Back to school, back to the City today. I'm teaching both graduate and undergraduate versions of my introductory survey for critical theory at SFAI this term. As always for a first lecture, I'm full of butterflies and running on little sleep. Here is the syllabus for today's class, Monday's undergraduate version is not identical (requirements differ, a couple texts get added and dropped, or switched for flow, etc) but much the same, indeed I've taught versions of this course nearly every term for years. Last year saw major revisions, but this year is much the same still:
"The philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." -- Karl Marx
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 | January 25 | Fact, Figure, Fetish
Maps, Stories, Warnings by Way of Introduction
Week Two | February 1 (Drop/Add Deadline is today) -- Ancients and Moderns, Margins and Centers
Week Five | February 22 | 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 Six | March 1 | Commodity, Aura, and Culture Industry
Week Seven | March 8 (midterm grading period) | Nature As The Fetish; Or, Ideology Is Structured Like A Language
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Week Eight | March 15 | Being to Having, Having to Appearing, Appearing to Branding
Week Nine | March 22 | Spring Break
Week Ten | March 29 | Out With The Old, In With The New
William Burroughs, Immortality
Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Violence
Week Eleven | April 5 | Racial Fetishism and the Gaze (last day to withdraw with a "W" is April 12)
Week Fourteen | April 26 | Intersections and Performances
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.
An Introduction to Critical Theory
Spring, 2019, San
Francisco Art Institute
Instructor:
Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu; ndaleca@gmail.com
Course
Blog: https://introcritsfai.blogspot.com/2019/01/our-syllabus.html
Fridays, 1-3.45pm, SR 1 Fort Mason, 1/22/18--5/10/18
Rough Basis for Grade: Att/Part, 20%; Reading Notebook, 15%; Co-facilitation, 15%; Final
Paper, 16-20pp., 50%.
Fridays, 1-3.45pm, SR 1 Fort Mason, 1/22/18--5/10/18
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 | January 25 | Fact, Figure, Fetish
Maps, Stories, Warnings by Way of Introduction
Week Two | February 1 (Drop/Add Deadline is today) -- 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
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 Three | February 8 | Nietzsche and the Fetishism of ressentiment
Nietzsche,
On Truth and the
Lie in an Extramoral Sense
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: Preface -- Why I Am So Wise -- Why I Am So Clever -- Why I Am a Destiny
--supplemental Selections from The Gay Science
Nietzsche, 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 Four | February 15 | Marx and the Fetishism of Commodities
Marx on The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof from Capital
Marx on The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof from Capital
Week Five | February 22 | 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 Six | March 1 | Commodity, Aura, and Culture Industry
Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproducibility
Adorno and Horkheimer, The Culture Industry
Adorno and Horkheimer, The Culture Industry
--supplemental Benjamin, A Short History of Photography and Adorno, The Culture
Industry Reconsidered
Week Seven | March 8 (midterm grading period) | Nature As The Fetish; Or, Ideology Is Structured Like A Language
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
--supplemental Daniel Harris, The
Futuristic
Week Eight | March 15 | Being to Having, Having to Appearing, Appearing to Branding
Week Nine | March 22 | Spring Break
William Burroughs, Immortality
Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Violence
--supplemental William Burroughs, On
Coincidence
Hannah Arendt, The Miracle of Forgiveness and Must Eichmann Hang? (handouts)
Hannah Arendt, The Miracle of Forgiveness and Must Eichmann Hang? (handouts)
Week Eleven | April 5 | Racial Fetishism and the Gaze (last day to withdraw with a "W" is April 12)
Frantz Fanon, Selections from Black Skin, White
Masks
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Kobena Mercer On Mapplethorpe
Week Twelve | April 12 | The Carceral Archipelago and Abolition Democracy Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Kobena Mercer On Mapplethorpe
Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish, Introduction, Docile Bodies, PanoptismAngela Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete?
Week Thirteen | April 19 | MFA ReviewsWeek Fourteen | April 26 | Intersections and Performances
Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference
The Combahee River Collective Statement
Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs
Judith Butler, Introduction and Chapter One from Undoing Gender
Week Fifteen | May 3 | Ecology
Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Bruno Latour, To Modernise Or Ecologise?
Week Sixteen | May 10 | Fact, Figure, Fetish in Planetary Assembly
David Harvey Fetishism of Technology
Carol Adams, Preface from Neither Man Nor Beast and Manifesto
Alison Kafer, from Feminist, Queer, Crip
Gayatri Spivak, Theses on Planetarity
The Combahee River Collective Statement
Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs
Judith Butler, Introduction and Chapter One from Undoing Gender
Week Fifteen | May 3 | Ecology
Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Bruno Latour, To Modernise Or Ecologise?
Week Sixteen | May 10 | Fact, Figure, Fetish in Planetary Assembly
David Harvey Fetishism of Technology
Carol Adams, Preface from Neither Man Nor Beast and Manifesto
Alison Kafer, from Feminist, Queer, Crip
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.
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