The overall goal of this course is to assess the political claims made for new media and new technologies and to define possible points of articulation and/or critique between Marxist traditions and new theories of radical democracy, on the one hand, and new technocultural formations, on the other hand. To that end, the course will weave together three strands of inquiry, all of which will combine readings in popular culture, understood as a site of critical reflection on and speculation about technocultural developments, and an examination of movements organized around new technologies. First, we will consider the ongoing structural transformation of the democratic public sphere and the mass mediation of social relations through new communications and computer interface technologies, as these changes affect models of citizenship and collective forms of belonging or “imagined community.” Key texts in this section of the course might include John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” the Peter Ludlow collection on “cyberstates” and “pirate utopias,” Bruce Sterling’s non-fiction work on ubiquitous computing, and Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs, along with critical work by Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant on the new norms of publicness that emerge in highly mass-mediated consumer societies, where there is a shift toward embodied self-production rather than rational self-transcendence. Second, we will discuss possible new models of collectivity emerging out of intellectual property debates, such as the copyleft movement, the creative commons licensing system associated with Lawrence Lessig, and attempts to elaborate such movements into a general open source culture, in the work of writers and musicians like Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky. In this section of the course we will also read Marxist theories of information technologies, possibly including selections from Hardt and Negri’s Empire, Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Marx, Wark’s Hacker Manifesto, Galloway’s Protocol, and Wendy Chun’s Control and Freedom. We may examine examples of this kind of collective culture, including mash-ups and wikis. Third, we will discuss claims for the progressive potential residing in new forms of technological self-transformation, of trans- or post-humanism, with a particular focus on their relation to social and liberation movements organized around more familiar categories, such as feminism or civil rights. Key texts in this section of the course might include James Hughes’s Citizen Cyborg, Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution, Andy Clark’s Natural-Born Cyborgs, and Michael Chorost’s memoir Rebuilt, though we will also examine web sites and blogs such as the one run by the World Transhumanist Association. Popular texts might include fiction by Bruce Sterling, Samuel R. Delany, Greg Egan, John Wright, Charles Stross, Octavia Butler, and Nalo Hopkinson; films like Strange Days, The Matrix, Robot Stories, or Final Cut; and graphic novels like Transmetropolitan or Swamp Thing.
Assignments for the course are likely to include either two shorter papers or one longer one, as well as some kind of oral presentation.