Today's Long Day

Another eight to eight teaching day, I'm afraid. "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility" by Benjamin and the "Culture Industry" chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer in the City from nine to noon, then starting off my new intensive at Berkeley later in the afternoon, going over the syllabus and class policies and providing the first overview of the terrain:

In a nutshell, I'll make a first approach to critical theory as post-philosophical discourse, declare Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the thresh-hold figures who take us from philosophy into post-philosophy, I'll remark on the substance of rhetoric and the philosophical attribution of insubstantiality to that substance, offer the first of many genuflections to the figurative register of language, elaborate a little the etymological and ethical kinship of argument and interpretation, and then finally end with a discussion of the ambivalent course title, "Who Holds the Keys," at once the question which methodologies provide the keys decoding textual opacity into clarity, a question that takes us directly into anthropological, Marxian, psychoanalytic, and Burroughsian magical notions of the fetish, as well as the suggestive proposal that the one constituted as a "who" rather than a "what" is the one who can manage to contend they have such keys in hand. Doesn't that sound fun? I think we'll end about an hour early, but once I start talking, however tired I am, however ill I am, however distracted I am, I find it easy to talk three hours without noticing the passage of time, so we'll see.