Class Contemporary culture

The modern debate on «culture» is consolidated in the context of the technical, social, and economic transformations of the 18th and 19th centuries, intertwined with concepts such as art, aesthetics, progress, technics and nature. This course proposes an archaeological examination of the concept of culture, tracing its emergence and development as a means of understanding the contemporary horizon. With this aim, a constellation of problems is articulated around two contemporary cultural trends: on the one hand, the technological structuring of experience, which fuels debates on mediation, communication, performance and simulation; on the other hand, the growing self-reflexivity concerning the relationships between culture and the broader material processes that sustain it, leading to debates about the connections between the human world and the world-without-us that surrounds it.

Not applicable

1 - The question of culture 1.1 - Foundational debates: technics, nature, aesthetic and culture 1.2 - Constitutive insufficiency and the historical construction of experience 2 - Culture in the age of technical reproducibility 2.1 - Modernity, technics, and culture 2.2 - Cultural cycles of estrangement and habituation 2.3 - The aesthetic dispositif: between critical judgement and affection 3 - Problems of contemporary culture 3.1 - The question of performativity: framing and expressive control 3.2 - Communication and culture: dialogue / dissemination 3.3 - Simulation and hyperreality: The production of worlds without referents 3.4 - Distributed agency: actor, object, space, and technology 3.5 - More-than-human: a planetary vision of culture

Lectures; textual hermeneutic analysis; structured classroom discussion of arguments; case study analysis; and the use of visual support materials.

Baudrillard, J. (1991). Simulacros e simulação. Relógio D'Água. Böhme, G. (2017). Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces. Bloomsbury. Eagleton, T. (2025). Cultura. Edições 70. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor books. Gunning, T. (2003). Re-newing old technologies: Astonishment, second nature, and the uncanny in technology from the previous turn-of-the-century. In D. Thorburn & H. Jenkins (Eds.), Rethinking Media Change (pp. 39-60). The MIT Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Manifestly Haraway. University of Minnesota Press. Latour, B. (2013). An inquiry into modes of existence: An anthropology of the moderns. Harvard University Press.  Rosa, H. (2013). Social Acceleration: A new theory of modernity. Columbia University Press. Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. University of Chicago Press.