amor mundi

CS 301AK-01 (3759) Critical Theory B: For Futurity: A Clash of Futurisms

When/Where: Tuesdays/Thursdays, 4.15-7pm. Online (ONL-CS3) 

Summer Session, 2020, June 9-July 30 at the San Francisco Art Institute
Course Blog: aclashoffuturisms.blogspot.com
Instructor: Dale Carrico dcarrico@sfai.edu; ndaleca@gmail.com

Course Description: Futurity is a register of freedom, "The Future" another prison-house built to confine it. Futurity is the openness in the present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of calculating, contending, and collaborative stakeholders who struggle to make and remake the shared world. "The Future," to the contrary, brandishing the shackle of its definite article, is always described from a parochial present and is always a funhouse mirror reflecting a parochial present back to itself, amplifying its desires and fears, confirming its prejudices, reassuring its Believers that the Key to History is in their hands. This course will stage a contest of futures: Italian Futurism, corporate-military think-tank futurologies, Afro-Futurists, punks, crips, queers, and some competing versions of posthumanism for good measure. Both ranting and raving will be involved. In the end, I will send you out on stage yourselves... and Into! The! Future!

In this class we will distinguish (while also pressuring these distinctions):

1). Futurity: The quality of openness inhering in the diversity of stakeholders to any political present.

2). The Future: Sites of imaginative investment, a Destiny/Destination at which "We" never arrive.

3). Futurisms: imagined and intentional communities, subcultures, memberships, and fandoms organized and sustained through identification with particular visions or narratives of The Future.

4). Futurology: A parochially profitable pseudo-scientific discipline confusing marketing with understanding, and the quintessential justificatory discourse for white-racist patriarchal extractive-industrial corporate-militarism (ie, global financialized "neoliberal" capitalism).

Grade Provisionally Based on the Following: Attendance/Participation, 15%; Reading Notebook (3 Quotes/3 Questions/3 works), 15%; Mid-term Precis (2-3pp.), 15%; In-Class Presentation, 15%; Final Symposium Presentation, 15%; Final Paper, 25%. (This is a rough basis for your final grade, which is also subject to contingencies, improvement, and so on.) 

Schedule of Meetings (Subject to Change, Check Online Version for Updates)

June

Week One: Futurity 

Readings:

Discussion, Tuesday, June 9

Workshopping: Syllabus

PRESENTATION(S):  Personal Introductions

Lecture, Thursday, June 11

Week Two: Singularity

Readings:

Lecture, June 16

Discussion, Thursday, June 18

Workshopping: Ethos, Pathos, Logos; Audience and Intentions.

PRESENTATION(S):  

Week Three: Ecology

Readings:

Laurie Anderson, “The Language of the Future” (performance)

Lecture, Tuesday, June 23

Discussion, Thursday, June 25

Workshopping: The Toulmin Schema

PRESENTATION(S):  

Week Four: Eugenics

Readings:

Octavia Butler, The Evening, the Morning, and the Night (short story)

Lecture, Tuesday, June 30

July

Discussion, Thursday, July 2

Workshopping: Aims of Argument: Interrogation – Convinction – Persuasion – Reconciliation

PRESENTATION(S):

Precis due by end of scheduled class session.

Week Five: No Future!                                

Readings/Screenings:

Alfonso Cuaron (dir.), Children of Men (film)

Lecture, Tuesday, July 7

Discussion, Thursday, July 9

Workshopping: Critical Film Terms

PRESENTATION(S):

Week Six: The Italian Futurists

Readings:

Lecture, Tuesday, July 14

Discussion, Thursday, July 16

Workshopping: Final Papers

PRESENTATION(S):

Week Seven: Afro-Futurists

“Africa Is The Future”

Lanre Bakare, Afrofuturism Takes Flight: From Sun Ra to Janelle Monae

Janelle Monae: “Dirty Computer” (short “emotion picture”) and selected other videos (linked on the blog).

Lecture, Tuesday, July 21

Discussion, Thursday, July 23

Workshopping:

PRESENTATION(S):

Week Eight: Symposium

Symposium, Day One, Tuesday, July 28 (program will appear online)

Symposium, Day Two, Thursday, July 30 (program online, followed by housekeeping, last chance Presentations, and concluding remarks).

Final Paper due by end of final scheduled class session.