Doug Ashford

This course provides a speculative and nonlinear body of collaborative research and practical experiment on expanding definitions of human life, bodies, and politics as produced by participants in the class. Key in our research will be proposals on the qualities of "humanness" that challenge the received expectations of this word as defined by the present. Examples could be: the human that is driven toward a wish for death, the body liberated in combination with machines, the historical figure of the monster, the importance of the animal as an aspect of humanity hidden from culture or the inflation of humanity in collective imagination as beings outside constraint or as residents in a global city perpetually in revolution. And finally we might ask, if the critique of what is understood as normality and sanity could be an opportunity for regeneration.

These questions will be addressed in carefully selected readings, class demonstrations and discussions. There will be daily individual meetings in which the individual histories and concerns of each participant can be discussed in depth. More centrally, there will be a series of practical assignments that the instructor will also have to follow and a reciprocal participatory set of assignments gleaned from each participant. In other words, we will each propose an alternative to the failures of humanity to each other. The instructor claims no expertise in any aspect of the common dream that occupies the central texts and objects we will examine together, and instead propose that we achieve this expertise together.