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 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, 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? What if fetishism is just another kind of figurative language, or another 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.
Notebook 15%, 10-min Report 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 the Preface of Ecce Homo on the Eternal Return and ressentiment.
Week Four | September 19 -- Sigmund Freud: Fetishism; Selections from the Schreber Case Study: 1, Psychoanalysis and Scientificity; 2, Storytelling; 3, Psychoanalysis and Patriarchy (Homosociality and Homosexuality); 4. Psychoanalysis Brought to Crisis; .
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" and 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"; E. McCallum: "How To Do Things Wish Fetishism"; Aldo Leopold, "The Land Ethic"
Week Eleven | November 7 -- Screening and discussion of Alfred Hitchcock, dir.: North by Northwest; Michael Taussig: "State Fetishism" (Chapter 7, starting on pg. 111)
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.
"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 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, 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? What if fetishism is just another kind of figurative language, or another 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.
Notebook 15%, 10-min Report 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 the Preface of Ecce Homo on the Eternal Return and ressentiment.
Week Four | September 19 -- Sigmund Freud: Fetishism; Selections from the Schreber Case Study: 1, Psychoanalysis and Scientificity; 2, Storytelling; 3, Psychoanalysis and Patriarchy (Homosociality and Homosexuality); 4. Psychoanalysis Brought to Crisis; .
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" and 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"; E. McCallum: "How To Do Things Wish Fetishism"; Aldo Leopold, "The Land Ethic"
Week Eleven | November 7 -- Screening and discussion of Alfred Hitchcock, dir.: North by Northwest; Michael Taussig: "State Fetishism" (Chapter 7, starting on pg. 111)
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.
