This course began as an attempt to pull together a course on 20th century social theory. That of course was a foolish goal from the get-go given how much social theory was written during the 20th century. So, I shifted my focus toward critical theoretical concerns at the end of the 20th century. Much of this gets lumped under the rubric of postmodernism, but could as easily be considered as issues of hypermodernism. As I imagined that course, I saw my main themes focused on relationships between time, space and capital in the emergent era of global capitalism; representation and simulation in the society of the spectacle; technoscience and the production of value; and relationships between ideology and the production of value, as well as fundamental changes in the relationship of ideology and power.
Well, those are my issues. But do they necessarily make for a good way of structuring an undergraduate theory course? Maybe. But maybe not. So, I thought about other narratives that I might use to narrow down the thinkers that we read and study. Rather than begin this theoretical journey in the new millennium, I thought about beginning in the writings of critical theory from the 1920s through the 1960s. Here I had in mind thinkers from Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Simmel, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, C. Wright Mills, Jurgen Habermas, Henri Lefebvre, Louis Althusser, to Michel Foucault. From there, I reasoned, we could quickly jump to the postmodern, post-Fordist, post-colonial, global society of the spectacle, along with the works of Guy Debord, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Jessica Benjamin, Stuart Hall, Cornel West, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Celeste Olalquiaga, Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Paul Virilio, and Dick Hebdige. If I've left your favorite theorist out, I apologize. But that is my point.
So after deciding that all-inclusive reading assignments are self-defeating and the notion of achieving coverage is futile, I decided to go with what you see below: a syllabus that addresses selected issues in contemporary social theory.
This first part of the course addresses questions regarding Modernity, along with the struggle of critical social theory to make sense of historical changes in the mode of capitalist societies -- particularly the transition to corporate capitalism. Other questions raised by critical theory concerned relationships between class formations and ideology, along with heightened concerns over how ideology figures in the reproductions of power relations and how science and technology contribute to emancipation or domination. In search for a new theory of praxis, critical theorists looked anew at how social power reproduced itself.
We'll end this section with Foucault, who though a student of modernity, is often labeled as postmodern. I've selected Fred Jameson and Jean Baudrillard to frame the issues of postmodernism. Shifting the focus from society to culture, the debates that ensue have to do both with the contradictions of modernity, as well as their supercession driven by the institutional form of the Spectacle and the evolution of the Subject. The book by Ann Game, Undoing the Social, addresses relationships of the Ego (Subject, Identity, Self, Mind) and the history of Capitalism. One of the major theoretical shifts of this century has been the calling into question of the authoritativeness of knowledge. Writings by Foucault, Berger and Luckmann, Haraway, Butler, and Spivak all address this in various ways. While many of these works aim at empowering those who have previously been marginalized and dispossessed, do they accomplish this by undermining unified theories of praxis?
This course remains unfinished in conceptualization. I expect it to continue to mutate over the space of this term and our conversations.
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. NY: Penguin, 1988.Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press. Introduction to 1967 edition. 1971
"Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," pp.82-149"The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought" (online version of pp.110-149).
Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks. "Americanism and Fordism, pp.277-318. NY: International Publishers. 1971.
Stuart Hall, "Gramsci's relevance for the study of race and ethnicity" pp.411-440, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. Routledge, 1996.
Stuart Hall, "The problem of ideology; marxism without guarantees." pp.25-46, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. Routledge, 1996.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Pp.217-52 in Hannah Arendt (ed.) Illuminations. 1969. NY: Schocken Books.
Marshall Berman, Angel in the City. About Benjamin. 1993Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, "The Culture Industry," from Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1947. NY: Seabury Press.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. NY: Knopf, 1995.
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory. Guilford, 1991.
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle. 1977. Detroit: Black & Red Press.
Ann Game, Undoing the Social. U. of Toronto Press, 1991.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" pp.609-614 in Charles Lemert (ed), Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993.
Cornel West, "The New Cultural Politics of Difference," pp.577-589 in Charles Lemert (ed), Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993.
Fredrick Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
David Harvey, "From space to place and back again: Reflections on the condition of postmodernity," pp.3-29 inJon Bird, et al., Mapping the Futures: local cultures, global change. Routledge, 1993.
David Harvey. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. 1989Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Sage, 1993.
"The End of Production," pp.6-49."The Order of the Simulacra," pp.50-86.
Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 133-156.
Paul Virilio, Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!
Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War. NY: Semiotext(e). 1983.
Course assignments and grading:
I hope to organize this class as a seminar on most days. That doesn't mean that from time to time you won't have to listen to me ramble on. But in the interest of minimizing that possibility and achieving the didactic virtues of a seminar, I am going to ask students in the class to take turns in terms of facilitating class discussions of theorists and their arguments. This will count for 30% of your course grade.
The primary writing assignments for this course will be the weekly writing we share with one another about the materials we have been reading and discussing. We will do this writing online (electronically) in the form of something like an online e-mail conversation. Here we can raise questions, go off on riffs, or muse about connections between ideas and issues. If everyone contributes to this, it will also raise the level of our discourse in the classroom by allowing us to practice or rehearse our intellectual struggles. This will count for 40% of your course grade.
Finally, I will ask everyone to write a 12-15 page paper. Either on a theorist that we haven't covered -- mind the gaps -- or a synthetic piece on the materials that we have covered. 30%