York University Faculty of
Environmental Studies
C O U R S E S Y L L A B U S
Winter Term 1999
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
"Postmodernism
is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature
is gone for good."
- Fredric Jameson
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
BRIEF GENERAL
DESCRIPTION
This course will be
an advanced seminar acquainting students with the proliferating literatures
that fall under the rubric of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and the
modernity/postmodernity debate, and exploring how these literatures impact on,
and may be seen as grounded in, environmental concerns broadly defined. The
goal is to develop an understanding of how postmodernity (as a condition) and
postmodernism and poststructuralism (as analytic and political approaches)
affect and are affected by environmental studies.
COURSE DIRECTOR Adrian Ivakhiv
Office : 337 Lumbers Bldg.
Office hrs : t.b.a.
Email : ai@yorku.ca
COURSE WEB SITE
www.yorku.ca/faculty/academic/ai/6147.htm
PREREQUISITES
& LIMITATIONS
This course is NOT
recommended for students with little or no previous background in social or
cultural theory. For that reason, ENVS 5147 Nature and Environment in
Western Thought (or or its predecessor, ENVS5180 Interdisciplinary Social
Analysis) is a prerequisite. ENVS 5103 Nature and Society is also
recommended. Course enrolment is limited to 20 students.
RELATION TO
OTHER COURSES
This course extends
the directions of ENVS 5103 Nature and Society and ENVS 5147 Nature
and Environment in Western Thought (previously ENVS 5180 Interdisciplinary
Social Analysis), and also particularly complements ENVS 6111 Cultural
and Historical Perspectives of Nature, ENVS 6149 Culture and the Environment,
and ENVS 7175 Global Environmental Politics.
OBJECTIVES
This course has two
main objectives:
(1) to deepen our
understanding of the present era and of the 'environmental crisis' by examining
the cultural, sociopolitical, technological and ecological dimensions of the
condition that has been controversially labelled 'postmodernity'; and
(2) to examine
selected critical responses to these developments, as these have been
articulated in postmodernist, poststructuralist and (to some extent) postcolonial
critical theory, assessing their usefulness and applicability for environmental
thought and practice.
A third and
supplementary objective will be to advance and refine our abilities to theorize
and analyze the cultural world through critical engagement with a range of
theoretical materials and cultural documents. The course will therefore be an
intensive seminar demanding extensive reading and week-to-week preparation and
participation.
DETAILED
DESCRIPTION AND OUTLINE
Understanding the
present is never an easy task, but this is especially so in times and places
where the 'ground' seems to be 'shifting under our very feet.' Some of the
profound shifts of the past few decades include transformations in:
Postmodernity or postmodernization
are two of the terms that have been suggested to characterize these various
shifts. Others--all different in their emphases and inflections--include 'late'
or 'advanced modernity,' 'reflexive modernity' (Beck, Giddens), 'transnational
capitalism,' 'fast' or 'disorganized capitalism' (Offe, Lash and Urry),
'society of the spectacle' (Debord), 'post-Fordism,' the 'information age'
(Castells), and (in a different register) 'postcoloniality.'
This course will
focus primarily on the cultural, technological, and ecological
dimensions of these changes. In the first four weeks of the course we
will focus on the broad questions: How can we best characterize our present
era? In what ways has 'modernity' been replaced by a condition that can be
called 'postmodernity', and what does it mean to say this? We will examine
competing positions in the modernity/postmodernity debate, including those
which analyze the 'postmodern condition' (1) as a logical continuation of
modernity (and/or capitalism), (2) as a radical rupture with modernity, and (3)
as a heterogeneous process and contested terrain, uneven in its effects and
divergent in its implications for politics, culture, nature, and the experience
of everyday life.
In the remainder of
the course we will examine the impact of the processes associated with 'postmodernization'
on actual environments--including natural and 'wild' ecosystems, built
environments, cultural and media environments--and on changing understandings
of 'nature,' 'life,' 'the environment,' and the possibility of environmental
action and practice. Weeks 5 through 7 will focus on the effects of
communication and information technologies in the 'society of the spectacle'
and the 'simulacrum' (drawing on the theories of Baudrillard and others) and
their implications for the understanding of nature (as image and simulation,
virtuality and cybernetic system). Weeks 8 through 11 will explore
changing theoretical understandings of nature and the nature/society
relationship, and will focus on specific critical (poststructuralist)
strategies for making sense of and responding to the postmodern situation,
including the 'cyborg politics' of Donna Haraway and the discourse-analytical
'genealogies' of Michel Foucault. The final two weeks will be devoted to topics
selected by students and to presentations of 'in progress' final paper work.
COURSE READINGS
The reading load
for the course will be relatively heavy (both in quantity and in depth of
theoretical engagement), and the bulk of the course work will involve
responding to, discussing, and analyzing the implications of the ideas
expressed therein. Readings for the course will include some of the by now
'canonical' texts of the postmodern discourse, such as theoretical readings by
Baudrillard, Jameson, Haraway, and literary readings by Gibson and Delillo; texts
that reflect some of the diversity of ways in which the
postmodernism/postmodernity thesis has been taken up by feminists, postcolonial
(and anti-colonial) critics, and others; and applications of postmodern,
poststructuralist and related forms of theory to the environmental problematic
(by such authors as Beck, Latour, Escobar, Luke, Haraway, and others). Most
required readings will be in a course reading kit; supplementary readings (if
articles) will be made available on reserve in the FES Resource Center.
REQUIRED READING
1. Course Reading
Kit
2. Willliam Gibson,
Neuromancer.
RECOMMENDED
BACKGROUND REFERENCES
M. Zimmerman, Contesting
Earth's Future: Radical Ecology & Postmodernity (U. California, 1994).
J. McGuigan, Modernity
and Postmodern Culture (Open University Press, 1999).
S. Sim, ed., Routledge
(Icon) Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Culture (Routledge 1999/Icon 1998)
B. Braun and N.
Castree, eds., Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millenium (Routledge,
1998).
M. Oelschlaeger,
ed., Postmodern Environmental Ethics (SUNY Press, 1995).
T. Jagtenberg and
D. McKie, Eco-Impacts and the Greening of Postmodernity (Sage, 1997).
G. Robertson, M.
Mash, et al., eds., FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture (Routledge,
1996).
REQUIREMENTS AND
EXPECTATIONS
Enrollment in the
course is normally for 2 Course Units. The course will include extensive
reading (averaging close to 100 pages a week), weekly preparation of brief
commentaries and 'discussion papers' on the readings, informed participation in
class activities, one in-class presentation on an author or reading, and a
final paper (to be presented in unfinished form in one of the final two classes
of the course).
Evaluation of
students will be based on the following general breakdown, subject to individual
variations (to be negotiated with the course instructor and confirmed in a
written 'work contract' by the fifth week of the course):
CLASSROOM FORMAT
Much of our
classroom work will be structured around the model of a panel of speakers and
discussants: i.e., each week's readings will be read as if they were
talks presented by the authors in class, and students will be expected to
prepare and present discussion questions and critical commentaries which link
the readings with course themes.
Beginning in the
fourth or fifth week of the course, individual and/or group presenters will be
responsible for preparing a brief introduction to a selected author and
reading. This will involve articulating the context, including the biographical
and the theoretical/intellectual background of the article (who is the
author? what audience are/were they addressing in this article? what broader discussion
were they engaging in?). This should take up no more than about five minutes of
class time. The presenter(s) should also prepare a class exercise, which may
involve media or found materials, intended to allow the class to elaborate our
understanding of the readings and ideas. This exercise should normally not take
more than 10-15 minutes of class time (per presenter), though this can be
negotiated with the course director under special circumstances. In addition,
these students will be given the 'speaker's priviledge' to respond to other
students' prepared questions and comments (a task the instructor will normally
take on as well).
The final two
classes of the course will be devoted to in-class presentations by all students
of their final papers as works-in-progress (but significantly advanced towards
completion). It is expected that the final papers, due two weeks after the
final class, will incorporate the critical comments and insights gained during
the in-class presentation of the material.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
SCHEDULE of
READINGS AND TOPICS
WEEK 1
INTRODUCTION
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WEEK 2
POSTMODERNITY:
MAPPINGS
1. Charles Lemert,
'Postmodernism is not what you think,' in Postmodernism is Not What You
Think, (Blackwell, 1997), 15-53.
2. David Morley,
'Postmodernism: the rough guide,' in J. Curran, D. Morley, V. Walderkine, Cultural
Studies and Communications (Arnold, 1996), 50-64.
3. Jane Flax, 'The
end of innocence,' in J. Butler and J. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the
Political (Routledge, 1992), 445-60.
4. Gianni Vattimo,
'The postmodern: a transparent society,' in The Transparent Society
(Johns Hopkins U.P., 1992), 1-11.
5. Cornel West,
'The new cultural politics of difference,' in R. Ferguson, et al., eds., Out
There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (MIT Press/New Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1990), 19-36.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
WEEK 3
POSTMODERN
CULTURE
1. Fredric Jameson,
'Introduction' and 'Postmodernism: or, the cultural logic of late capitalism,' Postmodernism:
Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Verso, 1991), ix-xxii, 1-54.
2. Rosalyn
Deutsche, 'Boys town' (excerpt), Society and Space 9 (1991), 13-30.
3. Susan Bordo,
'"Material girl": the effacements of postmodern culture,' Unbearable
Weight (Univ. of California Press, 1993).
Supplementary
reading
David Harvey, ch.
3, 17 and 18 in The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1989).
____________________________________________________________________________________________
WEEK 4
POSTMODERN
SPACE: GLOBAL FLOWS AND DETERRITORIALIZATION
1. Doreen Massey,
'A place called home?' and 'A global sense of place,' Space, Place and
Gender (U. of Minnesota Press, 1994), 146-56.
2. Arjun Appadurai,
'Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy,' Modernity at
Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (U. of Minnesota Press, 1996),
27-47.
3. Jim McGuigan,
'The information age,' Modernity and Postmodern Culture (Open University
Press, 1999), 104-21.
4. Smadar Lavie and
Ted Swedenburg, Introduction to Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of
Identity (London: Duke U. Press, 1996), 1-23.
Supplementary
reading
Doug Kellner,
'Globalization and the postmodern turn.'
Akhil Gupta and
James Ferguson, "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of
Difference," Cultural Anthropology 9:1, 6-20.
Edward Soja, Postmodern
Geographies (Verso, 1989) and Thirdspace (Blackwell, 1996).
David Harvey, The
Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1989).
Michael Keith and
Steve Pile, eds., Place and the Politics of Identity (Routledge, 1993).
Neil Smith,
'Homeless/global,' in Jon Bird, et al., Mapping the Futures (Routledge,
1991).
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WEEK 5
SIMULACRAL
SOCIETY
1. Jean
Baudrillard, 'The precession of simulacra' and 'The order of simulacra'
(excerpts), Selected Writings, 166-82, 135-47.
2. Beth Seaton,
'Affected by artifice: the populist resentments of Reality TV,' Border/Lines
38/39, 43-7.
3. Don Delillo,
'The Airborne Toxic Event,' from White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1986),
109-63.
4. Steven Best,
'The commodification of reality and the reality of commodification:
Baudrillard, Debord, and postmodern theory.' In Kellner, ed., Baudrillard: A
Critical Reader (Blackwell, 1994).
Video: The Ad and the Ego
or Videodrome.
Supplementary
reading
Jean Baudrillard, The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Indiana Univ. Press, 1995).
Mackenzie Wark, Virtual
Geography: Living With Global Media Events (Indiana Univ. Press, 1994).
Kevin Robins, Into
the Image: Culture and Politics in the Field of Vision (Routledge, 1996).
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WEEK 6
SIMULACRAL
NATURE
1. Andrew Ross,
'The ecology of images.' The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt
to Society (Verso, 1994), 159-201.
2. Nigel Clark,
'Panic ecology: nature in the age of superconductivity,' Theory Culture
& Society 14(1): 77-96, 1997.
3. Jean
Baudrillard, 'Maleficent ecology.' The Illusion of the End (Stanford
U.P., 1994), 78-88.
4. Dean MacCannell,
'Nature incorporated.' Empty Meeting Grounds (Routledge, 1992), 114-7.
5. Mackenzie Wark,
'Third nature,' Cultural Studies 8:1 (1994).
Supplementary
reading
Denis Cosgrove,
'Contested global visions: one-world, whole-earth, and the Apollo space
photographs,' Annals of the Assocition of American Geographers 84 (2),
1994, 270-94.
Jennifer Price,
'Looking for nature at the mall,' in W. Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground
(Norton, 1996).
Jennifer Light,
'The changing nature of nature,' Ecumene 4: 2 (1997).
Jody Berland,
'Mapping Space: Imaging Technologies and the Planetary Body,' in Aronowitz,
ed., Technoscience and Cyberculture (Routledge, 1996).
____________________________________________________________________________________________
WEEK 7
CYBERCULTURE AND
VIRTUAL NATURE
1. William Gibson, Neuromancer
(Ace, 1984).
Recommended
reading
2. Katherine
Hayles, 'Virtual bodies and flickering signifiers,' in How We Became
Posthuman (U. of Chicago Press, 1999); available at
http://englishwww.humnet.ucla.edu/Individuals/ Hayles/Flick.html.
Supplementary
reading
Doug Kellner,
'Mapping the present from the future: from Baudrillard to cyberpunk,' in Media
Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and
Postmodern (Routledge, 1995).
Larry McCaffery,
ed., Storming the Reality Studio (Duke U. P., 1991).
Mark Poster,
'Postmodern virtualities,' in Robertson, Mash, et al., FutureNatural:
Nature, Science, Culture (Routledge, 1996).
Tiziana Terranova,
'Posthuman unbounded: artificial evolution and high-tech subcultures,' in FutureNatural.
Vivianne Sobchack,
'New Age mutant Ninja hackers: reading Mondo 2000,' in M. Dery, ed., Flame
Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke U. P., 1994).
Scott Bukatman, Terminal
Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-modern Science Fiction (Duke, 1993).
Mark Dery, Escape
Velocity: Cybercultuyre at the End of the Century (Hodder and Stoughton,
1996).
Arthur Kroker,
'Virtual Capitalism' in S. Aronowitz, ed., Technoscience and Cyberculture (Routledge,
1996).
____________________________________________________________________________________________
WEEK 8
THEORIZING
HYBRID NATURE
1. Kate Soper,
'Nature/"nature".' FutureNatural. 22-34.
2. Bruno Latour,
'Crisis' and 'Constitution' 2.1 and 2.8, We Have Never Been Modern, pp.
1-12, 13-5, 29-32.
3. Arturo Escobar,
'After nature: steps to an antiessentialist political ecology,' Current
Anthropology 40 (1), 1999, 1-20.
4. Ulrich Beck,
'World risk society as cosmopolitan society? Ecological questions in a
framework of manufactured uncertainties,' Theory, Culture & Society
13 (4), 1996, 1-32.
Supplementary
reading
A. Escobar, 'Whose
knowledge, whose nature?' in Journal of Political Ecology 5 (1998):
53-82. Available electronically on Expanded Academic ASAP database (Scott
Library web page).
A. Escobar,
'Constructing nature: elements for a poststructural political ecology.' Peet
and Watts, eds., Liberation Ecologies (Routledge, 1996), 46-68.
Scott Lash and John
Urry, 'Nature and the environment,' Economies of Signs and Space,
292-305.
Pramod Parajuli,
'Beyond capitalized nature: ecological ethnicity as an arena of conflict in the
regime of globalization.' Ecumene 5 (2), 1998, 186-213.
Cronon, William,
ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (W.W. Norton & Co.,
1995).
Phil Macnaghten and
John Urry, Contested Natures (Sage, 1998).
Scott Lash,
Bronislaw Szerszynski and Brian Wynne, eds. Risk, Environment and Modernity:
Towards a New Ecology (Sage, 1996).
____________________________________________________________________________________________
WEEK 9
HARAWAY'S CYBORG
POLITICS
1. Donna Haraway,
'A cyborg manifesto.' Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(Routledge, 1991), 149-81.
2. Donna Haraway,
'The promises of monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others,'
in Grossberg, et al., Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1992), 295-337.
Video: Donna Haraway Reads the
National Geographies of Primates
Supplementary
reading
Michael Zimmerman,
'Chaos theory, ecological sensibility, cyborgism,' ch. 8 in Contesting
Earth's Future (Univ. of California Press, 1994).
'Nature, politics,
and possibilities: a debate and discussion with David Harvey and Donna
Haraway," Social Space 1995'.
Timothy Luke,
'Liberal society and cyborg subjectivity: The politics of environments, bodies,
and nature,' Alternatives 21 (1996), 1-30.
Jane Bennett,
'Primate visions and alter-tales,' in J. Bennett and W. Chaloupka (eds.), In
the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment (Univ. of
Minnesota Press, 1993), 250-65.
Joseba Gabilondo,
'Postcolonial cyborgs,' in C. H. Gray, ed., The Cyborg Handbook
(Routledge, 1995), 423-32.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
WEEK 10
FOUCAULT and the
CRITIQUE of 'ENVIRONMENTALITY'
1. Mark Poster,
'Databases as discourse, or electronic interpellations,' in Heelas, Lash and
Morris, eds., Detraditionalization (Blackwell, 1996), 277-91.
2. Timothy W. Luke,
'On environmentality: geo-power and eco-knowledge in the discourses of
contemporary environmentalism,' Cultural Critique, Fall 1995, 57-81.
3. Paul Rutherford,
'The entry of life into history,' E. Darier, ed., Discourses of the
Environment (Blackwell, 1999), 37-60.
4. Bruce
Willems-Braun, 'Buried epistemologies,' Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 87: 1 (March 1997).
Video: The End of Violence
(dir: Wim Wenders).
Supplementary
reading
Michel Foucault,
'Two lectures,' Power/Knowledge (Pantheon, 1981).
Michel Foucault, The
History of Sexuality: Vol. 1 (Vintage Books, 1978).
Eric Darier, ed., Discourses
of the Environment (Blackwell, 1999).
Thomas Birch, 'The
incarceration of wildness: wilderness areas as prisons,' in Oelschlaeger, ed., Postmodern
Environmental Ethics (SUNY Press, 1995).
T. W. Luke,
'Worldwatching at the Limits of Growth' and 'Environmental Emulations:
Terraforming Technologies and the Tourist Trade at Biosphere 2,' in Ecocritique:
Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture. (U. of Minnesota
Press, 1997).
T. W. Luke, Capitalism,
Democracy, and Ecology: Departing from Marx (U. of Illinois Press, 1999.
Richard Peet,
'Social theory, postmodernism, and the critique of development.' G. Benko and
U. Strohmayer, eds. Space and Social Theory (Blackwell, 1997), 72-85.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
WEEK 11
POSTMODERN
SUBJECTIVITY, ETHICS, & ECOPOLITICS
1. Homi Bhabha,
'The other question,' The Location of Culture (1994).
2. Cate Sandilands,
'From natural identity to radical democracy,' Environmental Ethics 17
(Spring 1995), 75-91.
3. Eric Darier,
'Foucault against environmental ethics,' in Darier, ed., Discourses of the
Environment, 217-31.
4. Felix Guattari,
'The three ecologies,' New Formations 8, 131-47.
Supplementary
readings
John Johnston,
'Ideology, representation, schizophrenia: toward a theory of the postmodern
subject,' in G. Shapiro, ed., After the Future.
Peter van Wyck, Primitives
in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject (SUNY, 1997).
Cate Sandilands, The
Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Univ. of
Minnesota Press, 1999).
Gustavo Estera and
Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures
(Zed, 1998).
Barri Cohen,
'Technological colonialism and the politics of water,' Cultural Studies
8: 1 (1994).
Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987).
Felix Guattari,
'Regimes, pathways, subjects,' in J. Crary and S. Kwinter, eds., Incorporations
(Zone, 1992).
Verena A. Conley, Ecopolitics:
The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (Routledge, 1996).
____________________________________________________________________________________________
WEEK 12
STUDENT
PRESENTATIONS
____________________________________________________________________________________________
WEEK 13
STUDENT
PRESENTATIONS
____________________________________________________________________________________________
NOTE: The final two
weeks of the course will be devoted to student presentations of final papers as
works-in-progress. Specific paper topics will be determined in advance; but
normally the final paper will draw on a specific course theme or themes and
will explore in depth at least one author or book not read in the class (to be
determined in consultation with course director). Where appropriate, it will be
the responsibility of the student to find a brief selection to be shared with
the rest of the class at least one week prior to the presentation.