Here is the mid-term exam due in a few weeks. We have not yet read together all the texts described in this exam, but I recommend that you pick at least one of the questions early, so that you only have to deal with one question the last week before it's due. We'll be screening a film on the day the exam is to be handed in and so there won't be any preparation for you to worry about that last weekend before the exam's due. Start work now and please don't expect to wiggle out of this deadline without very good reasons -- you should have ample time to complete the exam on time with this kind of advance notice.
Pick two of the following Four Questions. For each of the two Questions you have chosen, produce a short essay (4-5 pp.) that substantiates your claim through a close reading of the relevant text under discussion in a way that responds to the that Question.
Question One:
How might one make a good case that despite what appears to be a rampant and relentless megalomania in his Ecce Homo, Nietzsche is actually rather modest in the claims he makes in the book? Substantiate this claim with material from the text. What insights might this modesty provide us as we try to determine what Nietzsche’s ambitions are for the interpretive method of “affirmation” he offers up in Ecce Homo?
Question Two:
In his 1888 Preface to The Communist Manifesto, Frederick Engels attributes to Marx a “proposition which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology[.]” This proposition is as follows:
“[I]n every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiters and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class -– the proletariat –- cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class –- the bourgeoisie -– without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.”
First, describe simply and in your own words the basic propositions that characterize Marx’s unique contribution to the interpretation of history from this viewpoint. And second, describe the status of these propositions in Barthes' Mythologies and propose how any change in their status for Barthes might have an impact on his own interpretive project as a Marxist or post-marxist critical theorist.
Question Three:
In his essay “Psychological Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” Freud offers up an interpretation of the autobiography of Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber. Near the conclusion of his reading of Schreber’s story, Freud makes the last of a series of curious claims on a similar theme: “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 the project of psychoanalytic interpretation as a scientific practice? 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?
Question Four:
In the Preface to the 1970 edition of his Mythologies Roland Barthes says that his ambition for the book was to “account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature.” In the extended theoretical essay “Myth Today,” at the end of the volume, Barthes spells out this transformation in greater detail. In a key section of that culminating essay, “Myth as Depoliticized Speech,” Barthes writes:
[M]yth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Now this process is exactly that of bourgeois ideology… [M]yth is the most appropriate instrument for the ideological inversion which defines this society… [:] What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined… by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality… The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature[.]
In the series of shorter essays that make up the bulk of the volume, Barthes offers up interpretations of a host of phenomena, popular icons, events, attitudes, and so forth. In each essay he exposes the way something that is actually a contingent and specific product of historical circumstances (which might therefore be open to contestation and reform in the ongoing social struggle of history) has come to assume the status of the natural, the inevitable, the taken-for-granted, the best of all possible worlds, the best workable solution, and so on. But although each short essay testifies in its own way to the ideological accomplishment of naturalization, the fact is that the force of “nature” for each of the objects of his interpretations is a bit different in the specific work it seems to do, and in the specific forms it seems to take.
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.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Monday, September 03, 2007
Invitation to Our Blog
I've invited everybody to the blog, or at least I've tried to do so. If you have not received an invite, or if you have had trouble logging in, e-mail me from the e-mail account that you use most often and I'll re-send your invitation. I may have misinputted your e-mail address or screwed with case-sensitivity or some such thing. Accepting the blog invitation should be a relatively simple matter of clicking a link and providing some information at your first log in. To post content to the blog type in the address for blogger and it should ask you to log in or automatically will take you to our blog, at which point you should be able to post content. To read the blog just type in the address for our blog itself. If there are any problems, we can talk about them at our next meeting. Don't worry, there are always little problems to deal with here and there, it's not a big deal. Feel free to experiment, post whatever you like, see you all soon.
Syllabus
Critical Theory A, Fall 2007
Instructor: Dale Carrico; dalec@berkeley.edu
Course Site: http://arguere.blogspot.com
Course Objectives:
Contextualizing Contemporary Critical Theory: 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.
Survey of Key Themes in Critical Theory: The Problem of Scientificity, The Problem of Rhetoric, Linguistic Turns, Cosmopolitanisms, Theory and Emancipation.
Survey of Key Critical Methodologies: Critique of Ideology, Post-Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, Science and Technology Studies, etc.
Grade Breakdown:
Attendance/Participation 15%
Co-facilitate Class Discussion 15%
Mid-Term Exam: 35%
Final Exam: 35%
Week One | August 28
Administrative Introduction, Personal Introductions.
Week Two | September 4
Introduction to Critical Theory: History, Themes, Problems
Oscar Wilde, "Soul of Man Under Socialism"
Week Three | September 11
*Nietzsche: Ecce Homo
Preface
Why I Am So Wise
Why I Am So Clever
Why I Am a Destiny (or Fatality)
Week Four | September 18
Marx on Commodity Fetishism, from Capital
Naomi Klein, No Logo, selection
One
Two
Week Five | September 25
Sigmund Freud, on the Psychotic Doctor Schreber (Handout)
Week Six | October 2
*Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Purchase Book
Week Seven | October 9
Carpenter (dir.), They Live, In-Class Screening
Hand in Take Home Mid-Term Exam
Week Eight | October 16
*Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Purchase Book
Week Nine | October 23
*Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Purchase Book
Week Ten | October 30
*William Burroughs, "Immortality"
Week Eleven | November 6
*Valerie Solanas, "SCUM Manifesto"
Week Twelve | November 13
*Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Purchase Book
Week Thirteen | November 20
*Carol Adams, “Preface” & “On Beastliness and Solidarity," Handout
Week Fourteen | November 27
*Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, Handout
Week Fifteen | December 4
*Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
Week Sixteen | December 11
Closing Remarks
Hand in Take Home Final Exam
Instructor: Dale Carrico; dalec@berkeley.edu
Course Site: http://arguere.blogspot.com
Course Objectives:
Contextualizing Contemporary Critical Theory: 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.
Survey of Key Themes in Critical Theory: The Problem of Scientificity, The Problem of Rhetoric, Linguistic Turns, Cosmopolitanisms, Theory and Emancipation.
Survey of Key Critical Methodologies: Critique of Ideology, Post-Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, Science and Technology Studies, etc.
Grade Breakdown:
Attendance/Participation 15%
Co-facilitate Class Discussion 15%
Mid-Term Exam: 35%
Final Exam: 35%
Week One | August 28
Administrative Introduction, Personal Introductions.
Week Two | September 4
Introduction to Critical Theory: History, Themes, Problems
Oscar Wilde, "Soul of Man Under Socialism"
Week Three | September 11
*Nietzsche: Ecce Homo
Preface
Why I Am So Wise
Why I Am So Clever
Why I Am a Destiny (or Fatality)
Week Four | September 18
Marx on Commodity Fetishism, from Capital
Naomi Klein, No Logo, selection
One
Two
Week Five | September 25
Sigmund Freud, on the Psychotic Doctor Schreber (Handout)
Week Six | October 2
*Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Purchase Book
Week Seven | October 9
Carpenter (dir.), They Live, In-Class Screening
Hand in Take Home Mid-Term Exam
Week Eight | October 16
*Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Purchase Book
Week Nine | October 23
*Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Purchase Book
Week Ten | October 30
*William Burroughs, "Immortality"
Week Eleven | November 6
*Valerie Solanas, "SCUM Manifesto"
Week Twelve | November 13
*Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Purchase Book
Week Thirteen | November 20
*Carol Adams, “Preface” & “On Beastliness and Solidarity," Handout
Week Fourteen | November 27
*Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, Handout
Week Fifteen | December 4
*Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
Week Sixteen | December 11
Closing Remarks
Hand in Take Home Final Exam
Co-facilitating Discussions and Writing a Precis
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.
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?
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
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.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Final Pep Talk
All the questions are up at this point. I'm hoping everybody is fairly happy with the state of at least one of their essays by now, and is preparing to take up their second one. Read the questions carefully. Even if you worry that you have not yet entirely mastered these essays, you will notice that the questions permit you to focus on very specific dimensions of the pieces and apply them in concrete ways that you should be able to get a handle on. And so, for example, you need not be an expert on the philosopher Levinas to grasp why and how Butler reads him in her essay to help explain what she means when she wants to talk about the connection of ethics to the scene in which we are addressed by another's speech. Once you grasp that more concrete idea you are probably in a pretty good position to think about how Butler's reading of the Face (in her discussion of the burka, for example) might speak to the impact of Mike Davis's rhetoric -- did it enrage you? incite you to action? make you feel hopeless? paralyze you? give you hope? Similarly, we have already talked about how Arendt's ideas about the difference between violence and power play out in her response to the student demonstrations against military-research and ethnocentrism. Now think how the situation of decolonization that preoccupies Fanon seems to you analogous or disanalogous to the student revolts. Even if there are stretches of these texts that still seem opaque to you -- you should be able to focus in on concrete questions and apply them to the case you mean to make. Over the next three classes next week we will discuss these very questions -- and I hope these discussions will provide companionable material for you as you put your final exam essays into shape. See you all soon.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Syllabus for Rhetoric 10, UC Berkeley, Summer 2007
Rhetoric 10
Everyday Arguments, Everyday Violences
Summer 2007
3-5.30pm., Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 106 Moffitt
Instructor, Dale Carrico: dalec@berkeley.edu
T.A., Ben Lempert: blempert@berkeley.edu
Attendance/Participation: 15%; Workshops: 15%; Mid-Term: 35%; Final 35%
A Provisional Schedule of Meetings
Week One
May 22
Course Introduction
SKILL SET: An argument is a claim supported by reasons and/or evidence.
May 23
2-3 Minute Introduction Speeches
SKILL SET: Ethos, Pathos, Logos
May 24
Euripides, Hecuba
SKILL SET: Reading Critically/Writing Critically; Four Habits of Argumentative Writing: 1. Formulate a Strong Thesis, 2. Define Your Terms, 3, Substantiate/Contextualize, 4, Anticipate Objections; Audience/Intentions
Week Two
May 29
Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose"
SKILL SET: Intentions -- Interrogation, Conviction, Reconciliation
May 30
Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from the Birmingham Jail"
SKILL SET: Audiences -- Sympathetic, Unsympathetic, Apathetic; Rogerian Rhetoric
May 31
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
SKILL SET: The Toulmin Schema
Week Three
June 5
Art Spiegelman, Maus
SKILL SET: Literal/Figurative Language; Figures, Tropes, Schemes; Four Master Tropes
June 6
Art Spiegelman, Maus
SKILL SET: Syllogisms, Enthymemes, Formal Fallacies
June 7
Carol Adams, "Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity"
SKILL SET: Informal Fallacies
Week Four
June 12
Mid-Term Examination
June 13
Screening and Discussion of Film, "A History of Violence"
June 14
SKILL SET: Debate
Week Five
June 19
Hannah Arendt, from On Violence
June 20
Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish
Octavia Butler, Kindred
June 21
Octavia Butler, Kindred
Week Six
June 26
Frantz Fanon, from The Wretched of the Earth
June 27
Mike Davis, from Planet of Slums
June 28
Take Home Final Examination Due
Judith Butler, from Precarious Life
Everyday Arguments, Everyday Violences
Summer 2007
3-5.30pm., Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 106 Moffitt
Instructor, Dale Carrico: dalec@berkeley.edu
T.A., Ben Lempert: blempert@berkeley.edu
Attendance/Participation: 15%; Workshops: 15%; Mid-Term: 35%; Final 35%
A Provisional Schedule of Meetings
Week One
May 22
Course Introduction
SKILL SET: An argument is a claim supported by reasons and/or evidence.
May 23
2-3 Minute Introduction Speeches
SKILL SET: Ethos, Pathos, Logos
May 24
Euripides, Hecuba
SKILL SET: Reading Critically/Writing Critically; Four Habits of Argumentative Writing: 1. Formulate a Strong Thesis, 2. Define Your Terms, 3, Substantiate/Contextualize, 4, Anticipate Objections; Audience/Intentions
Week Two
May 29
Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose"
SKILL SET: Intentions -- Interrogation, Conviction, Reconciliation
May 30
Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from the Birmingham Jail"
SKILL SET: Audiences -- Sympathetic, Unsympathetic, Apathetic; Rogerian Rhetoric
May 31
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
SKILL SET: The Toulmin Schema
Week Three
June 5
Art Spiegelman, Maus
SKILL SET: Literal/Figurative Language; Figures, Tropes, Schemes; Four Master Tropes
June 6
Art Spiegelman, Maus
SKILL SET: Syllogisms, Enthymemes, Formal Fallacies
June 7
Carol Adams, "Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity"
SKILL SET: Informal Fallacies
Week Four
June 12
Mid-Term Examination
June 13
Screening and Discussion of Film, "A History of Violence"
June 14
SKILL SET: Debate
Week Five
June 19
Hannah Arendt, from On Violence
June 20
Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish
Octavia Butler, Kindred
June 21
Octavia Butler, Kindred
Week Six
June 26
Frantz Fanon, from The Wretched of the Earth
June 27
Mike Davis, from Planet of Slums
June 28
Take Home Final Examination Due
Judith Butler, from Precarious Life
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Immortality
by William S. Burroughs
"To me the only success, the only greatness, is immortality." -- James Dean, quoted in James Dean: The Mutant King, by David Dalton
The colonel beams at the crowd . . . pomaded, manicured, he wears the satified expression of one who has just sold the widow a fraudulent peach orchard. "Folks, we're here to sell the only thing worth selling or worth buying and that's immortality. Now here is the simplest solution and well on the way. Just replace the worn-out parts and keep the old heap on the road indefinitely."
As transplant techniques are perfected and refined, the age-old dream of immortality is now within the grasp of mankind. But who is to decide out of a million applicants for the same heart? There simply aren't enough parts to go around. You need the job lot once a year to save 20 percent, folks. Big executives use a heart a month just as regular as clockwork. Warlords, paying off their soldiers in livers and kdneys and genitals, depopulate whole areas. Vast hospital cities cover the land; the air-conditioned hospital palaces of the rich radiate out to field hospitals and open-air operating booths.
The poor are rising in mobs. They are attacking government warehouses where the precious parts are stored. Everyone who can afford it has dogs and guards to protect himself from roving bands of parts hunters, like the dreaded Wild Doctors, who operate on each other after the battle, cutting the warm quivering parts from the dead and dying. Cut-and-grab men dart out of doorways and hack out a kidney with a few expert strokes of their four-inch scalpels. People have lost all shame. Here's a man who sold his daughter's last kidney to buy himself a new groin-appears on TV to appeal for funds to buy little Sally an artificial kidney and give her this last
Christmas. On his arm is a curvaceous blond known apparently as Bubbles. She calls him Long John; now isn't that cute?
A flourishing black market in parts grows up in the gutted cities devastated
by parts riots. In terrible slums, scenes from Brueghel and Bosch are reenacted; misshapen masses of rotten scar tissue crawling with maggots supported on crutches and cans, in wheel-chairs and carts. Brutal-as-butchers practitioners operate without anesthetic in open-air booths surrounded by their bloody knives and saws.
The poor wait in parts lines for diseased genitals, a cancerous lung, a cirrhotic liver. They crawl towards the operating booths holding forth nameless things in bottles that they think are usable parts. Shameless swindlers who buy up operating garbage in job lots prey on the unwary.
And here is Mr. Rich Parts. He is three hundred years old. He is still subject to accidental death, and the mere thought of it throws him into paroxysms of idiot terror. For days he cowers in his bunker, two hundred feet down in solid rock, food for fifty years. A trip from one city to another requires months of sifting and checking computerized plans and alternate routes to avoid the possibility of an accident. His idiotic cowardice knows no bounds.
There he sits, looking like a Chimu vase with a thick layer of smooth purple scar tissue. Encased as he is in this armor, his movements are slow and hydraulic. It takes him ten minutes to sit down. This layer gets thicker and thicker right down to the bone-the doctors have to operate with power tools. So we leave Mr. Rich Parts and the picturesque parts people their monument, a mountain of scar tissue.
As L. Ron Hubbard, founder of scientology, said: "The rightest right a man could be would be to live infinitely wrong." I wrote "wrong" for "long" and the slip is significant-for the menas by which immortality is realized in science fiction, which will soon be science fact, are indeed infinitely wrong, the wrongest wrong a man can be, vampiric or worse.
Improved transplant techniques open the question whether the ego itself could be transplanted from one body to another, and the further question as to exactly where this entity resides. Here is Mr. Hart, a trillionaire dedicated to his personal immortality. Where is this thing called Mr. Hart? Precisely where, in the human nervous system, does this ugly death-sucking, death-dealing, death-fearing thing reside? Science gives only a tentative answer: the "ego" seems to be located in the midbrain at the top of the head. "Well," he thinks, "couldn't we just scoop it out of a healthy youth, throw his in the garbage where it belongs, and slide in MEEEEEEEE?" So he starts looking for a brain surgeon, a "scrambled egg" man, and he wants the best. When it comes to a short-order job old Doc Zeit is tops. He can switch eggs in an alley.
Mr. Hart embodies the competitive, acquisitive, success-minded spirit that formulated American capitalism. The logical extension of this ugly spirit is criminal. Success is its own justification. He who succees deserves to succeed; he is RIGHT. The operation is a success. The doctors have discreetly withdrawn. When a man wakes up in a beautiful new bod, he can flip out. It wouldn't pay to be a witness. Mr. Hart stands up and stretches luxuriously in his new body. He runs his hands over the lean young muscle where his potbelly used to be. All that remains of the donor is a blob of gray matter in a dish. Mr. Hart puts his hands on his hips and leans over the blob.
"And how wrong can you be? DEAD."
He spits on it and he spits ugly.
The final convulsions of a universe based on quantitative factors, like money, junk, and time, would seem to be at hand. The time approaches when no amount of money will buy anything and time itself will run out.
This is a parable of vampirism gone berserk. But all vampiric blueprints for immortality are wrong not only from the ethical standpoint. They are ultimately unworkable. In Space Vampires Colin Wilson speaks of benign vampires. Take a little, leave a little. But they always take more than they leave by the basic nature of the vampire process of inconspicuous but inexorable consumption. The vampire converts quality-live blood, vitality, youth, talent-into quantity-food and time for himself. He perpetrates the most basic betrayal of the spirit, reducing all human dreams to his shit. And that's the wrongest wrong a man can be.
Personal immortality in a physical body is impossible, since a physical body exists in time and time is that which ends. When someone says he wants to live forever, he forgets that forever is a time word. All three-dimensional immortality projects, to say the least, are ill-advised, since they always immerse the aspirant deeper in time.
The tiresome concept of personal immortality is predicated on the illusion of some unchangeable precious essence: greedy old MEEEEEEEE forever. But as the Buddhists say, there is no MEEEEEEEE, no unchanging ego.
What we thing of as our ego is defensive reaction, just as the symptoms of an illness-fever, swelling, sweating-are the body's reaction to an invading organism. Our beloved ego, arising from the rotten weeds of lust and fear and anger, has no more continuity that a fever sweat. There is no ego; only a shifting process as unreal as the Cities of the Odor Eaters that dissolve in rain. A moment's introspection demonstrates that we are not the same as we were a year ago or a week ago. "What ever possessed me to do that?"
A step toward rational immortality is to break down the concept of a separate personal, and therefore inexorably mortal, ego. This opens many doors. Your spirit could reside in a number of bodies, not as some hideous parasite draining the host, but as a helpful little visitor. "Roger the Lodger . . don't take up much room . . show you a trick or two . . never overstay my welcome."
Take fifty photos of the same person over an hour. Some of them will look so unlike the subject as to be unrecognizable. And some of them will look like some other person. "Why, he looks just like Khrushchev with one gold tooth peeking out."
The illusion of a separate, inviolable identity limits your perceptions and confines you in time. You live in other people and other people live in you- "visiting," we call it-and of course it's ever so much easier with one's Clonies.
When I first heard about cloning I thought, what a fruitful concept: why, one could be in a hundred different places at once and experience everything the other clones did. I am amazed at the outcry against this good thing not only from men of the cloth but also from scientists, the very scientists whose patient researdch has brought cloning within our grasp. The very thought of a clone disturbs these gentlemen. Like cattle on the verge of stampede, they paw the ground mooin apprehensively. "Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of human nonselfness is terrifying."
Terrifying to whom? Speak for yourself, you timorous old beastie cowering in your eternal lavatory. Too many scientists seem to be ignorant of the most rudimentary spiritual concepts. They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow, terrified, no doubt, that some skulking ingrate-of-a-clone student will sneak into their very brains and steal their genius work. The unfairness of it brings tears to his eyes as he peers anxiously through his bifocals.
Cloning isn't ego gone berserk. On the contrary, cloning is the end of the ego. For the first time, the spirit of man will be able to separate itself from the human machine, to see it and use it as a machine. He is no longer identified with one special Me machine. The human organism has become an artifact he can use like a plane, a boat, or a space capsule.
The poet John Giorno wondered if maybe a clone of a clone of a clone would just phase out into white noise like copies of copies of tape. As Count Korzybski used to say: "I don't know, let's see."
But ultimately, I postulate, true immortality can be found only in space. Space exploration is the only goal worth striving for. Over the hills and far away. You will know your enemies by those who attempt to block your path. Vampiric monopolists would keep you in time like their cattle. "It's a good thing cows don't fly," they say with an evil chuckle. The evil, intelligent Slave Gods.
The gullible, confused, and stupid pose an equal threat owing to the obstructive potential of their vast numbers. I have an interesting slip in my scrapbook. News clipping from the Boulder Camera. Picture of an old woman with a death's-head, false teeth smile. She is speaking for the Women's Christian Temperance Union. "WE OPPOSE CHILD ABUSE, INTEMPERANCE, AND IMMORTALITY."
The way to immortality is in space, and Christianity is buried under slag heaps of dead dogma, sniveling prayers; and empty prayers must oppose immortality in space as the counterfeit always fears and hates the real thing. Resurgent Islam . . . born-again Christians . . . creeds outworn . . . excess baggage . . . 'raus 'mit!
Immortality is prolonged future, and the future of any artifact lies in the direction of increased flexibility capacity for change and ultimately mutation. Immortality may be seen as a by-product of function: "to shine in use." Mutation involves changes that are literally unimaginable from the perspective of the future mutant. Coldblooded, nondreaming creatures living in the comparatively weightless medium of water could not conceive of breathing air, dreaming, and experiencing the force of gravity as a basic fact of life. There will be new fears like the fear of falling, new pleasures, and new necessities. There are distinct advantages to living in a supportive medium like water. Mutation is not a matter of logical choices.
The human mutants must take a step into the unknown, a step that no human has taken before.
"We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea."
Recent dream research has turned up a wealth of data, but no one has assembled the pieces into a workable field theory.
By far the most significant discovery to emerge frm precise dream research with vounteer subjects is the fact that dreams are a biological necessity for all warm-blooded animals. Deprived of REM sleep, they show all the symptoms of sleeplessness no matter how much dreamless sleep they are allowed. Continued deprivation would result in death.
All dreams in male subjects, except nightmares, are accompanied by erection. No one has proffered an explanation. It is interesting to note that a male chipanzee who did finger and dab paintings, and was quite good too, went into a sexual frenzy during his creative acts.
Cold-blooded animals do not dream. All warm-blooded creatures including birds do dream.
John Dunne discovered that dreams contain references to future time as experienced by the dreamer. He published his findings in An Experiment with Time in 1924. Dream references, he points out, relate not to the event itself but to the time when the subject learns of the event. The dream refers to the future of the dreamer. He says that anybody who will write his dreams down over a period of time will turn up precognitive references. Dreams involve time travel. Does it follow then that time travel is a necessity?
I quote from an article summarizing the discoveries of Professor Michel Jouvet. Jouvet, using rapid eye movement techniques, has been able to detect dreaming in animals in the womb and even developing birds in the egg. He found that animals like calves and foals, who can fend for themselves immediately after birth, dream a lot in the womb and relatively little after that. Humans and kittens dream less in the womb and are unable to fend for themselves at birth.
He concluded that human babies could not walk or feed themselves until they had enough in practice in dreams. This indicates that the function of dreams is to train the being for future conditions. I postulate that the human artifact is biologically ddesigned for space travel. So human dreams can be seen as training for space conditions. Deprived of this vital link with our future in space, with no reason for living, we die.
Art serves the same function as dreams. Plato's Republic is a blueprint for a death camp. An alien invader, or a domestic elite, bent on conquest and extermination, could rapidly immobilize the earth by cutting dream lines, just the way we took care of the Indians. I quote from Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt:
"The nation's hoop is broken and scattered like a ring of smoke. There is no center any more. The sacred tree is dead and all its birds are gone."
"To me the only success, the only greatness, is immortality." -- James Dean, quoted in James Dean: The Mutant King, by David Dalton
The colonel beams at the crowd . . . pomaded, manicured, he wears the satified expression of one who has just sold the widow a fraudulent peach orchard. "Folks, we're here to sell the only thing worth selling or worth buying and that's immortality. Now here is the simplest solution and well on the way. Just replace the worn-out parts and keep the old heap on the road indefinitely."
As transplant techniques are perfected and refined, the age-old dream of immortality is now within the grasp of mankind. But who is to decide out of a million applicants for the same heart? There simply aren't enough parts to go around. You need the job lot once a year to save 20 percent, folks. Big executives use a heart a month just as regular as clockwork. Warlords, paying off their soldiers in livers and kdneys and genitals, depopulate whole areas. Vast hospital cities cover the land; the air-conditioned hospital palaces of the rich radiate out to field hospitals and open-air operating booths.
The poor are rising in mobs. They are attacking government warehouses where the precious parts are stored. Everyone who can afford it has dogs and guards to protect himself from roving bands of parts hunters, like the dreaded Wild Doctors, who operate on each other after the battle, cutting the warm quivering parts from the dead and dying. Cut-and-grab men dart out of doorways and hack out a kidney with a few expert strokes of their four-inch scalpels. People have lost all shame. Here's a man who sold his daughter's last kidney to buy himself a new groin-appears on TV to appeal for funds to buy little Sally an artificial kidney and give her this last
Christmas. On his arm is a curvaceous blond known apparently as Bubbles. She calls him Long John; now isn't that cute?
A flourishing black market in parts grows up in the gutted cities devastated
by parts riots. In terrible slums, scenes from Brueghel and Bosch are reenacted; misshapen masses of rotten scar tissue crawling with maggots supported on crutches and cans, in wheel-chairs and carts. Brutal-as-butchers practitioners operate without anesthetic in open-air booths surrounded by their bloody knives and saws.
The poor wait in parts lines for diseased genitals, a cancerous lung, a cirrhotic liver. They crawl towards the operating booths holding forth nameless things in bottles that they think are usable parts. Shameless swindlers who buy up operating garbage in job lots prey on the unwary.
And here is Mr. Rich Parts. He is three hundred years old. He is still subject to accidental death, and the mere thought of it throws him into paroxysms of idiot terror. For days he cowers in his bunker, two hundred feet down in solid rock, food for fifty years. A trip from one city to another requires months of sifting and checking computerized plans and alternate routes to avoid the possibility of an accident. His idiotic cowardice knows no bounds.
There he sits, looking like a Chimu vase with a thick layer of smooth purple scar tissue. Encased as he is in this armor, his movements are slow and hydraulic. It takes him ten minutes to sit down. This layer gets thicker and thicker right down to the bone-the doctors have to operate with power tools. So we leave Mr. Rich Parts and the picturesque parts people their monument, a mountain of scar tissue.
As L. Ron Hubbard, founder of scientology, said: "The rightest right a man could be would be to live infinitely wrong." I wrote "wrong" for "long" and the slip is significant-for the menas by which immortality is realized in science fiction, which will soon be science fact, are indeed infinitely wrong, the wrongest wrong a man can be, vampiric or worse.
Improved transplant techniques open the question whether the ego itself could be transplanted from one body to another, and the further question as to exactly where this entity resides. Here is Mr. Hart, a trillionaire dedicated to his personal immortality. Where is this thing called Mr. Hart? Precisely where, in the human nervous system, does this ugly death-sucking, death-dealing, death-fearing thing reside? Science gives only a tentative answer: the "ego" seems to be located in the midbrain at the top of the head. "Well," he thinks, "couldn't we just scoop it out of a healthy youth, throw his in the garbage where it belongs, and slide in MEEEEEEEE?" So he starts looking for a brain surgeon, a "scrambled egg" man, and he wants the best. When it comes to a short-order job old Doc Zeit is tops. He can switch eggs in an alley.
Mr. Hart embodies the competitive, acquisitive, success-minded spirit that formulated American capitalism. The logical extension of this ugly spirit is criminal. Success is its own justification. He who succees deserves to succeed; he is RIGHT. The operation is a success. The doctors have discreetly withdrawn. When a man wakes up in a beautiful new bod, he can flip out. It wouldn't pay to be a witness. Mr. Hart stands up and stretches luxuriously in his new body. He runs his hands over the lean young muscle where his potbelly used to be. All that remains of the donor is a blob of gray matter in a dish. Mr. Hart puts his hands on his hips and leans over the blob.
"And how wrong can you be? DEAD."
He spits on it and he spits ugly.
The final convulsions of a universe based on quantitative factors, like money, junk, and time, would seem to be at hand. The time approaches when no amount of money will buy anything and time itself will run out.
This is a parable of vampirism gone berserk. But all vampiric blueprints for immortality are wrong not only from the ethical standpoint. They are ultimately unworkable. In Space Vampires Colin Wilson speaks of benign vampires. Take a little, leave a little. But they always take more than they leave by the basic nature of the vampire process of inconspicuous but inexorable consumption. The vampire converts quality-live blood, vitality, youth, talent-into quantity-food and time for himself. He perpetrates the most basic betrayal of the spirit, reducing all human dreams to his shit. And that's the wrongest wrong a man can be.
Personal immortality in a physical body is impossible, since a physical body exists in time and time is that which ends. When someone says he wants to live forever, he forgets that forever is a time word. All three-dimensional immortality projects, to say the least, are ill-advised, since they always immerse the aspirant deeper in time.
The tiresome concept of personal immortality is predicated on the illusion of some unchangeable precious essence: greedy old MEEEEEEEE forever. But as the Buddhists say, there is no MEEEEEEEE, no unchanging ego.
What we thing of as our ego is defensive reaction, just as the symptoms of an illness-fever, swelling, sweating-are the body's reaction to an invading organism. Our beloved ego, arising from the rotten weeds of lust and fear and anger, has no more continuity that a fever sweat. There is no ego; only a shifting process as unreal as the Cities of the Odor Eaters that dissolve in rain. A moment's introspection demonstrates that we are not the same as we were a year ago or a week ago. "What ever possessed me to do that?"
A step toward rational immortality is to break down the concept of a separate personal, and therefore inexorably mortal, ego. This opens many doors. Your spirit could reside in a number of bodies, not as some hideous parasite draining the host, but as a helpful little visitor. "Roger the Lodger . . don't take up much room . . show you a trick or two . . never overstay my welcome."
Take fifty photos of the same person over an hour. Some of them will look so unlike the subject as to be unrecognizable. And some of them will look like some other person. "Why, he looks just like Khrushchev with one gold tooth peeking out."
The illusion of a separate, inviolable identity limits your perceptions and confines you in time. You live in other people and other people live in you- "visiting," we call it-and of course it's ever so much easier with one's Clonies.
When I first heard about cloning I thought, what a fruitful concept: why, one could be in a hundred different places at once and experience everything the other clones did. I am amazed at the outcry against this good thing not only from men of the cloth but also from scientists, the very scientists whose patient researdch has brought cloning within our grasp. The very thought of a clone disturbs these gentlemen. Like cattle on the verge of stampede, they paw the ground mooin apprehensively. "Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of human nonselfness is terrifying."
Terrifying to whom? Speak for yourself, you timorous old beastie cowering in your eternal lavatory. Too many scientists seem to be ignorant of the most rudimentary spiritual concepts. They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow, terrified, no doubt, that some skulking ingrate-of-a-clone student will sneak into their very brains and steal their genius work. The unfairness of it brings tears to his eyes as he peers anxiously through his bifocals.
Cloning isn't ego gone berserk. On the contrary, cloning is the end of the ego. For the first time, the spirit of man will be able to separate itself from the human machine, to see it and use it as a machine. He is no longer identified with one special Me machine. The human organism has become an artifact he can use like a plane, a boat, or a space capsule.
The poet John Giorno wondered if maybe a clone of a clone of a clone would just phase out into white noise like copies of copies of tape. As Count Korzybski used to say: "I don't know, let's see."
But ultimately, I postulate, true immortality can be found only in space. Space exploration is the only goal worth striving for. Over the hills and far away. You will know your enemies by those who attempt to block your path. Vampiric monopolists would keep you in time like their cattle. "It's a good thing cows don't fly," they say with an evil chuckle. The evil, intelligent Slave Gods.
The gullible, confused, and stupid pose an equal threat owing to the obstructive potential of their vast numbers. I have an interesting slip in my scrapbook. News clipping from the Boulder Camera. Picture of an old woman with a death's-head, false teeth smile. She is speaking for the Women's Christian Temperance Union. "WE OPPOSE CHILD ABUSE, INTEMPERANCE, AND IMMORTALITY."
The way to immortality is in space, and Christianity is buried under slag heaps of dead dogma, sniveling prayers; and empty prayers must oppose immortality in space as the counterfeit always fears and hates the real thing. Resurgent Islam . . . born-again Christians . . . creeds outworn . . . excess baggage . . . 'raus 'mit!
Immortality is prolonged future, and the future of any artifact lies in the direction of increased flexibility capacity for change and ultimately mutation. Immortality may be seen as a by-product of function: "to shine in use." Mutation involves changes that are literally unimaginable from the perspective of the future mutant. Coldblooded, nondreaming creatures living in the comparatively weightless medium of water could not conceive of breathing air, dreaming, and experiencing the force of gravity as a basic fact of life. There will be new fears like the fear of falling, new pleasures, and new necessities. There are distinct advantages to living in a supportive medium like water. Mutation is not a matter of logical choices.
The human mutants must take a step into the unknown, a step that no human has taken before.
"We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea."
Recent dream research has turned up a wealth of data, but no one has assembled the pieces into a workable field theory.
By far the most significant discovery to emerge frm precise dream research with vounteer subjects is the fact that dreams are a biological necessity for all warm-blooded animals. Deprived of REM sleep, they show all the symptoms of sleeplessness no matter how much dreamless sleep they are allowed. Continued deprivation would result in death.
All dreams in male subjects, except nightmares, are accompanied by erection. No one has proffered an explanation. It is interesting to note that a male chipanzee who did finger and dab paintings, and was quite good too, went into a sexual frenzy during his creative acts.
Cold-blooded animals do not dream. All warm-blooded creatures including birds do dream.
John Dunne discovered that dreams contain references to future time as experienced by the dreamer. He published his findings in An Experiment with Time in 1924. Dream references, he points out, relate not to the event itself but to the time when the subject learns of the event. The dream refers to the future of the dreamer. He says that anybody who will write his dreams down over a period of time will turn up precognitive references. Dreams involve time travel. Does it follow then that time travel is a necessity?
I quote from an article summarizing the discoveries of Professor Michel Jouvet. Jouvet, using rapid eye movement techniques, has been able to detect dreaming in animals in the womb and even developing birds in the egg. He found that animals like calves and foals, who can fend for themselves immediately after birth, dream a lot in the womb and relatively little after that. Humans and kittens dream less in the womb and are unable to fend for themselves at birth.
He concluded that human babies could not walk or feed themselves until they had enough in practice in dreams. This indicates that the function of dreams is to train the being for future conditions. I postulate that the human artifact is biologically ddesigned for space travel. So human dreams can be seen as training for space conditions. Deprived of this vital link with our future in space, with no reason for living, we die.
Art serves the same function as dreams. Plato's Republic is a blueprint for a death camp. An alien invader, or a domestic elite, bent on conquest and extermination, could rapidly immobilize the earth by cutting dream lines, just the way we took care of the Indians. I quote from Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt:
"The nation's hoop is broken and scattered like a ring of smoke. There is no center any more. The sacred tree is dead and all its birds are gone."
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Mid_Term Exam
Mid-Term (Answer Two of the Following Four Questions):
Question One
“From the nineteenth century on, beginning with Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche the sign is going to become malevolent,” writes Michel Foucault. “There is in the sign an ambiguous quality and a slight suspicion of ill will and ‘malice.’” Consider the imagery of inversion, reversal, and distrust that characterizes the projects of these three threshold figures for contemporary critical theory, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. “[I]n all ideology,” write Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, “men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura[.]” Freud writes (not in the text by him assigned for our course) that psychoanalysis “prove[s] to the ego that it is not even master of its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in his mind,” an insight Freud compares to Copernicus’s insistence that the earth is not the center of the Universe. Nietzsche describes the method of affirmation he delineates in Ecce Homo and the other books he wrote in the brilliant brief burst of creative activity before his madness all as part of a vast project he considered a “Revaluation of All Values.”
Choose one of these figures, Nietzsche, Marx, or Freud, and explain in your own words how, in the pieces of theirs we read in class, they are offering up projects of interpretation that express a deeply ironic sense of the way we conventionally understand the world. Recall that we discussed irony in class as one of four “Master Tropes,” and concluded that irony is a form of substitution or association defined by opposition, inversion, or reversal. Now compare or contrast the project of the figure you have chosen with the project of Roland Barthes in Mythologies, in which he claims “to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.”
Question Two:
In his 1888 Preface to The Communist Manifesto, Frederick Engels attributes to Marx a “proposition which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology[.]” This proposition is as follows:
“[I]n every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiters and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class -– the proletariat –- cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class –- the bourgeoisie -– without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.”
First, describe simply and in your own words the three propositions that characterize Marx’s unique contribution to the interpretation of history from this viewpoint. And second, describe the status of these three propositions in Barthes' Mythologies and propose how any change in their status for Barthes might have an impact on his own interpretive project as a Marxist or post-marxist critical theorist.
Question Three:
In his essay “Psychological Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” Freud offers up an interpretation of the autobiography of Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber. Near the conclusion of his reading of Schreber’s book, and, presumably of Schreber himself, Freud makes the last of a series of curious claims on a similar theme: “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 the project of psychoanalytic interpretation as a scientific practice? 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?
Question Four:
In the Preface to the 1970 edition of his Mythologies Roland Barthes says that his ambition for the book was to “account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature.” In the extended theoretical essay “Myth Today,” at the end of the volume, Barthes spells out this transformation in greater detail. In a key section of that culminating essay, “Myth as Depoliticized Speech,” Barthes writes:
[M]yth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Now this process is exactly that of bourgeois ideology… [M]yth is the most appropriate instrument for the ideological inversion which defines this society… [:] What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined… by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality… The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature[.]
In the series of shorter essays that make up the bulk of the volume, Barthes offers up interpretations of a host of phenomena, popular icons, events, attitudes, and so forth. In each essay he exposes the way something that is actually a contingent and specific product of historical circumstances (which might therefore be open to contestation and reform in the ongoing social struggle of history) has come to assume the status of the natural, the inevitable, the taken-for-granted, the best of all possible worlds, the best workable solution, and so on. But although each short essay testifies in its own way to the ideological accomplishment of naturalization, the fact is that the force of “nature” for each of the objects of his interpretations is a bit different in the specific work it seems to do, and in the specific forms it seems to take.
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.
Question One
“From the nineteenth century on, beginning with Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche the sign is going to become malevolent,” writes Michel Foucault. “There is in the sign an ambiguous quality and a slight suspicion of ill will and ‘malice.’” Consider the imagery of inversion, reversal, and distrust that characterizes the projects of these three threshold figures for contemporary critical theory, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. “[I]n all ideology,” write Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, “men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura[.]” Freud writes (not in the text by him assigned for our course) that psychoanalysis “prove[s] to the ego that it is not even master of its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in his mind,” an insight Freud compares to Copernicus’s insistence that the earth is not the center of the Universe. Nietzsche describes the method of affirmation he delineates in Ecce Homo and the other books he wrote in the brilliant brief burst of creative activity before his madness all as part of a vast project he considered a “Revaluation of All Values.”
Choose one of these figures, Nietzsche, Marx, or Freud, and explain in your own words how, in the pieces of theirs we read in class, they are offering up projects of interpretation that express a deeply ironic sense of the way we conventionally understand the world. Recall that we discussed irony in class as one of four “Master Tropes,” and concluded that irony is a form of substitution or association defined by opposition, inversion, or reversal. Now compare or contrast the project of the figure you have chosen with the project of Roland Barthes in Mythologies, in which he claims “to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.”
Question Two:
In his 1888 Preface to The Communist Manifesto, Frederick Engels attributes to Marx a “proposition which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology[.]” This proposition is as follows:
“[I]n every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiters and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class -– the proletariat –- cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class –- the bourgeoisie -– without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.”
First, describe simply and in your own words the three propositions that characterize Marx’s unique contribution to the interpretation of history from this viewpoint. And second, describe the status of these three propositions in Barthes' Mythologies and propose how any change in their status for Barthes might have an impact on his own interpretive project as a Marxist or post-marxist critical theorist.
Question Three:
In his essay “Psychological Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” Freud offers up an interpretation of the autobiography of Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber. Near the conclusion of his reading of Schreber’s book, and, presumably of Schreber himself, Freud makes the last of a series of curious claims on a similar theme: “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 the project of psychoanalytic interpretation as a scientific practice? 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?
Question Four:
In the Preface to the 1970 edition of his Mythologies Roland Barthes says that his ambition for the book was to “account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature.” In the extended theoretical essay “Myth Today,” at the end of the volume, Barthes spells out this transformation in greater detail. In a key section of that culminating essay, “Myth as Depoliticized Speech,” Barthes writes:
[M]yth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Now this process is exactly that of bourgeois ideology… [M]yth is the most appropriate instrument for the ideological inversion which defines this society… [:] What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined… by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality… The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature[.]
In the series of shorter essays that make up the bulk of the volume, Barthes offers up interpretations of a host of phenomena, popular icons, events, attitudes, and so forth. In each essay he exposes the way something that is actually a contingent and specific product of historical circumstances (which might therefore be open to contestation and reform in the ongoing social struggle of history) has come to assume the status of the natural, the inevitable, the taken-for-granted, the best of all possible worlds, the best workable solution, and so on. But although each short essay testifies in its own way to the ideological accomplishment of naturalization, the fact is that the force of “nature” for each of the objects of his interpretations is a bit different in the specific work it seems to do, and in the specific forms it seems to take.
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.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Co-facilitating Discussions and Writing a Precis
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 precis
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.
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 precis
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.
co-facilitation of class discussion of an assigned text.
This assignment also requires that you generate a precis
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.
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 precis
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.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Next Week: Freud
For next week we'll be tackling Sigmund Freud's account, from his Three Case Studies of the Psychotic Dr. Schreber. It isn't available online, but rather than having you purchase the whole book for this one bit I've gone ahead and made photocopies of the relevant text for you which I'll distribute first thing. See you tomorrow for our discussion of Marx, hope you are enjoying it!
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Next Week: Marx
Tomorrow we are reading section's from Nietzsche's Ecce Home, but I wanted to let you know quite a bit in advance that next week we are turning to Karl Marx. We are reading the very short Preface and rather more involved section A (Idealism and Materialism) from Part One of The German Ideology. After break we will take up an enormously influential section from Capital "The Festishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof." See everybody tomorrow morning!
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Next Week: Haraway
The online syllabus is up and you should be able to click directly through to Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" from there. Blog invites should be arriving in your e-mailboxes soon. Always feel free to post whatever you want to the blog, since this discursive space is more yours than mine. As people post content to the blog the syllabus will quickly travel out of sight, of course, and so there is a link to the syllabus at the top of the blogroll to your left. Just click it and the syllabus will return. The links to the sections of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo that we will be reading for class week after next are already live if you are inclined to read ahead.
Syllabus for Critical Theory A: The Enterprise of Interpretation
Spring 2007, Thursdays, 9.00-11.45
Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu, dalec@berkeley.edu
Course Blog: http://arguere.blogspot.com/
Office Hours: Before and after class and by appointment.
Course Description
Just what is the relationship of argument to interpretation? “Interpretation” derives from the Latin interpretatio, a term freighted with the sense not only of explication and explanation, but translation. What are the conventions that govern intelligible acts of interpretation, translation, argumentation? What are the conventions through which we constitute the proper objects of interpretation in the first place? And who are the subjects empowered to offer up interpretations that compel our attention and conviction? What happens when objects object to the interpretations and demand the standing of subjects themselves? How does the interpretation of literary texts differ from the interpretation of the law? How does it differ from a scientist’s interrogation of her environment? Or from any critical engagement with the “given” terms of the social order in which one lives? Or even from the give and take through which we struggle to understand one another in everyday conversation? These are questions with which we will begin our survey of some of the themes, problems, and conventions in the rhetoric of interpretation. Where we will have arrived by the end will of course be very much a matter open to interpretation.
Breakdown of Grades
Presentation and Co-Facilitation: 20%
Mid-Term Examination Essays: 30%
Final Examination Essays: 30%
Participation and Attendance: 20%
Provisional Schedule of Meetings
Jan 18 Introduction (Syllabus, Course Policies); Introductions
Jan 25 Introduction (Course Themes); Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
Feb 1 Nietzsche: Ecce Homo (online); read the "Preface," and the sections "Why I Am So Wise," "Why I Am So Clever," "Why I Am A Destiny"
Feb 8 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (online); selections.
Feb 15 Sigmund Freud, on the Psychotic Doctor Schreber
Feb 22 Roland Barthes, Mythologies [ISBN: 0374521506]
Mar 1 Barthes, Mythologies (continued); Kobena Mercer on Mapplethorpe
Mar 8 Carpenter (dir.), They Live (in-class screening); Mid-Term Due
Mar 15 Spring Break
Mar 22 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish; selections. [ISBN: 0679752552]
Mar 29 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction; selections. [ISBN: 0679724699]
Apr 5 William Burroughs, "Immortality" (online)
Apr 12 Valerie Solanas, "SCUM Manifesto" (online)
Apr 19 Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; selections. [ISBN: 0802150845]
Apr 26 Carol Adams, “Preface” & “On Beastliness and Solidarity”
May 3 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender.
May 10 Final Comments, Final Exam Due
Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu, dalec@berkeley.edu
Course Blog: http://arguere.blogspot.com/
Office Hours: Before and after class and by appointment.
Course Description
Just what is the relationship of argument to interpretation? “Interpretation” derives from the Latin interpretatio, a term freighted with the sense not only of explication and explanation, but translation. What are the conventions that govern intelligible acts of interpretation, translation, argumentation? What are the conventions through which we constitute the proper objects of interpretation in the first place? And who are the subjects empowered to offer up interpretations that compel our attention and conviction? What happens when objects object to the interpretations and demand the standing of subjects themselves? How does the interpretation of literary texts differ from the interpretation of the law? How does it differ from a scientist’s interrogation of her environment? Or from any critical engagement with the “given” terms of the social order in which one lives? Or even from the give and take through which we struggle to understand one another in everyday conversation? These are questions with which we will begin our survey of some of the themes, problems, and conventions in the rhetoric of interpretation. Where we will have arrived by the end will of course be very much a matter open to interpretation.
Breakdown of Grades
Presentation and Co-Facilitation: 20%
Mid-Term Examination Essays: 30%
Final Examination Essays: 30%
Participation and Attendance: 20%
Provisional Schedule of Meetings
Jan 18 Introduction (Syllabus, Course Policies); Introductions
Jan 25 Introduction (Course Themes); Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
Feb 1 Nietzsche: Ecce Homo (online); read the "Preface," and the sections "Why I Am So Wise," "Why I Am So Clever," "Why I Am A Destiny"
Feb 8 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (online); selections.
Feb 15 Sigmund Freud, on the Psychotic Doctor Schreber
Feb 22 Roland Barthes, Mythologies [ISBN: 0374521506]
Mar 1 Barthes, Mythologies (continued); Kobena Mercer on Mapplethorpe
Mar 8 Carpenter (dir.), They Live (in-class screening); Mid-Term Due
Mar 15 Spring Break
Mar 22 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish; selections. [ISBN: 0679752552]
Mar 29 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction; selections. [ISBN: 0679724699]
Apr 5 William Burroughs, "Immortality" (online)
Apr 12 Valerie Solanas, "SCUM Manifesto" (online)
Apr 19 Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; selections. [ISBN: 0802150845]
Apr 26 Carol Adams, “Preface” & “On Beastliness and Solidarity”
May 3 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender.
May 10 Final Comments, Final Exam Due
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Your Final Exam
Here is your final exam. You must answer Question One (although it is up to you to choose which two pieces you are going to compare and contrast) and then choose to answer one more question from the five remaining options. Each of your answers should be approximately 3-4 pages long. You may spend as much time as you wish on the exam and you should use your texts to help substantiate your points. Stick to the questions and be sure to finish on time. You are to submit a physical copy of your exam to me on the last scheduled meeting of the course.
Question One:
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 Valerie Solanas, Judith Butler, Franz Fanon, Carol Adams, or Donna Haraway.
Question Two:
In his 1888 Preface to The Communist Manifesto, Frederick Engels attributes to Marx a “proposition which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology[.]” This proposition is as follows:
“[I]n every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiters and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class -– the proletariat –- cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class –- the bourgeoisie -– without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.”
First, describe simply and in your own words the three propositions that characterize Marx’s unique contribution to the interpretation of history from this viewpoint. And second, describe the status of these three propositions in Barthes' Mythologies and how any change in their status for Barthes might have an impact on his own interpretive project as a Marxist or post-marxist critical theorist.
Question Three:
In the Preface to the 1970 edition of his Mythologies Roland Barthes says that his ambition for the book was to “account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature.” In the extended theoretical essay “Myth Today,” at the end of the volume, Barthes spells out this transformation in greater detail. In a key section of that culminating essay, “Myth as Depoliticized Speech,” Barthes writes:
[M]yth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Now this process is exactly that of bourgeois ideology… [M]yth is the most appropriate instrument for the ideological inversion which defines this society… [:] What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined… by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality… The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature[.]
In the series of shorter essays that make up the bulk of the volume, Barthes offers up interpretations of a host of phenomena, popular icons, events, attitudes, and so forth. In each essay he exposes is the way something that is actually a contingent and specific product of historical circumstances (which might therefore be open to contestation and reform in the ongoing social struggle of history) has come to assume the status of the natural, the inevitable, the taken-for-granted, the best of all possible worlds, the best workable solution, and so on. But although each short essay testifies in its own way to the ideological accomplishment of naturalization, the fact is that the force of “nature” for each of the objects of his interpretations is a bit different in the specific work it seems to do, and in the specific forms it seems to take.
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.
Question Four:
Would you characterize John Carpenter’s film “They Live” as a film about ideology? Why or why not? In what ways does the film recognizably depict the workings of ideology in contemporary American society? Do you think the account of ideology we discussed in Barthes’ Mythologies corresponds to (or interestingly fails to do so) the account of ideology one might discern in the film? Does Carpenter’s film express its own ideological commitments? Substantiate your claims with examples from the film and quotations from any relevant texts.
Question Five:
In the History of Sexuality, Vol. I, Michel Foucault complains that “[i]n political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king.” Similarly, quite early on in the text he expresses doubt at the notion that “the workings of power… belong primarily to the category of repression.” Is Foucault’s own account of power in the book different in a way that makes a difference from the account he criticizes? Why or why not? Provide concrete textual evidence in support of your view.
Question Six:
Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo certainly appears at first glance to be an exercise in rampant and relentless megalomania. But how might you the argument that Nietzsche is actually rather modest in the claims he makes in the book? What insight might this modesty provide as we try to make sense of Nietzsche’s project and his interpretive method of “affirmation” in Ecce Homo?
Question One:
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 Valerie Solanas, Judith Butler, Franz Fanon, Carol Adams, or Donna Haraway.
Question Two:
In his 1888 Preface to The Communist Manifesto, Frederick Engels attributes to Marx a “proposition which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology[.]” This proposition is as follows:
“[I]n every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiters and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class -– the proletariat –- cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class –- the bourgeoisie -– without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.”
First, describe simply and in your own words the three propositions that characterize Marx’s unique contribution to the interpretation of history from this viewpoint. And second, describe the status of these three propositions in Barthes' Mythologies and how any change in their status for Barthes might have an impact on his own interpretive project as a Marxist or post-marxist critical theorist.
Question Three:
In the Preface to the 1970 edition of his Mythologies Roland Barthes says that his ambition for the book was to “account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature.” In the extended theoretical essay “Myth Today,” at the end of the volume, Barthes spells out this transformation in greater detail. In a key section of that culminating essay, “Myth as Depoliticized Speech,” Barthes writes:
[M]yth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Now this process is exactly that of bourgeois ideology… [M]yth is the most appropriate instrument for the ideological inversion which defines this society… [:] What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined… by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality… The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature[.]
In the series of shorter essays that make up the bulk of the volume, Barthes offers up interpretations of a host of phenomena, popular icons, events, attitudes, and so forth. In each essay he exposes is the way something that is actually a contingent and specific product of historical circumstances (which might therefore be open to contestation and reform in the ongoing social struggle of history) has come to assume the status of the natural, the inevitable, the taken-for-granted, the best of all possible worlds, the best workable solution, and so on. But although each short essay testifies in its own way to the ideological accomplishment of naturalization, the fact is that the force of “nature” for each of the objects of his interpretations is a bit different in the specific work it seems to do, and in the specific forms it seems to take.
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.
Question Four:
Would you characterize John Carpenter’s film “They Live” as a film about ideology? Why or why not? In what ways does the film recognizably depict the workings of ideology in contemporary American society? Do you think the account of ideology we discussed in Barthes’ Mythologies corresponds to (or interestingly fails to do so) the account of ideology one might discern in the film? Does Carpenter’s film express its own ideological commitments? Substantiate your claims with examples from the film and quotations from any relevant texts.
Question Five:
In the History of Sexuality, Vol. I, Michel Foucault complains that “[i]n political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king.” Similarly, quite early on in the text he expresses doubt at the notion that “the workings of power… belong primarily to the category of repression.” Is Foucault’s own account of power in the book different in a way that makes a difference from the account he criticizes? Why or why not? Provide concrete textual evidence in support of your view.
Question Six:
Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo certainly appears at first glance to be an exercise in rampant and relentless megalomania. But how might you the argument that Nietzsche is actually rather modest in the claims he makes in the book? What insight might this modesty provide as we try to make sense of Nietzsche’s project and his interpretive method of “affirmation” in Ecce Homo?
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Saturday, November 04, 2006
William Burroughs' "Immortality"
Here is the link to an online version of the text "Immortality" by William Burroughs. As I mentioned in class, this version is somewhat abbreviated. I'll be reading a longer version aloud in class on Tuesday before our discussion. After you have read the short text at the other end of the link, return to this post and read the follwing extended version of the conclusion of the piece as well:
"We are such stuff as dreams are made of."
Recent dream research has turned up a wealth of data, but no one has assembled the pieces into a workable field theory.
By far the most significant discovery to emerge frm precise dream research with vounteer subjects is the fact that dreams are a biological necessity for all warm-blooded animals. Deprived of REM sleep, they show all the symptoms of sleeplessness no matter how much dreamless sleep they are allowed. Continued deprivation would result in death.
All dreams in male subjects, except nightmares, are accompanied by erection. No one has proffered an explanation. It is interesting to note that a male chipanzee who did finger and dab paintings, and was quite good too, went into a sexual frenzy during his creative acts.
Cold-blooded animals do not dream. All warm-blooded creatures including birds do dream.
John Dunne discovered that dreams contain references to future time as experienced by the dreamer. He published his findings in An Experiment with Time in 1924. Dream references, he points out, relate not to the event itself but to the time when the subject learns of the event. The dream refers to the future of the dreamer. He says that anybody who will write his dreams down over a period of time will turn up precognitive references. Dreams involve time travel. Does it follow then that time travel is a necessity?
I quote from an article summarizing the discoveries of Professor Michel Jouvet. Jouvet, using rapid eye movement techniques, has been able to detect dreaming in animals in the womb and even developing birds in the egg. He found that animals like calves and foals, who can fend for themselves immediately after birth, dream a lot in the womb and relatively little after that. Humans and kittens dream less in the womb and are unable to fend for themselves at birth.
He concluded that human babies could not walk or feed themselves until they had enough in practice in dreams. This indicates that the function of dreams is to train the being for future conditions. I postulate that the human artifact is biologically ddesigned for space travel. So human dreams can be seen as training for space conditions. Deprived of this vital link with our future in space, with no reason for living, we die.
Art serves the same function as dreams. Plato's Republic is a blueprint for a death camp. An alien invader, or a domestic elite, bent on conquest and extermination, could rapidly immobilize the earth by cutting dream lines, just the way we took care of the Indians. I quote from Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt:
"The nation's hoop is broken and scattered like a ring of smoke. There is no center any more. The sacred tree is dead and all its birds are gone."
Monday, August 28, 2006
Syllabus for Critical Theory A, Fall 2006
Critical Theory A
“The Point Is to Change It”
Fall 2006
Tuesdays, 9.00-11.45
Instructor: Dale Carrico, dalec@berkeley.edu; dcarrico@sfai.edu
Office Hours: Before and after class and by appointment.
Course Blog: http://arguere.blogspot.com
Course Description
What is theory good for? Marx famously complained that while philosophers have only interpreted the world, “the point is to change it.” Just what are the relations of theory and practice? How does theory illuminate and invigorate human agency?
Course Requirements
Required Texts Include:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
John Carpenter (dir.), They Live
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1
Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender
Essays Available Online or Distributed In-Class:
Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
William Burroughs, “Immortality,” from The Adding Machine
Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto
Carol Adams, “On Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity,” from Neither Man Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals
Your final grade will be based on the following:
Attendance/Participation/Quizzes: 25%
Five 2-3pp Blog Posts: 50%
Final Examination: 25%
Schedule of Meetings
Week One, August 29
Administrative Introduction
Personal Introductions
Week Two, September 5
Course Introduction
Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
Week Three, September 12
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Week Four, September 19
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology
First Blog Post Must Be Published by Now
Week Five, September 26
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology
Week Six, October 3
Barthes, Mythologies
Week Seven, October 10
They Live (Screening)
Barthes, Mythologies
Second Blog Post Must Be Published By Now
Week Eight, October 17
They Live (discussion)
Week Nine, October 24
Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Week Ten, October 31
Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1
Third Blog Post Must Be Published By Now
Week Twelve, November 7
Burroughs, “Immortality”
Week Thirteen, November 14
Solanas, “SCUM Manifesto”
Week Fourteen, November 21
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Fourth Blog Post Must Be Published By Now
Week Fifteen, November 28
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia
Week Sixteen, December 5
Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia
Adams, “On Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity”
Week Seventeen, December 12
Butler, Undoing Gender
Concluding Remarks
Take-Home Final Examination Due In-Class
Fifth Blog Post Must Be Published By Now
“The Point Is to Change It”
Fall 2006
Tuesdays, 9.00-11.45
Instructor: Dale Carrico, dalec@berkeley.edu; dcarrico@sfai.edu
Office Hours: Before and after class and by appointment.
Course Blog: http://arguere.blogspot.com
Course Description
What is theory good for? Marx famously complained that while philosophers have only interpreted the world, “the point is to change it.” Just what are the relations of theory and practice? How does theory illuminate and invigorate human agency?
Course Requirements
Required Texts Include:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
John Carpenter (dir.), They Live
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1
Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender
Essays Available Online or Distributed In-Class:
Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
William Burroughs, “Immortality,” from The Adding Machine
Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto
Carol Adams, “On Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity,” from Neither Man Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals
Your final grade will be based on the following:
Attendance/Participation/Quizzes: 25%
Five 2-3pp Blog Posts: 50%
Final Examination: 25%
Schedule of Meetings
Week One, August 29
Administrative Introduction
Personal Introductions
Week Two, September 5
Course Introduction
Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
Week Three, September 12
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Week Four, September 19
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology
First Blog Post Must Be Published by Now
Week Five, September 26
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology
Week Six, October 3
Barthes, Mythologies
Week Seven, October 10
They Live (Screening)
Barthes, Mythologies
Second Blog Post Must Be Published By Now
Week Eight, October 17
They Live (discussion)
Week Nine, October 24
Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Week Ten, October 31
Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1
Third Blog Post Must Be Published By Now
Week Twelve, November 7
Burroughs, “Immortality”
Week Thirteen, November 14
Solanas, “SCUM Manifesto”
Week Fourteen, November 21
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Fourth Blog Post Must Be Published By Now
Week Fifteen, November 28
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia
Week Sixteen, December 5
Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia
Adams, “On Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity”
Week Seventeen, December 12
Butler, Undoing Gender
Concluding Remarks
Take-Home Final Examination Due In-Class
Fifth Blog Post Must Be Published By Now
Monday, January 16, 2006
Syllabus for Rhetoric 1A
Rhetoric 1A
Ranting, Raving, Writing
Spring 2006
Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 9.00-10.00
Instructor: Dale Carrico, dalec@berkeley.edu
Office Hours: Before and after class and by appointment; Office: Dwinelle
Course Blog: http://arguere.blogspot.com
Course Description
This is a course in argumentative reading and writing, which means for me a course both in expository writing and critical thinking. But the works we will be reading together are anything but exemplary argumentative texts. Our texts rant and rave, they are brimming with rage, dripping with corrosive humor, suffused with ecstasies. In ranting and raving arguments are pushed into a kind of crisis, and in them rhetoric becomes a kind of poetry.
What does it tell us about argument in general to observe it in extremis like this? How can we read transcendent texts critically, in ways that clarify their stakes without dismissing their force, and enable us to communicate intelligibly to others the reactions they inspire in us and the meanings we find in them?
Course Requirements and Policies
1. Attendance -- You should warn me in advance about absences. When this is not possible, call the Rhetoric Office (642-1415) and leave a message explaining why you are absent. Keep in mind that missing classes or arriving late disrupts the community of the classroom, especially since you will be doing a great deal of work with your peers this term. Absences and lateness will affect your performance negatively, and will lower your final grade significantly.
2. Deadlines -- You are required to observe assignment deadlines. If you anticipate trouble completing an assignment on time, you must speak to me in advance about an extension. Any paper or homework assignment handed in late without an extension will be reduced by a half of a letter grade for each day ? including Saturdays and Sundays – that it is late. Try to break the procrastination cycle: leave enough time so that printer failures, disk errors, and lines at the printout place do not make you late.
3. Format -- All written work for this course must be printed on a word processor or typed. Written work that is not printed on a word processor or typed will not be accepted (unless of course it is an in-class assignment), and the late policy (see #2 above) will apply. Always spell-check your written assignments. Resist the use of your computer’s thesaurus. Use your own vocabulary. Always proofread your papers after you have printed them out. Excessive spelling and proofreading errors will be subject to significant grade reductions. Also, it is a good idea to keep copies of papers and other important written assignments. Papers do get lost, and if an instructor loses a paper it is your responsibility to provide a new copy.
4. Participation – Participation in class discussion is required. I know that some people are less enthusiastic about class participation than others. Let me state my philosophy on this: Classroom discussion is the only way I know to make visible the genuinely broad range of valid responses any complicated argument will provoke. Understanding objections to your viewpoint will either sharpen the effectiveness of that view or it will change your mind, and either outcome can only be a good thing. If you are pathologically shy it may be possible to satisfy the participation requirement by attending office hours regularly. But please make an effort at class participation – I’ll do what I can to make the class a safe environment for the exploration and dispute of ideas. Feel free to disagree with one another or with me or with anybody, but always respect one another and keep an open mind about other viewpoints. And keep in mind also that borderline grades will be affected both positively and negatively by regular classroom participation or by its lack.
Your final grade will be determined by summing the grades of the following assignments in the given proportions:
1. Peer Responses on the First Paper Draft 05%
2. First Paper 12%
3. Peer Responses on Second Paper Draft 05%
4. Second Paper 12%
5. Peer Responses on Third Paper Draft 05%
6. Third Paper 12%
7. Peer Responses on Fourth Paper Draft 05%
8. Fourth Paper 12%
9. In-Class Work and Homework 12%
10. Class Participation 10%
11. Final Report 05%
12. Journal 05%
Provisional Schedule of Meetings
January
Week One
Monday, January 16, Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday
Wednesday, January 18, Administrative
Friday, January 20, Introduction
Week Two
Monday, January 23, 2-3 Minute Personal Introductions
Wednesday, January 25, 2-3 pp. Diagnostic Due,
Discussion of Anonymous, “Fuck the South”
http://www.fuckthesouth.com/
Friday, January 27, Four Habits of Argumentative Writing
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~dalec/fourhabits.html
Week Three
Monday, January 30, Discuss Plato, Symposium
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/plato/p71sy/
February
Wednesday, February 1, Discuss Plato, Symposium
Friday, February 3, Thesis/Opposition Workshop
Week Four
Monday, February 6, Draft of Paper One Due, Make Copies for Peer Editors
Discuss Ginsberg, “Howl”
http://members.tripod.com/~Sprayberry/poems/howl.txt
Wednesday, February 8, Discuss Ginsberg, “Howl”
Friday, February 10, Peer Editing Workshop
Week Five
Monday, February 13, Paper One Due, 4pp.
Discuss Dostoievski, Notes from the Underground
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DosNote.html
Wednesday, February 15
Discuss Dostoievski, Notes from the Underground
Friday, February 17
Discuss Dostoievski, Notes from the Underground
Week Six
Monday, February 20, President’s Day Holiday
Wednesday, February 22,
Friday, February 24, Thesis/Opposition Workshop
Week Seven
Monday, February 27, Draft of Paper Two Due, Make Copies for Peer Editors
Discuss Wilson, Preface to A Massive Swelling: Celebrity
Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease
March
Wednesday, March 1,Discuss Wilson, A Massive Swelling
Friday, March 3, Peer Editing Workshop
Week Eight
Monday, March 6, Paper Two Due, 4-5pp.
Discuss Woolf, Orlando
http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200331.txt
Wednesday, March 8, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Friday, March 10, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Week Nine
Monday, March 13, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Wednesday, March 15, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Friday, March 17, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Week Ten
Monday, March 20, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Wednesday, March 22, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Friday, March 24, Thesis/Opposition Workshop
Week Eleven
March 27 – March 31, Spring Recess
Week Twelve
April
Monday, April 3, Draft of Paper Three Due, Make Copies for Peer Editors
Discuss Burroughs, “Immortality”
http://www.interpc.fr/mapage/westernlands/immortality.html
Wednesday, April 5, Discuss Burroughs, “Immortality”
Friday, April 7, Peer Editing Workshop
Week Thirteen
Monday, April 10, Paper Three Due, 4-5pp.
Screen/Discuss Network
Wednesday, April 12, Screen/Discuss Network
Friday, April 14, Screen/Discuss Network
Week Fourteen
Monday, April 17, Discuss Film
Wednesday, April 19, Discuss Solanas, “SCUM Manifesto”
http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm
Friday, April 21, Thesis/Opposition Workshop
Week Fifteen
Monday, April 24, Individual Meetings
Wednesday, April 26, Individual Meetings
Friday, April 28, Individual Meetings
Week Sixteen
May
Monday, May 1, Draft of Paper Four Due, Make Copies for Peer Editors, Final Reports Due
Wednesday, May 3, In-class Workshop
Friday, May 5, Notebooks Due, Peer Editing Workshop
Week Seventeen
Monday, May 8, Final Paper Due, Final Reports Due, Concluding Remarks
Ranting, Raving, Writing
Spring 2006
Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 9.00-10.00
Instructor: Dale Carrico, dalec@berkeley.edu
Office Hours: Before and after class and by appointment; Office: Dwinelle
Course Blog: http://arguere.blogspot.com
Course Description
This is a course in argumentative reading and writing, which means for me a course both in expository writing and critical thinking. But the works we will be reading together are anything but exemplary argumentative texts. Our texts rant and rave, they are brimming with rage, dripping with corrosive humor, suffused with ecstasies. In ranting and raving arguments are pushed into a kind of crisis, and in them rhetoric becomes a kind of poetry.
What does it tell us about argument in general to observe it in extremis like this? How can we read transcendent texts critically, in ways that clarify their stakes without dismissing their force, and enable us to communicate intelligibly to others the reactions they inspire in us and the meanings we find in them?
Course Requirements and Policies
1. Attendance -- You should warn me in advance about absences. When this is not possible, call the Rhetoric Office (642-1415) and leave a message explaining why you are absent. Keep in mind that missing classes or arriving late disrupts the community of the classroom, especially since you will be doing a great deal of work with your peers this term. Absences and lateness will affect your performance negatively, and will lower your final grade significantly.
2. Deadlines -- You are required to observe assignment deadlines. If you anticipate trouble completing an assignment on time, you must speak to me in advance about an extension. Any paper or homework assignment handed in late without an extension will be reduced by a half of a letter grade for each day ? including Saturdays and Sundays – that it is late. Try to break the procrastination cycle: leave enough time so that printer failures, disk errors, and lines at the printout place do not make you late.
3. Format -- All written work for this course must be printed on a word processor or typed. Written work that is not printed on a word processor or typed will not be accepted (unless of course it is an in-class assignment), and the late policy (see #2 above) will apply. Always spell-check your written assignments. Resist the use of your computer’s thesaurus. Use your own vocabulary. Always proofread your papers after you have printed them out. Excessive spelling and proofreading errors will be subject to significant grade reductions. Also, it is a good idea to keep copies of papers and other important written assignments. Papers do get lost, and if an instructor loses a paper it is your responsibility to provide a new copy.
4. Participation – Participation in class discussion is required. I know that some people are less enthusiastic about class participation than others. Let me state my philosophy on this: Classroom discussion is the only way I know to make visible the genuinely broad range of valid responses any complicated argument will provoke. Understanding objections to your viewpoint will either sharpen the effectiveness of that view or it will change your mind, and either outcome can only be a good thing. If you are pathologically shy it may be possible to satisfy the participation requirement by attending office hours regularly. But please make an effort at class participation – I’ll do what I can to make the class a safe environment for the exploration and dispute of ideas. Feel free to disagree with one another or with me or with anybody, but always respect one another and keep an open mind about other viewpoints. And keep in mind also that borderline grades will be affected both positively and negatively by regular classroom participation or by its lack.
Your final grade will be determined by summing the grades of the following assignments in the given proportions:
1. Peer Responses on the First Paper Draft 05%
2. First Paper 12%
3. Peer Responses on Second Paper Draft 05%
4. Second Paper 12%
5. Peer Responses on Third Paper Draft 05%
6. Third Paper 12%
7. Peer Responses on Fourth Paper Draft 05%
8. Fourth Paper 12%
9. In-Class Work and Homework 12%
10. Class Participation 10%
11. Final Report 05%
12. Journal 05%
Provisional Schedule of Meetings
January
Week One
Monday, January 16, Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday
Wednesday, January 18, Administrative
Friday, January 20, Introduction
Week Two
Monday, January 23, 2-3 Minute Personal Introductions
Wednesday, January 25, 2-3 pp. Diagnostic Due,
Discussion of Anonymous, “Fuck the South”
http://www.fuckthesouth.com/
Friday, January 27, Four Habits of Argumentative Writing
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~dalec/fourhabits.html
Week Three
Monday, January 30, Discuss Plato, Symposium
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/plato/p71sy/
February
Wednesday, February 1, Discuss Plato, Symposium
Friday, February 3, Thesis/Opposition Workshop
Week Four
Monday, February 6, Draft of Paper One Due, Make Copies for Peer Editors
Discuss Ginsberg, “Howl”
http://members.tripod.com/~Sprayberry/poems/howl.txt
Wednesday, February 8, Discuss Ginsberg, “Howl”
Friday, February 10, Peer Editing Workshop
Week Five
Monday, February 13, Paper One Due, 4pp.
Discuss Dostoievski, Notes from the Underground
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DosNote.html
Wednesday, February 15
Discuss Dostoievski, Notes from the Underground
Friday, February 17
Discuss Dostoievski, Notes from the Underground
Week Six
Monday, February 20, President’s Day Holiday
Wednesday, February 22,
Friday, February 24, Thesis/Opposition Workshop
Week Seven
Monday, February 27, Draft of Paper Two Due, Make Copies for Peer Editors
Discuss Wilson, Preface to A Massive Swelling: Celebrity
Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease
March
Wednesday, March 1,Discuss Wilson, A Massive Swelling
Friday, March 3, Peer Editing Workshop
Week Eight
Monday, March 6, Paper Two Due, 4-5pp.
Discuss Woolf, Orlando
http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200331.txt
Wednesday, March 8, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Friday, March 10, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Week Nine
Monday, March 13, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Wednesday, March 15, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Friday, March 17, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Week Ten
Monday, March 20, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Wednesday, March 22, Discuss Woolf, Orlando
Friday, March 24, Thesis/Opposition Workshop
Week Eleven
March 27 – March 31, Spring Recess
Week Twelve
April
Monday, April 3, Draft of Paper Three Due, Make Copies for Peer Editors
Discuss Burroughs, “Immortality”
http://www.interpc.fr/mapage/westernlands/immortality.html
Wednesday, April 5, Discuss Burroughs, “Immortality”
Friday, April 7, Peer Editing Workshop
Week Thirteen
Monday, April 10, Paper Three Due, 4-5pp.
Screen/Discuss Network
Wednesday, April 12, Screen/Discuss Network
Friday, April 14, Screen/Discuss Network
Week Fourteen
Monday, April 17, Discuss Film
Wednesday, April 19, Discuss Solanas, “SCUM Manifesto”
http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm
Friday, April 21, Thesis/Opposition Workshop
Week Fifteen
Monday, April 24, Individual Meetings
Wednesday, April 26, Individual Meetings
Friday, April 28, Individual Meetings
Week Sixteen
May
Monday, May 1, Draft of Paper Four Due, Make Copies for Peer Editors, Final Reports Due
Wednesday, May 3, In-class Workshop
Friday, May 5, Notebooks Due, Peer Editing Workshop
Week Seventeen
Monday, May 8, Final Paper Due, Final Reports Due, Concluding Remarks
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
For Thursday
Remember, we'll be discussing Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto Thursday. It is incredibly dense and difficult in some ways, a return to the kinds of poetic philosophical stuff we read with Plato and Nietzsche and Dostoievski. I recommend you read it for its imagery, for its language, the way you read Ginsberg and Burroughs. Read sections out loud to get a taste for the rhythm of the piece. Rather than trying to puzzle through all of the arguments, note the images that it inspires in your minds and think about the things those images share and conflict with other about.
Also, you'll be handing in copies of the latest paper for your peer editing groups. And, wonder of wonders, you'll be getting back your papers from me at long last, too.
Also, you'll be handing in copies of the latest paper for your peer editing groups. And, wonder of wonders, you'll be getting back your papers from me at long last, too.
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