This Week In Teaching

My summer intensive survey of critical theory at SFAI over in the City finished up last week, although I still have a pile of finals to work through, and this week is the last of my three-day marathons of three-hour lectures on the Rhetoric of Interpretation at Berkeley. Today is Donna Haraway, tomorrow is Bruno Latour, Thursday is Judith Butler, every one a joy to read and to talk through, but also dense and difficult to capture in a lecture, especially for students who at this point tend to feel as though they've spent a month in the trenches of theoryhead boot camp and can no longer remember their childhoods. It's been a truly exhausting couple of months.

Next fall my teaching load lightens considerably (as will, scarily, my paycheck), presumably to make time for writing and publishing. I haven't taught fewer than three separate courses (and usually it's been four) for a single term, including summers, since I got my PhD half a decade ago and I haven't been able to write anything but these scattered speculations on my blog. I have outlines for seven books gathering dust (one a refurbishment of my dissertation on the techno-politics of privacy/secrecy, two on futurological discourse, one emphasizing environmental issues the other more general, one on Hannah Arendt and p2p politics, one on the anti-politics inhering in "design" discourses, one on the anti-democratizing rhetoric of the canon of post New Deal market fundamentalist pop-economics, and one on the politics of human/nonhuman animal demarcations), and it seems the time has arrived to get at least one of the blasted things out of my system.