The new year

My work these days revolves around a few big ideas and a cluster of questions that arise from them.  First: I define political thought as how we experience and imagine ourselves living with others, and I believe that a significant part of political action consists in how each of us makes our experiences and the offspring of our imagination comprehensible and valuable to others who may or may not share them.  I think that at least some work in the field academics call "political thought" (which I distinguish from "political philosophy"; the relation to "political theory" is more complicated) should be devoted to understanding how people accumulate experiences of the political, which is to say, how they accumulate experiences of living with others on different levels: the block, the neighborhood, the city, the state, the nation, other parts of the globe, and in their heads, in artworks, books, and movies; and how people imagine politics, in ideal terms and otherwise.  Understanding how images of living together with others are motivated by hatred and fear and desire is just as important to me as understanding normative ideas about justice.  

Since people tend to view relations with others in terms that blend the moral and the aesthetic (I like/don't like her; he seems like a good/indifferent/bad person; she's interesting/boring/intolerable) I think it's important to understand how people's assessments of surfaces relate to their moral judgments, because -- to pursue a metaphor a little too far -- the resulting mix is like a schist, part of the bedrock of the political, with mica-like gleams of hope and pleasure juxtaposed with grey streaks of fear and ignorance.

One of the most interesting aspects of aesthetic experience is that it has the power both to affect you in your current state and to change you out of that state into another state, temporarily or permanently.  This is true of a painting, a concerto, a movie, or a political speech.  I've chosen to spend a lot of time in the last couple of decades concentrating on how literary texts work because I believe that this analysis offers insight into how states of belief are formed and how they change.   I do this work, that is, I ask and think over these questions at my desk, in my office on campus, at bars and dinner parties where I talk with other academics, architects, bankers, writers, and other people in the information world.  I do it at the cinema and the opera and the symphony, where I am led to think about collective experiences of art and many more finer-grained questions of form and content.  For a few hammer-hit-exhausting months early last year, I did it in the Guggenheim museum, as a trained "player" in Tino Sehgal's large conversation-installation, "This Progress."   

And I do it in the classroom.  This blog is named after a course I developed last summer and taught last fall, and which (as usual) I'm reworking in light of its first run.  I'm no stranger to over-commitment and excessively high self-expectations -- you don't succeed unless you try for too much, is my general take on work -- but I hope it will combine brief journal-style notes of what I'm reading and thinking about with occasional longer, more thoughtful posts.