The Power of the Image or, The Surface of Things

This is the course website for HUM 425, Thought and Image, Fall 2011, at San Francisco State University. Students can find a copy of the course syllabus here as well as documents, handouts, and assignments. I doubt I will have time to maintain a blog, but I may occasionally post links and other items of interest for the course. This course critically studies the relation between thought and image in the historical present. We will analyze various media, such as video games, film noir, melodrama, cinema, Pop Art, and study concepts like simulacra/simulation and spectacle. The course is intended to be both fun and challenging. All of the material we cover is connected to the same themes and concepts. My teaching method is cumulative. It is not until the course is finished that, I think, you are fully able to "get" the material (so don't freak out, we still have a lot of time).

Below is a philosophical description of the course. It can't be the course description in the syllabus (I think) because it's where I want you to "get" by the end of the course. However, I am including it here for your consideration (because it encapsulates one of the big ideas of the course). You are free to use it however you want in your work. Think of it as an alternative and more philosophical course description. 

One of the defining characteristics of globalization has been the increasing proliferation of images throughout society. Images are everywhere: Cell phones, the World Wide Web, social networking, advertising, movies, video games, comics, pornography. Images pervade our everyday lives. Yet images, by definition, are not solid. They're not objects or, "things" as we have traditionally (and philosophically) defined those terms. Rather, images are abstractions: Dots of emulsion on film or, pixels on a screen. Far from referring to hidden depths, images are all about the surface of things. They're not "real" (though far from meaningless). How, then, do we think the growing proliferation of image in society? And how has this changed the ways we think and live? How do the ways we are already living call into question many of our assumptions (e.g. about the real/fake, true/false, essence/appearance, depth/surface), including of meaning itself. In this course, we will think seriously about the power (and potential) of the image in global culture. And we will ask how this changes the ways we think about race, sexuality, and gender, none of which are "true" or real, much less objects or essences, but are only social constructions.

Images from left to right: All That Heaven Allows; State of Emergency (game); detail from Rauschenberg's Retroactive, 1963; 1950's American Movie Theater (3-D glasses).