MST+A&H5606

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Communication Theory and Social Thought

Teachers College • Columbia University
MST+A&H5606 Navigator
Class Meetings Fall 2008 & Spring 2009:
Wednesdays, 3:00 to 4:40 p.m.
308 Lewisohn Hall
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9/3 • 1
9/10 • 2
9/17 • 3
9/24 • 4
10/1 • 5
10/8 • 6
10/15 • 7
10/22 • 8
10/29 • 9
11/5 • 10
11/12 • 11
11/19 • 12
12/3 • 13
12/10 • 14
12/17 • 15
1/21 • 16
1/28 • 17
2/4 • 18
2/11 • 19
2/18 • 20
2/25 • 21
3/4 • 22
3/11 • 23
3/25 • 24
4/1 • 25
4/8 • 26
4/15 • 27
4/22 • 128
4/29 • 129
5/6 • 130

Introductory
Marx & Engels, 1844-1888
Emile Durkheim, 1893 & 95
Ferdinand Tönnies, 1887
Max Weber, 1905
Georg Simmel, 1900, 1907
Thorstein Veblen 1904
W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903
John Dewey, 1927
G. H. Mead, 1908/1930
Karl Mannheim, 1929
Siegfried Kracauer, 1930
Antonio Gramsci, 1930+/-
Walter Benjamin, 1935+/-
Erich Fromm, 1942
Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944
Joseph Schumpeter, 1947
Karl Polanyi, 1944, 1957
David Riesman, 1950
C. Wright Mills, 1956
Roland Barthes, 1957
John K. Galbraith, 1958
Hannah Arendt, 1958
Jürgen Habermas, 1962
Herbert Marcuse, 1964
Michel Foucault, 1969
Paulo Freire, 1970
Pierre Bourdieu, 1970
Fredric Jameson, 1984
MSTU5606-wrap-up

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Robbie McClintock, Instructor
- Office hours @ 334G Horace Mann, Tuesdays 5:00-6:30 p.m. or by appointment
  (Please email me to schedule a specific time slot)
Frank Moretti, Instructor
- Office hours @ 603 Lewisohn Hall, by appointment (On leave for the Autumn semester)

Fall 2008 and Spring 2009:
A&H5606/A&H5607 • MSTU5606/MSTU5607

Please note: Students in Communication, Computing and Technology must register through the MSTU number and students in Arts & Humanities must register through the A&H number. Students in other programs can use either registration number, usually MSTU5606.

Readings in Communication theory and social thought is a year-long course, sampling the work of key 20th-century social thinkers. Each week during the academic year, we will read and discuss work by an important historical contributor to theories of communication and social life. A basic schedule for the year is in the MST+A&H5606 Navigator to the right of your screen. The dates (9/3 • 1, 9/10 • 2, etc.) link to a more detailed schedule, indicating readings and StudyPlace resources that we will add to and draw on. Here are some preliminary reflections on the course.

Teachers, academics, artists, journalists, public leaders, intellectuals — educators all — aggregate their work into an encompassing formative ethos, which feeds back upon their efforts, powerfully conditioning them. This formative ethos, itself massively moving, ever interacting with emergent events, filled with cross-currents and eddies, works on each in unique, determinate ways, setting limits on potentialities, defining a complex ecology of feasible actions. As participants in this formative ethos, we struggle to build up our capacity to understand and anticipate the changing character of it, to grasp how it affects historical action, personal and public, perhaps even to shape it by an increment towards what we deem to be the better, or away from what we fear to be the worse. As participants in the formative ethos, we seek to anticipate what knowledge, skills, and values will prove to be of most worth, both for us and for others, as the influence of events, foreseen and unforeseen, reverberates through the formative ethos of our time. We can strengthen our capacity for such anticipation by attending to how our predecessors diagnosed the challenge of self-determination within the encompassing formative ethos that they faced. In this course, we study examples of such efforts in twentieth-century Western experience.

A basic question drives our inquiry. How does education, understood as an historical component of all human experience, salient in the lives of every person and in the fate of every group, shape human interaction and condition the quality of life? This is one of the great pedagogical problems, prior to all professional educative efforts. To come to grips with it, we need to look, not at the norms and actualities of formal education, but at efforts to explain and interpret the ways in which humans give themselves determinate character and capacities in the course of their historical interactions. We can strengthen our capacities for such an inquiry by contending with the ideas about communication and social action developed by leading thinkers since the late 19th century. In doing so, we will view them engaged primarily in concept formation, Begriffsbildung in German — the fashioning of ideas with which to grasp the structure and meaning of human experience. Concepts so formed become formative in their turn, allowing people to try to draw new potentialities from the flux of their experience. In reading through our agenda of weekly works, we have the task of developing a clear and thoughtful inventory of the key concepts each writer worked to form. As a tangible outcome of our work, we should develop conceptual glossaries for each writer that we read as collaborative contributions about each on StudyPlace.

Here are a few tips about how we can best confront each reading. Each week, we should concentrate on a distinctive text, one that requires sustained, close reading. In class meetings, we should seek primarily to engage through conversation directly with the text in question, seeking to ground what we have to say by reference to particular words and passages in the text we have in common. We should not expect the seminar to impart a body of established knowledge that about some historical synthesis of social thought in the 20th century that we deem authoritative. An appreciation of common themes and concerns should emerge, unique for each participant, but we should not try to read each text as an example of some given context, ticking off which themes and concerns in the context the work reflected, as if the purpose animating it had merely been to illustrate some pre-existent givens. We strengthen our capacities to construe the context of our lives by seeking to appreciate through the close reading of substantial works how prior authors construed the contexts of their own lives.

In addition, we should not presume that our selection of texts merits attention because it forms an authoritative canon, an optimal foundation for sound theorizing about communications and society in the present. We select thinkers whose work achieved a challenging intellectual richness, forming concepts that were both deep and broad in relevance to historical experience. We build our own capacity to form powerful concepts, to engage in Begriffsbildung, by exercising our capacity to engage such work by others. We simply want to ask what sort of conceptual resources we find in each text, taking it as an autonomous work that we seek to experience in its integrity, as best we can under the constraints. We, merely human, need to contend with the work as peers of it, for it is the fruit of the merely human. What can we learn from the work? What can we do with the concepts formed in it and conveys through it? Do these help us make sense of our experience of our world? What do we find surprising in them? Disturbing? Confusing? Inspiring? These are our questions.

As the texts we read are not authoritative, our reading of them must be tentative and initial. One week permits only a too-brief encounter. An expansive intellect samples many works and much experience, returning recurrently with sustained attention to a chosen few of them. Those constitute a working canon for each of us, deriving its authority from each of us for each of us. Here we should work more quickly, seriously sampling somepossibilities. For what purpose would I include this work and others by this writer among those to which I think in future I might return? Of what potentials in my own educational and intellectual options do I find this work exemplary? What cautionary tales may it offer? To what degree does the work and the concepts it offers support my interior discourse about the meaning of my world and my potential for action within it? All these, too, are among the our many questions.

MST+A&H5606

From Studyplace

Meetings

1 • 9/3: Introductory

2 • 9/10: Marx & Engels, 1844-1888

3 • 9/17: Emile Durkheim, 1893 & 95

4 • 9/24: Ferdinand Tönnies, 1887

5 • 10/1: Max Weber, 1905

6 • 10/8: Georg Simmel, 1900, 1907

7 • 10/15: Thorstein Veblen 1904

8 • 10/22: W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903

9 • 10/29: John Dewey, 1927

10 • 11/5: G. H. Mead, 1908/1930

11 • 11/12: Karl Mannheim, 1929

12 • 11/19: Siegfried Kracauer, 1930

13 • 12/3: Antonio Gramsci, 1930+/-

14 • 12/10: Walter Benjamin, 1935+/-

15 • 12/17: Erich Fromm, 1942

16 • 1/21: Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944

17 • 1/28: Joseph Schumpeter, 1947

18 • 2/4: Karl Polanyi, 1944, 1957

19 • 2/11: David Riesman, 1950

20 • 2/18: C. Wright Mills, 1956

21 • 2/25: Roland Barthes, 1957

22 • 3/4: John K. Galbraith, 1958

23 • 3/11: Hannah Arendt, 1958

24 • 3/25: Jürgen Habermas, 1962

25 • 4/1: Herbert Marcuse, 1964

26 • 4/8: Michel Foucault, 1969

27 • 4/15: Paulo Freire, 1970

28 • 4/22: Pierre Bourdieu, 1970

29 • 4/29: Fredric Jameson, 1984

30 • 5/6: MSTU5606-wrap-up

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