One -- Introduce students to Science and Technology Studies, Media Studies, and Network Theory, and situate these in respect to broader critical theoretical discourses: Marx on fetishized commodities, Benjamin on auratic media-artifacts, Adorno on the Culture Industry, Barthes on naturalizing myth, Debord on the Spectacle, Chomsky and Herman on propaganda, Klein on the logo.
Two -- Discuss "science" as one among many forms of differently warranted belief (others: moral, legal, familial, utilitarian, religious, ethical, political, subcultural, aesthetic); discuss "technoscience" as a particular and usually at once reductive and imperializing figuration and narrativization of the scientific; discuss "technology" as the collective elaboration of agency, not so much as a constellation of artifacts and techniques but as familiarizing and de-familiarizing, naturalizing and de-naturalizing investments of environmental events in the context of developmental struggles.
Three -- Discuss end-to-end, many-to-many, peer-to-peer networks, formations, ethoi as occasions for democratizing and anti-democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle; discuss "democracy" not as an eidos we approach but as ongoing interminable experimental implementations of the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them; discuss "democratization" as the struggle through which ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.
Four -- Discuss the connection of p2p-formations and media/network theories grappling with these to relational, social, participatory aesthetic and curatorial practices.
Five -- This course takes as its point of departure that the novelties and perplexities of our experience of emerging p2p-formations are, on the one hand, uniquely illuminated when understood in light of the formulations of Hannah Arendt's political thinking and also that these novelties and perplexities provide, on the other hand, illustrations through which to understand Hannah Arendt's political thinking in its own right: Discussions will include her delineation of the political (as a site other than the private, the social, the violent, the cultural), her notion of the peer (as someone other than the citizen, the intimate, the colleague, the subject, the celebrity), her accounts of civitas, revolution, public happiness, futurism and AI, and totalitarianism as manifested historically in Nazism and potentially in neoliberalism.
The course blog is here.
As it happens, "Five" -- relating p2p-democratization to the political thought of Hannah Arendt -- is also the organizing idea for a book in progress, The Peer Appears: Hannah Arendt and Peer to Peer Democratization, a book I'm hoping will be nudged along by the preparation of lectures for this course!
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