Desiring Machines: Buildings, Maps, and Clouds

Focus is on early modern machines as tools for experience and action. In their break with Freudian psychoanalysis, French theorists Deleuze and Guattari speak of the machine as a tool of desire and attraction itself as "machinic" rather than desire for something that is missing. The goal of this course is to equip students with a different way of thinking by exploring a large group of objects from the early modern world (poems, buildings, costumes, maps, nets, and clouds) that help us to approach the period in a new way.