Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
Friday, January 31, 2020
Teaching Day Whew
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Teaching Day Gack
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Today, the House is voting on my bill to repeal the 2002 Congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Iraq. Trump has falsely claimed that the 2002 AUMF gives him the authorization to use military force in Iran.
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) January 30, 2020
The House must do our job to stop him.
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Prepping
Saturday, January 18, 2020
Syllabus for This Spring's Undergraduate Patriarchy in Antiquity Course at SFAI
HUMN-220E-01 (3534) Patriarchy in Greek and Roman Antiquity
Course Blog: https://patriarchyingreekandromanantiquity.blogspot.com
Course Description:
The societies of Greek, Roman, and Christian antiquity were conspicuously patriarchal. Homeric heroes made history and conquered death with great words and deeds in an aspirational fantasy of masculine agency. The Roman paterfamilias, perhaps patriarchy's most quintessential expression, centered around the authoritarian male head of the household who held an unquestionable power of life and death over his children, female relatives, and household slaves. But in philosophy and in poetry, in Greek tragedies and in Roman comedies, we find glimpses of a considerably richer and more complicated world of gendered relations, erotic imagination, and human possibility, we encounter profound anxieties, ambivalences, and resistances to patriarchal practices and prejudices. This course will examine these tensions. We will be reading from Sappho, Homer, Gorgias, Plato, Aristophanes, Euripides, Cicero, Terence, Juvenal, Petronius, and many others.
Course Requirements: Attendance/Participation (15%), Reading Notebook (15%), Midterm Paper, 2-3pp. (15%), Presentation 2pp. (15%), Final Paper 5-6pp. (40%)
Attendance Policy: Attendance and punctuality are expected. Necessary absences should be discussed in advance whenever possible.
Provisional Schedule of Meetings
Week One | January 23 | Introductions
Week Two | January 30 | Poems of Sappho
Presentation: Portrait of a Girl {"Sappho"}; Portrait of Terentius Neo (two works)
Week Three | February 6 | Homer First and Last Chapters of the Iliad and an excerpt from Chapter IX posted on the blog.
Week Four | February 13 | Gorgias -- Encomium of Helen; Thucydides -- Melian Dialogue and Pericles' Funeral Oration
Presentation: From the House of Jason ("House of Fatal Love"), three works: Medea; Phaedra; Paris and Helen
Week Five | February 20 | Euripides -- Hecuba
Week Six | February 27 | Plato -- Symposium
Week Seven | March 5 | Plato -- Apology and "Allegory of the Cave" from the Republic; Aristotle on Women
Week Eight | March 12 | Aristophanes -- Wasps
Week Nine | Spring Break
Week Eleven | Cicero, Against Cataline, Philippics (Against Antony), Suetonius -- Caligula
Week Twelve | 6 Hortensia in the Forum (posted to the blog), Marcus Cicero -- Commentariolum Petitionis
Week Thirteen | 13 Juvenal -- Satires I, II, and III
Week Fourteen | 20 Petronius -- Trimalchio's Feast from Satyricon (The link takes you to Chapter Six -- keep reading through Chapter Ten.)
Week Fifteen | 27 Workshop for the Final Paper
Week Sixteen | 4 Concluding Remarks, Augustine from City of God | Final Papers Due
Pennyversary!
Friday, January 17, 2020
Syllabus For This Spring's Graduate Introduction to Critical Theory at SFAI
CS-500A-01: An Introduction to Critical Theory
Wednesdays, 4.15-7pm, Fort Mason Lounge, 1/22/20-5/10/20
"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 22 | Fact, Figure, Fetish
Maps, Stories, Warnings by Way of Introduction
Week Two | January 23 -- Ancients and Moderns, Margins and Centers
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View
W.E.B. DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings
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
Marx on The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof from Capital
Week Five | February 19 | 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 | February 26 | Commodity, Aura, and Culture Industry
Adorno and Horkheimer, The Culture Industry
Week Seven | March 4 | Nature As The Fetish; Or, Ideology Is Structured Like A Language
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Week Eight | March 11 | Being to Having, Having to Appearing, Appearing to Branding
Week Nine | Spring Break
Screening, Carpenter (dir.) They Live
Week Eleven | April 1 | Out With The Old, In With The New
William Burroughs, Immortality
Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Violence
Hannah Arendt, The Miracle of Forgiveness and Must Eichmann Hang? (handouts)
Week Twelve | April 8 | Racial Fetishism and the Gaze
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Kobena Mercer On Mapplethorpe
--supplemental Fanon, "Concerning Violence"
Week Fourteen | April 22 | The Carceral Archipelago and Abolition Democracy
Angela Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete? (read Chapters, 1, 2, 6 of the pamphlet at least if you can)
The Combahee River Collective Statement
Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs
Judith Butler, Introduction and Chapter One from Undoing Gender
--supplemental Carol Adams, Preface from Neither Man Nor Beast and Manifesto
Week Sixteen | May 6 | 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 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.
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Poverty kills. Not having money means not being able to afford appointments, medicine, and treatments. Not having money means not having time for health and wellness activities.
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) January 17, 2020
We must prioritize ending our nation's wealth gap.https://t.co/042VJLODY7
Thursday, January 16, 2020
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
History made! Virginia is now the 38th state to ratify the #EqualRightsAmendment – the last state needed to ratify. Let’s get to work in Congress to enshrine the #ERA into our Constitution! #ERANow https://t.co/taEJjBNAFk
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) January 16, 2020
Anniversaries...
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Despite what Trump says, our economy is not booming. African American unemployment is rising. And even as unemployment decreases for white workers, the jobs don’t pay the bills. We must raise the wage for all and work to close the racial wealth gap.https://t.co/JMR8tGntlr
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) January 14, 2020
Friday, January 10, 2020
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
I was proud to vote for the War Powers Resolution yesterday. It was a good first step for Congress to reassert our Constitutional authority to declare war. The American people don’t want this unhinged president to throw us into another unnecessary war in the Middle East.
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) January 10, 2020
Wednesday, January 08, 2020
Trumpproval
Trump is stuck at 46-47% in Arizona (and has a 46/52 approval rating) and is stuck at 48-49% in Iowa (and has a 48/48 approval rating). He appears to have very little room to grow among undecideds. These numbers suggest that the fate of the 2020 election really stands in the hands of the voters who don’t like Trump. Trump does not have enough people who like him to get reelected: the only way he does is if the voters who don’t like him refuse to get on the same page after the Democratic primary is over. Right now we see a lot of people saying they will vote for Biden but not Bernie or will vote for Bernie but not Biden. If those people get on the same page once the nominee is chosen, Trump will lose. If they don’t, it will be close.This sort of analysis never quite takes on board the consequences of structural inequities (the anti-democratic operation of the electoral college and non-representative Senate, etc.), Republican cheating (gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, ballot tampering, voter intimidation, etc.) and foreign interference seeking to exacerbate unrest in an ill-educated and polarized US electorate and undermine the legitimacy of US government (not exactly a hard sell). My preferred ticket is Warren/Castro and I haven't given up on Warren's chances at all, by the way -- in historical terms Warren seems pretty well positioned both financially and in terms of likely delegate counts for a long haul during which what seem to me glaring weaknesses in the Bernie-Biden-Buttigieg boys will provide plenty of occasions for them to underperform and provide openings for a Warren campaign that seems to me mostly to be making all the right moves. I tend to think either of the current front-runners Biden or Bernie would make shitty presidents but will still eagerly vote for either of them over the dangerous evil bigot idiot Nazi Donald Trump and his death-cult base of deplorables, obviously.
Monday, January 06, 2020
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Trump’s twitter war mongering is pushing us closer to war with Iran.
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) January 6, 2020
It's past time to reassert Congress' Constitutional authority on war and say #NoWarWithIran. https://t.co/BQ5WtHxx8a
Saturday, January 04, 2020
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
🗣️ Trump 🗣️ does 🗣️ not 🗣️ have 🗣️ Constitutional 🗣️ authority 🗣️ to 🗣️ go 🗣️ to 🗣️ war 🗣️ with 🗣️ Iran.
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) January 4, 2020
Friday, January 03, 2020
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
It's been 19 years since I cast the only vote in Congress against the overly broad AUMF, which gave presidents blank checks for endless war.
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) January 3, 2020
As we hurtle toward potential war with Iran, I maintain that force is not the answer. Add your name if you agree. https://t.co/CQXeIVCHfi