Critical Theory A: The Point Is To
Change It
Fall, 2021, San Francisco Art
Institute
Instructor: Dale Carrico,
dcarrico@sfai.edu; ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog:
http://thepointistochangeit.blogspot.com/
Fridays, 1-3.45pm, MCR, 8/30/21--12/6/19
Rough Basis for Grade: Att/Part,
20%, Reading Notebook, 20%; Midterm Precis/Toulmin Schema, 20%; Final Paper,
5-6pp., 40%
Course
Description:
"The philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world, but the
point is to change it." -- Karl Marx
"Feminists
are no more aware of different things than other people; they are aware of the
same things differently. Feminist consciousness, it might be ventured, turns a
'fact' into a 'contradiction.'" -- Sandra
Lee Bartky
"Artists inhabit the magical
universe." -- William Burroughs
This course is a chronological and thematic survey of key texts in critical and
cultural theory. A skirmish in the long rivalry of philosophy and rhetoric
yielded a turn in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud into the post-philosophical
discourse of critical theory. In the aftermath of world war, critical theory
took a biopolitical turn in Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault -- a turn still
reverberating in work on socially legible bodies by writers like Haraway, Lorde, Butler, and Stone. And with the rise of the global precariat and climate
catastrophe, critical theory is now turning again in STS (science and
technology studies) and EJC (environmental justice critique) to articulate the
problems and promises of an emerging planetarity. Theories of the fetish define
the turn of the three threshold figures of critical theory -- Marx, Nietzsche,
and Freud (commodity, sexuality, and ressentimentality) -- and fetishisms ramify thereafter in critical accounts
from Benjamin (aura), Adorno (culture industry), Barthes (myth), Debord
(spectacle), Klein (logo), and Harvey ("tech") to Mulvey and Mercer
(the sexed and raced gaze). We think of facts as found not made, but facts are
made to be found and, once found, made to be foundational. Let us pursue the
propositions that fetishes are figures we take to yield false facts, while
facts are figures we have fetishized to yield paradoxical truths.
Provisional
Schedule of Meetings
Week One | September 3 | Intro(se)ductions
Maps, Stories, Warnings by Way of Introduction
Week
Two | September 10 | Ancients and Moderns, Fontenelle and Wilde
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns --
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Week
Three | September 17 | Nietzsche and ressentiment as Fetish
Nietzsche, On Truth and the Lie in an Extramoral Sense
-- Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: Preface -- Why I Am So Wise -- Why I Am So Clever -- Why I Am a Destiny
--supplemental Selections from The Gay Science
Week Four | September
24 | Marx and the Fetishism of Commodities
Marx on The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof
from Capital
--
supplemental Marx and Engels, Theses on Feuerbach and Marx on Idealism and Materialism
Week Five | October 1 |
Freud and Sexual Fetishism
Sigmund Freud, Fetishism -- from Freud's Study
of Schreber: 1, Psychoanalysis and Scientificity
2, Storytelling 3, Psychoanalysis and Patriarchy (Homosociality and
Homosexuality) 4. Psychoanalysis Brought to Crisis.
Week Six | October 8 |
Aura and the Culture Industry
Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility --
Adorno and Horkheimer, The Culture Industry
--supplemental
Benjamin, A Short History of Photography and
Adorno, The Culture Industry Reconsidered
Week Seven | October 15 |
Nature As Fetish; Or, Ideology Is Structured Like A Language
Roland Barthes, Mythologies ; Toulmin Schema
Workshop.
Week
Eight | October 22 | From Being to Having, Having to Appearing, Appearing to
Branding
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle -- Naomi
Klein, Taking On the Brand Bullies from No
Logo
--
supplemental Naomi Klein, Patriarchy Gets Funky
Week Nine | October
29 | Out With The Old, In With The New
William Burroughs, Immortality -- supplemental Burroughs, On Coincidence
John Carpenter, dir. They Live.
Week Ten | November 5 | The Eye of Power: Fanon,
Mulvey, and Mercer
Frantz Fanon, Selections from Black Skin, White Masks -- Laura
Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
-- Kobena Mercer On Mapplethorpe
Week Eleven |
November 12 | The Carceral Archipelago and Abolition Democracy
Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish (this is a .pdf of the
entire book from which you should read from the excerpts as far as you like)
from "The Body of the Condemned" (pp. 3-31), "Docile
Bodies" (pg. 135 +), and "Panoptism" (pg. 195 +) -- Angela
Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete? (Chapters 1, 2, 6)
-- supplemental Michel Foucault, from History of Sexuality: We Other
Victorians, Right of Death and Power Over Life
Week
Twelve | November 19 | Intersectional Feminism
Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference --
The Combahee River Collective Statement --
Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs
Week
Thirteen | November 19 | Thanksgiving Holiday, Workshopping the Final Paper at
Home
Week
Fourteen | Queer Theories
Judith Butler, Intro. and Ch. One
from Undoing Gender -- Sandy Stone, The
Empire Strikes Back https://sandystone.com/empire-strikes-back.pdf
– Sara Ahmed, A Killjoy Manifesto (handout)
Week Fifteen | November 3
| Environmental Justice
John Bellamy Foster, The Four Laws
of Ecology and the Four Anti-Ecological Laws of Capitalism https://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/04/02/four-laws/
-- Aldo Leopold Thinking Like A Mountain (handout) -- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
– Robert Bullard, Confronting Environmental Racism in the United States https://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/543B2B250E64745280256B6D005788F7/$file/bullard.pdf
-- Hazel Johnson, A Personal Story https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/jcred/vol9/iss2/9/
Course
Objectives:
I. Contextualizing Contemporary
Critical Theory: The inaugural Platonic repudiation of rhetoric and poetry,
Vita Activa/Vita Contemplativa, Marx's last Thesis on Feuerbach, Kantian
Critique, the Frankfurt School, Exegetical and Hermeneutic Traditions, Literary
and Cultural Theory from the Restoration period through New Criticism, from
Philosophy to Post-Philosophy: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud; the postwar biopolitical
turn in Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault; and the emerging post-colonial,
post-international, post-global planetarity of theory in an epoch of digital
networked media formations, anthropogenic climate catastrophe, and polycultural
assemblies.
II. Survey of Key Themes in Critical
Theory: Abolition Democracy, Agency, Alienation, Assembly, Aura, Capitalism,
Cisheteronormativity, Critique, Culture Industry, Discourse, Ecology,
Equity-in-Diversity, Facticity, Fetish, Figurality, Humanism/Post-Humanism,
Ideology, Intersectionality, Judgment, Normativity, Patriarchy, Performance,
Planetarity, Post-Colonialism, Precarity, Queerness, Race, Recognition,
Resistance, Scientificity, Sociality, Spectacle, Textuality, Violence, White
Supremacy.
III. Survey of Key Critical
Methodologies: Critique of Ideology, Marxism/Post-Marxism, Psychoanalysis,
Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, Science
and Technology Studies, Environmental Justice.
IV. Connecting theoria and poiesis:
thinking and acting, theory and practice, creative expressivity as aesthetic
judgment and critical theory as poetic refiguration, etc.