Week 4 (February 22)
Horizontal Democracy
Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power (2012), Chapter 4
John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (2010), 245-262.
Steven Weber, “The Political Economy of Open Source Software and Why it Matters,” Latham and Sassen, eds. Digital Formations (2005), pp. 178-211.
February 14 (week 3)
Readings: Zizek First as Tragedy…. W.Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End….”
some thought-links (thlinks) to the Communist Hypothesis: http://foodanthro.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/bread-milk-and-the-greek-parliamentary-record/ (and its link to Greek Communist Party MP Liana Kaneli: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BB4Z10ix7I
Kaneli is interviewed in English, re: the Greek debt crisis, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8Do77sSZQ0 (her best line: we’re not a company, we’re a country). In what ways does it matter that, within Greece, she is criticized by the young Left as in fact NOT on the left, but too much a CP party-line stalwart, a populist, nationalist and even worse? how about her effect OUT of context? how do we approach “Communist” as a hypothesis, an Idea, and not a party?
HERE’S THE SITE, AND HERE’S THE FIRST POST – IF YOU WANT TO COMMENT BELOW ON THE SYLLABUS AND PLANS FOR THE SEMINAR, FEEL FREE!
Professor S. Buck-Morss
Spring 2012
Political Science 80303
CUNY GS/ Wed. 2-4/ Room 5383
Horizontal Democracy will be considered in multiple ways. In light of the continuing global protests against nation-state politics as it interacts with global economies, we will read recent texts (including brand new publications) around questions of democracy in the 21st century. What is the post-colonial future of democracy after the financial collapse of the socalled free market and the “end of liberal democracy” (W. Brown)? What are the possibilities, specifically, of “horizontal democracy” as an organizational form (Holloway, Sitrin)? What is the relevance of theories of ideology (Zizek), community (Nancy), the commons (Hardt), the class struggle (Negri), and the “communist idea” (Badiou)? We will consider national populism from the left and right (Laclau and Skocpol), as well as global “open-source” populism (Lowndes and Warren). We will consider democracy as cosmopolitanism and human rights (Gilroy, Ahmad), internet and urban networks (Latham and Sassen), democracy and difference (Eisenstein, Rancière), and post-colonial politics (Chatterjee, Mbembe). We will consider the BRICS geopolitical realignment as a democratization of the distribution of global power (Camaroff, Guardiola-Rivera). Finally we will ask what it might mean to Occupy our own (acadmec) Occupations (wa Thiang’o, Chen, Byeong-Gwon, Mendieta).
Required Books:
Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, 2005)
The Idea of Communism, eds. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek (Verso, 2010)
Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (Columbia U, 2011)
Paul Gilroy, Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Harvard, 2010)
Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (Verso, 2005)
Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (Verso, 2009)
Week 1 (February 1) ) Introduction
Week 2 (February 8)
The New Global Social Movement: What’s Happening?
OWS dossier (via email/dropbox) feel free to add your favorite links
Blogs and other Reports:
Tunis/Egypt/Syria/ etc.
Angela Davis; Judith Butler; Naomi Klein, Slavoj Zizek
Chandra Mohanty and Zillah Eisenstein
http://thefeministwire.com/2011/10/in-support-of-occupy-wall-street
This changes everything: instant book on OWS:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/74487027/This-Changes-Everything-The-Occupy-Movement
Stéphane Hessel, Indignez-Vous! (English: Time for Outrage)
Hessel interviewed on Democracy Now (October 10, 2011):
Ayesha Kazmi, “Why I am not Protesting at the Occupy,” in Americanpaki, 6/12/2011
http://americanpaki.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/why-i-am-not-protesting-at-occupy
Week 3 (February 15)
The Situation
Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009)
Wendy Brown, “NeoLiberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Edgework (2005), 37-59.
Week 4 (February 22)
Horizontal Democracy
Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power (2012), Chapter 4
John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (2010), 245-262.
Steven Weber, “The Political Economy of Open Source Software and Why it Matters,” Latham and Sassen, eds. Digital Formations (2005), pp. 178-211.
Week 5 (February 29)
The Idea of Communism
The Idea of Communism (2010) esp. pp 1-80 (Badiou, Balso, Bosteels, Buck-Morss) and 130-177 (Hardt, Nancy, Negri, Rancière), and 209-226 (Zizek)
Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth (2009), preface (vii-xiv); de corpore 1: Biopolitics as Event (56-66); chapter 4.1 “Brief History…”(203-218); de corpore 2: Metropolis (249-262); chapter 5.3, “Preshocks…” (296-311); de homine 2: Cross the Threshold! (312-324); chapter 6.1: “Revolutionary Parallelism” (325-344) 5.1 – 5.3 (and notes, pp. 387, 394-395, 410-413, s414-417, 418-421, 416-423)
Week 6 (March 7)
Populism
Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason 2007
Week 7 (March 14)
Teaparty versus Open Source Populism
Joe Lowndes and Dorian Warren, “Open Source Populism: OWS – a 21st Century Populist Movement?” October 21st 2011
Skocpol and Vanessa The Teaparty and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Chapters 5
and 6, pp. 155-205
OWS as seen by the Teaparty
Wendy Brown, “Political Idealization and its Discontents,” Edgework, pp. 16-36
Week 8 (March 21)
Post-Colonial Cosmopolitanism/Human Universality
Frantz Fanon, “French Intellectuals and Democrats and the Algerian Revolution, “ Toward the Aftican Revolution, pp. 76-169.
Achille Mbembe, “Provincializing France?” Public Culture 23(1): 85-119.
Achille Mbembe, “A Critical Humanism,” Interventions 7(3): 283-86.
Muneer Ahmad, “Resisting Guantanamo: Rights at the Brink of Dehumanization,” Northwestern Univ Law Reviewxi, 1684-1730.
.
Week 9 (March 28)
Democracy and the Post-Colonial Nation
Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy, (Columbia U, 2011), especially:
Chapter 1, “Lineages of Political Society,” 1-26
Chapter 6, “The People in Utopian and Real Time,” 129-153.
Chapters 9-11, Part III: “Democracy” 189-252.
Partha Chatterjee et al. on the Anna Hazare movement (Anna Hazarre debate: Kafila .org.India.doc)
Week 10 (April 4)
Democracy and Difference
Jacques Rancière , Dis-Agreement: Politics and Philosophy (1998)
Chapter 1, “the Beginning of Philosophy” (1-19)
Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010)
Chapter 2, “Does Democracy Mean Something?” (45-61);
Chapter 5, “the People or the Multitudes?” (84-90)
Chapter 8, “War as Supreme Form of Plutocratic Consensus” (105-111)
Chapter 13, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” (184-202)
Chapter 14, “The Use of Distinctions” (205-218)
Zillah Eisenstein, Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism and the West (Palgrave 2004):
Chapter 3, “Humanizing Humanities” (53-72)
Chapter 5, “Colonialism and Difference” (96-113)
Chapter 8, “Feminisms from Elsewheres” (181-221)
Week 11 (April 11) SPRING VACATION
Week 12 (April 18)
Racial Equality-Human Rights-Global Culture
Paul Gilroy, Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture, esp. pp.
55-119.
Week 13 (April 25) Free Week
TERM PAPER TOPICS DUE MAY 2
Week 14 (May 2)
Democratization of Geopolitics
Jean Camaroff, Chapter I, Theory from the South, or, How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa
(Paradigm, 2012), pp. 1-49 (193-98 endnotes)
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, What if Latin America Ruled the World? How the South Will Take the North, pp. 1-18; 286-396
Week 15 (May 9)
Occupying our Occupation
Ngugi wa Thiongo, “Globalectics: Reading the World in the Postcolonial,” Globalectics:
Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2012), pp. 44-62.
Kuan-Hsing Chen, Chapter 5, “Asia as Method: Overcoming the Present Conditions of Knowledge Production,” Asia as Method (2011), pp. 211-255.
Goh Byeong-Gwon, “A Presentiment of the Death of Intellectuals in Korean Society,” Universities in Translation: The Mental Labor of Globalization, ed. Brett de Bary (Hong Kong
U Press, 2010), 27-49.
Eduardo Mendieta, “Remapping Latin American Studies”
Hirokazu Miyazaki and Annelise Riles, “Failure as an Endpoint,” Aihwa Ong & Stephen J. Collier,
Global Assemblages (2005), pp. 320-331.
Wendy Brown, “The Future of Political Theory,” Edgework, 60-82
horizontaldemocracy 