writing assignment - due April 21st

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For this assignment you are asked to review, research and critique an exhibition of your choice (you may include an exhibition that has included your work) using one or a combination of a group of theorists (e.g. Frankfurt School, Stuart Hall & Kohso, deCerteau & Foucault) we have read in this seminar as a lens.

The main purpose of the second assignment is to critically reflect upon the mediatisation of identities politics to the 'the politic of identity' in order to consider how others have understood this terrain. By looking at exhibitions, you are asked to select a case study, that may allow you to also articulate how you envision the ways in which you and others are active participants in creating the relationship between youself and the world around you through work. as well.
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In this second part of the seminar, we have engaged various theorists who maintain different theories regarding identity and power, as well as illustrate various aspects of the culture industry (conditions of production, distribution, exhibition, consumption):

the identity principle of the commodity that preoccuppied the early and revisited Frankfurt School's (critical theory) concern about both fascist governments and cultures of late capitalism.

the culture wars and "identity politics" mobilized by Reaganism and Thatcherism that revised former theories of power, the role of the state, and how identifications are internalized and reproduced.

the politics of identity and war of positions encouraged by the BCC to reconsider how an implicitly queer racialized gender formation theory interrogates not just how an individual is racialized and positioned, more about the projects that engage in geographic wagers and circumscription/distribution of freedom and unfreedoms (eg legacies and rearticulations of the black Atlantic)

the antisystemic war of positions of theorists analysing the legacies of a global '68 and '89

most recently the difference between Foucault and deCerteau about the microtechniques of power, and Foucault and Marcuse and their analysis on the aesthetic dimension as well as image-power within Western modern episteme.

In the next/third section of the seminar we will be discussing shifts in theories of analog to virtual image- and network power.
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