(Reading materials finalized. Course info updated as of Sept. 12.)

**NOTE: The first half of the semester will be conducted in Chinese (because of the difficulty of the Benjamin texts!) and the second half in English. No auditing allowed.

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This course seeks to address the exigency of imagination and experience prompted by the rise of digital technologies. The premise of the inquiry is that many discourses on the digital today fall short of offering sophisticated responses. They either celebrate indiscriminately the newness of experience advanced by new technologies, or interrogate the epistemic violence of digitality or socio-economic inequalities precipitated by digitality insofar as both binarism and division of labor are considered ramifications of the digital. While there are admittedly critical formulations that affirm the digital experience in much more thought-provoking ways (such as philosophical conceptions of virtuality), they often ignore the physicality of the digital per se, that is, the discreteness of the signals.

The course aims to salvage the concept of the digital and will examine digitality narrowly and broadly -- that is, digitality as it is understood in cybernetics as well as digitality as a way of reasoning, a cultural logic, or a progressive take on temporality. Course readings will be culled from philosophy, media theory, new media studies, and cybernetics. We will also consider literary works and art practices.

Thematic rubrics:

(A) Imagination and Experience in the Digital Era
To broach narratives on contemporary digital experience ranging from philosophy-inspired new media theory to down-to-earth critiques of digital media.

(B) Experience: Erlebnis or Erfahrung
To delve into Walter Benjamin’s writings on experience and see how his conceptions of the two senses of experience, together with his proposition of mimetic faculty or nonsensuous similitude, may provide illuminating approaches to immersive technologies today.

(C) The Digital vs. the Analog
To examine the stakes of valorizing analog mode of thinking in contemporary thought, and to look at literary works that demonstrate digital thinking.