Course Times: Wednesdays, 7:00-9:45 pm, in 442 EPB
Office Hours: Mondays, 2:30-4 PM, and Wednesdays, 2:00-3:30 PM, in 401 Jefferson
E-mail/Phone: rob-latham@uiowa.edu; 335-0035
Required Texts (available at Prairie Lights Bookstore):
Also Required (available at Technigraphics in the PedMall):
Recommended Text (some copies at Prairie Lights):
Screenings: There will be two film screenings during the semester. You are encouraged to attend, but copies of the films will be made available in the library's Media Center for those with conflicts. Both screenings are in EPB 107; the dates and times are as follows:
Description: Drawing eclectically on various forms of theory, works of social history, and literary texts, this course offers an introduction to the burgeoning field of technoculture studies. An area of scholarly inquiry that brings together issues and contexts related to the industrial production, textual refraction, and sociopolitical deployment of technological innovations, technoculture studies links the domains of high-tech research and popular culture. The course will not only review work by major theorists and scholars in the field, but it will also offer a focused survey of twentieth-century culture in terms of technology. The central themes we will address include: the collapse of secure distinctions between humans and machines, the reorientation of embodied experience in relation to proliferating technological interfaces, and the reinvention of aesthetic, political, sexual, and other practices in light of these developments. Basically, the concern throughout the course is to see what happens to the personal and social worlds, and to the links between them, as technological systems come more and more to establish their formal boundaries and horizons of possibility.
Requirements and Assignments: The first requirement is preparation and attendance. Because we meet only once per week, and because the material we will cover builds cumulatively, missing class for any reason short of serious illness or other major emergency is not a good idea. Also, I am committed to conducting this course as a genuine seminar, so your consistent participation in communal dialogue&emdash;based on a focused and critical engagement with the course's issues, contexts, and materials&emdash;is absolutely essential to its success. An evaluation of your contribution to class discussion will form a major part of my assessment of your final grade.
Another major factor will be in-class presentations. Every class meeting, starting with Week Three, will be divided into two roughly 75-minute periods (with a break between them), each of which will be kicked off by a presentation involving two of you. The first half of the session will feature responses to the texts we have read in common, the purpose being to initiate and frame the discussion; you should thus focus your remarks on these texts and not introduce unfamiliar or off-topic material. Your response can be expository (explaining some issue or implication in the texts), critical (arraigning the texts on the basis of factual or ideological problems), and/or quizzical (formulating questions to be addressed in our collective response to the texts). Those participating in these presentations must consult with one another in advance, so that your work can be profitably divided up and your individual remarks dovetailed. Each co-operative presentation may take no longer than 12 minutes (I will forcibly abridge them, if necessary), but their particular structure is up to the presenters: you can speak serially, or engage in critical dialogue, or whatever.
Moreover, to augment the oral presentations and to provide the class with material permitting us to formulate our questions and concerns in advance, all presenters must provide me, via e-mail, with a 1-page write-up of your ideas no later than 2 PM of the day you are slated to present. I will then circulate these write-ups to the entire class. Thus, even during the weeks when you are not scheduled to present, all of you will be expected to check your e-mail sometime during Wednesday afternoons, to read over the write-ups, and to come to class prepared to respond to our presenters. Since the presenters' basic ideas will be available to the class in written form, the presentations themselves need not be overly detailed or discursive, but rather should involve a more or less extemporaneous overview of the ideas articulated in the written responses. In other words, you may work from notes, but please do not simply read prepared remarks. Each of you will be required to participate in two such presentations during the course of the semester.
The presentations that will kick off the second half of each class meeting will focus not on works we have read in common (at least not in their entirety) but on important books that address or intersect with the issues we are discussing. There will be two such books per session, and the presenters will be assigned one apiece. Because you will be working on disparate materials, you need not feel compelled to consult with one another before presenting; instead, each of you will be given about 8 minutes (and no more!) to speak. In the case of the first of these "secondary" texts, we will all be reading excerpts together, so those of you presenting on the books should report on how the assigned chapters or sections cohere with the works as a whole. Regarding the other books, we will not all have read from them, so the presentations will need to address not only their animating arguments but also their relevance to the themes of the sessions. We will continue to discuss the "primary" texts during the second half of the class sessions, but my hope is that the inclusion of these "secondary" perspectives will expand and complexify our discussions.
Those presenting on the books from which we have all read excerpts need not provide a write-up: the in-class reports should thus be sufficiently cogent and clear to permit us to engage with them. Those presenting on the books from which we have not read excerpts will be required to write book reviews. These reviews should be conceived and drafted as if for professional publication; briefly, each review should contextualize the work under discussion theoretically and/or historically, summarize its basic organization and main line of argument, critically analyze selected topics in some depth, and evaluate the volume's overall merits and defects&emdash;all within roughly 2000-2500 words (about 4-5 single-spaced pages). I plan to circulate these reviews to the entire class, so I will need to receive them, via email, by 2 PM on Wednesday so that I can send them along to everybody. Your in-class presentation should be distinct from the review in that it should bring the argument of the book to bear on the session topic and/or the texts we have read in common. Once again, the second-half presentations should be structured but extemporaneous. Each of you will be required to do one report and one review during the course of the semester.
The final requirement for the semester is a seminar paper (or its equivalent in electronic form) incorporating original research. You are strongly encouraged to begin developing these projects as early as possible during the term, and obviously I will be available throughout the semester to help you refine your ideas, narrow your research, and gather your arguments into a final form. Our final class session will be given over to discussions of your individual projects in roughly 15-minute blocks. These final presentations should involve a capsule overview of your project and an indication of any questions or concerns you may have regarding it, leaving time for feedback from the rest of the class.
Grading: The distribution of your grade will be as follows: 20% class participation (including presentations); 10% response papers; 20% book review; and 50% final paper.
Week One. (1/22) Introduction
Week Two. (1/29) Gravity's Rainbow: Technocracy, War, and Masculinity
Week Three. (2/5) Gravity's Rainbow: System and Agency
Week Four. (2/12) Gravity's Rainbow: Techno-Ethics, Techno-Mysticism
Week Five. (2/19) The Iron Cage: Rationalization, Reification, Taylorism
Week Six. (2/26) The Culture Industry: Technologies of Mass Consciousness
Week Seven. (3/5) Questioning Technology: Techne and the End(s) of Metaphysics
Week Eight. (3/12) Intelligent Machines: Cybernetics and Posthumanity
Weeks Nine & Ten (3/19, 3/26)
Spring Break & Reading Week
Week Eleven. (4/2) The Electric Metropolis
Week Twelve. (4/9) Desire Machines
Week Thirteen. (4/16) Simulation
Week Fourteen. (4/23) TV Land
Week Fifteen. (4/30) Cyberculture
Week Sixteen. (5/7)
Exam Week. (5/14)