Chapter 1: Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire , from Gender Trouble

Conclusion: From Paradoy to Politics, from Gender Trouble

Discussion April 5th @ 5pm

5pm

Texts by Roland Barthes:

“Wrestling” from Mythologies

“Striptease” from Mythologies

“Rhetoric of the Image” from Image Music Text

“Third Meaning” from Image Music Text

Readings for

Thursday, March 7, 2013
5:30 pm

@ The Art School in the Art School: 1003 E. Fayette St., #8

C. S. Peirce_Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs

Roman Jakobson_Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances

Catherine Lord, Harmony Hammond, Ulrike Müller, Martha Wilson, Aruna D’Souza

from the Feminist Art Project: http://feministartproject.rutgers.edu

The Artist as Archivist
Chair: Aruna D’Souza, Independent Scholar
Panelists: Harmony Hammond, artist, writer, and independent curator; Catherine Lord, Professor of Studio Art, University of California, Irvine; Ulrike Müller, artist; and Martha Wilson, artist and Founding Director, Franklin Furnace.
This panel will address the question of artist’s archives — archives of artistic work, archives created by artists of work that otherwise would be lost to time, archives as art. While the archive has long had an important place in feminist art practice,  representing a crucial artistic strategy to deal with the exclusion of women artists from the museum since the early 1970s by creating and occupying alternative spaces, and while they have been often the richest site of feminist work within such institutions, we will pose the question of how these archives operate – both as a literal space and as a conceptual resistance – in relation to the museum, to artistic practice, and to personal narrative.

5pm

@ The Art School in the Art School: 1003 E. Fayette St., #8

Reading: Pt1-2Saussure-Ferdinand-Course-General-Linguistics

Full text: http://archive.org/details/courseingenerall00saus

quick background: Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Marx_The_German_Ideology

Marx_the_festishism_of_commodities

Jameson – Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Thursday, November 1
6pm

@ The Art School in the Art School
10003 E. Fayette Street (corner S. Crouse) Apt 8
(this is the Spark Building, we’re on the third floor. Enter through back door)

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Joanna’s slideshow about this text:

Notes on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Discussed on October 19

read here: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm

Joanna’s short notes:

Althusser begins within classical Marxist theory (base-superstructure) of the reproduction of relations of production and
the Marxist theory of the State, and moves from this mostly “descriptive theory” into his thesis on ideology and ideological state apparatuses. Within classical Marxism, reproduction of relations or production produce competent workers, with a diversity needed for production.

Althusser then distinguishes between Repressive State Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatuses. RSAs come from a singular source, they are the product of the State, they are public, and exert force through violence. ISAs are plural, they exist within the private domain. Althusser defines ideology, the function of Ideological State Apparatuses, and then the function of ideology in constituting the subject.

To paraphrase: Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. Ideology has no history, it is eternal, like the unconscious. ISAs are secured by ruling ideology, each contribute to a single result in the way proper to it. Ideology has a material existence, it always exists in practice. From a bourgeois conception of the subject,
where one chooses ones actions according to beliefs, ideas disappear: for the subject, there is no practice except by ideology, no ideology except by and for the subject. From here, Althusser can move into the concept of interpellation.

Ideology functions to constitute concrete individuals as subjects. The obviousness of the category of the subject is an ideological recognition. We are always already subjects, through ideological recognition. Ideology hails, or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete Subjects. This recognition, or rather, interpellation, is a mirror-structure. Ideology is centered on the Absolute Subject, from which each Subject can contemplate its own image. So, this mirror-structure ensures: I) the interpolation of , individuals’ as subjects; 2) the subjection to the Subject; 3) mutual recognition of subjects ad Subject; 4) the absolute guarantee that everything is really so. We are interpellated as a free subject in order to submit freely to subjection.

A better summary:

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/marxism/modules/althusserideology.html

LISTEN

(btw, it was cold and ukes seem to go out of tune fast)