Fetish, Figure, Fact
Instructor: Dale Carrico, e-mail: dcarrico@sfai.edu, blog: http://fetish-figure-fact.blogspot.com/
Description: 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, ressentiment). Fetishism recurs deliriously thereafter in contemporary critical accounts, 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? Is fetishism a kind of figurative language, an anti-figurative mode, or a perverse kind of literalization? 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.
January
Week One | 25 Introduction
February
Week Two | 1
Week Three | 8
Scene from a recorded performance of Earnest including "The Grigsby Episode" from Wilde's original four act version of the play:
Week Four | 15
Week Five | 22
Week Six | 1
Marx [and Engels] :
[1] Idealism and Materialism from The German Ideology
[2] Theses on Feuerbach
[3] The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof from Capital, Volume One
[4] Manifesto of the Communist Party (We probably won't get around to discussing this until next week.)
Week Seven | 8
Sceening Max Ophuls, dir.: Earrings of Madame de… and continuing our discussion of Marx and all things fetishistic.
Week Eight | 15
Post-Marxist Variations on Themes from Marx's Fetishism of Commodities:
[1] Benjamin, Aura: Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility
[2] Adorno, Culture Industry: The Culture Industry
[3] Debord, Spectacle: Society of the Spectacle
[4] Klein, Logo: No Logo, One and Two
Week Nine | 22 Spring Break
Week Ten | 29
Roundtable on Final Projects: Truncated Section, making room for Guest Lecture.
April
Week Eleven | 5
Re/Turn to Facticity:
[1] Donna Haraway: The Promises of Monsters
[2] Bruno Latour: Making Things Public
[3] David Harvey: The Fetish of Technology
Week Twelve | 12
Sigmund Freud on:
[1] Paranoia [Schreber Handout]
[2] Fetishism
[3] William Burroughs: On Paranoia and the Magical Universe ["On Coincidence" Handout]
Week Thirteen | 19
Final Reviews
Week Fourteen | 26
[1] Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks [online excerpts]
[2] Kobena Mercer: On Mapplethorpe [Handout]
[3] Butler: Doing/Undoing Gender [Handout]
May
Week Fifteen | 3
Continuing Fanon, Concerning Violence, Hannah Arendt, "On Violence," Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from the Birmingham City Jail | Must Eichmann Hang? and The Human Condition, Section 33 (Handout)
Week Sixteen | 10
Hannah Arendt, Conquest of Space | CS Lewis Abolition of Man | Slavoj Zizek Bring Me My Philips Mental Jacket
Instructor: Dale Carrico, e-mail: dcarrico@sfai.edu, blog: http://fetish-figure-fact.blogspot.com/
Description: 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, ressentiment). Fetishism recurs deliriously thereafter in contemporary critical accounts, 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? Is fetishism a kind of figurative language, an anti-figurative mode, or a perverse kind of literalization? 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.
January
Week One | 25 Introduction
February
Week Two | 1
Oscar Wilde:
[1] The Decay of Lying;
[2] The Soul of Man Under Socialism;
[3] Phrases and Philosophies;
[4] Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray;
[5] Wilde on Trial;
[6] Critic As Artist
Week Three | 8
Oscar Wilde:
The Importance of Being Earnest
Scene from a recorded performance of Earnest including "The Grigsby Episode" from Wilde's original four act version of the play:
Week Four | 15
Nietzsche:
[1] Selections from Gay Science
[2] On Truth and the Lie in an Extramoral Sense
[3] Maxims and Arrows
[4] How the "True World" Finally Became A Fable
Week Five | 22
Nietzsche:March
Ecce Homo; Or, How One Becomes What One Is
[1] Preface
[2] Why I Am So Wise
[3] Why I Am So Clever
[4] from Why I Write Such Good Books, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals
[5] Why I Am a Fatality (or Destiny)
Week Six | 1
Marx [and Engels] :
[1] Idealism and Materialism from The German Ideology
[2] Theses on Feuerbach
[3] The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof from Capital, Volume One
[4] Manifesto of the Communist Party (We probably won't get around to discussing this until next week.)
Week Seven | 8
Sceening Max Ophuls, dir.: Earrings of Madame de… and continuing our discussion of Marx and all things fetishistic.
Week Eight | 15
Post-Marxist Variations on Themes from Marx's Fetishism of Commodities:
[1] Benjamin, Aura: Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility
[2] Adorno, Culture Industry: The Culture Industry
[3] Debord, Spectacle: Society of the Spectacle
[4] Klein, Logo: No Logo, One and Two
Week Nine | 22 Spring Break
Week Ten | 29
Roundtable on Final Projects: Truncated Section, making room for Guest Lecture.
April
Week Eleven | 5
Re/Turn to Facticity:
[1] Donna Haraway: The Promises of Monsters
[2] Bruno Latour: Making Things Public
[3] David Harvey: The Fetish of Technology
Week Twelve | 12
Sigmund Freud on:
[1] Paranoia [Schreber Handout]
[2] Fetishism
[3] William Burroughs: On Paranoia and the Magical Universe ["On Coincidence" Handout]
Week Thirteen | 19
Final Reviews
Week Fourteen | 26
[1] Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks [online excerpts]
[2] Kobena Mercer: On Mapplethorpe [Handout]
[3] Butler: Doing/Undoing Gender [Handout]
May
Week Fifteen | 3
Continuing Fanon, Concerning Violence, Hannah Arendt, "On Violence," Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from the Birmingham City Jail | Must Eichmann Hang? and The Human Condition, Section 33 (Handout)
Week Sixteen | 10
Hannah Arendt, Conquest of Space | CS Lewis Abolition of Man | Slavoj Zizek Bring Me My Philips Mental Jacket
