Critical Theory A: The Point Is To Change It
Fall, 2021, San Francisco Art Institute
Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu; ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog:
http://thepointistochangeit.blogspot.com/
Fridays, 1-3.45pm, MCR, 8/30/21--12/6/19
Rough Basis for Grade: Att/Part,
20%, Reading Notebook, 20%; 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
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, Lorde, Butler, and Stone. 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 | September 3 | Intro(se)ductions
Maps, Stories, Warnings by Way of Introduction
Week Two | September 10 | Ancients and Moderns, Fontenelle and Wilde
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns --
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Week Three | September 17 | Nietzsche and ressentiment as Fetish
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
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 Five | October 1 |
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 8 |
Aura and the 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 15 |
Nature As Fetish; Or, Ideology Is Structured Like A Language
Roland Barthes, Mythologies ; Toulmin Schema
Workshop.
Week Eight | October 22 | From 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 Nine | October
29 | Out With The Old, In With The New
William Burroughs, Immortality -- supplemental Burroughs, On Coincidence
John Carpenter, dir. They Live.
Week Ten | November 5 | The Eye of Power: Fanon, Mulvey, and Mercer
Frantz Fanon, Selections from Black Skin, White Masks -- Laura
Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
-- Kobena Mercer On Mapplethorpe
Week Eleven |
November 12 | The Carceral Archipelago and Abolition Democracy
Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish (this is a .pdf of the entire book from which you should read from the excerpts as far as you like) from "The Body of the Condemned" (pp. 3-31), "Docile Bodies" (pg. 135 +), and "Panoptism" (pg. 195 +) -- Angela Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete? (Chapters 1, 2, 6)
-- supplemental Michel Foucault, from History of Sexuality: We Other Victorians, Right of Death and Power Over Life
Week
Twelve | November 19 | Intersectional Feminism
Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference --
The Combahee River Collective Statement --
Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs
Week Thirteen | November 19 | Thanksgiving Holiday, Workshopping the Final Paper at Home
Week Fourteen | Queer Theories
Judith Butler, Intro. and Ch. One from Undoing Gender -- Sandy Stone, The Empire Strikes Back https://sandystone.com/empire-strikes-back.pdf – Sara Ahmed, A Killjoy Manifesto (handout)
Week Fifteen | November 3
| Environmental Justice
John Bellamy Foster, The Four Laws of Ecology and the Four Anti-Ecological Laws of Capitalism https://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/04/02/four-laws/ -- Aldo Leopold Thinking Like A Mountain (handout) -- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor – Robert Bullard, Confronting Environmental Racism in the United States https://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/543B2B250E64745280256B6D005788F7/$file/bullard.pdf -- Hazel Johnson, A Personal Story https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/jcred/vol9/iss2/9/
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.
