Texts and Contexts

An Annotated Bibliography for the Texts and Contexts Core Seminar at the University of Pittsburgh var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-39164917-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();

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Syllabi Old and New

This being a brand new course, more than a few changes were made to the syllabus over the course of the semester. Here, for your reference, are PDF's of both versions of the syllabus: the original and revised versions.

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Derrida's Specters of Marx

Last week, we talked about the idea of the specters in Derrida's Archive Fever. It is really a simple concept (if I do understand it correctly myself) articulated in a perhaps unnecessarily convoluted way in the book.

For a much more readable explanation of this Derridean idea of the specter, I'd recommend his Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (Routledge, 1994). This is the key work from the late Derrida, and in many ways, it is the work that introduces the idea of the specter which came to inform much of his writings in the decade or so before his passing in 2004.

This work was in fact considered significant enough to have warranted its own symposium, proceedings of which were published in 1999 under the title Ghostly Demarcations. Here, you can read responses from figures such as Fredric Jameson and Antonio Negri, as well as a response from Derrida himself. 

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This is the noted debate between Foucault and Chomsky in 1971. I've recommended the book on this debate to a few of you (The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature. The New Press, 2006). Here, you can see how Foucault articulates his politics against Chomsky who insists an universal humanism, a foundational human nature, beyond history.

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The Wind from the East

Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s. Princeton UP, 2010.

Remember the Chinese encyclopedia in the Jorge Borges story that Foucault talks about at the very beginning of The Order of Things? It is no accident that it is a Chinese encyclopedia. The idea of "China" has long played a pivotal role in how critical theory developed, especially in 1960s among the French intellectuals. This is an excellent monograph on this topic, published very recently by Princeton.

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On "Postmodernism"

That dreaded word, "Postmodernism." It is not something that we deal with at all in our course, but nevertheless, despite how useless it tends to be, it is still a term that persists in the way some people speak. And the works that deal with it seriously are in fact quite exciting and useful.

Here, I'd recommend the following three books that really help define the term for much of the past two decades:

Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1990)

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1990)

Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans., Bennington and Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

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Raymond Williams' Keywords

Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised edition. Oxford University Press, 1976 and 1983).

We read one short piece by Raymond Williams ("Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory") early on in the semester. It is a very useful volume on the history of the various "keywords" in cultural studies. In a way, it is consistent with the model of historical change presented in that article. He shows how different keywords (and ideas associated with them) persisted through history, taking on different meanings, entering or leaving the dominant discourse, whatever that means. 

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On "Structuralism"

At the very beginning of the semester, the term "Structuralism" came up in relation to our discussion to Foucault's The Order of Things (I think). Its definition is very fluid, and it is often very unhelpful to invoke the term. But nevertheless, it is a term that still circulates. If you're interested in reading how the term is used and what sort of classic works are used to help define what it meant and still means today, I'd recommend the following:

Michael Lane, ed., Introduction to Structuralism (Basic Books, 1970)

Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970 and 1972; Reprinted in 2007)

In the latter, I'd mention specifically the essay by Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," which, for some at least, inaugurates the so-called "post-structuralist" movement that were to be elaborated in Derrida's later work.

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In class we discussed the alleged impossibility of a positive political agenda based on Judith Butler's critique of gender. In particular, the example of Turkey was used as an example for how difficult it is to think through contemporary politics by way of Butler. Interestingly, she does write a lot on contemporary politics, and in this 2001 essay, she addresses street protests and touches on those in Turkey in particular.

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Louis Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"

Louis Althusser was at one point a teacher of Foucault, and here we have one of his most important essays on the subject of ideology, collected in the volume Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (Monthly Review Press, 2001). It is also available online. There’s a lot of continuity between Althusser’s understanding of how ideology works and Foucault’s notion of the episteme. It’s an exhilarating essay, despite its chilling vision of how we live. I'd recommend it. 

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On Foucault and the Genealogical Method in the History of Sexuality, Volume One.

Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Second edition with an afterword and an interview with Michel Foucault. (The University of Chicago Press, 1982 and 1983). [PittCat]

This is a good book to read after our discussion of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume One, last week. There is a very interesting interview between Foucault and the editors of the book at the end of the book, where they discuss the changes in his methodology, specifically the transition from epistemic analysis to the genealogical method, in these studies on the history of sexuality. You can see that the editors were baffled, and perhaps even somewhat disappointed, by this shift.