Jochen Schmon - Teaching

Spring 2024: Racial Foundations of Political Theory and their Critical Re-articulations

(Teaching Fellowship, self-designed undergraduate course)

The Western canon of modern political thought has been irreducibly embedded in the colonial endeavors of European imperialism, which is why contemporary critical theorists have used it as a privileged discursive site and archive to study the ideologies of racial hierarchy as well as justifications of colonial dispossession and enslavement. But for the very same reason, however, the engagement with the Western canon has also served to explore the terms of decolonial and anti-racist politics. Following this twofold strategy in engaging with the coloniality of the Western canon, the first part of this course will be dedicated to study the beginning of racial modernity in Renaissance humanism and its continuation in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Through the seminal works of Sylvia Wynter and Charles W. Mills, we will interrogate the racial foundations of early-modern Christian political theology as well as the colonial discourses of the ascending civil societies of Europe, paradigmatically crystallized in the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, or Immanuel Kant. The second part of this course will be introduced by abolitionist and decolonial engagements with Hegel's political philosophy, such as C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, or Orlando Patterson. We will continue with Black and anti-imperial re-articulations of Marx’s theory of capitalism and class struggle performed by W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, Ranajit Guha, or Angela Davis. In the final section, we will engage with the tradition of postcolonial and abolitionist thought that emerged from critical readings of Michel Foucault’s analyses of power, such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Saidiya Hartman, or Achille Mbembe.

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Fall 2025: The Arts and Social Engagement

(Teaching Fellowship, self-designed undergraduate course)

The social status of artistic practices has continuously been of uncertain and questionable relevance: What is the function of art, what are its powers, if there is one at all? This course serves as an introduction to a pathway of courses that investigate this question and explore various ways in which the arts engage in the formation of social relations, and vice versa, how societies shape the practice of art. We explore different modes of engagement: the creation of works that help us imagine and understand the complex lives of others and the histories that shaped them, that articulate critiques of social conditions, as well as the research that informs these processes; from criticism and curation that analyze and stage art to works of art in the service of political ends; from the institutions, policies, markets, and social inequalities that organize the arts to creative practices that help building communities of care and aid. Different publics build and need different artworks, so we also look at how networks – cities, institutions, collectives – shape, deter, or support the arts. We think through what arts and engagement mean: who defines these ideas, to what ends, for what purposes, for how long? Students will be introduced to some of the foundational modern theorists of art, such as John Dewey, Jean-Paul Sartre and Aimé Césaire, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Rancière, Audre Lorde and bell hooks, Fred Moten and Hito Steyerl. Case studies ground our broad investigation into how imagination and creativity connect to societal insight and action. The course also introduces students to the variety of theory, practice, and experience in the arts in which New School faculty are engaged.

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Spring 2026: The Political Theory of Art

(Teaching Fellowship, self-designed undergraduate course)

The relationship between politics and art has continuously been thought in the most Janus-faced ways: Between complete irrelevance and artistic warfare, l'art pour l'art and culture wars. This course interrogates this issue by focusing on the debate between Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, perhaps the two most important art theorists of the 20th century. The German Marxists engaged in a most paradigmatic dispute on the social conditions and functions of art, its critical potentials and political interventions. Students will be introduced to some of the philosophical foundations that conditioned their reflections on the relationship between politics and art, society and its critique, such as Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Nietzsche. But we will also work through their writings by discussing the crucial artists and artistic movements that guided Benjamin and Adorno’s competing theories of art, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, or Charlie Chaplin. In the final section of the course, we will engage with contemporary theorists that have paradigmatically worked through the terms that Benjamin and Adorno have exemplarily put forward, such as Jacques Rancière, Fred Moten, or Hito Steyerl.