Mediating the Bio-Political Body
Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
Allen Feldman
Associate Professor
Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
New York University
239 Greene Street
New York, NY 10003
Conventional media theory frequently dematerializes communication. Communication is
reduced to a transparent cognitive immediate event, resulting in the marginalization or
erasure of the tangible means, support, substratum, body, casing, the recto verso (backing) or
intervening substances, that materially convey and circulate social knowledge, cultural codes,
memory, norms and imagery in a socio-political field
In contrast, the seminar seeks to relocate media theory in the social history and material
cultures of embodiment/disembodiment and to treat the body as media and media as
embodied. We will explore the racialized, colonized, gendered, medicalized,
technologized,disabled and terrorized body as the site for envisioning and archiving biopolitical communication and ex-communication. The political encoding of bodies is a
crucial, yet under-analyzed, modality of modern political communication whiich encompass
gross violations of human rights, racial stigma, ethnic conflict, gender objectification, and
political incarceration in refugee and concentration camps. The practices of political
communication/ex-communication construct terrains of the sensible and the insensible and
divide the social world into the visible and invisible, the audible and the inaudible. The
course proposes that the body as a vehicle of intersubjective political communication and
technological prosthetics can be conceptualized as a state of being-in-a-medium, and thus
within a political philosophy of means, gesture, and communicability.
Seminar Requirements and Grading:
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Consistent attendance and participation in class discussion: 25%
Midterm Final Paper proposal: 25%
End Term Final Essay /Exam 2 Questions 50%
Course Resource Materials:
Course Documents Section Blackboard Course Site.
Learning Outcomes:
Students who successfully complete the course will be able to demonstrate:
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advanced understanding of research methodologies, vocabularies and comparative
analyses appropriate to doctoral level work in Philosophy of Media, Visual and
Cultural Studies and Critical Theory
ability to write a critical literature review;
knowledge of a range of specific critical vocabularies, debates and concerns focused
on, body theory, critical theory and postcolonial theory.
Syllabus
Week One: Introduction: The Mediality of the Body
Bernadette Wegestein, 2006 Making Room for the Body. In Getting Under the Skin: Body and
Media Theory, Cambridge, MIT Press.
Margaret Lock, 1993 Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily
Practice and Knowledge. Annual; Review of Anthropology, Vol. 22 pp 133-155.
Jacques Derrida, 2005 Paper or Me. In Paper Machine, Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Maria Fernandez 1999 Postcolonial Media Theory Art Journal Vol. 58 No.3 pp. 58-71.
Recommended Reading:
Jean Pierre Vernant 1988 Dim Body, Dazzing Body. In Fragments for a History of the Human
Body, New York: Zone Books.
Paul Connerton, 1989 Bodily Practices. In How Societies Remember, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Part One Inscriptive Technologies
Week Two: The Somatics of Truth
Paige Dubois, 1991 Torture, The Slave’s Truth Torture And Writing. In Torture And Truth
New York, London, Routledge.
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887 “Second Essay, Guilt, Bad Conscious and Related Matters,
Genealogy of Morals “ http:www..mala.bc.ca/-johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogy2.htm
Elaine Scarry, 1985 The Structure of Torture, the Conversion of Pain into the Fiction of
Power. In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press.
Week Three: Agency, Visibility, and Subjection
Michel Foucault, 1985 The Spectacle of the Scaffold, Docile Bodies, "Panopticism" In
Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault Vintage Books, Random House.
Gilles Delueze, 1985 Active and Reactive. In The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles Of
Interpretation Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press.
Alphonse Lingus, 1985 The Will to Power. In The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles Of
Interpretation Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press.
Recommended Reading:
Gilles Deleuze, 1992 Postscript on the Societies of Control, October, Vol. 59 Winter.
Michel Foucault, 1977 Nietzsche Genealogy and History. In Language, Memory and Counter
Practice, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
Week Four-Six: Colonial and Post Colonial Typographics of the Body
Saidiya S Hartman, 1997 "Redressing the Pained Body." In Scenes of Subjection: Terror Slavery
and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. Oxford University Press,
Allen Feldman, 1991 The Breaker’s Yard. In Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and
Political Terror in Northern Ireland, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.
Gayatri Chakavorty Spivak, 1990 Women in Difference: Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the
Bountiful,” Cultural Critique, No 14, pp 105-128.
Veit Erhlmann, 1996 The Homeland Embodied: Dance and Dress in Isicathamya. In
Nightsong, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.
Shane and Graham White. 1994 Done up in the Tastiest Manner. In Styling: African
American Expressive Culture from its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
Comaroff, John and Jean, 1987 The Madman and the Migrant, American Ethnologist, Volume
14, no 2.
Achille Mbembe, 2003 Necropolitics Public Culture 12(1), pp 11-40.
Michael Taussig, 1987 Culture Terror and the Space of Death. In Shamanism, Colonialism and
the Wildman: a Study of Terror and Healing, Chicago, the University of Chicago Press.
Allen Feldman, 2003 Strange Fruit: the South African Truth Commission and the Demonic
Economies of Violence. In Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery. edited
Bruce Kapferer:, New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books
Recommended Reading:
Pheng Cheah 1999 Spectral Nationality: the Living On of the Postcolonial Nation in
Neocolonial Globalization, Boundary 2 26.3 2225-252.
Week Seven Creaturely and Bare Life: Bio-Political Media
Georgio Agamben, 1998 Homo Sacer, Sovereign Body, and Sacred Body, The Camp as
Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford,
Stanford University Press.
Georgio Agamben 2004 Bodies Without Words: Against the Biopolitcal Tatoo, German Law
Journal Volume 5, no.2 , 167-169.
Part Two: Disembodiment As Political Excommunication
Week Eight: Dialectics of Misrecognition 1
G. F. Hegel, 1807 Independence and Dependence of Self Consciousness: Lordship and
Bondage, The Phenomenology of the Mind.
Alexandré Kojeve, 1977 Summary of the First Six Chapters pf the Phenomenology of the
Spirit. In Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures o the Phenomenology of the Spirit ed. Alan
Bloom, Cornell, Cornell University Press.
Week Nine: Dialectics of Misrecognition II
Jacques Lacan, 1977 The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I . In Ecrits.
W.W. Norton and Company.
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, 1991 The Statue Man in Lacan: the Absolute Master, Stanford
University Press.
Susan Buck-Morss, 2000 “Hegel and Haiti,”: Critical Inquiry 26, Summer 2000, pp 821-865.
Frantz Fanon, 1967 The Fact of Blackness, The Negro and Psychopathology, the Negro
and Recognition. In Black Skin, White Masks, New York, Grove Press
Teresa de Lauretis, 2002 “Difference Embodied: Reflections on Black Skin, White Masks,”
Parallax, vol.8 no.2 54-66.
Francois Verges, 1997 “Creole Skin, Black Mask:” Fanon and Disavowal, Critical Inquiry, Vol.
23 No 3, pp 578-595.
Recommended Readings
Diana Fuss ,1994 Interior Colonies: Franz Fanon and the Politics Of Identification, Diacritics
24, 2-3: 20-42.
Gayle Salomen, 2006 The Place Where Life Hides Away: Merleau Ponty, Fanon and the
Location of Bodily Being. Differences: A journal of Feminist Criticism, Vol. 17 No.. 2 p96-112
Shannon Sullivan, 2004 Ethical Slippages, Shattered Horizons and the Zebra Striping of the
Unconscious: Fanon on Social, Bodily and Psychical Space, Philosophy and Geography, Vol 7,
no.1, 9-24.
Week Ten: Subtracted Bodies
Foucault Michel 2003 Abnormal. New York Picador (Selected Chapters)
Lock Margaret 2001 The Alienation of Body Tissue and the Biopolitics of
Immortalized Cell Lines, Body & Society, 7:63 pp 63-83
Ulrich Baer 2005 Photography and Hysteria: Toward a Poetics of the Flash. In
Spectral Evidence The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MIT Press.
Lynn Shelley 2001 Foucault and the Government of Disability. Edited by Tremain.
University of Michigan Press. (Selected Chapters)
Mitchell W. J. T. 2001 Seeing Disability, Public Culture 13(3): 391-398.
del Val Jaime, 2006 Situated Tékhne. Beyond the Performative: Metaformative
Bodies and the Politics of Technology in Post-postmodernism International Journal
of Performance Arts and Digital Media Volume: 2 | Issue: 2: 187-207
Stone, A. 1995." “Violation and Virtuality: Two Cases of Physical and Psychological
Boundary Transgression and their Implications”. In Posthuman Bodies. Judith Halberstam
Ira Livingston (Editors), ( Indiana University Press.
Recommended Reading:
Lisa Diedrich 2005 Introduction: Genealogies Of Disability, Cultural Studies, 19:6, 649 –
666
Hughes, Bill (2000) 'Medicine and the Aesthetic Invalidation of Disabled People', Disability
& Society, 15:4, 555 - 568
Verstraete, Pieter (2005) 'The Taming of Disability: Phrenology and Bio-power on the Road
to the destruction, History of Education, 34:2, 119 – 134
Donaldson, Elizabeth J. 2002 The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist
Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness NWSA Journal Volume 14, Number 3, Fall, pp. 99-119
Weeks Eleven and Twelve: Second Bodies, Virtuality, and the Politics of the Puppet
and the Doll
Walter Benjamin, 1933/1979 Doctine of the Similar New German Critique No. 17, pp 65-69
Elizabeth Grosz, 2005 Prosthetic Objects, the Force of Sexual Difference, Inhuman Forces:
Power, Pleasure and Desire. In Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, and Power, Durham,
Duke University Press.
Walter Benjamin, 1968 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Shocken Books
Heinrich Von Kleist, 1989 On the Marionette Theater. In Fragments for the History of the
Human Body, Part One, New York, Zone Books
Rainer Nagele, 1991 Puppet Play and Traurspiel, The Marquis de Sade Watches the Scene,
From Aesthetics to Poetics: Benjamin, Brecht and the Poetics of Caesura. In Theater, Theory,
Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity, Baltimore Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Gerhard Richter,, 2000 Benjamin’s Face: Defacing Fascism. In Walter Benjamin and the Corpus
of Autobiography. Detroit Wayne State University Press.
Giorgio Agamben, 2000 Notes on Gesture, Face. In Means Without Ends, Minneapolis,
University of Minneapolis Press.
Brigid Doherty, 2000, Text and Gestus in Brecht and Benjamin, Modern Language
Association 115, 442-481.
Weeks Thirteen and Fourteen: Student Presentations