11.19.2009
11.12.2009
11.10.2009
Fail Log
I recently tried to do some more creative writing. I would start with a specific memory, and engage in stream-of-consciousness writing while continuing to picture that memory or detail. It often helped to to put that memory in motion, just as it's easier to picture someone moving than simply trying to picture their face. I hit off about fourteen pages of decent stuff, but then lost interest; then, the writing was forced and the voice inauthentic, the flow no longer captivating. It is also painful to travel back to old memories.
11.07.2009
11.05.2009
11.04.2009
Detection & Rhetorics of Evidence
Instructor: Barry F. Saunders
Detection engages the problem of the hidden—criminal disguises, buried treasure, coded meaning, invisible particles—and thus involves modes of conjectural, hypothetical knowing, and histories of curiosity. It also involves rhetorics of evidence and practices of proof. These problems and practices are as ancient as reading—e.g. of animal tracks, and signs of divine intentions.
Detective stories as such arose in the nineteenth century, in metropolitan settings that connected police work (and its limitations) with new popular enthusiasms for comparative anatomy, Egyptology, cryptography, and other projects of reconstructive knowing. These developments were contemporaneous with the consolidation of important new modes of medical diagnosis. This course develops these historical contexts along with some critical dimensions of detective literature and films—and of medical/scientific modes of finding, knowing, and showing. Half the course hours will be shared with 8 second-year UNC medical students.
Posthumanism
ENGL 785.1 Proseminar in Lit. after 1870: “Posthumanism”
Prof. Matthew Taylor
TTh 12:30-1:45
Course Description
Although the posthuman frequently is associated with current or near-future
developments in cybernetics and immersive virtual realities, the idea that
we might benefit from expanding the boundaries of our bodies (and thus our
selves) is both centuries-old and inclusive of a range of traditionally
technophobic discourses, from aesthetic romanticism and transcendentalist
metaphysics to the deep ecology movement and critical animal studies. With
this broad definition in mind, our course will survey major statements in
“posthumanist” literature, painting, film, web media, and philosophy from
the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries; address the differences
and similarities between popular and critical posthumanisms; reflect upon
posthumanism’s political and ethical implications; and ask what futures, if
any, the posthuman might have.
We will consider the following: short fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and Franz
Kafka; H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau; William Gibson’s seminal
cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer; Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, a meditation on
the metaphysics of artificial intelligence; STELARC’s transhumanist
website; Peter Høeg’s recent The Woman and the Ape; select paintings by
Francis Bacon; Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg’s A.I.; and Werner
Herzog’s Grizzly Man. Likely theorists/philosophers to be included: Donna
Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, Cary Wolfe, and N. Katherine Hayles.
Prof. Matthew Taylor
TTh 12:30-1:45
Course Description
Although the posthuman frequently is associated with current or near-future
developments in cybernetics and immersive virtual realities, the idea that
we might benefit from expanding the boundaries of our bodies (and thus our
selves) is both centuries-old and inclusive of a range of traditionally
technophobic discourses, from aesthetic romanticism and transcendentalist
metaphysics to the deep ecology movement and critical animal studies. With
this broad definition in mind, our course will survey major statements in
“posthumanist” literature, painting, film, web media, and philosophy from
the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries; address the differences
and similarities between popular and critical posthumanisms; reflect upon
posthumanism’s political and ethical implications; and ask what futures, if
any, the posthuman might have.
We will consider the following: short fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and Franz
Kafka; H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau; William Gibson’s seminal
cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer; Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, a meditation on
the metaphysics of artificial intelligence; STELARC’s transhumanist
website; Peter Høeg’s recent The Woman and the Ape; select paintings by
Francis Bacon; Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg’s A.I.; and Werner
Herzog’s Grizzly Man. Likely theorists/philosophers to be included: Donna
Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, Cary Wolfe, and N. Katherine Hayles.
11.03.2009
“Histories and Theories of Sexuality”
Comm 849: Seminar in Cultural Identity, Spring 2010
Weds 5-8pm, Hamilton 150
Rich Cante
Focus: major redirections of “post-identitarian” anglophone political thought since queer theory and, in particular, during the past few years.
Readings (NOT in this order):
Bataille, Erotism
Berlant, Intimacy (selections)
Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies
Braidotti, Transpositions (excerpts)
Butler, Bodies that Matter (excerpts) & Precarious Life (excerpts) & Undoing Gender (excerpt)
Chauncey, Gay New York (excerpt)
Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida
D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity”
Dean, Unlimited Intimacy
Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life
Derrida, “Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas” & “ A Word of Welcome”
Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I am
Derrida, “Circumfession”
Derrida, HC for Life , That is to Say…
Duttmann, At Odds with AIDS (excerpt)
Edelman, No Future
Ferguson, Aberrations in Black (excerpt)
(viewing) Fellini, Roma
(viewing) Fellini, Satyricon
Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I & Volume II & Volume III
Fuss, Identification Papers (excerpt)
Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want?
Kunzel, ed., Queer Futures (issue of Radical History Review, selections)
Lacan, Seminar on Transference
Love, Feeling Backward (excerpt)
Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes & Place for Us
Parker and Halley, eds., Writing Since Queer Theory (issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, selections)
“Plato,” Symposium
Puar, Terrorist Assemblages
Scott, “The Evidence of Experience”
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (excerpts) & Tendencies
Warhol, Philosophy of Andy Warhol (excerpt)
Comm 849: Seminar in Cultural Identity, Spring 2010
Weds 5-8pm, Hamilton 150
Rich Cante
Focus: major redirections of “post-identitarian” anglophone political thought since queer theory and, in particular, during the past few years.
Readings (NOT in this order):
Bataille, Erotism
Berlant, Intimacy (selections)
Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies
Braidotti, Transpositions (excerpts)
Butler, Bodies that Matter (excerpts) & Precarious Life (excerpts) & Undoing Gender (excerpt)
Chauncey, Gay New York (excerpt)
Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida
D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity”
Dean, Unlimited Intimacy
Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life
Derrida, “Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas” & “ A Word of Welcome”
Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I am
Derrida, “Circumfession”
Derrida, HC for Life , That is to Say…
Duttmann, At Odds with AIDS (excerpt)
Edelman, No Future
Ferguson, Aberrations in Black (excerpt)
(viewing) Fellini, Roma
(viewing) Fellini, Satyricon
Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I & Volume II & Volume III
Fuss, Identification Papers (excerpt)
Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want?
Kunzel, ed., Queer Futures (issue of Radical History Review, selections)
Lacan, Seminar on Transference
Love, Feeling Backward (excerpt)
Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes & Place for Us
Parker and Halley, eds., Writing Since Queer Theory (issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, selections)
“Plato,” Symposium
Puar, Terrorist Assemblages
Scott, “The Evidence of Experience”
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (excerpts) & Tendencies
Warhol, Philosophy of Andy Warhol (excerpt)
10.30.2009
Ideas for free
We need some DJ to juggle Greg Nice vs Barack Obama going "ah oui oui" vs. "ah wee wee". Barack says it at 0:52, Greg Nice says it at 0:49.
10.29.2009
Comm 842 Seminar in Performance and Cultural Studies: Surveillance, Simulation, Spectacle
In this course we will be studying surveillance, simulation, and spectacle as modalities of performance. While Foucault defined disciplinary society in opposition to Debord's society of the spectacle: "Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance," and Baudrillard famously told us to "forget Foucault," how might we think these as three distinct but intertwined elements of a performance assemblage? If we are, as Deleuze suggests, in a "society of control," then what can we make of how we are differently positioned as (not) performers: in surveillance, where we are cast as the coerced performer, in a society of the spectacle where are positioned as the entranced audience, and in the culture of simulation where there is only the second order of reality of the theatrical occasion? In addition to the core texts by Baudrillard, Debord, and Foucault, we will look at a broad range of sites where these technologies operate as fundamental elements of daily life, as well as how performance as a mode of "rupture" provides a possibility of thinking their destabilization as operations of power.
Required Readings to Include:
Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control
Hartman, Scenes of Subject: Slavery and Self-making in 19th Century America
Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched
Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
Ngai, Made In China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International (selections)
Levin, Frohne, and Weibel, CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (selections)
Duncombe, Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy
Tony Perucci, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In this course we will be studying surveillance, simulation, and spectacle as modalities of performance. While Foucault defined disciplinary society in opposition to Debord's society of the spectacle: "Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance," and Baudrillard famously told us to "forget Foucault," how might we think these as three distinct but intertwined elements of a performance assemblage? If we are, as Deleuze suggests, in a "society of control," then what can we make of how we are differently positioned as (not) performers: in surveillance, where we are cast as the coerced performer, in a society of the spectacle where are positioned as the entranced audience, and in the culture of simulation where there is only the second order of reality of the theatrical occasion? In addition to the core texts by Baudrillard, Debord, and Foucault, we will look at a broad range of sites where these technologies operate as fundamental elements of daily life, as well as how performance as a mode of "rupture" provides a possibility of thinking their destabilization as operations of power.
Required Readings to Include:
Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control
Hartman, Scenes of Subject: Slavery and Self-making in 19th Century America
Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched
Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
Ngai, Made In China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International (selections)
Levin, Frohne, and Weibel, CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (selections)
Duncombe, Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy
Tony Perucci, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
10.28.2009
10.25.2009
NC State Fair
that mark is from where the shotgun casing flew out of the gun chamber at the turkey shoot.
10.24.2009
10.20.2009
10.19.2009
10.17.2009
Basquiat
"The charmed life is about finding feelings where you thought they didn't exist, and religions among the godless. The charmed life is about reflecting on the meaning of 'french sevens'."
10.15.2009
10.13.2009
10.12.2009
10.07.2009
WS 240 Critical Genealogies: US Studies After American Exceptionalism
Spring 2010
Professor Robyn Wiegman
M 10:05 am- 12:35 pm
In recent years, there has been a conscious effort to redefine "American Studies" in global perspective, leading many scholars to focus not on the mythic over-reach of "America" but on the undertheorized nation-state form figured as the "United States." Much of this work has set itself against Cold War exceptionalist paradigms, repositioning the place of US Studies in relation to both area and identity knowledges on one hand and comparative nationalisms on the other. This course will focus its attention on the challenge of forging an internationalized approach to the US an object of study through four points of intervention. The first concerns resituating the history of the formation of the US outside national narratives of self-becoming. One important way to do this is to consider European colonial contestations over "New World" lands, resources, and people as the eviscerated global history in which the US as a specific entity emerged. The second intervention arises in the comparative reframing of nation-state formation, such that we interrogate the strange ways in which the study of the US in the US university has come to be posed against, even opposite to the "international." The third entails analyzing the various emergent paradigms that seek to turn the study of the US outside of itself, including the post-national, transnational, trans-Atlantic, diasporic, bordered, hemispheric, international, and global. And the fourth requires returning to the "origins" of American Studies in the U.S. university to consider the condition of post-nationality as, paradoxically, the precondition from which "American American Studies" was organized. Throughout the course we will specify what is now called "American American Studies" by paying attention to scholarly discourses and critical projects that arise in studies of the US from around the world.
Spring 2010
Professor Robyn Wiegman
M 10:05 am- 12:35 pm
In recent years, there has been a conscious effort to redefine "American Studies" in global perspective, leading many scholars to focus not on the mythic over-reach of "America" but on the undertheorized nation-state form figured as the "United States." Much of this work has set itself against Cold War exceptionalist paradigms, repositioning the place of US Studies in relation to both area and identity knowledges on one hand and comparative nationalisms on the other. This course will focus its attention on the challenge of forging an internationalized approach to the US an object of study through four points of intervention. The first concerns resituating the history of the formation of the US outside national narratives of self-becoming. One important way to do this is to consider European colonial contestations over "New World" lands, resources, and people as the eviscerated global history in which the US as a specific entity emerged. The second intervention arises in the comparative reframing of nation-state formation, such that we interrogate the strange ways in which the study of the US in the US university has come to be posed against, even opposite to the "international." The third entails analyzing the various emergent paradigms that seek to turn the study of the US outside of itself, including the post-national, transnational, trans-Atlantic, diasporic, bordered, hemispheric, international, and global. And the fourth requires returning to the "origins" of American Studies in the U.S. university to consider the condition of post-nationality as, paradoxically, the precondition from which "American American Studies" was organized. Throughout the course we will specify what is now called "American American Studies" by paying attention to scholarly discourses and critical projects that arise in studies of the US from around the world.
The Center for Global Studies and the Humanities presents:
De-colonial Aesthesis: A Workshop
The Thesaurus Dictionary offers these definitions of Aesthesis:
aesthesis - an unelaborated elementary awareness of stimulation; "a sensation of touch"esthesis - sensation, sense datum, sense experience, sense impressionperception - the process of perceiving
limen, threshold - the smallest detectable sensation
masking - the blocking of one sensation resulting from the presence of another sensation; "he studied auditory masking by pure tones"
visual sensation, vision - the perceptual experience of seeing; "the runners emerged from the trees into his clear vision"; "he had a visual sensation of intense light"
odour, olfactory perception, olfactory sensation, smell, odor - the sensation that results when olfactory receptors in the nose are stimulated by particular chemicals in gaseous form; "she loved the smell of roses"
gustatory perception, gustatory sensation, taste, taste perception, taste sensation - the sensation that results when taste buds in the tongue and throat convey information about the chemical composition of a soluble stimulus; "the candy left him with a bad taste"; "the melon had a delicious taste"
auditory sensation, sound - the subjective sensation of hearing something; "he strained to hear the faint sounds"
synaesthesia, synesthesia - a sensation that normally occurs in one sense modality occurs when another modality is stimulated
Since the eighteenth century, in Europe, the meaning of the word became associated with “the sensation of the beautiful” and with artistic labor. Art and sensation of the beautiful became synonymous.
From the perspective of the colonies, both concepts and practices were on the one hand alien and on the other hand were instruments for the management of subjectivity (e.g., coloniality of being). These “feelings” never died and today they are erupting in both artistic expressions and in art/literary criticism and history.
(Light dinner will be served)
De-colonial Aesthesis: A Workshop
The Thesaurus Dictionary offers these definitions of Aesthesis:
aesthesis - an unelaborated elementary awareness of stimulation; "a sensation of touch"esthesis - sensation, sense datum, sense experience, sense impressionperception - the process of perceiving
limen, threshold - the smallest detectable sensation
masking - the blocking of one sensation resulting from the presence of another sensation; "he studied auditory masking by pure tones"
visual sensation, vision - the perceptual experience of seeing; "the runners emerged from the trees into his clear vision"; "he had a visual sensation of intense light"
odour, olfactory perception, olfactory sensation, smell, odor - the sensation that results when olfactory receptors in the nose are stimulated by particular chemicals in gaseous form; "she loved the smell of roses"
gustatory perception, gustatory sensation, taste, taste perception, taste sensation - the sensation that results when taste buds in the tongue and throat convey information about the chemical composition of a soluble stimulus; "the candy left him with a bad taste"; "the melon had a delicious taste"
auditory sensation, sound - the subjective sensation of hearing something; "he strained to hear the faint sounds"
synaesthesia, synesthesia - a sensation that normally occurs in one sense modality occurs when another modality is stimulated
Since the eighteenth century, in Europe, the meaning of the word became associated with “the sensation of the beautiful” and with artistic labor. Art and sensation of the beautiful became synonymous.
From the perspective of the colonies, both concepts and practices were on the one hand alien and on the other hand were instruments for the management of subjectivity (e.g., coloniality of being). These “feelings” never died and today they are erupting in both artistic expressions and in art/literary criticism and history.
(Light dinner will be served)
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