Summer Days

An amazing but daunting week teaching underway -- this is the final week in my intensive critical theory survey course in the City, and we make our turn into technoscience studies, reading Arendt on the space program, C.S. Lewis on eugenics, and then, back to back, Donna Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs" and Bruno Latour's "Plea for Earthly Science." A more perfect prelude into my Fall course on technoscience and environmental justice (for which most of my summer students have now enrolled) could scarcely be imagined. In my Berkeley course we are reading first Gandhi on "Swaraj" (self-government -- in many related and competing senses), then Fanon's "Concerning Violence," and then Arendt's "On Violence" with a little Eichmann and the Human Condition on forgiveness thrown in for good measure. These texts go right to the center of my concerns, and usually these lectures are pretty rewarding for my students and for me, too. But, it's been such a long and exhausting slog teaching this term, so relentless, I'm feeling a little less joyful and luminous than usual, I'll admit.

I'm amused to discover that the "Fool Me Tee Vee" brickbats I've been posted more or less every day during this teaching, to provide some kind of ongoingness for my blogging when the demands of so much teaching incline me to use this blog more as a space to whine unedifyingly in about my work duties, turns out these pithy pissy little media bits are something of a hit. I guess I'll try to keep them up even after teaching is through, though I didn't expect to do so when I started out. Anyway, that's what I'm up to these days.