Syllabus 2025-26
Each week there are multiple texts - however, the page count should usually add up to around 100 pages or less. These should all be easy to get; almost all are linked below or in the library, if not then easy to find through quick searches, but let me know if not.
You don't have to read every text every week, but read as much as possible, and try to get ahead rather than leaving it to the week before.
Try to read on paper where possible. Try to read the whole book where possible, but don't worry about missing some texts. Additional suggestions for reading are welcome.
We can talk about choices of texts, reasons for this (one reason will be that, if there seem to be gaps, these are more than accounted for by other modules). Any difficulties with getting texts, please let me know, this will help everyone.
Issues: m.gardiner@warwick.ac.uk
WEEK ONE: INTRODUCTION
No required reading, but try to get ahead with those below.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS:
What have we studied in the past
What expectations do we have
Are there themes missing from this syllabus, if so why
What's the basis for selection of texts
How has cultural theory changed in the last five years
Who decides which cultural theory gets used and in which situations
Why read on paper rather than on screen
WEEK TWO: NOSTALGIA
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life (2014), sections ‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’, ‘Nostalgia for Modernism’, ‘Always yearning for the time that just eluded us’
Katy Shaw, Hauntology (2018), 1-23, 105-110
Grafton Tanner, Foreverism (2024), 17-28, 63-76
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS:
How is the past available to us?
What was being answered by hauntology?
What is the relationship between nostalgia and the attention economy?
To what extent has culture been robbed of its historical agency?
WEEK THREE: TRANSPARENCY
Byung-Jul Han, Transparenzgesellschaft (2012)/ The Transparency Society (2015), 37-49
Thomas Docherty, Confessions: The Philosophy of Transparency (2012), 128-143, last part of Part Two: 'Of persuasion and the confessional ground of judgment' to end
Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs/ Black Skin, White Masks, (1967/ 1952), Ch.5, any edition, in library
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS:
Is the ideal of transparency an evacuation of the political?
What is the aesthetic, or the narrative form, of the drive to transparency?
Do screens present space differently to paper pages and other kinds of material culture?
Is transparency necessary to rule by typology? Is transparency a capitalist dispositif?
WEEK FOUR: CLASS
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS:
How does culture register class in a post-industrial era?
How has class changed in the C21 (and what has this done to materialist readings of culture)?
What are the effects of shrinking the middle class?
WEEK FIVE: 'FEUDALISM'
Yevgeny Morozov, ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’ (2022)
Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism? (2024), 85-91, 97-108, 129-144, 176-179
Mackenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is this something worse?, ch.2
Nick Land, 'Critique of Transcendental Miserablism' (2007), various sources
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS:
What happens to the category of capitalism in 2020s cultural critiques?
How did digital culture change class relations?
What kinds of culture might push against 'vectoralist' control?
If capitalism ends, will we acknowledge it? Is 'capitalism' the name of a negative theology?
WEEK SIX: NUKES
Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (2012), 1-46, in library
John Kinsella and Drew Milne, ‘Nuclear Theory Degree Zero’, in eds. Kinsella and Milne, Nuclear Theory Degree Zero: Essays Against the Nuclear Android (2021), 1-16, version here
Adam Piette, ‘Deep Geological Disposal and Radioactive Time: Beckett, Bowen, Nirex and Onkalo’, in eds. Ryan and Bishop, Cold War Legacies (2016), in library
William Chaloupka, Knowing Nukes (1993), 105-125, book in library
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS:
How did the constant threat of nuclear violence come to be relatively accepted?
What is the relationship between a post-truth world and naturalised nukes?
What is nuclear imperialism, both in terms of a) displacement and extraction; b) control of space? What are some of the cultures of nuclear imperialism?
Where are the cultures of the 'third nuclear era'
WEEK SEVEN: X-RISK
Federico Campagna, Prophetic Culture (2021), 19-55
Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered its own Extinction (2020), 341-424
François J. Bonnett, Après la mort /After Death (2021/ 2017), 11-22 but try to read whole book, very short
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS:
How would a world without humans be represented?
What is the 'extinction unconscious'?
Is the 'end of the world' really the end of a specific cultural form?
WEEK EIGHT: BULLSHIT
When did bullshit become compulsory in public communication?
Do we live in two separate worlds - experience and public truth - and how does culture negotiate this?
Is evil banal?
Is the bullshit of the 2020s Pax Americana comparable to the bullshit of the 1970s-'80s Soviet Union?
WEEK NINE: SHANZHAI
Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhai: Dekonstruktion auf Chinesisch (2011)/ Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese (2017), 60-78
Mckenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street (2011), 30-37
Anna Greenspan, China and the Wireless Undertow (2023), 116-149
Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’: https://archive.org/details/DasKunstwerkImZeitalterSeinerTechnischenReproduzierbarkeit/page/n3/mode/2up / 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1935) (any edition)
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS:
How important is originality in cultural work?
What assmuptions are made in intellectual ownership of cultural or literary texts, and are these likely to change?
Is Wark right that a great unspoken question of literary theory was intellectual ownership?
WEEK TEN: PROVINCIALISATION
Yuk Hui, Post-Europe (2024), 67-102
Chūō Kōron First Symposium [The world-historical standpoint and Japan] (1943/ 1941), trans. in David Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance (2014) (both this week's books in library, paper)
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS:
What happens to progress after the destabilisation/ loss of moral authority of the US?
What does the collapse of the American-led order tell us about the relationship between technology and culture?
What might be the characteristics of a genuinely decentred cultural theory?