pharmakomedia seminar
This seminar surveys the history of drug literature and media from Plato to the present. We consider the pharmakon as a theoretical/philosophical idea-object that expresses our greatest hopes and deepest fears of media and their relationship to embodiment and consciousness. We study key texts by Thomas De Quincey, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, William S. Burroughs, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Avital Ronell, Sadie Plant, Richard Doyle, and others.
A central premise of the class is that individual and collaborative writing exercises mobilize aspects of the pharmakon as a technology of language-production and deconstruction. Textual experiments will seek to induce, through the written word, what the French poet Arthur Rimbaud called the “systematic derangement of the senses.” Our experiments with and on the written word will extend experimentally, through various prescriptions and protocols, into additional media formats in order to expand, contract, and counteract their purported effects on body and mind.
Spring 2012
Professor: Trace Reddell, PhD
Tues 6-9:50pm | Shwayder Art Building 221 (The Node)
Office Hours: Tuesday 3-5pm and by appt.
Office: Sturm 216B
Contact: treddell@du.edu
Session 01 (03-27-2012)
Introductions
Writing games & experiments
Session 02 (04-03-2012)
De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) + Suspiria De Profundis (1845)
The palimpsest experiment
Session 03 (04-10-2012)
Baudelaire, On Wine & Hashish (1851)
Comparative pharmacology experiment
Session 04 (04-17-2012)
Benjamin, On Hashish (1927-34)
The protocols experiment
Session 05 (04-24-2012)
Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1968), Dissemination
The pharmakon experiment
Session 06 (05-01-2012)
Burroughs, Electronic Revolution (1970)
Aural hallucinations experiment
Session 07 (05-08-2012)
Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania (1992)
Set & setting experiment
Session 08 (05-15-2012)
Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere (2011)
Media trip report experiment
Session 09 (05-22-2012)
Strassman et al, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies (2008)
Entheomedia experiment
Session 10 (05-29-2012)
Final projects: The Get Experienced experiment
Final (06-05-2012) Final reports posted on the blog by 7:50pm
Trace Reddell is a writer, artist and theorist exploring the interactions of sound and the cosmological imagination. Trace's live cinema performances and video works have screened at over thirty international venues including galleries and new media festivals in New York, London, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Berlin, Zurich, Sao Paolo, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Tehran. His net.art and audio projects have appeared regularly on the Web since 1999.