Dr. Orit Halpern
80 Fifth Avenue
Room 507
E: Halperno@newschool.edu
Office hours: Monday 2-4PM or by appt.
GHIS 5116: TIME, LIFE, AND MATTER:
This course is a methodology and research seminar introducing students
to contemporary methods in the history, sociology, and anthropology of
science, technology, and media. The main focus will be to have students
work on independent research utilizing questions and methods the course introduces. In the
course of the class, students will develop a
conference paper and a final research paper (hopefully) of publication
length and quality.
The first half of the course will concentrate on three post-structuralist approaches to
studying power and knowledge. We will focus on the historical study of new political and
social formations such as networks, subjects, and “nature”, and readings will concentrate on
three approaches: Foucauldian, Deleuzian, and
Deconstructionist.
The second half of the course will be focused on work-shopping student research and
developing advanced writing and independent research skills. Students will be urged to pick
a call for papers or a conference, using this forum to develop an independent project,
archivally or ethnographically based, that will assist them in forwarding their dissertation
work. There is enormous flexibility in the scope and range of possible topics. This course is
heavily geared towards the development of research and presentation skills important to
scholars.
Required Books:
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, (New York: Picador, 1997)
Michel Foucault, Security, Terror, Population, (New York: Palgrave, 2007)
Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987):
Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz, (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1995).
SECTION ONE: GENEALOGIES
Week One:
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, (New York: Picador, 1997)
Intro, Chapter 1, 2, 3, and 11.
Supplementary:
John Rajchmann, “Foucault’s Ways of Seeing” (on-line)
Week Two
Michel Foucault, Security, Terror, Population, (New York: Palgrave, 2007)
Chapter 1,2,3
Foucault,Nietzsche,Genealogy,History (handout)
Recommended:
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990),pp.1-51,pp.133-160.
Week Three: Histories of Subjectivity and Perception (Foucault Applied)
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, excerpts from Objectivity (Zone Books, 2007), pp.1-54,
115-190.
Jonathan Crary, Unbinding vision [emergence of the subjective vision in modernism as
illustrated by the paintings of Manet]. October (Cambridge, Mass.) no. 68 (Spring 1994) p.
21-44 [on-line]
Ian Hacking, excerpts from “the Taming of Chance”,(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), Chapter 1, 21,23. [on-line]
Recommended:
Hacking, Chapters 2, 19 (on-line)
Sterne, Jonathan.
A machine to hear for them: on the very possibility of sound's reproduction
Cultural Studies (0950-2386)
April 2001. Vol.15,Iss.2;p.259-94 (on-line)
Week 4: Application (Cont.)—Bio-power and politics
Nikolas Rose's 2007 The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First
Century, (excerpts—on-line)
Preparing for the Next Emergency.
Lakoff, Andrew; Lakoff, Andrew.
Public Culture (0899-2363)
05/01/2007. Vol.19,Iss.2;p.247-271 (on-line)
Thomas Laquer, excerpts from Making Sex, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990),
Chapters 1 and 3 (on-line)
Recommended:
Biosecurity: Towards an anthropology of the contemporary.
Collier, Stephen J.; Lakoff, Andrew; Rabinow, Paul; Collier, Stephen J.
Anthropology Today (0268-540X)
10/01/2004. Vol.20,Iss.5;p.3-7 (on-line)
SECTION TWO: NETWORKS/NOMADS/PARASITES
Week Five/Six:
Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987): translator’s forward, Author’s Note, Chapter 1,2,6,12
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, (New York: Columbia University
Press,1995), Part One, pp. 1-34. (on-line)
Recommended:
Brian Massumi, A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, excerpts (on-line)
John Rajchmann, The Deleuze Connections, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000),chapter 1, 3,5. (online)
Week 7: applying Deleuze—actors, agents, and networks
Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Week 8: Deleuze (cont.)Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Non-linear History, (New York: Zone Books, 1997), pp.
1-25, 257-275.(on-line)
Keller Easterling, Organization Space, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), Introduction,pp.39-54,
175-203. (on-line)
Chris Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, (Duke University Press, 2008),
introduction, part 3: Modulations, available at: kelty.org .
Eyal Weizmann, Hollow Land, (London: Verso, 2007), Chapter “Walking Through Walls”,
“Introduction” (on-line).
Recommended:
Elizabeth Grosz, Animal Sex, in Space,Time and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995) –online
Alex Galloway, Protocol, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), pp.1-27, 240-247.(on-line).
Is It Me or My Brain? Depression and Neuroscientific Facts.
Dumit, Joseph; Dumit, Joseph.
Journal of Medical Humanities (1041-3545)
06/01/2003. Vol.24,Iss.1/2;p.35-47 (on-line)
SECTION THREE: Deconstruction
Week 9:
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979), trans.
Preface by Gyvatri Spivak at:
http://books.google.com/books?id=95ZyM7vujG0C&dq=jacque+derrida+grammatology
&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result#
PPR9,M1
Exergue: pp.1-18 (on-line)
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz, (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1995).
Week 10: Deconstructing Science, Technology, and Media
Fredrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp.
xi-38, 243-263. (on-line)
Nano/Splatter: Disintegrating the Postbiological Body
Milburn, Colin. New Literary History (1080-661X) Spring 2005. Vol.36,Iss.2;p.283-311 (online)
Recommended:
Hannah Landaecker, Culturing Life, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007),Chapter
4:”Immortality,In Vitro”, pp.140-180. (on-line)
SECTION 5: HYBRIDS
Week 11:
James Siegel, Fetish Recognition Revolution, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997),pp.338, 231-255. (on-line)
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions (excerpts) (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp.1-19, 26-59,
368-383.
The Uses of Butterflies
Hugh Raffles
American Ethnologist, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Aug., 2001), pp. 513-548 (on-line)
The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination.
Helmreich, Stefan; Helmreich, Stefan.
Grey Room (1526-3819)
04/01/2006. Iss.23;p.66-95 (on-line)
Recommended:
Raffles, H., et. al., Further Reflections on Amazonian Environmental History: Transformations of
Rivers and Streams. Latin American Research Review v. 38 no. 3 (2003) p. 165-87 (on-line)
Week 12-16
Student Presentations
Final 15-20 page paper due on May 20th.