Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, August 13, 2012

Fetish, Figure, Fact

SFAI asked me to teach another graduate seminar in the Spring (I was already doing the MA thesis workshop and teaching an undergraduate critical theory survey), and believe me, strange though it may seem, even though I won't be teaching the course till 2013 the request was incredibly last minute, with a margin of minutes to generate a description for the catalogue and schedule the thing. Anyway, I'm rather excited about what I came up with, since the course will draw on connections that emerged for me in teaching the rhetoric of interpretation this summer at Berkeley.  Should be fun!

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.

2 comments:

Forrest O. said...

Put is online, let us follow along.

Dale Carrico said...

Definitely, I will.