MA Contemporary Art Theory: Special Subject
Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Week 1: What is postcapitalism?
Monday 7 November 2016
- Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Post-Work Imaginaries” inInventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, London and New York: Verso, 2015, pp107-127. (If you can also read and “Conclusion”, pp175-183)
- K. Gibson-Graham, “Affects and Emotions for a Postcapitalist Politics” in A Post-Capitalist Politics, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, pp1-22
- Paul Mason, “The Prophets of Postcapitalism” in PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, London: Allen Lane, 2015, pp109-146
Week 2 – “A social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude”: Countercultural bohemia as prefiguration
Monday 14 November 2016
- Ellen Willis, “The Family: Love it or Leave it”, in Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, pp149-168
- Herbert Marcuse, “The Dialectic of Civilization” in Eros and Civilization, London: Abacus, 1972, pp68-83
Week 3 – From class consciousness to group consciousness
Monday 21 November 2016
- Georg Lukacs, “The Standpoint of the Proletariat” from History and Class Consciousness(online at the Marxist Internet Archive, but split into three parts: Part 2 is here, Part 3 is here)
- Nancy C. M. Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism” in The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays, Boulder, Colarado: Westview Press, 1998, pp105-132
Week 4 – “Union power and soul power”
Monday 28 November 2016
- Jefferson Cowie, “Old Fashioned Heroes of the New Working Class”, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, New York and London: The New Press, 2010, pp23-75
Week 5 – Libidinal Marxism
Monday 5 December 2016
- Jean-Francois Lyotard, “The Desire Named Marx” in Libidinal Economy, London: Athlone Press, 1993, pp95-149
Week 6 – Autonomia and the refusal of work
Monday 9 January 2017
- Silvia Federici, “Wages Against Housework” in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, Oakland: PM Press, 2012, pp. 15-21
- Nicholas Thoburn, “The Refusal of Work” in Deleuze, Marx and Politics, London and New York, Routledge, 2003, pp103-138
Week 7 – The destruction of democratic socialism and the origins of neoliberalism: The case of Chile
Monday 16 January 2017
- Naomi Klein, “States of Shock: The Bloody Birth of the Counterrevolution” in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London: Allen Lane, 2007, pp75-98
- Eden Medina, “Cybernetics and Socialism” in Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, MIT Press:
- Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2011, pp15-42
Week 8 – The invention of the Middle
Monday 23 January 2017
- Carl Freedman, “Marx/Nietzsche/Freud/Nixon” in The Age of Nixon: A Study in Cultural Power, Winchester and Washington: Zer0, 2012, pp71-107
- Penny Lewis, “Hardhats Versus Elite Doves: Consolidation of the Image” in Hard Hats, Hippies and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory, Ithaca and London: ILR Press, 2013, pp159-185
Week 9 – Post-Fordism and New Times
Monday 30 January 2017
- Stuart Hall, “The Meaning of New Times” in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques eds, New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 90s, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989, pp116-136
- Paolo Virno, all sections from “Beyond the coupling of the terms Fear/ Anguish” through to “Intellect as Score” in A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, pp31-66
Week 10 – Technofeminism/ cyberfeminism
Monday 6 February 2017
- Shulamith Firestone, “The Two Modes of Cultural History” inArmen Avanessian and Robin Mackay eds, #accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Urbanomic: Falmouth, 2014), pp109-13
- Sadie Plant, all sections from “Cyborg Manifestos” through to “Cocoons” in Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, London: Fourth Estate, 1998, pp58-81
Week 11 – Accelerationism
Monday 20 February 2017
- Fredric Jameson, “Utopia as Replication” in Valences of the Dialectic, London and New York: Verso, 2009, pp410-435
- Nick Land, “Machinic Desire” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012, pp319-344
Week 12: The network and its discontents (1): Hardt and Negri
Monday 27 February 2017
- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Beyond Capital?” inCommonwealth, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2009, pp263-324
Week 13 – The network and its discontents (2): Peer to Peer
Monday 6 March 2017
- Michel Bauwens, “Peer to Peer: From Technology to Politics”, Jan Servaes and Nico Carpentiereds, Towards a Sustainable Information Society: Deconstructing WSIS”, Bristol: Intellect, 2006, pp151-168
- Jodi Dean, “The Common and the Commons” in The Communist Horizon, London and New York: Verso, 2012, pp119-156
Week 14 – Touchscreen capture
Monday 13 March 2017
- Jean Baudrillard, “The Tactile and the Digital” and “The Hyperrealism of Simulation” in Symbolic Exchange and Death, London/ Thousand Oaks/ New Delhi: Sage, 1993, pp61-75
- Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, “Info-Labor and ‘Precarization’” inPrecarious Rhapsody: Semiology and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation, London: Minor Compositions, 2009, pp30-54
Week 15 – Prometheus Reborn
Monday 20 March 2017
- Laboria Cuboniks, “Manifesto on Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation” (2015), available athttp://www.laboriacuboniks.net/#zero
- Helen Hester, “Promethean Labours and Domestic Realism”, available at https://www.academia.edu/11571359/Promethean_Labours_and_Domestic_Reali
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