From Buddha to Bataille, Eros to Wilde, Marx to Media Platforms, Freud to Cyborgs andWall Street IPOs, desire is the Trickster who hides within the gardens of the sensuous andthe market, who lurks behind the altars of passion, repression, and allure. Algorithm, Icon,fetish, logo, idol, brand, hot and cool, hand and skin, dream– desire is indeed the silver coinand golden bite, the primal scream, the screen, the color of the eye. Desire is opaqueobsession, projection, obscure temptation, nostalgia, longing, excess, memory scent, engineof commerce and war. Orgasmic Magus, fantastic Wiccan, creative might, sleepless night,whisper to the ear, high crack in the ice, leakage, fear, protoplasmic tear. Desire is aniceberg floating in a melting sea of oil and greed, tectonic tremor, shifting, changing,slipping, restless void, drunken shadow, devouring bot, sidereal appetite.This course aims to understand how the above “economies” of affect and desire mix withmyth and religion, our psychic and material economies, and our brain cartographies– inparticular, with love, sex and gender, race and class, fear, violence and peace, semioticrepresentations and the unconscious. The crafty aesthetics of commodity fetishism and TheSociety of the Spectacle, Big Data, and the emotariat of contemporary post-Fordist,emotional capitalism will be examined in the global economies of consumption and finance,art markets, technology, fashion, social media, and the image. Finally, we will ask what nextbeyond endless “innovation” wants, mindless shopping and waste, permanent hunger andneed. To try to harmonize the “reptile and mammal” behind our neocortex, with theelemental ecologies of water and air, fire and earth– So that, optimally, we may find ourmind’s hearth in the arts and cultures of our lived common(s).

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