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IN THeory 7 Fall 2013SCT faculty give public lectures (Top from left to right: Achille Mbembe, Amanda Anderson, Akeel Bilgrami;Bottom left: Catherine Malabou; Bottom right: SCT participants)to the contemporary “maker” movement.Such a spectrum proved immenselycapable of not merely speaking to but—more importantly—connecting ourdisparate, individual interests.Divided into three two-week sections, theseminar began with “Dwelling,” focusingon questions related to architecture andplace, especially in relation to Heideggerand Arendt. What does it mean to dwell,as Heidegger suggests? Is there a kind ofdwelling that we can identify as valuableand useful for us today, some sixtyyears on from his famous speech to anaudience of architects in that ideologicaland cultural hub of post-war Europeanreconstruction, Darmstadt? How does thenotion of dwelling, understood as “theroutines and needs of life,” connect withArendt’s conception of the vita activa andthe classical distinction between publicand private space, a distinction whichitself increasingly comes under erasurein a networked, post-Fordist era in whichcontinual, 24/7 connections are rapidlybecoming the default modes of being?From there, we moved on to “Telling,”emphasizing the increasing importanceof design in constructing contemporary,postmodern narratives based aroundinteractions between people and objects.For example, how might James Gibson’sinfluential theorizations of affordances,or the usages that an object facilitates,contribute to New Materialism and otherrecent considerations of the agency ofobjects? In a particularly serendipitousturn, Gibson’s own work in this settingprovided us with a prime demonstrationof his theory; having been a professor atCornell, Gibson’s papers are entrustedto an archive on campus, thus affordingour seminar a deeper engagement withhis work. Finally, we concluded witha section on “Selling,” considering theincreasingly indistinguishable overlapbetween contemporary design andlate capitalism, with an emphasis onAutonomist analyses of branding,especially as reflected in recent attemptsto market “immaterial” qualities suchas experiences and environments. As anadded bonus we were able to mix ourtheory with practice, both throughout theseminar, thanks to Lupton’s incrediblywell-designed and effective visualpresentations, and at the end, when sheran a supplementary session on basicdesign principles.As a scholar of digital media turning acritical eye on the practices and ideologiesof informational capitalism, I found thelatter sections of the seminar most usefulfor my own, current project, a studyof digital multimedia convergence inconjunction with the fall of the BerlinWall, the end of state communism,and the beginning of a newly globalsocioeconomic order. Yet not only theother parts of the seminar but SCT as awhole, including presentations from SCTfaculty members and thought-provokingvisits from scholars such as AchilleMbembe and Catherine Malabou, not tomention Ithaca’s unparalleled naturalbeauty and the infectious enthusiasm ofmy colleagues in the program, served toremind me of the benefits of a lifelongdedication to learning. Perhaps this,then—for an academic, at least—is whatit means, however briefly, to dwell.Andrew LisonBrown University