What is the Contemporary?

How do we figure and diagnose the present or contemporary moment in which we find ourselves? This is a question that has long preoccupied phenomenologists and philosophers of time from Hegel to Husserl, as well as mystics and artists of all sorts. But more than simply a philosophical or academic problem, figuring the contemporary and figuring out the contemporary pose discursive conundrums of the first order for critical theory, for aesthetics, for cultural studies and for art more broadly. This seminar will approach the problem presented by the present as it is addressed in a number of contemporary discourses and art. We will approach the contemporary not simply as a cultural or aesthetic period or marker but as a problem of representation on the level of structure, form, genre and discourse. The goal is an interdisciplinary history of the problem of the present, a crash course in what it means to be contemporary and what it means to speak of the contemporary.