John Noyes

October 07, 2021

KINETIC OBJECTS: Humans and Things and Puppets

This course is the intellectual property of John K. Noyes. It may not be used in part or in total, not by humans nor artificial intelligence, without the written permission of the author.

Course Description

  • Whether it's the Alexa home virtual assistant,

    the graphic interface on a computer game, the partially automated (not to mention the self-driving) vehicle, the robotic arm in an assembly line, or the bot assistant on an online store, we have built a world of animated things. What does it mean to be human in a world of animated things? Art, religion, and philosophy have been exploring the interface between human life and animated things for thousands of years. Can we use artistic explorations to better understand human life in a world of technologically animated things? In this course we will examine some aspects of this exploration, focusing on puppetry as a strategy and a solution to the problems of personhood. Puppets have always served as animated things that probe the limits of the human. And as soon as we talk about limits of the human, we are talking about how we imagine dehumanized bodies, about fictions of race. ‘The human’ has held onto its particular status in the modern era, associated with privileges and rights. But as we are increasingly aware, the limits and mode of existence of this self-described human also defined those deemed ‘not fully human’, including women, slaves and animals. Mimetic traditions across human histories and geographies have in various ways posed questions about the limits of the human. Enquiries across philosophy, theology, anthropology, and aesthetics have raised challenges through which to confront assumptions about the limits of the human; and puppetry arts have been integral both to reinforcing and to challenging the assumptions about relations of power, and conceptions of thought and agency. The questions raised are integrally about labour (and who does it); and in such terms the robot - a kind of contemporary stand-in for the puppet - has increasingly been integral to such debates.

  • Keywords


    • Animation: physiological, filmic, theological, technological
    • Thinking machines and the cultural history/deep time of AI
    • Dehumanization in the contexts of South African apartheid and North American indigeneity
    • Subjectivity/subject positions and performance: When can one speak as and for another?
    • Anthropomorphism and the non-human other--how and when is anthropomorphism licensed--artistically, ecologically, ethically?



What you need to know about this course

  • KINETIC OBJECTS Humans and Things (and Puppets!)

    ... is a teaching collaboration emerging from the Centre for Humanities Research and the Jackman Humanities Institute in the framework of the partnership on "Aesthetic Education: A South North Dialogue" funded by the Mellon Foundation. It is taught by three friends and colleagues living and working in Toronto and in Cape Town: John Noyes (University of Toronto), Lawrence Switzky (University of Toronto), and Jane Tayler (University of the Western Cape), all in very different ways, have an active research interest in pursuing the difficult limits of the Human. 

  • This is an experimental course

    that brings graduate students at the University of Toronto into dialogue with their peers at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. It is taught by colleagues at the two universities who share an interest in practical and theoretical problems associated with puppetry and the limits of the human. Our aim is to establish a dialogue to investigate a single practical and theoretical problem from the point of view of students and researchers living and working in two very different societies.

  • We meet every Tuesday and Thursday

    from 9am to 11am (Toronto) / 4pm to 6pm (Cape Town), from November 2 until December 9. It's a concentrated course, 6 weeks long, structured around set reading and discussion between the linked classrooms.

Week-by-week course content

  • You can access all set texts HERE

    Dropbox

    JGC1740 Texts

  • Week 1: Mind – Brain – Body


    Tuesday November 2: Introduction.

    Thursday November 4: What does it mean to be a mind with a body? Or a body with a mind?
    • Rimini Protokoll 2018. Video.
    • Cappelletto 2011
    • Damasio 2006



  • Week 2: Prosthesis and Extension



    Tuesday November 9: The politics of the artificial body
    • Kleist, The Marionette Theatre, 1810
    • Engelstein, “Out on a Limb”
    • Taylor, “The As If Reality of Puppetry Theatre”

    Thursday November 11: The art (and music) of the modified body








  • Week 3: Thinking Machines



    Tuesday November 16: Where does thought take place?
    • Descartes, Meditation, 1641. Selections. 
    • Descartes, Treatise on Man, 1664 [1648]. Selections. 
    • Condillac, Treatise on Sensations, 1754. Conclusion. 
    • Poe, “On Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” 1836

    Thursday November 18: Thinking Machines








  • Week 4: The Psychic lives of Puppets


    Tuesday November 23: Projection? Anthropomorphism?

    PRESENTATION: Rena, Hoffmann

    • Hoffmann, E. T. A., The Sandman (1819)
    • Hoffmann, E. T. A., Der Sandmann (1819)
    • Rilke, Rainer Maria, “On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel” (1914)
    • Rilke, Rainer Maria, "Zu den Wachs-Puppen von Lotte Pritzel" (1914)
    • Gross, “The Madness of Puppets” (2011)
    • Mark Fisher, “Beyond the Unheimlich” and “Approaching the Eerie” from The Weird and the Eerie (2016)

    Thursday November 25: Thingified humans, humanized things.

    PRESENTATION: Nathalie, Kafka
    PRESENTATION: Nonkwe, The eerie

    • Kafka, Franz, “The Cares of a Family Man” (1914-1917)
    • Kafka, Franz, "Die Sorge des Hausvaters" (1914-1917)
    • Judith Butler, Odradek and Capitalism. Video.

  • Week 5: Projection and Mimesis

    Tuesday November 30: Abjection, reification, animality

    PRESENTATION: 
    --Sophie, Taussig
    --Iona

    • Aristotle, "On the Motion of Animals"; “Politics” 
    • Michael Taussig, "Physiognomc aspects of visual worlds" & "His master's voice," Mimesis and Alterity
    • Maxim Gorki, "Last night I was in the kingdom of shadows".  
    • Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make Believe, p. 35-43.

    Thursday December 2: Men/women. Do marionettes have souls?

    PRESENTATION: 
    --Bongi
    --Jingyi

    • Derrida, Jacques, The Beast and the Sovereign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2009), Seventh Session, February 13, 2002, 187-205.
    • Valery, Paul, Monsieur Teste, trans. Jackson Mathews (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1973), 8-46.





  • Week 6: Speaking of Animism: Motion and Emotion


    Tuesday December 7: Animism, Animation, Animacy
    • Harry Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism” (2003)
    • Kimmerer, Robin, “The Grammar of Animacy,” 2020. Video.”   
    • Teri Silvio, “Animation: the new performance?” (2015)

    Thursday December 9: Concluding discussion.



Toronto Students!

  • Evaluation Details

    Toronto Students, you've enrolled in JGC1740, and this course counts toward your coursework. It is evaluated according to the following schedule:

    20 minute oral presentation on one of the texts: 20%
    • Due in class, sign-up on quercus
    • This is intended as the first step toward your research paper. 
    • Discuss the text, explain its argument and / or its structure, point out what you see as important points, identify questions, problems, things you don't understand.
    Research essay 50%
    • This is built on your oral presentation. Take some of the questions or problems that arose in discussion. 
    • Find some articles or books / chapters in books that address these problems. Write about 5000 words, 13-15 pages long. This is due after the winter break.
    Participation 15%
    • This is based on your participation in discussions during classes.
    Final conversation with instructors 15%
    • These will take place in the week after classes end (13-17 December). 
    • We will talk for about 15 or 20 minutes. 
    • You can use this to talk through any aspects of your research project / oral presentation you want. We see it as a step toward completion of the essay.







Reading List

  • Prescribed reading / viewing, and more...

    Texts:

    • Agamben, Giorgio. "The Open" (2004). Stanford: Stanford UP.
    • Aristotle, "On the Motion of Animals". Selections.
    • Aristotle: Politics. Selections.
    • Arbuthnot, Swift and Pope, "Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus" (1741) Selections.
    • Bogost, Ian, "Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s like to be a Thing", Introduction.
    • Cappelletto, Chiara, “The Puppet’s Paradox: an organic prosthesis,” RES 59/60 (2011), 325-336.
    • Clark, A., “Embodied Prediction,” In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 7(T) (2015). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570115
    • Damasio, Antonio and Hanna Damasio, “Minding the Body,” Daedalus 135/3 (2006), 15-22.
    • Dennett, Daniel, “When HAL Kills, Who’s to Blame?” (1997)
    • Derrida, Jacques, The Beast and the Sovereign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2009), Seventh Session, February 13, 2002, 187-205.
    • Descartes,  Meditations. Selections.
    • Dick, Philip K. “Man, Android and Machine”, in Science Fiction at Large, ed. Peter Nicholls (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 202.
    • Dolar, Mladen. "The Voice and Nothing More". (2006). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Selections.
    • Engels, Friedrich. "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" (1876).
    • Engelstein, Stefani. "Out on a Limb: Military Medicine, Heinrich von Kleist, and the Disarticulated Body," German Studies Review 23, no.2 (2000): 225-44.
    • Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny" (1919).
    • Freud, Sigmund, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920).
    • Gross, Kenneth "Puppet. An Essay on Uncanny Life." (2011)
    • Heidegger, Martin, "The Thing"
    • Hoffmann, E. T. A., “The Sandman” (1819)
    • Hoffmann, E. T. A., “Automata” (1814)
    • Kafka, Franz, “The Cares of a Family Man” (1914-1917)
    • Kleist, Heinrich v, “On the Marionette Theatre,” 1810
    • Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (selection from chapter on Identity, Book 2 Chapter 27)
    • Mauss, Marcel. "The Gift"  (1925) Selections
    • Rilke, Rainer Maria, “On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel” (1914), in Kenneth Gross, On Dolls (Devon: Notting Hill 2018), 51-62.
    • Roach, Joseph. "The Player's Passion". (1985). Newark: Associated University Press.Selections.
    • Silvio, Teri, “Animation: The new performance?”
    • Valery, Paul, Monsieur Teste, trans. Jackson Mathews (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1973), 8-46.

    Video and Film:
    • "Dead of Night" with Michael Redgrave. Dir ALberto Cavalcanti. (1945)
    • "Psycho" with Anthony Perkins. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. (1960)
    • Select clips of performance from YouTube.
    • Stanley Kubrick's "2001, A Space Odyssey"
    • Selections from Buster Keaton.
    • Selections from Svankmejer, as well as Tony Miyambo’s “Kafka’s Ape”, Gerhard Marx, “Vehicle”, and other experiments.
    • Lauzon, Jani,  Prophecy Fog
    • Gob Squad’s My Square Lady
    • Rimini Protocol, Uncanny Valley / Unheimliches Tal 2018
    • Rimini Protocol, Call Cutta in a Box
    • Josef Sudek: A Photographer Who Devoted His Life to Beauty