This course will deal with the foundations of social theory, starting with the French and Scottish Enlightenments and the beginnings of a specifically sociological worldview. We will then move on to Durkheim’s organic view of society, to Marx’s dialectical materialism, finishing with Weber’s Verstehen sociology and ideal types of authority. We’ll try to understand their theories not just as historical relics, but as living sets of ideas relevant to contemporary social issues. Class attendance and participation will be strongly encouraged, as will a critical engagement with the ideas presented in the class.

The Foundations of Social Theory

Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of History of Sexuality in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault's history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? In Race and the Education of Desire, Stoler challenges Foucault's tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume of History of Sexuality contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race. Drawing on Foucault's little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as "racisms of the state." In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault's insights have in the past constrained-and in the future may help shape-the ways we trace the genealogies of race. Race and the Education of Desire will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault.

Race and the education of desire

The politics of life itself Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century

1. Television, Ontology and the Transitional Object 2. Television and a Place Called Home 3. The Suburbanization of the Public Sphere 4. The Tele-Technological System 5. Television and Consumption 6. On the Audience 7. Television, Technology and Everyday Life References

Television and everyday life

In this paper we argue that understanding accounting practices in their organisational contexts requires more than a technical description of accounting information systems as they are conceived and designed in abstract. What is required are studies of the way in which accounting systems become embodied, through use, in organisational systems of accountability. We present a framework for analysing the operation of systems of accountability in organisations, and illustrate this by contrasting, in an ideal-typical manner, forms of accountability in relationships characterised by regular face-to-face contacts, with forms of accountability in relationships which span physical distance.

Accounting systems and systems of accountability — understanding accounting practices in their organisational contexts

Introduction, Part One: Interview 1: I Don't Belong to the Club, Part Two: Interview 2: I Like the Cinema, Interview 3: Baudrillard's Seductions, Interview 4: The 'Look' Generation, Interview 5: The Power of Reversibility that Exists in the Fatal, Interview 6: The Revenge of the Crystal, Interview 7: Isn't an Image Fundamentally Immoral? Interview 8: Intellectuals, Commitment and Political Power, Interview 9: Gane with Vestiges, Part Three: Interview 10: Forget Baudrillard, Part Four: Interview 11: America as Fiction, Interview 12: The Evil Demon of Images, Interview 13: The Work of Art in the Electronic Age, Interview 14: The Politics of Seduction, Interview 15: The End of the End, Interview 16: Fractal Theory, Interview 17: Writing has always Given me Pleasure, Interview 18: This Beer Isn't a Beer, Interview 19: Sublunar and Atonal Landscape, Part Five: Interview 20: Baudrillard The Interview, Afterword: Amor Fati, Suggested Reading

Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews

1. Introduction, Mike Gane and Terry Johnson 2. Kant on Enlightenment, Michel Foucault 3. Question, Ethos, Event, Colin Gordon 4. The Will to Knowledge, Pasqale Pasquino 5. A Genealogy of Political Economy, Denis Meuret 6. Governing Economic Life, Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose 7. The Promotion of the Social, Jacques Donzelot 8. Professions, Govermentality, Terry Johnson 9. Personality as a Vocation, Ian Hunter 10. Archaeologizing Genealogy, Phil Beavis, Michele Cohen and Gavin Kendall.

Foucault's new domains

Acknowledgements: Part 1, 1. Introduction, 2. Essential Background and Context, 3. Baudrillard, Postmodernism, Marxism and Feminism, Part 2, 4. Baudrillard's attempt to develop Marxism, 5. A Change of Position, 6. Baudrillard: Theoretical Critique, Part 3, 7. Cultural Implosion: the Social, the Mass, the Media, 8. The Object's Seduction 9. Fatal Objects 10. America, the Desert and the Fourth World, Part 4, 11. The Double Spiral, Notes, Biblio, Index.

Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory

Mike Gane provides an introduction to Baudrillard's cultural theory: the conception of modernity and the complex process of simulation. He examines Baudrillard's literary essays: his confrontation with Calvino, Styron, Ballard and Borges. Gane offers a coherent account of Baudrillard's theory of cultural ambience, and the culture of consumer society. And it provides an introduction to Baudrillard's fiction theory, and the analysis of transpolitical figures. The book also includes an interesting and provocative comparison of Baudrillard's powerful essay against the modernist Pompidou Centre in Paris and Frederic Jameson's analysis of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. An interpretation of this encounter leads to the presentation of a very different Baudrillard from that which figures in contemporary debates on postmodernism.

Baudrillard's Bestiary: Baudrillard and Culture

1. Introduction: Michel Foucault 2. Foucault's Genealogy of the Human Sciences 3. The Linguistic Fault: The Case of Foucault's Archaeology 4. The Nouvelle Philosophie and Foucault 5. Strategies for Socialists? Foucault's Conception of Power 6. Power and Analysis: Beyond Foucault

Mike Gane

Papers

Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews

Foucault's new domains

Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory

Baudrillard's Bestiary: Baudrillard and Culture

Towards a critique of Foucault