COML 4798

Labor and the Arts

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2018-2019.

This course, offered entirely in English, is open to advanced undergraduates and graduates who want to learn more about the relations of politics to art in general and the cultural politic of "autonomia" more specifically.  This movement, primarily associated with Italy, continues to have widespread influence around the globe.  During the 1960s and 70s in Italy and elsewhere, workers, and intellectuals began to think collectively about a social terrain outside of dominant structures such as the State, the political party or the trade union.  How does their "refusal to work" shape culture and vice versa?  What kinds of cultural productions can come "outside of the State" or from constituent power?  We will begin the course by tracing the term autonomy (self-rule) from antiquity to the modern period with emphasis on its relation to culture.  We will then focus on the period of the 1960s and 70s, with experimental and mainstream cinema of Antonioni, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Petri and others; with writers such as Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nanni Balestrini; with arte povera as one "origin" of contemporary conceptual art; architecture and the reformation of public space in the wake of the situationism; and critics or theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and so on.  We will conclude with the potential relevance of autonomist-or-some might say post autonomist-thought for the present and future.

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