The Politics of Wonder
Sean Cubitt

Wednesday 24 October 2007 @ 6pm
Room 327 Webster Building UNSW Anzac Parade Kensington 2052

Many of the canonical aesthetic statements of the 20th century modernism, from Schklovsky’s ostranenie to Bazin’s neo-realism, celebrated the disruption of habitual perception. Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory can serve as benchmarks for a turn of the tide towards critical suspicion of beauty and the marvellous. In this presentation, I want to consider the importance of negative aesthetics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in order to discover under what conditions it might be possible to move towards a new politics of wonder.

Professor Sean Cubitt is Director of the Program in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne and Honorary Professor of the University of Dundee.