From the Culture of Modernity to the Globalized Contemporaneity: Genealogy of Ideas

2022/2023

Academic Year

ENG

Instruction in English

10

ECTS credits

Delivered at:

School of Philosophy and Cultural Studies

Course type:

Compulsory course

When:

2 year, 1, 2 module

Instructor

Chukhrukidze (Chukhrov), Ketevan (.

Course Syllabus

Abstract

The course provides the comparative outlook of philosophic and theoretical paradigms, as well as of cultural edifices of Modern times and contemporaneity. Usually ‘classical’ and contemporary histories and theories of culture are either taught separately – as art before 20th century and the one after it; or if they are taught together, no epistemic or institutional watershed is made between modernity (Modern times) and contemporaneity, or between culture, visual studies and contemporary art. The core standpoint of the present course is that, the modernist and the contemporary art-practices are approached through the epistemological rupture within modernity - the rupture that revealed itself between modernism, avant-garde and contemporary critical theory, on the one hand; and the cultural and theoretic paradigms of ‘classical’ modernity, on the other. This view is indispensable to understand contemporary art’s negative genealogy (its numerous attempts of self-sublation since modernism) and controversial impact of the enlightenment in contemporary critical theory. Special attention will be dedicated to the paradigmatic aspects of culture. Traditionally culture is approached as the thesaurus of valorized artifacts. In the present course culture will be considered as the diachronic mode of universality, which (even in case of its rejection as it was the case in modernism or avant-garde), allows the artistic tendency to acquire meta-dimension and occupy its place in history. Culture in this sense is parallel to the notions of humanism and humanities. In this light techno-scientific and post-human studies acquire particular importance, as in the conditions of contemporary semio-capitalism they tend to neutralize the historical genealogy of culture. Consequently, the paradigmatic context of global contemporaneity will be defined not only through practices that embody it, but also through those experiences which had to be extracted from contemporaneity. The course encompasses the most important theoretical and paradigmatic issues starting with Kant’s Third Critique’ up to very recent debates in critical theory, philosophy and culture after computation, including the horizon of the post-humanist condition.