The line in the title is taken from Charles Olson’s Maximus, his colossal serial work on the subject of Gloucester, MA which, on the surface, is focussed primarily upon the organisation and possibilities of the social world, but in fact yields a vision and stance that is expressly ecological, drawn from what he calls earlier ‘American tales . . . of man against the earth.’

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Concentrating upon the arts of New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain College in a period of accelerated experimentation, this seminar moves within the interdisciplinary framework of cultural environmentalism and reflects an awareness that the ‘social’ is made not only in historical practices but in the construction of human geographies. 

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It explores how an imaginary of place might be performed by literary texts and non-verbal forms through examining relations between lived and socially produced space, and charts the play of forces and forms, of power and knowledge generated by the avant-garde during a time of increased aggression on the part of the Market State.

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Themes arising will include notions of performance and performativity, the encoding of cultural memory in the artwork, and the social ambivalence towards technology--as agency of democracy, of mechanisation, of repressive bureaucracy--or what Lewis Mumford dramatised as a dialectical tension between ‘Art and Technics.’ 

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Ideas drawn from commentators such as Henry Adams, Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, Michel de Certeau, Judith Butler, Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze will be brought to bear upon a series of works drawn from the Abstract Expressionist/Beat and Pop/Conceptualist eras: the means of theorising transitions from an immediate postwar emphasis on intuition and the body in creative production to the saturated mediations of the mid-1960s and the origins of what Paul Virilio terms the ‘disappearance of the aesthetic.’

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We will discuss how subsequent changes in the definition of subjectivity as the primary determinant of social location and analysis might underwrite moral and political self-confidence, marking out some points of origin, boundary lines and new relationships within the formations of city and biosphere. The topics are arranged thematically. Each will focus on a set of core texts, but will also draw on visual culture, music and performance art as a means of celebrating interdisciplinary and comparative practice.

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Students will be encouraged to invent their own coursework essay topics in association with the seminar themes, drawing upon whatever primary and secondary materials they may choose.

What follows is an indication of the primary materials and issues to be addressed in the seminar.

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