Module description
...[M]an is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements [that invented man] were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble...then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
In these famous concluding lines from The Order of Things (1966), Michel Foucault imagines an reversal of the process he has traced across the volume: if the post-Classical arrangements of knowledge brought the figure of 'man' into being, he suggests, then an incipient shift in these arrangements might well cause this figure-and all of its seemingly self-evident centrality-to crumble away to nothing as well. Because the distinction between 'man' and his others served to justify so much conceptual and material violence, Foucault and other key postwar thinkers strove to denaturalise the epistemic arrangements that ensured man was 'overrepresented as the human', to borrow Sylvia Wynter's phrase. Although the fifty years since Foucault's statement have indeed shifted the boundaries of the human in ways closely related to changes in our 'knowledge arrangements', it is not clear that these alterations have had the salutary effects for which Foucault appears to hope. From biocapitalism to the carceral state, from the rendering of animal capital to the ongoing effects of settler-colonialism, the epistemic and material transformations associated with post-Fordist global capital have reconfigured the relation between the human and the inhuman even as the distinction between the two has arguably intensified as a means for organising domination and dispossession. This module invites students to consider how the figures of the human, the nonhuman, and the inhuman function and shift in relation to linked historical structures of capital accumulation, race, gender, and technoscience.
Assessment details
4000 word essay (100%)
Educational aims & objectives
To provide students with an understanding of a range of theoretical approaches to the human as a concept; to enable them to assess the extent to which these approaches offer a sufficient framework for comprehending depictions of the epistemic and material violence of post-Fordist capital; to develop their capacity to offer a sustained theoretical investigation of these issues suitable for development in a final original essay on a subtopic of their own devising.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the seminar students will have:
- Knowledge of the range and characteristics of various prominent contemporary theorisations of the human
- Understanding of the various ways these theories relate to one another and their contemporaneous intellectual and political context
- A deep knowledge of and ability to identify in new contexts the way these theoretical perspectives shape contemporary political and aesthetic texts concerned with the human.
- The capacity to analyse these theoretical conversations in a way is rigorous, informed, and productive of new insights.
Teaching pattern
One two hour seminar weekly