Time Schedule:
Stacey C. Moran
CHID 250
Seattle Campus
Examines a different subject or problem from a comparative framework. Satisfies the Gateways major/minor requirement. Offered: AWSp.
Class description
CHID 250: Culture Machines: The Future of Cultural Studies Spring 2011 Instructors: Stacey Moran and Adam Nocek
Course Description Culture Machines is an introduction to the ideas of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst and political activist Felix Guattari. Together they wrote four books, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I, Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, and What is Philosophy? Separately, they wrote extensively as well, around thirty books in all, as well as articles, essays, and interviews. Any introduction to their philosophies will necessarily reduce the complexity of their ideas. In order to appreciate this complexity most fully in an introductory course, three movements will organize our inquiry: 1) to understand five interlocking philosophical concepts in the collaborative texts of Deleuze and Guattari (the body without organs, minor literature, rhizome, desiring machines, becoming, war machine, the nomad, plane of immanence, expression, intensity, assemblage) 2) to connect these five concepts to a series of familiar issues in cultural studies in order to explore the ways in which these Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts might serve as a structural ground for reinventing these issues and their political stakes 3) to place both the philosophical concepts and the cultural studies issues and approaches in historical context, thus examining the past, present, and future of cultural studies and its relation to philosophical ideas.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
lecture and sections
Recommended preparation
No prerequisites
Class assignments and grading
