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Week One
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: Book I upto chapter VI
The division of labour increasing in history. Workhouse (factory) manufacture. The use of technology to save labour. The relation of markets to transport. The use of uniform metallic money in exchange. Increasing production and consumption in history.
Week Two
Karl Marx, ‘Estranged Labour’ in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) (from Karl Marx: Early Writings translated by Livingstone and Benton), (with Friedrich Engels) ‘Bourgeois and Proletarians’ in The Communist Manifesto, Section 4 ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret’ in ‘Commodities’, Chapter One in Capital, Vol. I.
Industrial labour as objectified, estranged and alienated. Revolutions in production and technology. Growth of industry destroying tradition in life and ideology. Relations of production and ideological forms. The commodity (production for exchange) as a fetish.
Week Three
Max Weber, ‘Domination and Legitimacy’, Chapter X and ‘Bureaucracy’, Chapter XI of Part II of Economy and Society
Rational-legal authority as a form of domination. Bureaucracy as a general form of administration and its modern growth. Means-end calculations. Bureaucratisation of the state, law, corporations and political parties. Decline of personalised authority.
Week Four
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Era of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (from Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings IV, edited by Eiland and Jennings).
Art moves from ritual object to political object in modern conditions. The individual art object loses it uniqueness. The art of cinema transforms the perception of the audience through its techniques. Modern arts undermines the distance between artist and work.
Week Five
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment
Mass culture as manipulation. The loss of genuine art in the technology of mass media. Totalitarian manipulation through uniformity of culture. Creation of needs through advertising. The formulaic nature of popular culture. Invasion of the private sphere.
Week Six
Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea
The physical nature of the globe as a factor in world politics. The relation between land and sea in human culture. Land powers versus sea powers. Impact of technological development and science on these divisions. Conquest of the sea and then the air.
Week Seven
Hannah Arendt, ‘Labor’, Chapter III of The Human Condition
Labour-work distinction. The modern emancipation of labour as performed by free individuals. Modern emphasis on production. Division of labour and technology enable immediate consumption and growing production which may separate us from nature.
Week Eight
‘Work’, Chapter IV of The Human Condition
Computers show that intellect is not the highest human capacity as computers exceed human cognition. Mass production and consumption undermine the idea of work (as a product) as the highest human creation. This leaves art as distinctly human work.
Week Nine
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: Introduction, Chapter I. Spaces and Classes, Chapter II. A Political Consciousness
The classification of disease. The definition of disease. Disease in the body, the family and the hospital. How disease is seen in a gaze. National politics and national health. Natural order. Perceptual structure. Doctors inheriting the role of priests. Regulating normality.
Week Ten
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: Chapter III. The Free Field, Chapter IV. The Old Age of the Clinic, Chapter V. The Lessons of the Hospitals
Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the history of medicine. Observing individuals and observing space. Hospital and clinic. Clinic as place for innovation. Harmonising nature and knowledge of nature. Models of government and economy in medical policy.
Week Eleven
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: Chapter 6. Signs and Cases, Chapter 7. Seeing and Knowing, Chapter 8. Opening Up a Few Corpses
The clinic as a place for developing medical instruments. Shifts in definitions of medical knowledge. The languages of medical knowledge. The development of languages of description. Anatomical knowledge, dissection of corpses and individualisation of death.
Week Twelve
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: Chapter 9. The Visible Invisible, Chapter 10. Crisis in Fevers, Conclusion
Knowledge of and medical action on body tissues. Medical knowledge and observation as the making visible of the invisible. Greater description of symptoms and anatomical detail leads to the essence of the disease becoming more hidden. Subjectivity and objectivity.
Week Thirteen
Herbert Marcuse, ‘Introduction’; ’The New Forms of Control’ and ‘The Closing of the Political Universe’, Chapters 1 and 2 of One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society.
Technology and Domination. Containing political change in late industrial society. Totalitarian economic-technical coordination. Manipulation of needs. Total administration. Transplantation of social into individual needs. Irrational technical rationality.
Week Fourteen
Jürgen Habermas Towards a rational society: Student Protest, Science and Politics: Chapter 4. Technical Progress and the Social Life-World, Chapter 5. The Scientization of Politics and Public Opinion, Chapter 6. Technology and Science as “Ideology”.
Evaluation of Weber and Marcuse. Rationalisation and loss of traditional legitimacy. Technocratic politics and the weakening of the public sphere. Subordination of institutions to means-end instrumentalism. Open communication and democratic rationalisation. |