Eric Cazdyn

COL5131H NON DISCLOSURE ACTS

Time: Spring term, Wednesdays, 1-3

Sexual predators purchase secrecy from their victims, billionaires hide obscene wealth in off-shore bank accounts, government spies conduct counter intelligence under false identities–so many dirty truths are managed today by what we might call “non disclosure agreements.” But the double negative contained in the category of the “non disclosure” figures a limit to these agreements and opens up to the most pressing aesthetic, philosophical, and political questions regarding what constitutes truth, justice, and representation.  And then there is the act.  Whereas the “action” and the “agreement” function to reproduce the existing order, the act creates the conditions for something radically different to come into the world.  In this seminar, we will focus on the promise of the non disclosure act as a way to question such key modern binaries as public-private, exposure-concealment, knowable-unknowable, conscious-unconscious, presence-absence, representation-presentation, and theory-practice. We will study encounters with the problem of disclosure by such thinkers as Badiou (truth procedures), Barad (quantum entanglement), Butler (performativity), Derrida (deconstruction), Heidegger (unconcealment), Jameson (representation) Karatani (transcritique), Lacan (the real), Marx (ideology critique), Nishida (praxis), and Zizek (the parallax). We will also study artistic experiments of the non disclosure act, ranging from film, video, and literature to performance art, dance, architecture, and new media.

EAS 243 H Japanese Cinemas 2 (Fall)

VIC   Praxis and Performance (Fall)

EAS Body, Movement Japan (Spring)

Fall, 2017

COL 5110 Post-Capitalist Fantasy, 1-3 (Thursdays)

Every now and then we sense a world beyond the capitalist one in which we live. Maybe it is a society without punishing inequality. Or a self without anxiety. Or an ecosystem without human rapaciousness. This sense (feeling, impulse, drive) can be as banal as a quiet moment alone, or as go-for-broke as a revolutionary act together. Like death, it is something we already know and something beyond our wildest dreams. Like love, it is in us more than us. Sometimes we attempt to shake open this otherness by the sheer force of our imagination or collective will; other times we meet it without any intention, without any focused desire or recognition that we are actually engaged in such a radical act.  Regardless of whether such post-capitalist worlds are possible or whether such desires are naïve or hysterical, our encounter with them—with these speculative futures—is promising.  But promising of what?

EAS 448: Future, Architecture, Japan (Wednesdays)

How do we build something for the future? Wait! Who’s future? What future? What is the future? And who’s this “we” that will build something for this future that is so slippery to know? While we’re at it: to build? Must all buildings be built for them to be buildings? What about dreams? Political movements? Personal relationships? Are they buildings too? Let’s keep going: what about the unbuilt and the not-built? The act of unbuilding and not-building? In this seminar we will explore these creeping questions and examine how the future is imagined and materialized in architectural theory and practice throughout Japanese history. From the Ise Shrine of the seventh century to modernist experiments of the Metabolist movement, from contemporary works by Isozaki Arata and Atelier Bow Wow (and many others) to our own crazy experiments we will study built, unbuilt, and non-built structures as theories of the future…and significant acts of the present.

Winter, 2018

EAS 23x: The Japanese Cinemas: Film Form and the Problems of Modernity (I) (Wednesday)

Fall, 2015

Praxis and Performance (VIC 30x)

Approaches to East Asian Studies (EAS 209)

Winter, 2016

Marxism and Form (Graduate Seminar, COL)

Fall, 2014

East Asian Studies (undergraduate): “Future, Architecture, Japan”

Winter 2014-15

Comparative Literature (graduate): “Lacan, Clinic, Late Capitalism”

East Asian Studies (undergraduate): “Japanese Cinema (2)”

COL 5110H  POST-CAPITALIST FANTASY (graduate)

E. Cazdyn
Time: Fall term, Thursdays, 3-5

Triggered by the 2008 Global financial meltdown, there has emerged a reinvigorated engagement with the question “what comes after capitalism?”  This question—this desire—calls all parties to the table: artists, activists, intellectuals, psychoanalysts and the rest of us, who—whether we know it or not—stake a claim on this question in the most direct and indirect ways. This seminar will depart from two problems: first, the concept and practice of fantasy (in a psychoanalytic mode) and, second, the historiographical/literary problem of emplotment on which any expression of a post-capitalist future must turn. We will then pursue these problems as they intersect culture, politics and subjectivity, with special attention granted to utopian and dystopian fiction and film, radical architecture and urban planning, new theoretical and political radicalisms, and the affective turn in the project of transforming the human subject.

Materials will include work by Sigmund Freud, Isozaki Arata, Jacques Lacan, Felix Guattari, Karl Marx, Fredric Jameson, Lauren Berlant, Slavoj Zizek, Rem Koolhaus, Jodi Dean, Karatani Kojin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Shigeru Ban, Kathleen Stewart, Franco Bifo Berardi, Alexander Kluge, Christian Marazzi, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Hardt, China Miéville, Antonio Negri, Wang Hui, Alain Badiou, Hayden White, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Jacques Ranciere, Marge Piercy, and Bruno Bosteels.

Evaluation:
One Research Paper: 40%;
One Class Presentation and Write-up: 40%;
Class Participation and Weekly Responses*: 20%.
*Every Thursday a one-page (single spaced) response is due (these should include impressions and questions regarding readings and class discussion).

EAS xxxH  Japanese Cinemas: Film Form and the Problems of Japanese Modernity (Part 1) (unergraduate)

Fall Term, Tuesday 9-12
Innis Town Hall

COL 5036H,S: THE CRISIS IMAGES: THE EDGES OF FILM, THEORY AND HISTORY
Instructor: E. Cazdyn
Spring term (2012), Wednesdays, 3-5

In this seminar we will explore the status of the image today. Gilles Deleuze wrote his two “cinema” books around a transition—from the Movement-Image to the Time-Image. The Movement-Image presupposes an action that prompts a reaction (that coordinates, in principle, to pre-World War II cinema—Griffith, Eisenstein, classical Hollywood codes), while the Time-Image prompts actions that float in situations rather than bring these situations to conclusion—Rosselini, Resnais, Ozu, Godard. Is it time to theorize a third book, a third image in relation to the contemporary moment of a saturated, digitized, wiki-leaked imagescape? With this question in mind we will explore contemporary studies of the image as well as images of the contemporary moment…all the while wondering what might constitute a radical break of—and with—the dominant regime of representation. Readings will include works by Deleuze, Paul Virilio, D.N. Rodowick, Mary Ann Doane, Jacques Ranciere, Fredric Jameson, Susan Sontag, Guy Deborg, Laura Mulvey, Akira Lippit, Lev Manovich and others. And images by Claire Denis, Tsai Ming-Liang, Chris Marker, Apichtpong Weerasethakul, Manu Luksch as well as medical, surveillance, and an assortment of non-visual images.

VIC304H1S  Praxis and Performance
Professor E. Cazdyn
2012 T 3-5

This course will explore what it means to “act” in cultural, political, religious, and psychological realms.  We focus on the historically shifting relations between theory and practice, between structure and agency, and between being and doing.

We will begin with the aesthetic and then move to the political, the psychoanalytic, the spiritual, and the pedagogical. Readings and viewings will include: Nam June Paik, Sigmund Freud,  Lenny Bruce, Basho, Harold Pinter, Jean Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Pierre Gorin, John Cage, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Judith Butler, Marina Abramović’, Karl Marx, The Invisible Committee, John Stewart, Cathy Caruth, Jacques Lacan, Astra Taylor, Dogen, Jamgon Kongtrul, Slavoj Zizek, John D. Caputo, Jacques Rancière, Bertoll Ollman.

 EAS 209 H Approaches to East Asia

(2011) Tuesdays 7-9    Professor Eric Cazdyn

This course will introduce students to three of the most pressing theoretical problems faced in the study of East Asia: history, geography, and subjectivity. By history we mean the problem of history, the choices made when studying and narrating the past and how these choices shape the meaning of the present and the possibilities for the future. To think carefully about history is at once to think about time, or the way that various concepts of time shape lived experience. By geography we mean the problem of geography, the choices made when mapping the world and how these choices shape the meaning of the planet, region, nation, city, countryside, all the way to the smallest corners of everyday life.  To think about geography is at once to think about space, from physical space to the space of thought. Finally, by subjectivity we mean the problem of the human subject, the choices made when examining ourselves and others and how these choices shape (and are shaped by) gender, race, class, sexuality, and other categories of difference.  Together with subjectivity will come a focus on language, in particular how subjects do not only speak and write language, but are spoken and written by it. Whether we know it or not (or like it or not) we move through these three problems whenever we think about East Asia. The primary purpose of this course is to draw attention to this inevitability and to explore what such a recognition might enable for East Asian studies and beyond.

The Japanese Cinema(s): Film Form and the Problems of Modernity