"Ranting, Raving, Writing"

I'll be teaching a couple of courses in the fall at SFAI, and I just submitted my course descriptions and provisional reading lists to the office. The first is a composition class in the expository writing sequence. Here's my description:

"Ranting, Raving, Writing"

The word argument comes from the Latin arguere, to clarify. And contrary to its cantankerous reputation, the process of argumentation can be one that seeks after clarity rather than one that seeks always to prevail over difference.

We argue to inquire what are the best beliefs when we are ignorant or unsure of ourselves, we argue to interrogate our own assumptions, we argue to clarify the stakes at issue in a debate, we argue to gain a serious hearing for our unique perspective, we argue to find the best course of action in the circumstances that beset us.

This is a course in argumentative reading and writing, which means for me a course in expository writing and critical thinking. But the works we will be reading together are anything but exemplary argumentative texts. Our texts rant and rave, they are brimming with rage, dripping with corrosive humor, suffused with ecstasies. In ranting and raving arguments are pushed into a kind of crisis, and in them rhetoric becomes a kind of poetry.

What does it tell us about argument in general to observe it in extremis like this? How can we read transcendent texts critically, in ways that clarify their stakes without dismissing their force, and enable us to communicate intelligibly to others the reactions they inspire in us and the meanings we find in them?

Anonymous, “Fuck the South”
Plato, Symposium
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”
Fiodr Dostoievski, “Notes From the Underground”
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Allen Ginsberg, Howl
William Burroughs, “Immortality”
Film, Network. Dir: Sidney Lumet
Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto
Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
Gary Indiana, “Reproduction”
Diane Dimassa, Hothead Paisan
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
Cintra Wilson, “Statement of Intent”

The second course is an introduction to critical theory. The potted description in the catalogue which all its instructors will variously incarnate helpfully proposes that "[t]he Critical Theory sequence develops students¹ facility in understanding and assessing theoretical models such as psychoanalysis, historical and dialectical materialism, structuralism and semiotics which extend their understanding of the visual image, the written word, and cultural phenomena."

My reading list begins with the very basic post-Emersonian turn against Platonic philosophy (in Europe post-Nietzschean philosophies, in America pragmatisms) and so Richard Rorty's “Hope in Place of Knowledge” provides a broad situation, then we shift into ideologiekritik, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, into culture and ideology, Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” Roland Barthes, Mythologies, and then use Louis Althusser's, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” to take us from ideology into subjection. For subjection we read from Michel Foucault's, History of Sexuality, Part One, then Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments” and Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” turning then to Franz Fanon's, Black Skin, White Masks, and then read Gayatri Spivak's, “History.” There we turn into "prostheses," techocriticism and technopolitical discourses, Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Marshall McLuhan, “Understanding Media,” Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” sections of Hannah Arendt's magisterial, The Human Condition, and then conclude with Donna Haraway's, “Manifesto for Cyborgs.”

I regret that there will be no place for Raymond Williams, more Foucault ("Two Lectures," "What Is An Author"), Carol Adams, Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio. But I'm already unloading a huge amount on students and expect if anything the list will be further truncated. And of course my students are largely working artists and part of any course will be my ongoing efforts to respond usefully to their needs, which are always just a little perpendicular to my own expectations as a theory-head.

Of course, part of the reason to blog this stuff is because it is preoccupying me in this moment, and many of my preoccupations find their way onto my blog. Another reason is to provide a place for prospective students to find information (I know that some of my students at SFAI and Berkeley already keep tabs on me through my blog, for example).

But the real reason to mention these courses is to register a mild uneasiness I feel about them. I received the offer to teach these fall courses quite recently, and didn't have much time to put the reading lists and descriptions together, and so in the absence of that time I fell back on my habits. It worries me that looking over these two courses they come so close to representing the kinds of readings and overall organization and themes I would have proposed to teach fully a decade ago, if I were putting together comparable courses back then.

Here I am struggling to finally get the PhD. and move from my presumably preparatory inhabitation of the academy into some more fully-fledged and professional version of things and yet already I worry that my intellectual joints are stiffening and fuddy-duddiness is becoming all too evident.

Definitely one of the first things to do once the dissertation is in hand is just to do a crash course of reading in a hundred different directions, to find altogether new writing that shakes the plaster loose. Then again, part of this may simply be that these are more general sorts of classes already outside of the media criticism and technoethical stuff in which I am paying closest attention these days to new provocations. Hopefully, the technoethical course I teach at Berkeley this Summer and then the digital aesthetics and politics course I teach next Spring at SFAI will feel more bracingly cutting edge to me...