San Francisco Art Institute | Fall 2016 | CS 500V-01 Fetish, Figure, Fact
"Artists inhabit the magical universe." -- William Burroughs
Instructor: Dale Carrico, e-mail: dcarrico@sfai.edu, blog: http://fetish-figure-fact.blogspot.com
Course Description: We think of facts as found not made, but facts are made to be found and, once found, made to be foundational. Let us pursue together the propositions that fetishes are figures we take to yield false facts, while facts are figures we have fetishized to yield truths...
In this course we will explore the relations and distinctions in critical conceptions of fetishism, figuration, and facticity. We will discover early that theories of the fetish define the turn of the three threshold figures of critical theory from philosophy to post-philosophical discourse: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche (commodity, sexuality, ressentimentality). Fetishism recurs deliriously thereafter in contemporary critical theory, feminist, queer, anti-racist, post-colonial, technoscientific, and we will survey many of these. Fetishism, it turns out, may be indispensable to the delineation of the aesthetic, the constitution of the social, the adjudications of the cultural and subcultural, and to representational practices both artistic and political. Is the devotion of the critical to the separation of facts from fancies itself fetishistic? What if fetishism is just another kind of figurative language, or just another kind of literalization after all? What are we to make of the way distinctions between fetishism, figuration, and fact can themselves always be drawn fetishistically, figuratively, and factually? Our answers may well take us to the heart of making itself.
Notebook 15%, 10-min Report/Co-Facilitation 15%, Symposium Presentation 30%, Final Paper (12-15pp.) 40%
Week One | August 29 -- Introductions
Week Two | September 5 -- Labor Day Holiday
Week Three | September 12 -- Friedrich Nietzsche: On Truth and the Lie in an Extramoral Sense; Selections from The Gay Science and Ecce Homo on the Eternal Return and ressentiment.
Week Four | September 19 -- Sigmund Freud: Fetishism; Selections from Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Schreber.
Week Five | September 26 -- Karl Marx: The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof from Capital, Volume One; Selections from The German Ideology
Week Six | October 3 -- Screening and discussion of Max Ophuls, dir.: Earrings of Madame de…
Week Seven | October 10 -- Walter Benjamin: Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility; Naomi Klein, Logo: No Logo, One and Two
Week Eight | October 17 -- Frantz Fanon: "The Fact of Blackness" & other selections from Black Skin, White Masks
Week Nine | October 24 -- Laura Mulvey: "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"; Kobena Mercer: "Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe"
Week Ten | October 31 -- William Burroughs: "On Coincidence"; Elizabeth Grosz: "Lesbian Fetishism"; Charity Scribner: "Object, Relic, Fetish, Thing: Joseph Beuys and the Museum"
Week Eleven | November 7 -- Screening and discussion of Alfred Hitchcock, dir.: North by Northwest; Michael Taussig: "State Fetishism"
Week Twelve | November 14 -- David Harvey: The Fetish of Technology; Bruno Latour: Selections from The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods
Week Thirteen | November 21 -- Symposium (first panels)
Week Fourteen | November 28 -- Symposium (second panels)
Week Fifteen | December 5 -- Closing Remarks, Hand in Final Papers and Notebooks.
Syllabus for my undergraduate Critical Theory survey course, still coming up (I don't expect it to be much changed from the earlier versions I've been teaching for over a decade, however)....
Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog: http://patriarchalphilosophistry.blogspot.com
August 25-December 8, 2016, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3.30-5pm, LeConte Hall, Room 2
Participation/Attendance/In-Class Activities, 20%; Reading Notebook, 20%; Precis, 2-3pp., 15%; Figurative Reading, 2-3pp., 15%; Final Paper, 6pp., 30%. (Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies.)
Provisional Schedule of Meetings
Week One
Week Two
Week Four
Tuesday, September 13 | Euripides, Hecuba
Thursday, September 15 | Plato, Apology
Week Five
Tuesday, September 20 | Plato, Protagorus
Thursday, September 22 | Plato, Gorgias
Week Six
Tuesday, September 27 | Plato, Phaedrus
Thursday, September 29 | Plato, Symposium
Week Seven
Tuesday, October 4 | Plato, Republic Book V and Book VII
Thursday, October 6 | Aristophanes, Wasps
You should have posted your first short piece, whether your precis or figurative analysis by now.
Week Eight
Tuesday, October 11 | Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book I and Book II and from Topics
Thursday, October 13 | Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book III and from Poetics
Week Nine
Tuesday, October 18 | Marcus Tullius Cicero, Against Verres, Against Cataline, Against Antony
Thursday, October 20 | Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Ideal Orator
Week Ten
Tuesday, October 25 | Terence, Eunuchus
Thursday, October 27 | A selection of poems by Ovid
Week Eleven
Tuesday, November 1 | Seneca, Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii
Thursday, November 3 | Suetonius, Caligula
Week Twelve
Tuesday, November 8 | Quintus Tullius Cicero, Commentariolum Petitionis
Thursday, November 10 | Juvenal, Satires I, II, III
Week Thirteen
Tuesday, November 15 | Hortensia's Forum Oration to the Second Triumvirate. Quintilian, from Institutio Oratoria: Book I -- Preface, Chapters 1-3; Book III -- Chapters 1-5; Book VI -- Chapter 1; Book VII -- Chapters 8-10; Book VIII -- Chapter 1-3, and also Chapter 6; Book IX -- Chapter 1; Book XII -- Chapter 1
Thursday, November 17 | Libanius, "The Silence of Socrates"
Week Fourteen
Tuesday, November 22 | Gaius Petronius, Satyricon
Thursday, November 24 | Thanksgiving Day Holiday
You should have posted your second short piece, whether your precis or figurative analysis by now.
Week Fifteen
Tuesday, November 29 | Augustine, from City of God, Read as much as you like but Books I and XI are the crucial ones for us.
Thursday, December 1 | In-Class Workshop for Final Paper
Week Sixteen/RRR & Final Paper Due
Tuesday, December 6 | Optional Marathon Office Hour Availability
Monday, December 12 | You should have handed in your final paper to the GSI of your discussion section by now.
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