Contemporary Political Thought

Contemporary Political Thought.
Required for all MA Aesthetics & Politics
students. Other graduate students by permission
of instructor only, space permitting.

The premise for this course is: what would Herbert
Marcuse teach? The first dean of Critical Studies
Maurice Stein was an admirer of the radical
philosopher of the New Left, in particular his
"Essay on Liberation." Together with Larry Miller,
Stein had cooked up a utopian "Blueprint for
Counter Education" for CalArts that combined the
charged political context of the Vietnam War with
the radical do-it-yourself resources of the New
Left and a pedagogy of radical participation. But
in attempting to hire Marcuse, Stein not only
failed but was fired.

This course picks up this
past-that-could-have-been. It mines the radical
politics of the present for theoretical concepts
that unsettle, erupt, and transgress. Four units
reiterate the same three themes through different
prefixes: in- (institutions, intersections,
insurrections), a- (abolition, anarchism,
anti-capitalism), trans- (transgender,
transgression, transformation), and de-
(decolonization, destitution, disappearance). Key
figures include Marcuse's famous student Angela
Davis and other theorists of Black Study, Susan
Stryker and other major thinkers in gender and
sexuality, and topical theorizations of ongoing
political uprisings.

Along the way, students will develop techniques of
reading, writing, and presenting at a graduate
level inspired by the experimental forms proposed
for Stein's alternative CalArts.