Anti/formalisms Then and Now

This seminar examines the aesthetic and political stakes of form in film and visual arts by tracing formalist discourses from German idealism to the present. Beginning with Kant’s transcendental aesthetic and Hegel’s dialectic of form and matter, we will consider how Marx’s analysis of the value-form radicalizes formal thinking by linking aesthetics and critique. We will see how twentieth-century figures such as Warburg, Benjamin, Adorno, and Bataille reconfigured form as a historical, affective, and political process—or rather, project—before turning to contemporary theorists—including Bradley, Brinkema, Jackson, and Halberstam—who revisit and/or unsettle formalism through antiracist, feminist, queer, and materialist lenses. Films and art include works by American Artist, Hito Steyerl, Wu Tsang, Jacolby Satterwhite, Rosa von Praunheim, and more.