hour, 1991-2) and then BBC and Channel 4 television (The Day Today, 1994; BrassEye 1997, 2001), and even newspaper journalism (the “Second Class Male / Time To Go” suicide columns, 1999), first embraced and then mimicked, parodied and made grotesque the forms of broadcast news – a kind of divorce-minded lovers’ discourse, in which every facet of the found language is now pushed to its natural, distasteful, conclusion. Or, in terms of a model of resistance, Morris satirically deconstructed the “official worldview” of an ideological state apparatus through chaotic news and sport assemblages, exposing the parameters of the (social and political) debate, the willingness of participants to engage in their own co-option and exploitation, the opportunism of celebrity-hungry pundits and experts, and a common sense essentialism arising from the constructions of masculinity and femininity in news readers and anchors. A measure of the degree of success and subversion achieved is indicated in the hysterical media reactions to the 2001 “Paedophilia” episode of BrassEye which led to calls for the revoking of Channel 4’s license to broadcast, questions raised in the House of Parliament, and veiled threats to Morris and his family in tabloid newspapers.
This proposed paper will review Morris’s news satires, noting (and illustrating) their tendencies and techniques, and contextualising the satire in respect to the threadbare nature of broadcast news at the tail end of Conservative rule in the 1990s. The paper will question the potentials and limitations of such deconstructive news satires as a tool of resistance, suggesting Morris’s work as diagnosing a conceptual problem in the tradition of alternative comedy, and offering models for a solution.

10:45–12:30 • Theoretical Tools for Research I: Image / Helen Petrovsky
This session seeks to explore one of the key concepts of contemporary visual studies. What is to be understood by “disembodied image,” a term so often used by theorists of visual culture? Is this image just another set of signs (not unlike a written text) or is there something which sets it in contrast to the plainly visible and legible? In short, what is the relationship between image and representation? How do images become meaningful – historically, for a fleeting (i.e., non-institutional) collective? Part of the session will be devoted to an overview of the main theoretical approaches dealing with image and visuality.

Literature:

“Visual Culture Questionnaire,” in: October 77, summer 1996, pp. 25–70.

13:00-14:00 • Lunch

14:00-15:30 • Global Infrastructure of Culture: Full Group Session. Cultural Studies, Kulturologia, and Bologna / Jessie Labov
In this session we directly confront some questions about higher education: how the knowledge industry is changing as a result of globalization, how this affects our ability to study/teach Alternative Culture, and what are some of the important local differences which remain between higher education systems in Russia, FSU, Central Europe, etc. Is “alternative culture” in this context a question of content or disciplinary boundaries and methodology?  In addition to a general overview of the process & impact of Bologna accreditation, we will look at the parallel cases of “Cultural Studies” and “Kulturologia.”

Presentations:

Hajrudin Hronadzic, "Educational perspectives of neoliberal market transition: A critic of Bologna process"

Literature:

Background on the Bologna Process

Bologna Declaration 1999

Prague Communique 2001

Berlin Commmunique 2003

Bergen Communique 2005

London Communique 2007

Nick Couldry, “Culture and citizenship: the missing link?” European Journal of Cultural Studies 9: 3 (2006): 321-339.

Jochen Fried, Anna Glass, and Bernd Baumgartl, "Summary of an Extended Comparative Analysis on European Private Higher Education," Higher Education in Europe, Vol. 31, No. 1, April 2006.

Rosa-Maria Torres, “Education in the Information Society,” Word Matters: multicultural perspectives on information societies. Eds., Alain Ambrosi, Valérie Peugeot and Daniel Pimienta (C & F Editions, 2005).

15:45-17:15 • Meetings in small groups II (A)

Borders and Blockades: Topic: Alternative Discourse as Common Strategy in the History of Culture / Mikhail Uvarov, Sergey Chebanov
1. Can we reconstruct several alternative discourse strategies in the history of European culture?
2. Where is the ‘Alter Ego’ of alternative culture today?
3. Postmodernism: alternative culture or counterculture?

Presentations:

Anna Eremeeva, “On Alternative Culture Historiography”

Andrew Pendakis, “Communist Liquidations: Towards a Politics of Abolition”

Literature:

Uvarov, Mikhail. Religious anthropology in the post-modern situation

Uvarov, Mikhail. Metaphor of death. The fate and the symbols of Saint Petersburg

Collectivity in Contemporary Culture: Topic: The Party / Jonathan Flatley, Imre Szeman
Is the party still a useful concept and might it still be a useful way to think about the organization of collectives?  The key question here concerns the ability of collectives of various sorts to represent themselves to themselves, a function the party aims to serve.  We will consider classic writings by Lenin, along with more recent writings by the Black Panther Party.

Literature:

Lenin, The Lenin Anthology, "What Is To Be Done,"

"Left Wing Communism," pp 550-618.

The Black Panther Party:

The Ten Point Program:

Rules of the Black Panther Party

Rosa Luxembourg, "Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions"

Politics of Cultural Memory: Topic: Memories for Today / Petra Rethmann
More appropriately, perhaps, this section should have been entitled, “Memories for the Future.” Here I am especially interested in looking at how our sense of the future is frequently conditioned by knowledge of, and even nostalgia for, futures that we seem to have already lost.

Literature:

Mieke Bal, "Memories in the Museum: Preposterous Histories for Today."

Jeremy Cronin, "Even the Dead."

Grant Watson, "Interview with a Ghost."

Wednesday, August 6

9:00–9:15 • Daily Intro comments

9:15-10:30 • Lecture II: "Post-Communist Ironies in an East German Hotel" / Petra Rethmann
The impetus for this lecture emerges out of the fact that on May 1, 2007, a new hotel opened in Berlin: Ostel. The Ostel is located in “Berlin Mi tte,” – that is, that section of East Berlin that in 1989 metamorphosed from political fringe to center. Following on the heels of the international success of Wolfgang Becker’s film Good Bye, Lenin, the Ostel joined Berlin’ s hotel scene at a time when Ostalgie – the supposed longing East Germans feel for the past – marked no longer a dis-eased condition of mourning and loss but had become hip. Here I am interested in carrying the analysis of Ostalgie beyond the themes of trauma or loss into the more playfu l dimensions of what Czech-French writer Milan Kundera has called “the joke” – humor with an ironic edge.  Ultimately, I am interested in exploring if irony (rather then Ostalgie or nostalgia) makes it possible to open up critical interpretations of German post-unification history.

10:45–12:30 • Meetings in small groups II (B)

Visual Culture and Globalization and Histories of Alternative Culture: Joint Session: Topic: Soviet Underground Art / Helen Petrovsky, Olga Zaslavskaya, Jonathan Flatley, Barbara Falk
The session will pay tribute to some of the leading figures of Soviet underground art (Ilya Kabakov, the Collective Actions group, Vitaly Komar, Boris Mikhailov, etc.). The choice of artists is prompted by the lasting effect of their work as well as by their influence on contemporary art worldwide. Special attention will be given to sots-art and the place it occupies on the Russian art scene today. Art versus ideology, art and censorship, art as a critical tool for investigation and resistance - such are only some of the most obvious questions which call for discussion. Another take on the problem is art and/as archive.

Literature:

Sabine Haensgen, "Video, Archive, Storage: Moscow Performance Art in the Age of Digital Repetition

"The Moscow Archive of New Art: Andrei Monastyrsky and the Collective Actions Group in a Conversation with Victor Tupitsyn"

Victor Tupitsyn, "Ilya Kabakov: Tomatoes in Berdyansk"

The Global Infrastructure of Culture: Topic: Alternative Culture On-Air/On-line / Jessie Labov
Where do we find cases of cultural and political resistance on air and online? What role do political borders still play in containing the flow of information? Can we consistently call a lack of local media production ‘censorship’ or do we need a new set of terms to define the obstacles to the free exchange of information?

Presentations:

Viktor Radchenko "Alternative Media and Politics: Belarusian Case"

Literature:

Mark Tremayne, “Harnessing the Active Audience: Synthesizing Blog Research and Lessons for the Future of Media,” Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future of Media (NY: Routledge, 2007).

Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa, and Anya Lewin, ed. Economising Culture: On 'The (Digital) Culture Industry' (Autonomedia, 2004).

Jeremy Crampton, “Technologies of the Self: Authenticity & Authentication; Communities in Cyberspace,” The Political Mapping of Cyberspace (Edinburgh UP, 2003).

Peter van Aelst & Stefaan Walgrave, “New media, new movements? The role of the internet in shaping the 'anti-globalization' movement,” Cyberprotest: New media, citizens, and social movements (NY: Routledge, 2004).

Michael Dartnell, “Introduction,” “Insurgency Online as Media Relay,” “Appendix I,” Insurgency Online: Web Activism and Global Conflict (Toronto: U Toronto Press, 2006)

Jon Stratton, “Cyberspace and the Globalization of Culture,” & Ziauddin Sardar, “Alt.Civilizations.FAQ: Cyberspace as the darker side of the West,” The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell & Barbara M. Kennedy (NY: Routledge, 2000).

Roman Pawlowski, “Interview with Agnieszka Romaszewska” (head of Belsat TV station), BBC story translated from Gazeta Wyborcza website, June 5, 2008.

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (excerpts)

Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa, and Anya Lewin, eds. Economising Culture: On 'The (Digital) Culture Industry', ed. Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa, and Anya Lewin (Autonomedia, 2004).

Mitzi Waltz, Alternative And Activist Media (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005).

13:00-14:00 • Lunch

14:00-15:30 • Curriculum Development Workshop I / Jonathan Flatley, Jessie Labov

15:45-17:15 • Screening and Discussion: Kryzstof Wodiczko or Edward Burtynsky / Maria Whiteman
This session will consist of a screening of "Manufactured Landscapes," a documentary on the photographer Edward Burtynsky. We will discuss Burtynsky's use of photography in confronting the realities of contemporary globalization and its productivity for imagining alternatives.

Question 1. Edward Burtynsky has become well-known for photographs that attempt to capture the realities of contemporary capitalist globalization. He has specifically focused in many of his photographs on large-scale industry or its impact on the natural environment. While they seem to have a documentary impulse, Burtynsky's images are explicitly meant to be read as art photographs.
a. How does Burtynsky's aestheticization of industry function? What are its implications for his images?
b. What do they tell us about our contemporary imaginings of the function of contemporary industry?

Question 2. Krystoff Wodizcko has been working on projects that deal with political and human rights issues either on a national scale or a local domestic scale. Would you describe his work as a political project that brings awareness about the inhumanity voiced from people that have undergone "economic hardship under the guises of democracy"? Or is his work more about identity?

References:

Edward Burtynsky

Photographs

Works

Krzysztof Wodizcko

Thursday, August 7

9:00–9:15 • Daily Intro comments

9:15-10:30 • Lecture III: Alternative Interdisciplinary Studies in Leningrad (second half of the 1970s and the 1980s) / Sergey Chebanov

10:45–12:30 • Politics of Memory: Full Group Session. Topic: Loss, Melancholia, and Disorienting Presents / Petra Rethmann, Jessie Labov, Imre Szeman
This session takes off from Walter Benjamin’s notion that “only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” It is animated by the question of how we can navigate contemporary political landscapes when traditional compass points continue to disappear? The readings diagnose a range of contemporary political tendencies--from moralistic high-handedness to low - lying political despair in politics, from the difficulty of formulating political alternatives to reproaches against theory in intellectual life - as a consequence of this disorientation. Concrete questions that could act as guide in this session: What happens to left and liberal political orientations when faith in progress is broken, when both the sovereign individual and sovereign states seem tenuous, when desire seems as likely to seek punishment as freedom, when all political conviction is revealed as contingent? Further: what would happen if we forsake the idea that history has a purpose and treat it instead as a way of illuminating openings in the present (for example, by identifying the haunting and constraining effects of injustices unresolved).

Literature:

Wendy Brown, "Resisting Left Melancholia"

Wendy Brown, "Specters and Angels: Benjamin and Derrida"

Jeremy Cronin, "The Trouble with Revolutionism, The Trouble with Reformism, The Trouble with Certain Marxists."

13:00-14:00 • Lunch

14:00-15:30 • Visual Culture and Globalization: Full Group Session. Screening and Discussion: Chris Marker, "La jetee" / Helen Petrovsky, Jonathan Flatley, Maria Whiteman

15:45-17:15 • Meetings in small groups III (A)

Borders and Blockades: Topic: St. Petersburg Projects of Alternative Culture / Mikhail Uvarov, Sergey Chebanov
This session  deals with the ‘spirit’ of St.Petersburg culture as one of the fantastic field of alternative experiences of 20-21 centuries. Politics vs. Science, Science vs. Revolution, Revolution vs. Culture, Culture vs. Politics…: shadows and simulacrums of alternativity.

Presentations:

Elena Golovneva, "Alternative moral discourses and practices in contemporary Russia (case of Ural Old-Believers)"

Nadezhda Orlova, "The heritage of Russian theologians in emigration and YNCA-PRESS traditions"

Literature:

Theoretical biology in biocentrism. Lectures in Theoretical Biology. Tallinn, "Valgus". 1988. P. 159-167.

International Interdisciplinary Project «Thanatos' Figures» (1992-2000)

Collectivity in Contemporary Culture: Topic: Community / Jonathan Flatley, Imre Szeman
Here we will discuss Jean Luc Nancy's meditations on our being-in-common, and in particular his understanding of the 'inoperative community,' the community which does not give into the promises of immediacy nor betray itself in institutions.  How does this collective without identity (which may, in fact, be the experience of commonality most familiar to many of us) relate to the more explicitly political forms of collectivity analyzed by Marx and Lenin?

Literature:

Jean-Luc Nancy "The Inoperative Community"; "Literary Communism"

Politics of Cultural Memory: Topic: History, Art and Dream / Petra Rethmann
In this session I am interested in the – to use an inelegant term - generativity of cultural forms. I am especially interested in the circuits between image and matter, and at what point matter begins to carry an aesthetic and temporal charge. The concrete materials we will use here are photographic documents that mark moments of affect, resonance, and impact.

Literature:

W.G. Sebald, "Excerpts from The Rings of Saturn"

Kathleen Stewart, "Arresting Images"

Kathleen Stewart, "Scenes of Life/Kentucky Mountains"

Friday, August 8

9:00–9:15 • Daily Intro comments

9:15-10:30 • Theoretical Tools for Research II: 'The Everyday' / Maria Whiteman
In these readings we will examine a range of topics, themes and concepts in visual art and culture in relation to the concept of the 'everyday'. We will explore how it works as a tool in theory, with a particular emphasis on contemporary art practices.

Literature:

Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air (excerpts)

Guy Debord, Comments on Society of the Spectacle (excerpts)

Andy Merrifield, "David Harvey The Geopolitics of Urbanization" from Metromarxism

10:45–12:30 • Borders and Blockades: Full Group Session: Lecture and discussion "Rock Music between Alternative Culture and Counterculture" / Mikhail Uvarov
This lecture is devoted to the actual problems of the history of Russian rock music (and rock culture as a whole) in the context of similar ideas of western culture.

Literature:

Rock music (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, multiple issues)

13:00-14:00 • Lunch

14:00-15:30 • Lecture IV "Semblable" / Jonathan Flatley
This will be a lecture about similarity and multitude in the work of contemporary artist Mary-Ellen Carroll.

15:45-17:15 • Meetings in small groups III (B)

Histories of Alternative Culture: Topic: Strategies of Domination and Resistance. Seminar 2: Self-Organized Communities and Civil Societies / Barbara Falk, Libaora Oates-Indruchova, Olga Zaslavskaya
Much of the discussion and literature on dissent and resistance has focused on its intellectual and socila pre-conditions, in particular the need for a thriving and independent civil society. Under authoritarian communist regimes, self-organization and any type of independent initiative, whether cultural, social and political, was potentially interpreted as a direct challenge to the prty-state.In one sense, this analysis precludes the existence of  „grey zones” as described above. However, at the same time such an approach allows us to eximane the singular importance of establishing communities of dissent and alternative culture, and the tactics and strategies of domination and repression in the post-stalinist era.

1. What preconditions were necessary for the establishment of communities of dissent and alternative culture? Were such preconditions only political (i.e the “thaw” that followed the death of Stalin), or also sociological and personal (i.e. the building of networks and communities of social trust)?

2. How can the ideas emerging within and because of alternative media and culture be understood? Does McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message have relevance, particularly in considering samizdat texts as both ideas and artifacts?

3. How do all the alternatives, ideas, communities, movements, and specific projects discussed in your various research projects relate to the Soviet model as a governing totality? What varieties exist in terms of responses, i.e. as a reaction to authoritarian communism, as an effort to reform and reinvigorate it from below, as representative of a restorationist impulse to interwar and pre-Soviet pasts, or something else?

4. Similarly, how do the alternatives, ideas, communities, movements, and specific projects in your research relate a) to each other (can we make connections and draw similarities and differences?); b) new social movements and alternative media/culture in Western Europe and North America; and c) to the European Eurocommunist and New “Left”?

Presentations:

Kseniia Poluektova, "The politics of Soviet travel writing: borders and crossings in Sergei Obraztsov's travel to London (1953-54)"

Ilya Budratskis, “Socialists in the dissident movement in the USSR: problems of studying and interpretation”

Gorkem Akgoz, “Between the borders of labor history and cultural history: working-class formation in early republican Turkey”

Literature:

Václav Benda, "The Parallel Polis," reproduced in English in H.Gordon Skilling, Samizdat and An Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe (Columbus : Ohio State University Press, 1989).

Václav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless," in Paul Wilson, ed, Open Letters (New York: Knopf, 1991)

Barbara J. Falk, Chapter 8, Dilemmas of Dissidence: Citizen Intellectual and Philosopher Kings (Budapest, New York: CEU Press, 2003), pp. 313 - 364.

The Global Infrastructure of Culture: Topic: Audiences / Jessie Labov
The conceptualization of media audiences has changed as a result of at least two simultaneous and interconnected processes: the invention and spread of new information and communication digital media technologies, and the fragmentation and increasing heterogeneity of the audiences consisting of small niches useful for market players. This trend of fragmentation is to a large extent the result of technological features of the new media which prompt individual usage. On the other hand, we can spot new forms of social integration (networking) of media users, created and supported by interactive digital computer technology, visible in virtual social communities connected by a network of various relationships between their members. In this respect, audiences (in plural) have been granted the role of active citizens who display various modes of use and response to media outputs, but who also co-create media content, enabled by digital technologies. This move from 'old, traditional, mass media' to 'new, digital and interactive' media, from passive to active audiences, from homogenized toward fragmented audiences are some of the changes we will address here.

Presentations:

Helena Popovic, Changing Technologies, Changing Audiences

Literature:

Nick Couldry & Tim Markham, “Troubled closeness or satisfied distance? Researching media consumption and public orientation,” Media, Culture & Society 30:1 (2008): 5-21.

Tim Markham and Nick Couldry, “Tracking the Reflexivity of the (Dis) Engaged Citizen: Some Methodological      Reflections,” Qualitative Inquiry 13 (2007): 675-695.

Bennett, Tony Critical Trajectories: Culture, Society, Intellectuals. (Oxford, Blackwall, 2007). Sections: 2. Texts, Readers, Reading Formations; 3. Figuring Audiences and Readers.

Croteau, David i Hoynes, William, Media Society: Industries, Images and Audiences. (London: Pine Forge Press, 2003). Section 8: Active Audiences and the Construction of Meaning. Pp. 265 -299.

Longhurst, Brian. Cultural Change and Ordinary Life. Berkshire: Open University Press, 2007)

Visual Culture and Globalization: Topic: Image and Community: [On the Limits of Representation] / Jonathan Flatley, Helen Petrovsky, Maria Whiteman
“Inoperative” is the English word for “desoeuvre” which literally means “out of work.” Nancy adopts the term from Maurice Blanchot and highlights precisely the overtones of idleness that it carries; in his philosophical reflection a “non-working” community is that which has neither identity nor substance, which does not “betray” itself in institutional forms. The political stakes for addressing the issue are high. How is it still possible to speak (think) of the revolution and communism at a moment when both seem to have been completely discredited? Yet there is something about human existence which these phenomena tend to display: an initial connectedness, a being which is by definition shared with the others. Thus communism will always be a manifestation of some basic truth concerning ontological togetherness. The session seeks to explore the relationship between community and its representations.

Presentations:

Natalia Melekhova, "Some options of representation of Utopian in various forms of television images"

Literature:

Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Inoperative Community"

Helen Petrovsky, "The Anonymous Community"

Saturday, August 9-10 • Free day

WEEK TWO: 11-17 August

Monday, August 11

9:00–9:15 • Daily Intro comments

9:15-10:30 • Theoretical Tools for Research III: 'Melancholia' / Jonathan Flatley
The subtitle for this talk could be: "why dwelling on loss is not necessarily depressing." I will mainly here be borrowing arguments and ideas from my book (Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, coming out this fall from Harvard). In brief, if by melancholia we mean an emotional attachment to something or someone lost, the book argues that such dwelling on loss need not produce depression, that combination of incommunicable sorrow and isolating grief which results in the loss of interest in other persons, the world around us, our own actions and often life itself. In fact, some melancholias are the opposite of depressing, functioning as the very mechanism through which one may be interested in the world, creating an energizing, even sometimes politicizing effect. In the talk, I will lay out a more general picture of the history of melancholia and different approaches to it. I will also try to give a sense of the book's particular argument by discussing key texts by both Freud and Benjamin, and by briefly examining a few concrete examples from a variety of texts including Andrei Platonov's Chevengur, W.E.B. Du Bois and African-American sorrow songs (or 'spirituals') and the contemporary artist Sam Durant. Hopefully, along the way, the usefulness (in a range of contexts, including especially our present one) not only of melancholia as a concept, but also a whole range of concepts related to affect, including mood (or Stimmung), will also be considered.

Literature:

Freud: Mourning and Melancholia

Walter Benjamin: On the Concept of History

10:45–12:30 • Histories of Alternative Culture: Full Group Session: Resistance / Barbara Falk, Libora Oates-Indruchova, Olga Zaslavskaya
This open session will discuss the literature on civil society and civil disobedience, with particular reference to the communities and movements of dissent in Central and Eastern Europe in the post-Stalinist era. The importance of building independent communities and social networks of trust will be highlighted as important structural pre-conditions for not only dissent but also for meaningful political and social change. At the same time, dissent and resistance cannot be understood as an either/or phenomenon, as "grey zones" effectively existed and contributed as sites of resistance where interstitial social space for individual creativity and expression despite self-censorship and outright regime repression.

1. How can the literature on civil society and civil disobedience instruct us with tools of understanding in examining communities and movements of dissent and sites of alternative culture? (For example, the work of John Keane, Henry Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Jonathan Schell, etc.)

2. Similarly, how does the rich history and study of revolutions and revolutionary theory help us understand communities and movements of dissent and sites of alternative culture? Or does such an approach amount to an instrumentalization of the overall purposes of such communities and movements?

3. What is meant by some of the key terms we are using, i.e. samizdat, tamizdat, dissent, trust, media, culture, alternative, unofficial, etc.? Are these subject to any precision in definition or are they essentially contestable concepts, requiring a "field" of definitional understanding (following Bourdieu)? Similarly, how is resistance different from dissent? How can we determine the boundary between samizdat and the grey zone of publishing, or official publishing where authors have constructed careful strategies of text-coding?

4. With respect to the alternatives, ideas, communities, and movements discussed here represent "hidden transcripts" of resistance (following Scott)? Where and how does the rupture occur between the public and the hidden transcript, and what might this mean socially, culturally, and politically?

5. To what extent are traditions of dissent and resistance--to the extent they organize themselves along non-economic and non-class lines--practically anti-Marxist, at least in the sociological sense? Or does Marx's own dismissal of civil society demonstrate a fundamental theoretical and practical weakness filled by these movements and communities such that they are ideologically anti-Marxist as well, whether they want to be conceived as such or not? In this sense, is dissent a logical and philosophical by-product of liberalism?

Literature:

Miklós Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism (New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp. 142-53.

Jiřina Šiklová, "The 'Grey Zone' and the Future of Dissent in Czechoslovakia," Social Research 57.2 (1990), pp. 347-363.

Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World. New York : Metropolitan Books, 2003, PP. 187-216

Adam Michnik, "The New Evolutionism," in Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley, CA: U. California Press, 1985)

Václav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless," in Paul Wilson, ed, Open Letters (New York: Knopf, 1991)

Barbara J. Falk, Chapter 8, Dilemmas of Dissidence: Citizen Intellectual and Philosopher Kings (Budapest, New York: CEU Press, 2003), pp. 313 – 364

13:00-14:00 • Lunch

14:00-15:30 • Curriculum Development Workshop II: Visual Materials in Teaching / All faculty

15:45-17:15 • Meetings in small groups IV (A)

Borders and Blockades: Topic: On Polyphony of Culture's Alternatives / Mikhail Uvarov
1. Who are the ‘parents’ (or ‘roots’) of mainstream culture?
2. What do you think about ‘harmony’ between counterculture, alternative culture and mainstream culture? Is it possible in any aspects?
3. Alternative forms of culture: ‘playing with beads’ or field for academic discourse? Alternative culture in contemporary Cultural Studies (‘culturology’)

Literature:

Roszak, Theodore (1968) The Making of a Counter Culture

Heath, Joseph and Andrew Potter (2004) Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture

Claire Parnet (1996) L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze [Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet], in Russian

Politics of Cultural Memory: Topic: More Memories for Today / Petra Rethmann
This session builds on the session entitled, “Memories for Today.” Again, more appropriately, this session should have been entitled, “More Memories for the Future.” At the center of this session will be half-forgotten creative and artistic forms of cultural expression that nevertheless haunt the present.

Literature:

Petra Rethmann, "On Militancy, Sort Of."

Brian Holmes, "Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics: Cartographies of Art in the World."

Collectivity in Contemporary Culture: Topic: Multitude / Jonathan Flatley, Imre Szeman
Recently, several writers, including Paolo Virno, Michael Hardt and Tony Negri, have made the case that the multitude is the concept that best describes our being-in-common at the present moment, suggesting, too, that any attempt to create an agential collective or articulate a politics is best accomplished by way of this concept.  What do we think?  How does it correspond or not correspond to our various contemporary situations?  What is its relation to other concepts such as class?

Literature:

Paolo Virno A Grammar of the Multitude (excerpts)

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (excerpts)

Brown and Szeman, "What is the Multitude?"

"Multitude and Working Class"

"General Intellect, Exodus and Multitude:

"General Intellect"

Tuesday, August 12

9:00–9:15 • Daily Intro comments

9:15-10:30 • Theoretical Tools for Research IV: 'Hope' / Petra Rethmann
The recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in hope as a political and philosophical concept. If read as a symptom of times marked by wars, social inequalities and/or environmental disasters, or as a life-sustaining force in the face of despair, hope usually marks an energy that embeds “us” in the world. In this session I would like to look at hope as a concept tied to present lives and struggles. The readings are framed in the spirit of a conversation, and each conversation looks at hope in a variety of ways and explores its potential. The aim of this session is to stimulate thinking about the various aspirations, feelings, and desires that produce hope, and the communal politics that might emerge out o them.

Literature:

Zournazi, Mary, and Isabelle Stengers, A ‘Cosmo-Politics’ – Risk, Hope, Change: A Conversation with Isabelle Stengers. In Hope: New Philosophies for Change. New York: Routledge,, 2002, pp. 244- 272.

Zournazi, Mary, and Ghassan Hage,  “On the Other Side of Life” – Joy and the Capacity of Being. In Hope: New Philosophies for Change. New York: Routledge. 2002, pp. 150-171.

10:45–12:30 • Lecture V: Antonio Negri: "In Search of Commonwealth"

13:00-14:00 • Lunch

14:00-15:30 • Collectivity in Contemporary Culture: Full Group Seminar: Art Collectives / Danielle Aubert, Jonathan Flatley
This seminar will focus on examples of collective creative production. We will focus on the practical aspects of working as a group - how do collectively produced art and design objects differ from objects produced by artists working alone? Why have artists and designers chosen to work in groups? We will look at works and writings of the Russian Constructivists, the early 20th-century German typographer Jan Tschichold, the students of the Atelier Populaire (Paris, May '68), Fluxus, the AIDS activist group Gran Fury, and contemporary examples of collective production.

Literature:

Alexander Rodchenko & Varvara Stepanova, "Program of the First Working Group of Constructivists" (1921)

Jan Tschichold, "The New World-View," The New Typography (1928)

Atelier Populaire, statement about their posters (1968)

George Maciunas, "Manifesto on Art/Art Amusement" (1965):

PHILIP (a collaboratively written novel) (2007)

"The Price of Philip":

15:45-17:15 • Meetings in small groups IV (B)

Histories of Alternative Culture: Topic: Stratergies of Domination and Resistance. Seminar 3: Social Trust,Pluralism, and Activism / Barbara Falk, Libora Oates-Indruchova, Olga Zaslavskaya
While the previous discussion focused on the development and alternative civil societies and communities, this discussion will emphasize the sociological requirements at the individual level. For groups to exist and tactics/strategies to be viable, a significant level of social trust must be established between and among individuals, perhaps as an outgrowth of personal friendships, shared belief systems or ideological commitments, overlapping social backgrounds, or other factors. What is needed to fully understand the history of dissent as an essential feature of democratization (and its continued existence as a structural condition for consolidated democracies) is a complete „sociology of knowledge” as well as understanding of the psychological and social factors that pre-dispose particular individuals to engage in activities construed as alternative, dissenting, or challenging to the existing status quo.

1. What tactics and strategies are viable and potentially successful given the establishment of social trust and pluralism?

2. How can communities and movements of dissent and sites of alternative culture give rise to possibilities for and debates about political responsibility, representation and citizenship, identity and difference?

3. In terms of constructing a regional "sociology of knowledge" (following Mannheim), how mutually influential were the ideas, the actors, the tactics? Can we trace lineages or genres across borders or within particular communities and even "disciplines"? Or does such categorization inevitably reduce the important interdisciplinarity, multivalency, and non-linearity (i.e. the very "alternativeness" of these alternative cultures of dissent)?

4. How can the alternatives, ideas, communities, movements, and specific projects in your research be situated in the longue durée of the political philosophy and history of dissent in the West, stretching in the modern and Enlightenment sense to the 17th century, and more broadly in the history of political thought to Socrates?

5. What kind of eventual impact did these "islands of freedom" (following Arendt) that these the alternatives, ideas, communities, and movements represented have on the scope and type of political, social, and economic change that occurred in 1989-1991, and that is still occurring? What kind of "testament" is bequeathed to us today?

Presentations:

Anna Piotrowska, “Re-thinking exoticism”

Maria Romashova, “The Genesis of Dissent: The Soviet Case”

Literature:

Leszek Kolakowski, "Theses on Hope and Hopelessness," Survey 17.3, pp. 37-52.

Adam Michnik, "The New Evolutionism," in Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley, CA: U. California Press, 1985).

Václav Benda, "The Parallel Polis, or An Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe: An Inquiry," Social Research 55.1-2, pp. 214-222.

The Global Infrastructure of Culture: Topic: Creative Culture and Gentrification / Jessie Labov, Imre Szeman
This session will ask: how does art and how do artists play a role in the gentrification of cities? How does cultural capital affect the flow of real capital in urban space? This session is meant to continue a conversation begun last summer about gentrification, interrogating whether the same concept of gentrification that we use to refer to (mostly) North American cities can be so easily applied to post-socialist Eastern Europe. If the concept of “gentrification” doesn’t seem to account for the changes to cities in Eastern Europe, how can we characterize those changes, keeping in mind the same set of cultural actors (those making public policy, private investment, and various artists’ attempt to intervene between the two).  We will look for examples of artistic intervention—in the form of public, performance, or conceptual art--that directly point to changes in the urban landscape.

Literature:

"Situationist Manifesto"

Rob Shields, “A Guide to Urban Representation and What to do about it: Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory,” in Anthony King, ed. Representing the City (NYU, 1996)

Neil Smith, “After Tompkins Square Park: Degentrification and the Revanchist City,” in Anthony King, ed. Representing the City (NYU, 1996).

Hartmut Hausserman, “From the Socialist to the Capitalist City: Experiences from Germany,” Cities after Socialism, ed. Gregory Andrusz, Michael Harloe and Ivan Szelenyi (Blackwell, 1996).

C.G. Pickvance, “Environmental and Housing Movements in Cities after Socialism: The Cases of Budapest and Moscow,” Cities after Socialism, ed. Gregory Andrusz, Michael Harloe and Ivan Szelenyi (Blackwell, 1996).

Richard Lloyd, “Production and Neighborhood,” “Bohemia,” “Grit as Glamour,” Neo-Bohemia (Routledge, 2006) [about the gentrification of Wicker Park in Chicago]

Trummerkind, "The Apartment in the Mall"

Visual Culture and Globalization: Topic: Photography as Alternative Art / Jonathan Flatley

Presentations:

Svetlana Polischuk, "Exotizing Eastern Europe: Analysis of Some Photographic Projects"

Literature:

Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography"

Jean Baudrillard, "It Is the Object Which Thinks Us…"

John Berger, "Uses of Photography (For Susan Sontag)"

Walter Benjamin, "Little History of Photography"

Wednesday, August 13

9:00–9:15 • Daily Intro comments

9:15–10:30 • Workshop on Fuyuki Kurasawa's "Manifesto for Neoliberal Times" / Imre Szeman
In the 10th anniversary edition of the Canadian journal Topia, Canadian sociologist Fuyuki Kurawasa published a manifesto as to where theorists and educators might go from where we find ourselves now. This session will involve an analysis and discussion of his essay.

Literature:

• Fuyuki Kurasawa's "Manifesto for Neoliberal Times"

10:45–12:30 • Lecture VI: Judith Revel: "On the banlieues: elements for a new analysis of power relations"

13:00-14:00 • Lunch

14:00-15:30 • Curriculum Development Workshop III / Mikhail Uvarov

Thursday, August 14

9:00–9:15 • Daily Intro comments

9:15–12:00 • Workshop – Discussion of Slavoj Zizek's In Defense of Lost Causes (selected chapters) / Imre Szeman
In this seminar, we will look at excerpts from Slavoj Zizek most recent book, In Defense of Lost Causes. We will look specifically at Zizek's assessment of our contemporary situation following 9/11--the context in which many of us are exploring alternative cultures beyond borders.

Literature:

Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (excerpts); Zizek and Daly, Miracles do Happen" from Conversations with Zizek

13:00-14:00 • Lunch

14:00-15:30 • Lecture VII: The house angels will not enter. Muslim fundamentalism and visual propaganda / Konstantin Akinsha
During the last 10 years by Al Qaida and Hamas developed a kind of fundamentalist “political art.” The war against images started by the Sunni fundamentalist groups coexists today with intensive production of images and usage of them for propaganda purposes. It is possible to talk about the establishment of new political iconographies created as for local as for the international consumption. Fundamentalist succeeded to resurrect the medium of the political montage typical for the European modernity. As in modernist montage practice the fundamentalist propaganda is employing archaic visual elements, archetypal imagery and compositional structures typical for medieval art. Is “political art” a la Al Qaida just a sign of the late arrival of modernity, the unavoidable repetition of history, or it is similar to the European photomontage of 1920s-1930s only in its outward appearance?

Friday, August 15

9:00–9:15 • Daily Intro comments

9:15–12:30 • Curriculum Presentations from Participants

13:00-14:00 • Lunch

14:00-15:30 • Presentations from Research Groups (A) and (B)

15:30-17:00 • Closing Wrap-ups

17:00 • Evening program

Saturday, August 16 - Sunday, August 17 - Departure