Here Is the Syllabus for My Upcoming Fall Critical Theory Survey Course in the City, "The Point Is To Change It"

Critical Theory A: The Point Is To Change It

Fall, 2019, San Francisco Art Institute

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

Course Blog: http://thepointistochangeit.blogspot.com/
Mondays, 4.15-7pm, Studio 18, 8/26/19--12/6/19

Rough Basis for Grade: Att/Part, 15%, Reading Notebook & 2 pp. Final Report, 15%; Presentation, 15%; Midterm Precis/Toulmin Schema, 20%; Final Paper, 5-6pp., 35%.

                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 | 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 Three | September 10 | 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 

                Week Four | September 17 | 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 Five | September 24 | Freud and Sexual Fetishism
Sigmund Freud, Fetishism -- from Freud's Study of Schreber: 1, Psychoanalysis and Scientificity 2,  Storytelling  3, Psychoanalysis and Patriarchy (Homosociality and Homosexuality) 4. Psychoanalysis Brought to Crisis.

                Week Six | October 1 | 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 Seven | October 8 | Nature As Fetish; Or, Ideology Is Structured Like A Language
Roland Barthes, Mythologies  -- Workshop: The Toulmin Schema

--supplemental Daniel Harris, The Futuristic

                Week Eight | October 15 | "I Knew It Had To Be Something Like This"

Screening John Carpenter, dir. They Live.  Submit Midterm Precis/Toulmin Schema

 

                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 | Out With The Old, In With The New
William Burroughs,Immortality -- Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Violence

-- supplemental Burroughs, On Coincidence -- Arendt, The Miracle of Forgiveness and Must Eichmann Hang?
               

                Week Eleven | November 5 | Racial Fetishism and the Gaze 

Frantz Fanon, Selections from Black Skin, White Masks -- Laura Mulvey,Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema -- Kobena Mercer On Mapplethorpe 
               
                Week Twelve | November 12 | The Carceral Archipelago and Abolition Democracy
Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish, Introduction, Docile Bodies, Panoptism -- Angela Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete?

-- supplemental Michel Foucault, from History of Sexuality: We Other Victorians, Right of Death and Power Over Life

                Week Thirteen | November 19 | 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, Intro. and Ch. One from Undoing Gender

                Week Fourteen | November 26 | Workshopping Final Paper | Hand in Final Notebooks/Reports

                Week Fifteen | November 3 | Fact, Figure, Fetish in Planetary Assembly
Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic -- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor -- 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 polycultural assemblies.

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