Course Descriptions

Term:  

Fall Quarter

Dept Course No and Title Instructor
HUMAN (F26)260A  CRIT THRY WORKSHOP: THEORIES OF PROJECTIONTERADA, REI
In contemporary critical discourse, “projection,” unlike for example “disavowal,” functions
more as an ordinary language notion than a psychoanalytic term of art: it means attributing one’s
feelings to someone nearby, and we shouldn’t do it. This workshop will recover its complex
itinerary, its proximity to hallucination and dreaming, and, more important, its underused
capacities as a critical lens.
In its intellectual history, projection marks the moment when Freud’s economic idea of
displacement—a feeling takes a path of least resistance from a difficult site to an easier one—
swerves into Melanie Klein’s interpersonal theory of human development. For Klein, a legacy of
“projective identification” between mother and infant informs productive and coercive emotive
exchanges in adult life. From here on, fantasy is co-involved with power. Lacan’s criticism and
translation of Klein into negative and linguistic terms then generates his subordination of the
imaginary and his interest in inverted messages. Analytic wildman and maybe-visionary theorist
W.R. Bion develops an alternative metapsychology based on the ability or not of the mind to
transform turmoil through a play of containers and contents: the norm is projection and
hallucination, and the alternative is 24/7 “dreaming” as a model for thought. Clinical
psychoanalysis is still developing a tension between projection as an inevitable entanglement of
beings—in which it’s often the body that is unconscious and unknowable—and projection as the
active ingredient of language, arising because beings do not meet.
As interesting as projection’s journey is, the goal of the workshop is to avoid becoming
intellectual history at any cost. Rather, the dynamics that projection brings up suggest questions
and routes for future cultural analysis. Projection is not only a transfer from a hard to an easy site
—which is itself an interesting storage strategy—but a divergent process of alliance, enmity, and
transformation (of what, and how?); or a fantasmatic violence that is not a mere mistake but a
symptom within psychoanalysis itself; or a model of language, demonstrating how it is possible
to put a non-empirical object in a fictive container like an “image” or a “word,” change the “I”
that is holding it, and move it somewhere, for worse and better. In the workshop, we read mostly
clinical psychoanalytic literature that helps to give a feel for projection’s variability. Each
participant is invited to perceive and work with projection in their own writing’s materials in a
way that truly analyzes its instances and exposes the underlying rival theories of language and
social violence to which it is connected. (Texts from Freud, Klein, Lacan, Winnicott, Bion,
Isaacs, Searles, Ferro, Stern, Lombardi, De Masi; films TBA)
HUMAN (F26)270  COGNITIVE MAPPING IN MINDS, MACHINES, AND METAPHORSBORNSTEIN, A
"The cognitive revolution began with the observation that rodents could form mental ""maps"" useful for guiding navigation, planning, and memory. These findings portended the fall of behaviorism and the rise of a new scientific paradigm that centered these internal worlds. Shortly after, urban theorist Kevin Lynch introduced the term ""cognitive mapping"" to describe the distinct internal representations of shared city space that divide inhabitants and define the overlapping, but independent, extent of their experiences. This was taken up by many thinkers including, most famously, Frederic Jameson, to theorize the way in which built, cultural, and social environments propagate through the structures formed in individual minds. In parallel, the neurobiological study of cognitive maps continued in rodents and, later, humans, identifying key cell types that represent physical as well as non-spatial associations and the latent structure of our experiences. More recently, computer science has contributed rigorous quantitative theory to explain the various manifestations of cognitive maps in the brain, propelling advances in neurobiology and also artificial intelligence.

These two lines of inquiry — cognitive mapping in critical theory and cognitive maps in the brain sciences — have continued largely independently, in parallel, for decades, making complementary and concordant discoveries. In this cross-disciplinary class, students from many departments we will gain a rigorous understanding of the foundations in each field, while examining how to put these works into productive conversation, and reveal areas where each discipline might make meaningful contribution to the gaps in theory raised by the other. We will see how the humanistic disciplines have, in some ways, more faithfully represented Tolman’s stated intentions for the study of cognitive maps in rodents, and also ask how recent advances in quantitative theory of cognitive maps may have implications for the further development of cognitive mapping. We will engage with works by psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, urban theorists, critical geographers, and literary and art critics.  Guest speakers will provide in-depth analysis of the various manifestations of cognitive maps in their disciplines. Assignments will include options for programming simulations or writing short critical essays."
HUMAN (F26)270  CRITICAL THEORY DEBATESREYNOLDS, B
"Many of the most important developments in the recent history of critical theory and 20th-Century literary theory were defined and facilitated by debates between different schools of thought. This course is an exploration into the main theoretical and methodological differences at the heart of debates between critical theorists influenced by, on the one hand, Marxism and poststructuralism, and, on the other, psychoanalysis and structuralism. Our focus, however, will be on theorists who move interdisciplinarily and transversally – fugitively disrupting and pushing beyond established paradigms – through the debates to achieve groundbreaking impact on the future of critical inquiry. With a sub-emphasis on theories of desire and subjectivity to further narrow the field for the course, we will study works by Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Kate Millet, Helene Cixous, Angela Davis, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Alice Jardine, and Avital Ronell."
HUMAN (F26)398B  FOR LANG TEACH METHJONES, L.
No detailed description available.
HUMAN (F26)399  UNIVERSITY TEACHINGBEAUCHAMP, T.
No detailed description available.