Syllabus for This Fall's "Homo Economicus: Modern Political Economy and the English Comedy of Manners"

"Homo Economicus: Modern Political Economy and the English Comedy of Manners"

September 1-December 8, 2015, Seminar Room 18, Tuesdays, 1.00-3.45
Instructor: Dale Carrico; dcarrico@sfai.edu
Course Web-Site: http://homoecoonstage.blogspot.com/
Rough Grade Breakdown (subject to contingencies): Attendance/Participation 12%; Notebook 12%; Precis 16%; Essay 1 30%; Essay 2 30%

Course Description

Capitalism is so funny we forgot to laugh. In this course we will be reading plays drawn from over three hundred years of mannered comedy, some of the most coarse, witty, perverse, lively, and stylish works in English literature. From Early Modern Restoration comedies modeling the libertine rebel Rochester like The Man of Mode, The Rover, The Way of the World, and the Beggar's Opera, to High Modern high camp fascinated by the figure of Oscar Wilde from Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience to The Importance of Being Earnest to Noel Coward, up to Late Modern work from Joe Orton and Jennifer Saunders resonating with the space oddities of David Bowie: we will not only be reading these hilarious and hellraising plays, but staging their key scenes in class for one another in an effort to inhabit them more viscerally. The premise of the course is that these plays stage efforts to satirize and cope with definitive contradictions of modern capitalism but also with paradoxes of corporate-militarist societies and cultures more generally, especially what I will call the plutocratic paradox (a meritocratic rationalization and enactment of aristocracy), the patriarchal paradox (a sexist, heterosexist, cissexist homosocial order that must disavow its queer possibilities), and the planetary paradox (a nationalist project impossibly comprehending ramifying multicultures in "the cultural" while embedded in a global nation-state system in which it impossibly competes via the racist war-machine of "the social"). Readings from political economy and cultural theory from Hobbes, Smith, Marx, and Mill, Pateman, Berlant, and Edelman, Williams, Sontag, and Bruce LaBruce will help us grapple with the plays and the spectacle they make of themselves. Consider the course a contribution to Urbane Studies.

Provisional Schedule of Meetings:

Week One (September)

1 Administrative and Course Introductions.

Week Two

8 Lawrence Dunmore, dir. "The Libertine"

Week Three

15 Fontenelle, Digression on the Ancients and Moderns. Hobbes on Equality, on Power, on Laughter. A selection of poems by Rochester.

Week Four

22 Etherege, The Man of Mode. Raymond Williams, on Culture, Society, Urbanity

Week Five

29. Aphra Behn, The Rover. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract

Week Six (October)

6 Wycherley, The Country Wife. Texts in the Jeremy Collier controversy.

Week Seven

13 Congreve, The Way of the World, including the Preface. Paul Parnell, "The Sentimental Mask"

Week Eight

20 Sheridan, Rivals. Adam Smith. Kant, History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather.

Week Nine

27 Gay, The Beggars Opera. (The Threepenny Opera) Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

Week Ten (November)

3 Gilbert and Sullivan, Patience. Oscar Wilde, Preface to Dorian Gray and Phrases and Philosophies for the Young; Wilde on the witness stand.

Week Eleven

10 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest. Sontag, Notes on Camp; Bruce LaBruce Camp/Anti-Camp

Week Twelve

17 Noel Coward, Private Lives; Hands Across the Sea (screening a performance starring Joan Collins).

Week Thirteen

24 Joe Orton, The Good and Faithful Servant. Lauren Berlant, "Cruel Optimism" and Lee Edelman, "No Future."

Week Fourteen (December)

2 Todd Haynes, dir. "Velvet Goldmine." From Dick Hebdige: Style: The Meaning of Subculture.

Week Fifteen

8 Bacchanal: Jennifer Saunders, Absolutely Fabulous, "Death," "Doorhandle." Videos: Sun Ra, Bowie, Glam, Disco, Jarman, New Romantics, Ga Ga, Janelle Monae, Hi Fashion, so much more…

Hole/Whole

Liberty is an empty hole in the world compared to freedom. Freedom is a world full of recognition, care, and support.

Resilient Precariat

The neoliberal futurological term "resilience" celebrates people surviving abuse and neglect so that plutocrats can accumulate more wealth.

The Vienna Circle Was A Gerbil Wheel And Techbros Are Still On It

Today's techies and nerd pundits rather remind me of logical positivists and Anglo-American analytic philosophers. They too fancied themselves the Smartest Guys in the Room and after superficial readings of rich archives rolled up their shirtsleeves. They declared themselves eager and able to circumvent or dismiss philosophical quandaries and topple moral/political Business As Usual. They confidently declared themselves masters of topics they largely missed the point of, re-invented a lot of wheels to run around on. They established lots of marginal fandoms devoted to official puzzle-solving and ignored everybody while everybody else ignored them.

Now our nerd pundits offer up reductive superficial pie-charted "explainers" as our techies breathlessly re-invent laissez-faire pieties. Our nerds are so "smart" they think appliances are intelligent and our tech-talkers peddle "progress" while denying commonwealth. Our anti-intellectual "Thought Leaders" are so uneducated they don't even know their facile errors are a stale re-run of earlier errors.

I know that nerds and geeks Rule now (at least the dim white reactionary reductionist ones) but nobody cares about logical positivists. I don't expect people outside the clubhouse to care much for long for our innovative Thought Leaders "getting to the bottom of things." Sure, the coterie of super-rich techies can do some damage with their market fundamentalist pieties but that's just because they're rich. But the anti-historical sociopathic reductionist nerds and geeks are mostly just dumb, another American anti-intellectual boy's club.

By way of conclusion I'll add that I don't think geekdom had or has to play out in this cramped uncritical fashion http://t.co/1HvsNweAa0

Over-Clarked

Any sufficiently advanced magical thinking is indistinguishable from technology journalism.

The More Things Stay The Same The More They Are Marketed As Change

I truly do not understand popular representations of retired folks presumably befuddled by an internet that actually hasn't substantially changed much since they began surfing it, texting on it, making transactions with it themselves in what was at most middle age. In American popular culture the moment you hit retirement age you are transformed into someone who lived through the New Deal and World War II even if your adolescence was spent on rollerskates listening to Disco. I have noticed that cultural signifiers of the seventies and eighties and now even the nineties are weirdly mulching into an archive of indifferent simultaneity. I wonder will the real stasis of the contemporary US culture finally become palpable when kids realize their cellphone selfies and jeans and t-shirts are indistinguishable from their parents' cellphone selfies and jeans and t-shirts?

Disturbing!

Abortion isn't more "disturbing" than an appendectomy. If you support women's healthcare stop conceding this ridiculous point to the forced pregnancy zealots.