CS-500A-01: An Introduction to Critical Theory
Spring, 2020, San
Francisco Art Institute
Instructor:
Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu; ndaleca@gmail.com
Course
Blog: https://introcritsfai.blogspot.com/2020/01/our-syllabus.html
Wednesdays, 4.15-7pm, Fort Mason Lounge, 1/22/20-5/10/20 RONA REVISION: Migrating temporarily into cyberspace.
Rough Basis for Grade: Att/Part, 20%; Reading Notebook, 15%; Presentation, 15%; Final
Paper, 15-20pp., 50%.
THESE REQUIREMENTS HAVE BEEN REVISED FOR THE RONA: The Reading Notebook is now a weekly writing assignment to be handed in each week, 3 quotes/3 questions minimum, due by end of the day of each class "meeting." From here on out this requirement will stand in for the attendance requirement and contribute to the participation requirement as well (40% of the final grade) and the final 15-20pp. paper remains 60% of the final grade. The in-class presentation has become an extra credit assignment available to anybody who still wants to do it in an online form, the options for doing which are deliriously open-ended. Details of these changes soon forthcoming.
Wednesdays, 4.15-7pm, Fort Mason Lounge, 1/22/20-5/10/20 RONA REVISION: Migrating temporarily into cyberspace.
THESE REQUIREMENTS HAVE BEEN REVISED FOR THE RONA: The Reading Notebook is now a weekly writing assignment to be handed in each week, 3 quotes/3 questions minimum, due by end of the day of each class "meeting." From here on out this requirement will stand in for the attendance requirement and contribute to the participation requirement as well (40% of the final grade) and the final 15-20pp. paper remains 60% of the final grade. The in-class presentation has become an extra credit assignment available to anybody who still wants to do it in an online form, the options for doing which are deliriously open-ended. Details of these changes soon forthcoming.
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 22 | Fact, Figure, Fetish
Maps, Stories, Warnings by Way of Introduction
Week Two | January 23 -- 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
Week Three | February 5 | 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 12 | Marx and the Fetishism of Commodities {Ellen}
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 19 | Freud and Sexual Fetishism {Sarah}
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 {Anya and Miles}
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 4 | Nature As The Fetish; Or, Ideology Is Structured Like A Language {James}
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
--supplemental Daniel Harris, The
Futuristic
Week Eight | March 11 | Being to Having, Having to Appearing, Appearing to Branding{Flora and Kyle}
Week Nine | Spring Break
Week Eleven | April 1 | REVISED "I Knew It Had To Be Something Like This"
At-Home Screenings of, Carpenter (dir.) They Live
Week Twelve | April 8 | REVISED Out With The Old, In With The New {Ryan}
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)
Frantz Fanon, Selections from Black Skin, White Masks
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
Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish, the Body of the Condemned (pp. 3-31) Docile Bodies (pg. 135 +), Panoptism (pg. 195 +)
Angela Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete? (read Chapters, 1, 2, 6 of the pamphlet at least if you can)
Angela Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete? (read Chapters, 1, 2, 6 of the pamphlet at least if you can)
--supplemental Foucault, from History of
Sexuality:
We Other Victorians, Right of Death and Power Over Life
Week Fifteen | April 29 | Intersections and Performance
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
--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
--supplemental David Harvey Fetishism of
Technology 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.
