Spring 2008

(All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.)
Rhetoric 205: The Rhetoric if Disciplinarity

Instructor: Samera Esmeir

What place does the study of rhetoric have in the contemporary university, where disciplines govern, for the most part, the production of knowledge? How can rhetoric contribute to subjects of inquiry studied in other disciplines? In this seminar we will approach the study of rhetoric as an effort to trace the coming together of a number of problems, methods and perspectives that produce discursive disciplinary traditions, which not only represent the world, but redefine it and intervene in it, partly by classifying it into different domains. We will take rhetoric to explore how other disciplines shape subjects of inquiry, by endowing them with meaning and establishing their truth, integrity and legitimacy. The seminar combines disciplinary and interdisciplinary analyses. We will investigate the institutional arrangements, arguments, methods, problems, and perspectives that shape a disciplinary research question or a subject of inquiry.  We will also consider how to speak (and write) about the same question/subject outside its disciplinary formation, asking how alternate approaches, questions, and methods can extend or revise inherited meanings and patterns of thinking.  

In addition to the required books, our readings will include writings by Foucault, Weber, Nietzsche, Ian Hacking, Cassirer, Darwin, Benjamin, Adorno, Julian Franklin, and Peter Goodrich.

Required Books:

Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

Jacques Ranciere, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge,

Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline 

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Rhetoric 230: Artificial Intelligence: Theoretical Histories
Instructor: David Bates

If Artificial Intelligence is usually associated with the Age of the Computer, the concept has a long and complicated history. As a way of studying the modern problem of AI, this seminar will interrogate the theory of machine intelligence from its early appearance in the Scientific Revolution up to the contemporary era. Our goal will be to explore the intersecting discourses that make up Artificial Intelligence – including psychological, scientific, philosophical, social, and political discourses. We will begin with an intensive reading of Descartes’ thinking about reason and machinery, paying special attention to his physiological work on cognition, as well as the political valence of these new ideas. With the Enlightenment we will focus on the image of the “automaton” and link it with new conceptions of the human, and new economic and political relations in a modernizing society. The nineteenth century is a rich source for modern ideas on “machine intelligence.” We will of course investigate Charles Babbage and his early mechanical computer designs (the Difference Engine, the Analytical Engine), but we will also look at broader cultural forces that brought machines, bodies, and minds into close proximity, for example, via communications technology and theory. The last half of the seminar will focus on the computer era, beginning with early advances in cybernetics and electronic computers in the Second World War, and continuing with post war developments in digital technology and Artificial Intelligence research, stressing the military origins of these disciplines. The concluding sessions will look at some revolutionary new ideas on thinking and bodies that have emerged from new zones of exploration, including biology, phenomenology, and cognitive science.

Some of the texts we will read:

Descartes, Treatise on Man, Passions of the Soul, Discourse on the Method; Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe; Rousseau, Second Discourse; articles by Simon Schaffer, Jessica Riskin, and Lorraine Daston on Enlightenment robotics; selected materials on Charles Babbage; Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century; selected texts by Norbert Weiner et al. on cybernetics; Alan Turing, “Machine Intelligence and Computing”; Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America; John von Neumann, “General and Logical Theory of Automata,” The Computer and the Brain; selected texts by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon on logic programs; texts on connectionism; Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do; Douglas Hofstadter, Fluid Analogies and Creative Concepts.

Rhetoric 240G, Section 1: Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche:  On Philosophy and Tragedy
Instructor: Ramona Naddaff

The aim of this course is to investigate the dialogue generated by two genres: tragic poetry and philosophy.  Readings of selected works by Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche will serve as the central documents to analyze philosophical interpretations of the nature of tragic poetic language.  At the same time, we will engage in close readings of a series of tragedies that not only are the primary literary texts of these philosophers’ exegesis but also cohere around themes central to their excavations—namely, grief, revenge, and murder.  These themes themselves will also be envisioned as the topoi for philosophical (re)visioning of ethical and affective dilemmas and constitutions.  Finally, in our readings of Plato, we will also have occasion to read sections of Homer’s Iliad (insofar as Plato represents it as proto-tragic) and of Aristophanes’ The Clouds (insofar as it serves as the background in The Apology for constructing Socrates as an a-tragic figure). 

All readings will be in translation.  A course reader will be prepared including certain primary and secondary readings. 

Texts (Subject to Change):  Plato: Apology, Ion, Hippias Minor, Euthyphro, selections from Republic, Symposium.  Aristotle:  Poetics and selections from The Rhetoric.  Nietzsche:  Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks; Philosophy and Truth (selections); The Birth of Tragedy. Homer:  Selections from The Iliad.  Aeschylus: Agamemnon; Sophocles:  Oedipus Rex and Antigone.  Euripides:  Medea; Electra; Helen.

Rhetoric 240G, Section 2: Epistemologies of Empire: From the Early Modern to the Modern

Instructor: Michael Wintroub

The question of how empires are made, represented, resisted, etc., is not simply political, but epistemic.  Indeed, questions that have dominated the history and social studies of science over the past several decades are equally relevant to the history and sociology of colonialism and empire. How does power/knowledge operate so as to efface locality and particularism? What mechanisms/discourses/instrumentalities are operative in extending the reach of power/knowledge beyond specific sites towards the universal? How are local contexts replicated across space and time? In this course we will examine the articulation, mobilization and extension of political/epistemic/spiritual power from the end of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. In particular, we will, examine different ideas/discourses/practices/embodiments of science, gender, religion, class, politics, race, as they intersect, compete, and are transformed in the making of nations and empires; in other words, what are some of the ways that empire is thought about, made and challenged in the early modern and modern periods. 

Required Books:

  • Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, And Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World
  • Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization
  • Michel de Certeau, Possession of Loudun
  • Jeffrey N. Peters, Mapping Discord.  Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing
  • Chandra Mukerji, Territorial ambitions and the gardens of Versailles
  • Kristin Schultz, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1821 (New World in the Atlantic World)
  • Ken Alder, The Measure of All Things
  • Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France
  • Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ’Improvement’ of the World
  • Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850
  • Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation
  • Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection

Rhetoric 240G, Section 3: New Directions in Science and Technology Studies
Instructor: Charis Thompson

This course is divided into three sections, Theorists and Methods, The Sciences of Life, and Bio- and Necro-politics and STS, and within each section there are further thematic headings. The course serves both to introduce graduate students to science and technology studies and to introduce new works and directions in the field.  The syllabus foregrounds the life and biomedical sciences, and thematizes space and trans-place, time and genealogy, disciplines and inter-disciplines, method and / as theory, identity and governance, ethics and objectivity, knowledge and stratification, security and transparency.

This is a book-based class, with the exception of one article by Achille Mbembe that is available as a downloadable pdf online.  All reading is required.  The books are available at the University Book Store (NOT UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOKS!!!!) and will also be on reserve in the undergraduate library.

Required Text:

Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 2007.  Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging.  Seagull Books

Carson, John, 2006.  The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750-1940. Princeton University Press

Epstein, Steven, 2007.  Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research. Chicago University Press.

Foucault, Michel, (ed. Paul Rabinow), 2006. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth.  New Press

Galison, Peter, and Lorraine Daston, 2007.  Objectivity. Zone Books

Haraway, Donna, 2007.  When Species Meet.  University Of Minnesota Press

Hayden, Cori, 2003.  When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico.  Princeton University Press

Jasanoff, Sheila, 2007.  Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (new edition).  Princeton University Press

Landecker, Hannah, 2007. Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies.  Harvard University Press

Latour, Bruno, 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (new edition). Oxford University Press

MacKenzie , Donald, 2006. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets.  MIT Press

Petryna, Adriana, 2002.  Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton University Press

Rose, Nikolas, 2006.  The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press

Thompson, Charis, 2007. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (paperback).  MIT Press

Rhetoric 243: Time-Based Photography (Cross-Listed with Film 240, Section 1)

Instructor: Kaja Silverman

Photography is often associated with the “mortification” or “mummification” of time. Roland Barthes also emphasizes its anteriority—the stubborn way in which it keeps saying: “this was.” Recently, though, a number of visual artists have begun to experiment with other kinds of photographic temporality. Some of them use photographs to create series, sequences, or essays.  Others combine them in a way that volatilizes the still image, or precipitates other kinds of movement. Yet others re-temporalize the still photograph by layering it with paint or other photographs. In this course, we will read the classic works on photographic temporality, but our primary concern will be these new, “time-based” photographic forms. Our approach will be aesthetic, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and political, and one of the issues to which we will constantly return is what distinguishes them from cinema.

We will study works by Jeff Wall, Allan Sekula, Lorna Simpson, Bill Henson, Louise Lawler, Roni Horn, Sebastio Salgado, Tracey Moffatt, Gerhard Richter, and—if logistically possible—James Coleman;  and read texts by Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, Christian Metz, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Gerhard Richter, and Mieke Bal.
Rhetoric 244: On Wonder From the Passionate Soul to the Emotional Brain : Affects in Philosophyand Neurobiology Today
Instructor: Catherine Malabou

Current research in neurology and neurobiology show that the brain is the very form of subjectivity. This statement does not imply any simple reductionism. It simply insists upon the fact that continental philosophy and critical theory should not continue to ignore the genuine neurological revolution which took place in the late XXth century. The redefinition of the brain, the multiple discoveries that have been made concerning its organization, the end of determinism that follows such discoveries, the end of the conception of the brain as a gathering of rigid and localized areas, had become inescapable. We know now that the brain is plastic.

The brain has always been described through technological metaphors: a hydraulic pump that drives the animal spirits to the muscles, a central telephone exchange that connects or cuts communication, a computer that runs its programs. These metaphors proceed from a centralizing conception of the brain, seen as a machine that works from the top down, that orders movement, controls behavior, and brings about a unity of mind, conscience, and man himself. Cerebral plasticity shatters this conception. The brain learns, differentiates itself, reconstructs itself. Briefly, the plastic brain is a feeling brain.

“The Feeling Brain” is the subtitle of Antonio Damasio’s book Looking for Spinoza, Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. This book comes after Descartes’ Error. These titles show clearly that a new reading of the philosophical traditional theory of passions is necessary to redefine the role played by affects within consciousness, reason and cognition. Damasio opposes Spinoza’s notion that the human mind is the idea of the human body to Descartes’ dualistic conception of body and soul. For Spinoza, the mind and the body are parallel attributes of the very same substance, and not two distinct substances as in Descartes’ view. The confrontation between Descartes and Spinoza helps to interrogate the role of emotions, affects and feelings in the construction of the self. Neurobiologists show that brain damage may cause profound emotional indifference and unconcern. Brain damage render manifest that loosing emotion is loosing reason, that loosing the body is loosing the mind.

In order to study the importance of affects and loss of affects in the constitution of subjectivity, the course will focus on the central part played by a particular affect, wonder, in Descartes’ Passions of the Soul and in Spinoza’s Ethics (books III and IV).

Starting with the definition of affects in general and of wonder in particular in Descartes and Spinoza, we will study the contemporary philosophical interpretations of these definitions (Deleuze, Derrida, Zizek) and see how the neurological point of view challenges them. If the transition from a wired brain to a plastic brain is a transition from a “brain-machine” to a “brain-world”, it means that suffering from brain damage alters our existential relationship to the world. This implies that the study of the emotional brain cannot be reduced to a theory of passions, but must be considered from a new ontological point of view. The issue of auto-affection and its deconstruction will also be addressed on that point.

Requirements include:

Attendance : 30%

Seminar participation and presentations (number and formality to depend on seminar size : 30%)

Seminar paper (15 pages) : 40%

Required texts:

-Descartes, René, The Passions of the Soul, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 3 vols. (Cambridge), tr John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, 1985. Vol. 1

-Spinoza, Baruch, Ethics, tr. Samuel Shirley, Indianapolis/Cambridge : Hackett Publishing Company, 1992.

-Damasio, Antonio,

Descartes’ Error : Emotions, Reason, and the Human Brain, New York : Grosset/Putnam, 1994 ; Harper-Collins, 1995.

Looking for Spinoza, Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain, Harcourt, 2003.

-Deleuze,

Cinema 1 : The Movement Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Spinoza/BDSweb : University Courses,

Bdsweb.tripod.com/en/5-courses.htm

Sessions : 24/01/78 ; 25/11/80 ; 13/01/81 ; 24/03/81

-Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Recommanded texts:

-Damasio, Antonio, The Feeling of What Happens,

-Deleuze, Gilles, Expressionism in Philosophy : Spinoza, tr. Martin Joughin, Zone Books, Distributed by MIT Press, 1990.

-Derrida, Jacques, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, tr. Christine Irizarry, Stanford University Press, 2005.

-Foucault, Michel, Hermeneutics of the Subject, tr. Graham Burchell, New York : Picador, 2005.

-Ledoux, Joseph, Synaptic Self : How Our Brains Become Who We Are, London/New York : Penguin Books, 2003.

-Metzinger, Thomas, Being No One, The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, The MIT Press, 2003.

-Solms, Mark, Turnbull Oliver, The Brain and the Inner World : An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience, New York : Other Press, 2002.

-Zizek, Slavoj, The Parallax View, The MIT Press, 2006.