History 204A / History 304A
Fall 1998
Undergraduate / Graduate Colloquium
Wednesday 1:15-3:05
History Corner (Building 200), Room 15
Roger Hart
Office: History Corner, Room 27
Office Hours: T Th 2:00—3:00 and by appt.
Email: rhart@stanford.edu
Phone: 723-2760 (office); 497-1735 (home)
This course takes a critical approach to major theoretical issues at the intersection of science, language, and culture. We will read some of the most important theoretical statements of the twentieth century, beginning first with Saussure’s seminal work in the structuralist theory of language (together with alternative theories of language), and then proceed through deconstruction, post-structuralism, and science studies. The goal of the course is to critically assess the arguments in these works and to examine alternative formulations. In the final three weeks we will explore some of the most recent studies on language, culture, and science. This course is also intended as an introduction to the faculty/graduate student Humanities Center workshop "Critical Studies: Writing Science."
Class attendance is mandatory. Students may choose one of the following two options:
(1) Before class write a brief summary of the readings, to be sent to me by email. Notes on each of the readings should usually be two short paragraphs–one summarizing the central argument and one offering critical analysis–for a total of 2—5 pages per week. Students should complete notes for three of four readings per week and for eight of the ten weeks. These will be graded (distinguished, satisfactory, or unsatisfactory) and will serve as the basis for class discussions. Grading: reading assignments 70%; class participation 30%.
(2) Complete a final paper of 15 pp. for undergraduates and 20 pp. for graduate students. Students should consult me as early as possible on possible topics. An outline and bibliography are due by Nov. 18; a first draft must be turned in by Dec. 2; and the final draft is due Dec. 9. Grading: final paper 70%; class participation 30%.
The following required texts are available at the Stanford Bookstore (this covers all the required readings). Supplementary readings listed in this syllabus are available from the instructor.
History 204A/304A Course Reader.
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.
Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power.
Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus.
Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death.
Bhabha, Location of Culture.
Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.
Hacking, Rewriting the Soul.
Saussure developed structuralism as the science of language; Wittgenstein analyzed language as a logical picture of the world (Tractatus). Later alternative formulations include the "use" theory of language (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations), analysis of the performative aspects of language (Austin), and Grice’s conversational implicature.
Ferdinand de Saussure, pt. 1 "General Principles" and pt. 2 "Synchronic Linguistics," in Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 65—139.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 31-61 and 183—189; originally published as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (1921). In Course Reader.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, §§ 1-243 in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), pp. 1—89.
J. L. Austin, lectures 1 and 2, in How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 1-24. In Course Reader.
Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Charles S. Peirce, "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," in Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), pp. 98-119.
Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).
Structuralism, as the scientific model of language, became the model for the scientific analysis of primitive cultures (Levi-Strauss), literature (Barthes, S/Z), the subconscious (Lacan), and contemporary culture (Barthes, Mythologies); it was theorized as the model for all systems of signification (Barthes, Semiology).
Claude Levi-Strauss, "Nature and Culture" and "The Problem of Incest," in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, rev. ed (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 3-25; originally published as Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949, rev. ed 1967). In Course Reader.
Claude Levi-Strauss, "Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology," in Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 31—54; originally published as Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958). In Course Reader.
Jacques Lacan, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud," in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 146-178; originally published in Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil: 1966). In Course Reader.
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), pp. 3—41; originally published as S/Z (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970). In Course Reader.
Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Noonday Press, 1968); originally published as Éléments de Sémiologie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964).
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1972); originally published as Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957).
Pierre Bourdieu, "Irresistible Analogy," in The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 200-270; originally published as Le sens pratique (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980).
Leach, Edmund, ed. The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism. London: Tavistock Publications, 1967.
Drawing on Nietzsche’s celebration of the illogic of logic and language, early post-structuralist critiques retained many of the assumptions of structuralist models to assert the illogic of culture (Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play"), philosophy (Derrida, "Play"), literature (de Man), and history (Foucault, "Nietzsche"). If post-structuralists conflated the structuralist model of reality with the reality of the model, the failure of the structuralist model became the deconstruction of the West.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870's, trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), pp. 79-97. In Course Reader.
Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" in Eugenio Donato and Richard Macksey, eds., The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), pp. 247-265. In Course Reader.
Jacques Derrida, "Play: From the Pharmakon to the Letter and from Blindness to the Supplement," in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 156-171; originally published as La Dissemination (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972). In Course Reader.
Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 76—100; originally published as "Nietzsche, la généalogie, l'histoire," in Hommage À Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971). In Course Reader.
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 103—131.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); originally published as La Voix et le Phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967).
Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's "Origin of Geometry": An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1978); from revised edition of Introduction à "L'Origine de la géométrie" de Husserl (Presses Universitaires de France, 1962).
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988); translation of portions of Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique: folie et déraison(Paris: Librairie Plon, 1961).
Against earlier investigations that viewed universal science as radically transcending particular cultures (culture could only aid or distort the development of science along its natural teleology toward truth), work in the 1960s and 70s sought ways to re-place science in cultural context. These studies applied various models of culture to the study of science: paradigms and incommensurability (Kuhn); the archaeology of human sciences (Foucault); the social science of science (Collins); the anthropology of science (Latour and Woolgar); and gender studies of science (Keller).
Thomas S. Kuhn, postscript, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, 2d ed., enl. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 174-210. In Course Reader.
Michel Foucault, "The Human Sciences," in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, World of Man (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), pp. 344-387; originally published as Les mots et les choses (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966). In Course Reader.
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, "An Anthropologist Visits the Laboratory," in Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, vol. 80 of Sage Library of Social Research (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1979), pp. 43-90. In Course Reader.
Evelyn Fox Keller, "Spirit and Reason at the Birth of Modern Science," in Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 43-65. In Course Reader.
H. M. Collins, "The Scientist in the Network: A Sociological Resolution of the Problem of Inductive Inference," in Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1985), pp. 129-159.
David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Macmillan, 1976).
Sandra G. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).
Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1988).
If structuralist approaches to culture were based on the structuralist model of language, early post-structuralist works incorporated aspects of culture into reformulated analyses of language (Bourdieu, Foucault); yet these reformulations retained crucial structuralist assumptions (Bourdieu, Foucault, and Derrida, Grammatology; but for Derrida on Austin, Searle on Derrida, and Derrida on SARL, see Limited Inc.)
Jacques Derrida, "Linguistics and Grammatology," in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 27-73. In Course Reader.
Michel Foucault, introduction and "Appendix: The Discourse on Language," in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 3-20 and 215-237. In Course Reader.
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); originally published as Ce que parler veut dire: l'économie des échanges linguistiques (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1982), selections.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); originally published as Le sens pratique (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980).
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988); "Signature Event Context" and "Limited Inc a b c ..." appeared in Glyph 1 and 2 (1977).
The central theses of post-structuralism--deconstructive critiques and the focus on language as a system of discourse--had a profound influence on other areas of cultural studies, resulting in attempts to reconcile post-structuralism with post-colonialism (Spivak), marxism (Laclau and Mouffe), and feminism (Butler).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 197-221. In Course Reader.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, "Hegemony and Radical Democracy," in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985), pp. 149-193. In Course Reader.
Judith P. Butler, "Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire" and "Conclusion: From Parody to Politics," in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Thinking Gender (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1-34 and 142-149. In Course Reader.
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).
Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (New York: B. Blackwell, 1987).
Critical studies in the history of science conceptualized science as culture, fundamentally revising the received historiography on Galileo (Biagioli) and Boyle (Shapin and Schaffer); this then led to a rethinking of many of the cultural implications of history of science.
Mario Biagioli, "Galileo’s Self-Fashioning," in Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 11—101. In Course Reader.
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, 1985), pp. 22-79. In Course Reader.
Timothy Lenoir, "Was That Last Turn A Right Turn? The Semiotic Turn and A. J. Greimas" Configurations 2 (1994): 119-136. Available on Lenoir’s web site, listed below.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); originally published as Nous n'avons jamais été modernes: Essais d'anthropologie symmétrique (La Découverte, 1991).
This week we explore two recent approaches to language–Deleuze and Guattari’s "rhizomes" and Baudrillard’s simulacra–to assess whether they remain framed within structuralism or represent a radical alternative.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); originally published as Mille Plateaux, vol. 2 of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980), chaps. 1, 4, 5, 9, 12, 13, and 15.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, Theory, Culture & Society (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1993); originally published as L'échange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), chaps. 1 and 2.
This week we will examine new approaches to culture: cultural criticism (Bhabha); the self-reflexive critique of the role of ideologies of language in the formation of imagined communities (Saussy, Hart); and the circulation of cultural artifacts through intersecting material and discursive fields (Liu).
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Haun Saussy, "The Question of Chinese Allegory," in The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, Meridian–Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 13-46. In Course Reader.
Roger Hart, "Translating Worlds: Incommensurability and Problems of Existence in Seventeenth-Century China," forthcoming in Lydia H. Liu, ed., Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999). In Course Reader.
Lydia Liu, "Crusoe’s Pottery: Science, Aesthetics, and the Metaphysics of True Porcelain in the 18th Century," to appear in Hart, ed., Cultural Studies of Chinese Science, Technology and Medicine (to be submitted to UC Press in 1999). In Course Reader.
Lydia H. Liu, "Introduction: The Problem of Language in Cross-Cultural Studies," in Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity–China, 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Public Worlds, vol. 1 (Minneapolis,: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
Emily Apter and William Pietz, ed., Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1993).
In the final week we will explore new approaches to technoscience, focusing on virtuality (Lenoir).
Timothy Lenoir, "Inscription Practices and Materialities of Communication," in idem, ed., Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication, Writing Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Available on Lenoir’s web site, below.
–––, "Visions of Theory: Fashioning Molecular Biology as an Information Science" (draft), to appear in M. Norton Wise, Growing Explanations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Available on Lenoir’s web site, below.
–––, http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPST/TimLenoir/index.html
Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), selections.
Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.Femaleman©_ Meets_Oncomouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), selections.
Fischer, Michael M. J. "Eye(I)ing the Sciences and Their Signifiers (Language, Tropes, Autobiographers): InterViewing for a Cultural Studies of Science and Technology," in George E. Marcus, ed., Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs, Late Editions: Cultural Studies for the End of the Century, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Peter Galison and David J. Stump, The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, Writing Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Brian Rotman, Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back in: An Essay in Corporeal Semiotics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
Timothy Lenoir, Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines, Writing Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).