Literary and Cultural Theory, 2015-2016
Assessed Essay Questions (2500 words)
1st paper
Answer ONE of the following questions. Please note that essays are due on Tuesday of
Week 10 (8th December).
1. Discuss the meaning and significance of the categories of ‘reason’, ‘universality’, and ‘the
public’ as these are used by Kant in “What is Enlightenment?”
2. Jürgen Habermas suggests that “Foucault discovers in Kant the first philosopher to take
aim like an archer at the heart of a present that is concentrated in the significance of the
contemporary moment, and thereby to inaugurate the philosophical discourse of
modernity.” Why does Foucault describe Kant in this way? What is the significance of
situating Kant in this light?
3. “But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce
transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a
positive one: in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is
occupied by whatever is singular contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints? The
point in brief is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation
into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression. This entails an
obvious consequence: that criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for
formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the
events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of
what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental,
and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design
and archaeological in its method. Archaeological – and not transcendental – in the sense
that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible
moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we
think, say, and do as so many historical events [. . .], it will separate out, from the
contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or
thinking what we are, do, or think.” (Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, pp. 45-46)
Discuss the meaning and significance of this passage, situating it in relation to Foucault’s
understanding of the subject.
4. “Meanwhile, however, for about a century the social foundations of this sphere have been
caught up in a process of decomposition. Tendencies pointing to the collapse of the
public sphere are unmistakable, for while its scope is expanding progressively, its
function has become progressively insignificant.” (Habermas, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 4)
How would you characterize the contemporary public sphere? What position do new
technologies such as the internet and new social media occupy in relation to this sphere?
5. “Although there may have been a desire to perceive the sphere of the family circle as
independent, as cut off from all connection with society, and as the domain of pure
humanity, it was, of course, dependent on the sphere of labor and of commodity
exchange – even this consciousness of independence can be understood as flowing from
the factual dependency of that reclusive domain upon the private one of the market. In a
certain fashion commodity owners could view themselves as autonomous. To the degree
that they were emancipated from governmental directives and controls, they made
decisions freely in accord with standards of profitability. In this regard they owed
obedience to no one and were subject only to the anonymous laws functioning in accord
with an economic rationality immanent, so it appeared, in the market. These laws were
backed up by the ideological guarantee of a notion that market exchange was just, and
they were altogether supposed to enable justice to triumph over force. Such an autonomy
of private people, founded on the right to property and in a sense also realized in the
participation in a market economy, had to be capable of being portrayed as such. To the
autonomy of property owners in the market corresponded a self-presentation of human
beings in the family. The latter's intimacy, apparently set free from the constraint of
society, was the seal on the truth of a private autonomy exercized in competition.”
(Habermas, The Structural Transformation...p. 46).
Discuss.
6. “To find value in a commodity by just looking at a commodity is like trying to find gravity
in a stone. It only exists in relations between commodities and only gets expressed
materially in the contradictory and problematic form of the money commodity” (Harvey,
Companion, p. 35). Analyse the characteristics of ‘value’ as it is presented by Marx in the
opening chapter of Capital.
7. “...a monstrous collection of commodities”...“phantom-like objectivity”...”werewolf-like
hunger”...“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living
labour....” (Marx, Capital). Discuss Marx’s use of Gothic tropes and devices in Capital.
What purpose do they serve in his analysis of the capitalist mode of production?
8. Analyse the concepts of commodity fetishism, reification, and branding as these are
presented in the work of Marx, Lukács, and Klein.
9. Lukács argues that under the reifying conditions of modern capitalism, time ‘becomes
space’. How do you understand this formulation? Is Lukács’s argument about the
temporalisation of space compatible with David Harvey’s, which centres on the
spatialisation of time?
10. “Thus technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training”
(Benjamin, “Motifs”, p. 328). Discuss Benjamin’s presentation of the relationship between
new technologies and the structure of experience. How might his argument be extended
to contemporary technologies and the new kinds of training to which they subject our
sensoria?
11. Analyse the category and experience of ‘shock’ as this is presented in any one or more of
the authors we have studied this term.
12. “The historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a
transition, but in which time takes a stand [einsteht] and has come to a standstill. For this
notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism offers the
‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the
past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once
upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers – man enough
to blast open the continuum of history.” (Benjamin, On the Concept..., p. 396)
Attempt a close reading of this passage, explaining its terms and drawing out its
meanings and implications.
13. “In a well-known passage [in the Communist Manifesto] Marx powerfully urges us to do
the impossible, namely, to think [the] development [of capitalism] positively and
negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable
of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary
and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without
attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a
point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the
best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.” (Fredric Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 55).
Discuss Marx and Engels’ presentation of capitalism in the Communist Manifesto, paying
particular attention to their dialectical method of argumentation.
14. Critically examine the relationship between the flãneur and the ‘man of the crowd’ as
these figures are presented in the work of Benjamin, Baudelaire, and Poe.
15. “The conclusion we should draw is simply that neither time nor space can be assigned
objective meanings independently of material processes, and that it is only through
investigation of the latter that we can properly ground our concepts of the former”
(Harvey, Condition, p. 204).
Discuss Harvey’s ‘conclusion’ here, drawing out its implications for our understanding of
space and time.
16. “Haussmann's ideal in city planning consisted of long perspectives down broad straight
thoroughfares. Such an ideal corresponds to the tendency – common in the nineteenth
century – to ennoble technological necessities through artistic ends. The institutions of the
bourgeoisie's worldly and spiritual dominance were to find their apotheosis within the
framework of the boulevards. Before their completion, boulevards were draped across
with canvas and unveiled like monuments. Haussmann's activity is linked to Napoleonic
imperialism. Louis Napoleon promotes investment capital, and Paris experiences a rash
of speculation. Trading on the stock exchange displaces the forms of gambling handed
down from feudal society. The phantasmagorias of space to which the flâneur devotes
himself find a counterpart in the phantasmagorias of time to which the gambler is
addicted’ (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 11-12).
Discuss the relationship Benjamin sketches in this passage between capitalist
modernisation and transformations in space and structures of experience. Refer to at least
one theorist you have read this term in addition to Benjamin in your answer.