Previews Of Coming Attractions: Syllabus for My Undergraduate Critical Theory Survey Course This Fall At SFAI

CS-300-01:

The Point Is To Change It 

Spring, 2018, San Francisco Art Institute

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu; ndaleca@gmail.com

Course Blog: http://thepointistochangeit.blogspot.com/
Mondays, 1-3.45pm, 8/27/18--12/7/18
Rough Basis for Grade: Att/Part, 15%, Reading Notebook, 15%; Co-facilitation, 10%; 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, Spivak, Butler, and Puar. 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 | August 27 | Fact, Figure, Fetish
Maps, Stories, Warnings by Way of Introduction

                Week Two | September 3 (Drop/Add Deadline is September 7) -- Labor Day Holiday
 

                Week Three | September 10 | Ancients and Moderns, Margins and Centers

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View
W.E.B. DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism  

                Week Four | September 17 | Nietzsche and the Fetishism of ressentiment

Nietzsche, On Truth and the Lie in an Extramoral Sense
Nietasche, 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 Five | 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 Six | October 1 | Freud and Sexual Fetishism

Sigmund Freud, Fetishism

Excerpts from Freud's Case Study of Dr. Schreber: 1, Psychoanalysis and Scientificity; 2,  Storytelling;
3, Psychoanalysis and Patriarchy (Homosociality and Homosexuality); 4. Psychoanalysis Brought to Crisis.

                Week Seven | October 8 (midterm grading period ends) | Commodity, Aura, and 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 Eight | October 15 | Nature As Fetish; Or, Ideology Is Structured Like A Language
Roland Barthes, Mythologies 
Workshop: The Toulmin Schema 

--supplemental Daniel Harris, The Futuristic

                Week Nine | October 22 | 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 Ten | October 29 (Hand in Precis/Toulmin) | "I just knew it had to be something like this."

Screen and discuss, "They Live," dir. John Carpenter

                 Week Eleven | November 5 | The Magical Universe
William Burroughs, Immortality 
Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto

--supplemental William Burroughs, On Coincidence

                Week Twelve | November 12 | Racial Fetishism and the Gaze (last day to withdraw with a "W" is November 9)

Frantz Fanon, Selections from Black Skin, White Masks
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Kobena Mercer On Mapplethorpe 

               Week Thirteen | November 19 | Intersections

Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference

The Combahee River Collective Statement

Judith Butler, Introduction and Chapter One from Undoing Gender

Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs

Carol Adams, Preface from Neither Man Nor Beast and Manifesto

                Week Fourteen | November 26 | Technofetishisms
David Harvey Fetishism of Technology

Hannah Arendt, The Conquest of Space
CS Lewis Abolition of Man (you need only read Chapter Three)
--supplemental  Hannah Arendt, Action and the Miracle of Forgiveness

                Week Fifteen | December 3 | Fact, Figure, Fetish in Planetary Assembly
Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic
Bruno Latour, To Modernise Or Ecologise?

Gayatri Spivak, Theses on Planetarity

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 intersectional associations.
 
II. Survey of Key Themes in Critical Theory: Agency, Alienation, Aura, Cisheteronormativity, Critique, Culture Industry, Discourse, Equity-in-Diversity, Facticity, Fetish, Figurality, Humanism/Post-Humanism, Ideology, Intersectionality, Judgment, Normativity, Performance, Planetarity, Post-Colonialism, Queerness, Race, Recognition, Resistance, Scientificity, Sociality, Spectacle, Textuality, 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.