Sophomore Dialogue Seminar
History 204I, HPS 158 Winter Quarter 1997
Instructors: Timothy Lenoir & Sha Xin Wei
New media technology such as the printing press, photography, film,
and, more recently, computer-mediated communication as well as computer-generated
visualization and simulation: all these have had profound effects on our
conceptions of objectivity, agency, the self, and the body. This course
explores several historical episodes in which technologically mediated
virtual worlds have transformed our experience of the "real."
We will begin with a brief introduction to theories of mediated experience,
and then move to a consideration of the invention of graphism in paleolithic
times and the relation between linear writing and graphic presentation.
We will then move to 17th century considerations of technologies of "virtual
witnessing" in constructing arguments about scientific facts, followed
by a consideration of the 18th century fascination with the disembodied
subject in works such as Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiment. Questions
of embodiment will guide our consideration of the "interpretant"
in Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics, and focus on material media-grammophone,
film, typewriter-will frame our consideration of Freud's notions of the
subject. Our final set of topics will focus on visualization, the "second
computer revolution," in several fields of biomedicine, including
new developments in "virtual surgery." With VR scientists and
artists at the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory, Sun Microsystems,
we will engage in a hands-on laboratory exercise in the problems of constructing
virtual worlds, while readings on hypertext, cyberspace, and cyborgs will
frame our exploration of the shifts new hypermedia may introduce into our
practices of reading and rhetoric.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 3-63.
André Leroi-Gourhan, Speech and Gesture (Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press, 1993), pp. 187-266.
Alberto Manguel, "The Silent Readers," from A History of Reading (New York: Viking, 1996), pp. 42-53.
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, "Seeing and Believing: The Experimental Production of Pneumatic Facts," in Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 23-79.
Daniel DeFoe, Robinson Crusoe (London: Penguin, 1965), pp. 80- 117; 199-230.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 9-66.
Recommended: David Marshall, "Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments," Critical Inquiry, 10 (1984), 592613.
Charles Sanders Peirce, "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," Peirce: Of Signs. (Chapel Hill:Univ of North Carolina Press, 1991).
Brian Rotman, "The Emergence of the Metasubject," Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (New York: St. Martinís Press, 1987), pp. 27-56; "Absence of an Origin," pp. 87-107.
Brian Rotman, "The Technology of Mathematical Persuasion,"
in Tim Lenoir, ed., Inscribing Science (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997) in press.
Jacques Derrida, "Différance," Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 3-28.
Mark Poster, "Derrida and Electronic Writing: The Subject of the Computer," The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 99-128.
Friedrich Kittler Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 206-346.
David Wellbery, "Post-Hermeneutic Criticism," Forward to Discourse
Networks, pp.vii-xxxiii.
We'll take a field trip to the Stanford Computer Graphics Lab to see the Responsive Workbench and the Phantom Haptic Feedback system.
Vaneevar Bush, "As We May Think," Atlantic Magazine, August,1945, in SiliconBase.
Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework," Stanford Research Institute Report AF 49(63-8)-1024
George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporay Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 2-119.
Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations," in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 166-184.
Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, "The Lessons of Lucasfilmís Habitat, in Michael Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 273-302.
Habitat: on course website
Moira, "Colony Alpha: Making Active Worlds." On course website.
Roger Coyne, Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 147-202; 249-302.
Hands on stuff.
This class is intended for heavy reading and interaction with media.
We will ask students to form teams of two to make presentations of the
material. We would like you to bring in additional perspectives on the
material listed in the syllabus, but aimed at focussing our discussion
for the day. Ideally we would like this material to be developed into an
interactive course website. Presentations will begin at the fourth class
meeting in order to give you time to work up something interesting.
Each student will also be required to produce a term project. The project
can be in the form of a term paper, a website or simulation. We encourage
students to work together on the course projects. We will assist in clarifying
the project as we proceed, but below are a few ideas of the sorts of things
you might contemplate as a term project.
A. Study an artifact (traditional paper format is fine, but think about
how to cite non-print artifacts) --
Compare it with traditional virtualities (eg. Crusoe, the debit card). How is it authored? How is it received, read, experienced?
B. Do a creative piece --
Using a computational authoring system of your choice, such as any HTML editor
create a piece of fiction, or a simulation, or a visualization. Compare
it with more traditional writing technologies. How might your creation
be different? One good way to do this project might be to create alternate
treatments of a given theme in different "media," eg. a photo
essay vs. a hypertext.
C. Write an analytic work (traditional paper format is fine) --