FINAL EXAM

Many of you are exhibiting or presenting original work on the final day of class for your final projects. Please remember that you need to generate a few pages connecting your work to a text or texts in the course and hand that in to me on the final day so that I can refer to it in making my own final assessments.

Those who would opt to generate a more conventional final may respond to the following prompt with an essay 5-6pp. in length, due at the beginning of our final class meeting.

The prompt for the final essay:

To be recognized as human is to be accorded a special or “authentic” kind of ethical standing, while to be dismissed as nonhuman, subhuman, infrahuman through racializing, sexualizing, pathologizing, infantilizing, primitivizing, or bestializing language is to be rendered especially vulnerable to being cast outside of both culture and history. Discuss what you take to be significant similarities or differences in the role of this proposition in any two of the pieces we read in class by Michel Foucault, Valerie Solanas, Judith Butler, John Carpenter, Franz Fanon, William Burroughs, Donna Haraway, or Carol Adams.

Mid-Term for Critical Theory A

Part One:

First, choose one of these three questions to discuss. Your answer should be 4-5pp. long. It is very important that you remain focused on the topic of the question you have chosen, and that you substantiate your claims with quotations from the text your are discussing.

Question One:

In "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," Oscar Wilde forcefully distinguishes our possessions (property) from our creations (art). What impact do you think this distinction has on Wilde's individualist politics, since it would seem that his version of individualism demands both self-possession and self-creation?

Question Two:

Despite what appears to be a relentless megalomania in Ecce Homo, it is also true that many of the topics on which Nietzsche focuses in the book are actually rather modest. What insights might Nietzsche's modesty or immodesty provide as we try to determine what his ambitions are for the interpretive method of “affirmation” he offers up in Ecce Homo?

Question Three:

In his essay “Psychological Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” Freud provides an interpretation of the autobiography of Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber. Near the conclusion of his reading of Schreber’s story, Freud makes a striking claim: “It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe.” How and why does the figure of Schreber seem to pose such a challenge to Freud’s larger effort to portray psychoanalysis as a scientific project? Are there other places in the text in which Freud seems to play out this ambivalence to Schreber’s own interpretation of the world and of his own place in it? Why might this matter so much Freud in the first place?

Part Two:

Now, choose another question to discuss, from these two options. Your answer should be 4-5pp. long.

Question One:

Provide a brief account of Marx's critique of the fetishized commodity, and then discuss how either Klein's critique of the Logo or Barthes' critique of myth (choose only one of these two) is both indebted to Marx's account but also departs from it in some key way.

Question Two:

Pick two of the objects Barthes interprets in his shorter essays. First, show how these essays both illustrate the more general thesis that myth is naturalization, and then point to some significant differences in the way “the natural” seems to function more specifically in each of your chosen examples.

Co-Facilitating Discussions and Writing a Precis

Critical Theory A: Fall 2008

One of the key assignments for our course will be your co-facilitation of class discussion of an assigned text. This assignment also requires that you generate a précis of the text you are taking responsibility for. This precis should provide a point of departure for your contribution to the discussion in class, and you will also hand it in to me at the end of the session. I expect you to post your precis to our course blog the Friday prior to the Tuesday class meeting you are co-facilitating.

Think of this precis as a basic paraphrase of the argumentative content of a text.

Here is a broad and informal guide for a precis, consisting of question you should ask of a text as you are reading it, and again after you have finished reading it. Don't treat this as an ironclad template, but as a rough approach to producing a precis -- knowing that a truly fine and useful précis need not necessarily satisfy all of these interventions.

A precis should try to answer fairly basic questions such as:

1. What is the basic gist of the argument?
2. To what audience is it pitched primarily? Does it anticipate and respond to possible objections?
3. What do you think are the argument's stakes in general? To what end is the argument made?

a. To call assumptions into question?
b. To change convictions?
c. To alter conduct?
d. To find acceptable compromises between contending positions?

4. Does it have an explicit thesis? If not, could you provide one in your own words for it?
5. What are the reasons and evidence offered up in the argument to support what you take to be its primary end? What crucial or questionable warrants (unstated assumptions the argument takes to be shared by its audience, often general attitudes of a political, moral, social, cultural nature) does the argument seem to depend on? Are any of these reasons, evidences, or warrants questionable in your view? Do they support one another or introduce tensions under closer scrutiny?
6. What, if any, kind of argumentative work is being done by metaphors and other figurative language in the piece?
7. Are there key terms in the piece that seem to have idiosyncratic definitions, or whose usages seem to change over the course of the argument?

As you see, a piece that interrogates a text from these angles of view will yield something between a general book report and a close reading, but one that focuses on the argumentative force of a text. For the purposes of our class, such a precis succeeds if it manages

1. to convey the basic flavor of the argument and
2. provides a good point of departure for a class discussion.

Syllabus for Critical Theory A, Fall 2008

Critical Theory A: Fall 2008

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dalec@berkeley.edu

Provisional Schedule of Meetings

September 2
Administrative Introduction, Personal Introductions.

September 9
Course Introduction
Oscar Wilde, "Soul of Man Under Socialism"

September 16
Nietzsche: Ecce Homo, Preface
Why I Am So Wise
Why I Am So Clever [dominic]
Why I Am a Destiny (or Fatality)

September 23
Marx, from The German Ideology, "Idealism and Materialism" [warren]
Marx on Commodity Fetishism, from Capital

September 30
Sigmund Freud, on "The Psychotic Doctor Schreber" [Handout] [angie]

October 7
Naomi Klein, No Logo
One
Two [hailey]
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle [hannah]

October 14
Roland Barthes, Mythologies [Purchase Book] [kristi]

October 21
Adorno & Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry" [shemoel]
Walter Benjamin, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility" [linze]

October 28
Carpenter (dir.), They Live In-Class Screening
Hand in Take Home Mid-Term Exam

November 4
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish [Purchase Book] [naomi]

November 11
William Burroughs, "Immortality" [bird] [danny]
Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto [robin]

November 18
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [Purchase Book] [sydney]

November 25
Paul Gilroy, "Melancholia and Multiculturism" [misty]
Carol Adams, “Preface” & “On Beastliness and Solidarity" [Handout] [zabrina]

December 2
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender [Handout] [lizzie]

December 9
Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
Hand in and/or Exhibit Take Home Final Exam

Crisis and Critique Syllabus

Critical Theory A: Crisis and Critique, Summer 2008

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dalec@berkeley.edu

Provisional Schedule of Meetings

June 17
Administrative Introduction, Personal Introductions.

June 19
Course Introduction
Oscar Wilde, "Soul of Man Under Socialism"

June 24
Nietzsche: Ecce Homo, Preface
Why I Am So Wise
Why I Am So Clever
Why I Am a Destiny (or Fatality)

June 26
Marx, from The German Ideology, "Idealism and Materialism"
Marx on Commodity Fetishism, from Capital

July 1
Sigmund Freud, on "The Psychotic Doctor Schreber" [Handout]

July 3
Naomi Klein, No Logo
One
Two
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

July 8
Roland Barthes, Mythologies [Purchase Book]

July 10
Adorno & Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry"
Walter Benjamin, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility"

July 15
Carpenter (dir.), They Live In-Class Screening
Hand in Take Home Mid-Term Exam

July 17
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish [Purchase Book]

July 22
William Burroughs, "Immortality"

July 24
Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

July 29
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [Purchase Book]

July 31
Paul Gilroy, "Melancholia and Multiculturism"
Carol Adams, “Preface” & “On Beastliness and Solidarity" [Handout]

Aug 5
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender [Handout]

Aug 7
Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
Hand in and/or Exhibit Take Home Final Exam

FINAL: Part B

Hello, all. I hope your weekend has gone well, and that everybody has managed to produce at least a draft of their response to their chosen question from Part A of their take-home final. Here are the three questions from which you will choose your second response, for Part B. Remember, you are going to be handing in your final exams at the beginning of class one week from Tuesday.

Question One:

Charity Scribner proposes that in Joseph Beuys' Economic Values a collection of objects memorializes a State while Rey Chow proposes that in Lao She's story "Attachment" a collection of objects threatens a State. A work of Stately memory, it would seem, confronts a work of non-Stately priorities; and an uneasy past confronts an uncertain future. But how different, finally, do you think these projects of collection really are, how different do you think the works of collection they are documenting really are, how different do you think their politics really are? Does it matter that in each of these essays the State under scrutiny is at once an example, however flawed, of "actually-existing socialism" as well as a failed or tyrannical state? Substantiate your claim with close reading of the essays themselves.

Question Two:

The paradox of Luis Bunuel's film The Milky Way is that it denounces religious, philosophical, political, and artistic zealotry, but at the same time it embraces religious mystery, philosophical passion, political idealism, and artistic imagination. Does the film provide a clear path or even clues that might help us along the way toward reconciling this paradox? Is it possible in the terms of the film to embrace mystery without feeding tyranny? Provide your answer through close readings of scenes in the film itself or through an examination of what you take to be the film's larger narrative, formal, logical, or tropological structure.

Question Three:

In Mythologies, Barthes claimed "to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth." How does his sarcastic truth differ from the fidelity of "blasphemy" Donna Haraway claims to express in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs'? When Haraway announces in her opening sentence that the project of her Manifesto is "to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism," it would seem that she is using myth in a different way than Barthes does. Or is she? Choose at least two moments in Haraway's Manifesto that seem to you to illustrate how her ironic cyborg mythologizing either is essentially continuous with or significantly different from the demythologizing drive of Barthes's project.

Four Habits of Argumentative Writing

The short guide to the four habits of argumentative writing I mentioned in class last time is available here. This is a document I use in writing classes and so I refer in it to writing "papers," and this should not distress you. Remember, in the exam you are just answering a question you find compelling from the prompts I've provided for you. Your answer is a strong claim you substantiate with the actual text at hand, addressing conspicuous objections of which you've been made aware in lecture or in discussion, but that's it. These questions are far more direct argumentative exercises than a paper would be...

In a longer argumentative paper based on close reading (in one of my classes) you would be producing an engaged critique of some work, locating yourself among its complexities, illuminating some aspect that shows or produces some of the meaning available in the text. In an argumentative exam responding to a given prompt, you are answering a question by making a claim and a case for it, providing textual support for it.

You have plenty of opinions about these works -- quickly figure out what they are, and then choose the ones that actually interest you most as the ones you want to argue for in your final. It's as simple as that.

FINAL: Part A

Two weeks from Tuesday I do believe you'll be handing in your finals for Aesthetics and Politics. You'll be choosing to answer one question from the three I am providing for you here, and then answering a second question from another three I will be providing in a week. This is a take home exam and I would recommend that you get your draft of the first question done before the second group comes online. Each question, as before, is to be 4-5pp. long. This time you are answering these questions at home with all of your notes, texts, and colleagues around you... And so we will expect clearer theses supported by readings of passages from the actual texts this time around.

PART A

Question One:

Bill Brown writes of "the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power: you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut." Jeanette Winterson begins her own account of an education into visual art by telling a story that seems to complement Brown's in key respects: "I was wandering happy, alone… when I passed a little gallery and in the moment of passing saw a painting that had more power to stop me than I had power to walk on." Brown draws on such experiences to flesh out his sense of the thing as distinct from the object. "These are occasions outside the scene of phenomenological attention that nonetheless teach you that you're 'caught up in things' and that the 'body is a thing among things.'" As for Winterson, it would seem for Brown that aesthetic encounters have something to teach us, especially when we are unprepared for them. What are the politics of this aesthetic education for Winterson and Brown? Do they seem to follow the same route from their initial encounter? Do the politics of this encounter differ or do they resemble the political education attributed to the "realist" art object in some of the Marxist aesthetics we read early on in the term? Assume a perspective on one of these questions, and make a claim that you substantiate with close reading of relevant passages from the texts.

Question Two:

Identify what looks to you like a key difference in the way Simon Frith and Iain Chambers document possible forms of political commitment in popular art practice and popular culture. What political significance attaches to this difference in your view? Substantiate your claim with close reading of relevant passages from the texts. In highlighting this difference you may (or may not -- it's entirely up to you) choose to point to the way in which you find in this difference an echo of a difference between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno reflected in their writings "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "The Culture Industry."

Question Three:

Name a way in which the treatment of the figure of the Spectator differs in Wilde's "Soul of Man Under Socialism" from its treatment in Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Make an argument about the key political significance that attaches in your view to this differing treatment of spectatorship in these texts and then substantiate your claim through readings of relevant passages from both texts.

Reminder --

The Syllabus has shifted a bit -- I decided that we should just read the essays from the Things volume in the order in which they actually appear in your reader, which means "The Defecating Duck" for today.

Links to the Haraway Pieces We'll Be Reading at the End of Class

Manifesto for Cyborgs

Promises of Monsters

Maya Deren

Next Week

I sincerely hope you are all enjoying yourselves far too much to notice this post right away, but I wanted to remind you that not all of the texts we will be discussing next week are in your readers. Links to supplemental texts follow...

For Tuesday, April 1

Frith, "At Ideology and Pop Practice," in your reader.
Breton/Rivera, "Manifesto"

For Thursday, April 3

Chambers, "Urban Culture and the Avant-Garde," in your reader.
Miller "Material Memories"

Our Mid-Term

Question One (This Question Is Certain to Be on the Exam):

Provide a brief account of Marx's critique of the fetishized commodity (approximately one of the roughly 4 pp. or so of your complete response), and then discuss how [1] Klein's discussion of the Logo, [2] Debord's discussion of the Spectacle, [3] Benjamin's discussion of Aura, [4] Horkheimer and Adorno's discussion of the Culture Industry, [5] Barthes' discussion of Myth, [6] Harris's discussion of the Futuristic, [7] Mercer's discussion of Racial Fetishism (choose just one of these) is, on the one hand, indebted to Marx's account in your view but also, on the other hand, departs from it in some key way.

Question Two (Either This or the Following Question Will Be on the Exam):

How does the treatment of the figure of the Spectator differ in Wilde's "Soul of Man Under Socialism" from its treatment in Debord's Society of the Spectacle? What political significance attaches to these different treatments in their respective texts in your view?

Question Three (Either This or the Preceding Question Will Be on the Exam):

How do the differing attitudes toward German Expressionism conveyed in Ernst Bloch's "Discussing Expressionism" and Georg Lukacs's "Realism in the Balance" provide a window onto the larger stakes of their differing views on the relation of aesthetics and politics?

A Question for the Mid-Term

Provide a brief account of Marx's critique of the fetishized commodity (approximately one of the roughly 4 pp. or so of your complete response), and then discuss how [1] Klein's discussion of the Logo, [2] Debord's discussion of the Spectacle, [3] Benjamin's discussion of Aura, [4] Horkheimer and Adorno's discussion of the Culture Industry, [5] Barthes' discussion of Myth, [6] Harris's discussion of the Futuristic, [7] Mercer's discussion of Racial Fetishism (choose just one of these) is, on the one hand, indebted to Marx's account in your view but also, on the other hand, departs from it in some key way.

Blobjects

Some Random Images via Google

Who Is Guy Debord?

Highly silly and cheesy and enjoyable.

Lukacs on the Fetishization of Commodities

From History and Class Consciousness

The essence of the commodity structure... is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a "phantom objectivity," an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature, the relation between people.

NOLOGO Trailer

Four Yes or No Questions

1. Should art represent reality?

2. Can a work of art fail?

3. Is there such a thing as avant-garde art?

4. Does some art contribute more to progress than others?

Syllabus

Rhetoric 103B: Postmarxist Aesthetics and Politics

Tues/Thurs: 5-6.30, 106 Stanley;
Instructor: Dale Carrico: dalec@berkeley.edu,
Office Hours: Tues. 2-4pm. Dwinelle, and by Appointment.

Breakdown of Grade:

Precis/Co-facilitation 15%
Mid-term 30%
Final 35%
Attendance/Participation 20%

JANUARY

WEEK 1
22 Intro/Course Syllabus-Policies-Administrivia
24 Intro/Course Themes

WEEK 2
29 Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism
31 Marx, Fetishism of Commodities

FEBRUARY

WEEK 3
5 Klein, No Logo
Part One
Part Two
7 Debord, Society of the Spectacle

WEEK 4
12 Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
14 Adorno/Horkheimer, Culture Industry

WEEK 5
19 Barthes, Mythologies
21 Barthes, Mythologies

WEEK 6
26 Harris, "The Futuristic"
28 Mercer, "Reading Racial Fetishism"

MARCH

WEEK 7
4 Bloch, "Expressionism," Lukacs, "Realism in the Balance"
6 Brecht, "Against Lukacs," Benjamin, "Brecht," Adorno, "Benjamin"

WEEK 8
11 Screening Bunuel, "The Milky Way"
13 Screening Bunuel, "The Milky Way"

WEEK 9
18 Discussion of Bunuel
20 In-Class Mid-Term Examination

WEEK 10
25 Spring Break
27 Spring Break

APRIL

WEEK 11
1 Frith, "At Ideology and Pop Practice," Breton/Rivera, "Manifesto"
3 Chambers, "Urban Culture and the Avant-Garde," Miller "Material Memories"

WEEK 12
8 Winterson, "Art Objects"
10 Brown, "Thing Theory"

WEEK 13
15 Riskin, "The Defecating Duck"
17 Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam"

WEEK 14
22 Scribner, "Joseph Beuys"
24 Chow, "Fateful Attachments"
WEEK 15
29 Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs

MAY

1 Haraway, Promises of Monsters

WEEK 16
6 Final Exam Due