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The CTI typically engages a particular research project for three to four years. In relation to its current project, the CTI organizes several presentations and discussions of work of both CTI members and invited guests in its Irvine Lectures in Critical Theory series. Much of this work is then published in the CTI’s project series. In addition to organizing and hosting our annual Wellek Library Lecture series, the CTI hosts lectures of a number of international guest speakers, organizes conferences and workshops in critical theory, and co-sponsors a number of lectures and conferences with other UCI Departments and Programs.
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Poor Theory (2008-2012) |
| Poor Theory (2008-2012) [top] | |||
From the Poor Theory: Notes Toward a Manifesto: Poor theory is less a theory than a way of proceeding. Poor theory proposes to find ways of making the most of limited resources. Poor theory uses the tools at hand to take the present to task. In the process it tinkers with theoretical technique and analytical object. Poor theory suggests the need to ‘work around’ intransigent problems, when clear solutions are not discernible and the means at our disposal are limited. Poor theory reflexively re-encounters the history of theory through paying attention to the murky, unsystematic practices and discourses of everyday life. Poor theory is conditioned by reflexive imbrication with probable pasts and arguments with/about possible futures, and thus comes to see the present, too, as heterotemporal.... |
Poor Theory: Notes Toward a Manifesto (pdf)
Irvine Lectures in Critical Theory Kavita Philip (Women's Studies, UC Irvine) Ackbar Abbas (Comparative Literature, UC Irvine) |
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| In Security (2003-2008) [top] | |||
| The Critical Theory Institute's project begun in 2003 devoted itself to the implications of the play between security and insecurity. Insofar as the social warrants itself as a means of ordering and controlling individuals, groups, societies, and nations, security looms large in defining our social existence. According to Hobbes and Foucault, security is deeply constitutive of modernity itself, coming to mark the difference between modern social orders from all that lies outside them - the "dark ages," the "non-western" or "pre-colonial," or the chaos" beyond the rule of law (both juridical and scientific). That security has come of late to be the focus of so much desperate attention should be seen as a sign of a deeper crisis in how the social currently is being conceived and challenged. Given that socio-economic, political, epistemological, and psychological forms of security are interdependent, this crisis cuts across all levels of modern systems of order | Project Description (pdf)
Irvine Lectures in Critical Theory Derek Gregory (Geography, University of British Columbia) Wendy Brown (Political Science, UC Berkeley) Eyal Weizman (Center for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University London) Inderpal Grewal (Women's Studies, UC Irvine) Lisa Hajjar (Law & Sociology, UC Santa Barbara) Mark Poster (History, UC Irvine) David Theo Goldberg (African American Studies, UC Irvine) John H. Smith (German, UC Irvine) Joseph Masco (Anthropology, Chicago) Michael Dillon (Political Science and International Relations, University of Lancaster) |
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| Futures of Property and Personhood (1999-2003) [top] | |||
In the 1999-2000 academic year the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine began its new three-year research project, “The Futures of Property and Personhood.” In its focus on property, the topic explores the challenges to social and cultural theory posed by privatization and its broader political, cultural and institutional effects. It considers, too, the manifold changes in the status of personhood brought about by the forces of privatization and globalization, as well as the new technologies that facilitate the remaking of human bodies and determine the politics of reproduction. The most pervasive effects of privatization include a general weakening of liberalism’s hold on the social imaginary, a trend that profoundly affects state practices, socio-cultural reproduction, and the institutional production of knowledge. By exploring the synergy and dissonance between conceptions of the private as marketable and the private as inalienable, the CTI poses the question of how critical theory can productively engage with the contemporary transformations and futures of notions such as property, personhood, and related concepts of citizenship, state, culture, and knowledge. Since the Enlightenment, definitions of property have entailed corresponding configurations of the person who owned, and/or was subjected to, property. In the past three decades, critical theories have devised and debated new models to respond to historical changes in the relation between property and personhood. Most of these theories challenge the classical paradigms of liberalism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, expanding their focus to include issues such as symbolic economies, regimes of power and knowledge, or the superimposition of commodity and sexual fetishism. Many of these theories rethink the legacy of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud from the vantage point of the new economies of a global corporate media culture and its continually changing impact on relations between property and personhood. Today, new forms of privatization demand that we rethink the range of available models of subjectivity in relation to late capitalist, global and corporate economies and their effects on personhood. We need to ask whether contemporary critiques of the subject are adequate to challenge narratives of the triumph of the market and the privatization of knowledges, persons, and life itself. Privatization, as we understand it, refers to a complex array of interconnected processes and relationships through which political rights, social membership, knowledge production, and the related spheres that constitute personhood are increasingly brought within the ambit of the capitalist marketplace. We are currently living through a profound acceleration of such processes of privatization and their far-reaching effects on the social and cultural imaginary. Among such effects we may count the economic, political, and epistemological reworking of notions of citizenship, the re-definition of the nation-state in relation to a transnational economy and its global markets, and the privatization of services formerly under state management. Similarly, privatization deeply affects social and cultural identities, subjectivities, and cosmologies of personhood. Niche marketing and demographic “indicators” of consumer preference, for example, are rendered as self-identity. Moreover, identity itself is increasingly framed through acquisitive individualism. Self-identity becomes a product to be worked on, invested in, and competitively performed and deployed as a social currency. In a similar vein, identitarian forms of social protest are increasingly recoded as consumptive and private. We witness a pervasive expansion and transformation of property, accompanied by concomitant changes in the self-as-proprietor and the self-as-investor. Newly expanded property constructs and laws extend from rights in potential and future ideas, to rights in cells, organs, and genetic material. These complicated economic, legal, and social changes are also transforming the very category of culture. As the concept itself comes under scrutiny in the anthropological and literary circles that made it their hallmark for the greater part of the century, culture is now increasingly recoded in proprietary terms. Collectivities and corporations battle over knowledges and practices newly configured as potentially alienable and commodifiable cultural properties. Individuals protect cultural works through the apparatus of patent and copyright. Opponents of a neo-liberal stance often frame their project in terms of claiming collective properties, re-imagining the commons, and reinvigorating the community. But what is the status of commonality and community when culture itself — in Marilyn Strathern’s phrase — has been “enterprized up?” What happens if culture can be both chosen and selected from a seemingly infinite array of patented goods for consumption? What are the consequences when culture is deemed intrinsic to identity and becomes the object of collective property rights? These processes are transforming not only the world at large, but also the immediate environment of our intellectual activity. Everyday practices of privatization in the academy include the university’s use of market models to guide curricular changes and the privatization of knowledge — from information technologies and copyright restrictions impacting the classroom, to modes of knowing and new categories of the known.These practices are radically transforming the most fundamental relations concerning the conceptions of person, knowledge, and property on which intellectual production has long rested. The consequences of such transformations have yet to be fully anticipated and explored. The proposed project identifies three rubrics within which to focus its analysis of how privatization and the related reconfiguration of the social imaginary pose a challenge for contemporary debates in critical theory:
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Project Description (pdf) Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood. Edited by Gabriele Schwab and Bill Maurer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Irvine Lectures in Critical Theory Akhil Gupta (Cultural & Social Anthropology, Stanford) Gabriele Schwab (English & Comparative Literature, UCI) Akira Lippit (Film Studies, UCI) Paul Rabinow (Anthropology, UC Berkeley) Étienne Balibar (Political Philosophy, Université de Paris X Nanterre & French & Italian, UCI) Mary Poovey (English & Director of the Institite for the History of the Marilyn Strathern (Social Antropology, Cambridge) Alexander Gelley (English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine) Rosemary Coombe (Law, Communication and Cultural Studies, York U) Pheng Cheah (Rhetoric, UC Berkeley), Lindon Barrett (English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine) William Maurer (Anthropology, UC Irvine) N. Katherine Hayles (English, UCLA) |
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| The Forces of Globalization (1995-1999) [top] | |||
In the Fall of 1995, the Critical Theory Institute began its project devoted to the general topic of “globalization” and a critical analysis of just what forces constitute “globalization” as the term and its related concepts are used today. Like other idioms of the intellectual community, such as “culture” in our previous research project (“‘Culture’ and the Problem of the Disciplines”), “globalization” is used with great frequency to describe complex processes and yet these uses are often uncritical of their ideological and methodological assumptions. In the tradition of our previous projects, we read critically the multiple assumptions behind the term, in order better to theorize the range of meanings associated with “globalization” today. We understand “globalization” in terms of communications’ models, which we term “networks” to distinguish these signifying practices from those governed by more narrowly conceived linguistic and semiotic models that were developed before the advent of the technologies partially responsible for the new globalization. One of the subtexts of this project is an investigation of similarities and differences between “modern internationalism” and “postmodern globalization.” By the same token, the “networks” we analyze are not utterly distinct from the older semiotic models; each network suggests a coherent discursive community, not unlike the unified field model of some semiotic systems, that transcends specific national and regional boundaries. Implicit in many of these new discursive communities are new theories of social organization that follow from the communications’ protocols of these networks. In many cases, these social organizations include reconceptualizations of traditional categories of social division and identification, such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual identity. Although the four networks of globalization we study critically are intended to provide an approximate mapping or topography of the new transnational terrain, they are not intended to constitute the total scheme of cultural expressions and social behaviors in what some have termed the “new global order.” Just what this expression means cannot be answered even by a manifold project like this one, but will in large part be determined by historical events. Academic research projects such as this should not attempt to predict or anticipate those events; instead, such research can read critically what is already operative within the several different networks of transnational practice. We analyze the forces of globalization into four dominant networks, each of which is immediately recognizable by a term or concept used today as one conventional sign for the new “global” situation. These networks are: Corporate These networks of globalization intersect in many crucial ways, and we analyze their respective predicates in approximately analogous terms. It should be noted, however, that the analogies between the subdivisions of these different networks do not presume homologies that we expect to “find” in our research. We merely aim to organize the different areas investigated in ways that would make productive comparisons and contrasts more likely. In order to foreground possible overlaps between different global networks and thus articulate better what we mean by “global forces,” we apply three different methodological criteria to each of our four transnational networks. We ask to what extent each of these global networks contributes to: decentering or recentering of the customary modes of scientific knowledge; new hierarchies and processes of hierarchization, such as class, gender, race, and such formulations as “first,” “second,” and “third world”; diasporas, nationalism, local, and regionalism as metaphors for new social organizations. |
Irvine Lectures in Critical Theory Jean Comaroff (Anthropology, U Chicago) Dipesh Chakrabarty (South Asian Studies and History of Culture, U. Chicago) Elizabeth Grosz (Visiting Professor in the Critical Theory Emphasis, UC Irvine) Étienne Balibar (Professeur de philosophie politique et morale à l'Université de Paris-X Nanterre) Leslie Rabine (French & Italian and Women’s Studies, UC,Irvine) Verena Andermatt Conley (Literature Program, Harvard) Roderick Nash (Environmental Studies, UC, Santa Barbara) Jim Ferguson (Anthropology, UC Irvine) Iain Chambers (Anglo-American literature, Istituto Universitario Orientale, Italy) |
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| "Culture" and the Problem of the Disciplines (1991-1995) [top] | |||
In recent years the question of culture has become a focus of theorizing in several disciplines and intellectual currents. Postmodern theorists dispute the distinction between high and low culture. Anthropological theorists problematize culture as an object of knowledge as well as the position of the ethnographer and the “informant.” In literary theory deconstruction and new historicism revise the understanding of culture, raising a general question of the translatability among cultures. Historians open a field of “a new cultural history” to unsettle the treatment of culture in the older social and intellectual histories. Feminism and ethnic studies indicate limitations of theorizing culture in relation to masculine and Eurocentric presuppositions. Finally a newer tendency has emerged called cultural studies which draws upon diverse theories and analytic traditions to address the domain of culture as an autonomous region. At the epistemological level, these initiatives raise doubts about the possibility of culture as a discrete object of knowledge, of cultural identity as a stable unity, and of the subject as the basis for aesthetic judgements. The Critical Theory Institute wishes to explore the issue of culture from the many theoretical perspectives that may shed light on it in order, if possible, to bring these various positions of questioning into defined loci of scrutiny, to develop theoretical postures that may clarify the issues at stake, and perhaps to propel them to a new level of understanding. One area where collaborative work may be especially productive for a group like ours is that of the institutional framework of our own profession. Thus a focus on the culture of academia will enable us to examine assumptions underlying our professional-institutional practices (e.g., of criticism, of pedagogy) and to initiate specific investigations such as the following: the rationale of the disciples; the lifespan and mutation of theoretical schools or movements in academic principles; the interdependence and antagonisms in the relation of cultural criticism to the disciplines. In these examples we would like to focus on the way notions and assumptions about culture interact with disciplinary practices. We understand Critical Theory and the problem of culture as dialectically constituted, not discrete or isolable theoretical practices or entities. Our goal is thus both to explore the role that cultural presuppositions and stated or implicit theories of culture have played in the constitution of various forms of Critical Theory and also to explore the theoretical presuppositions underpinning the notion of culture in its various historical and disciplinary forms. |
“Culture ” and the Problem of the Disciplines. Edited by John Carlos Rowe. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Irvine Lectures in Critical Theory Sacvan Bercovitch (English and American Literature, Harvard) James Boone (Anthropology and European Cultural Studies, Princeton) J. Hillis Miller (English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine) Leslie Rabine (French & Italian and Women’s Studies, UC,Irvine) Suzanne Gearhart (French and Italian, UCI) Linda Williams (Film Studies and Women’s Studies, UC Irvine) David Lloyd (English, UC, Berkeley) Nancy Armstrong(Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media, Brown U) Gerald Graff (English, U Chicago) |
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| Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture (1988-1991) [top] | |||
[Original Title: Critical Theory, Contemporary Culture, and the Question of the Political] Our hypothesis is that the great traditions of western political thought (liberalism and Marxism) no longer serve as effective frameworks to make intelligible political experience and no longer function as spurs of the Enlightenment project of emancipation. In short, traditional political “meta-narratives” do not effectively stage the play of power. At the same time the peculiar intervention of theory in the field of disciplinary forces has not yet adequately produced coherent paradigms of politics, or at least has not yet rigorously addressed the question of politics. While certain initiatives have been tried (Foucault, “Truth and Power”; Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition), they have been rudimentary and relatively unsuccessful. (Foucault renounced his own statements about “power” and Lyotard disowns The Postmodern Condition). It may be that theory cannot intervene effectively in the discourse on politics or it may be that its rethinking of the political will open new lines of interrogation and even consolidate new positions. The point would be not to show once again that each of the “fields” is “political” but rather that our contemporary sense of what constitutes “the political” has been dramatically shaken by the events (political, historical, theoretical, aesthetic, literary, etc. “events”) of the 20th century, and that a critical questioning of the political cannot occur if the traditional (for us, post-Enlightenment, positivist, liberal or Marxist, etc.) teleologies are not challenged. Our focus would be on the challenges that history, art and literature (but also sociology, psychoanalysis) constitute for political theory. The issue of the political raises the connected question of self-reflexivity. The clarification of the political as a theoretical question implies a taking stock of the place and role of theory, of accounting for the manner in which theory inserts itself into the contention of discourses (the hidden university). The important question here is how has a non-disciplinary interpretive strategy (critical theory) been able to insert itself in a texture of discourse characterized by sharp disciplinary boundaries. What are the implications of this insertion and what are the challenges to the institutional framework of these disciplines, and to the social framework of the institution? How does the absorption of theory by the interrelated levels of society, institution, discipline (down to the micro-level of teacher-course-student) not only subvert those levels but also transform the contours and the direction of theory? At this point the second questions turn around and face the first: is the very turn to the political a sign of the recalibration of theory through its “successful” penetration of the institutional discourses? Is the question itself of the political an indication of uncertainty or hesitation or worry that theory may be or may have been “co-opted,” or rather is it a sign of the continuing vitality of theory, an indication of its extension into new terrain, terrain that may prompt a restructuring of the disciplines? |
Politics, Theory and Contemporary Culture. Edited by Mark Poster. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Irvine Lectures in Critical Theory Jean-François Lyotard (French & Italian, UC Irvine) Teresa de Lauretis (History of Consciousness, UC, Santa Cruz) Donna Haraway (History of Consciousness, UC, Santa Cruz) Joan Scott (Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton) Gabriele Schwab (English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine) Alexander Gelley (English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine) Catharine Stimpson (English, Rutgers University) John Carlos Rowe (English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine) Sam Weber (Comparative Literature, U Massachusetts, Amherst) Jessica Benjamin (Psychoanalyst) Ernesto Laclau (U. Essex) |
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| The States of "Theory" (1985-1988) [top] | |||
As David Carroll puts it in his introduction to the published volume, The States of Theory: History, Art and Critical Discourse, upon completion of its previous project, the Critical Theory group “decided to devote the next three years to the problem of the transformation of the notion of the sign in contemporary criticism and theory and to how that transformation had affected the various disciplines of the humanities, the social sciences, and the university institution as a whole. In particular, the group decided to examine how the questioning and even the rejection of the ‘natural origin’ of or model for the sign had disrupted and transformed research in the various fields.” To this end it planned various lectures and colloquia under the title “Nature, Sign and Institutions in the Domain of Discourse,” and formulated the following accompanying statement: “By this we mean those ideas, ideologies, or discourses which claim to have their basis in nature, and to examine the extent to which they have been shaped by institutional pressures. The traditional distinction between natural and arbitrary-conventional signs is one — but hardly the only — way of conceiving this examination as it cuts across the human sciences from art and literary theory to social theory.” During the period in which the Critical Theory group, then a Focused Research Program, was christened as the Critical Theory Institute (1987), the topic, too, transformed, re-named “The States of Theory: Theory at its Boundaries,” and later with its publication title. David Carroll's explanation is instructive: “As can already be seen from the title given to this collection, the problem of the sign, the loss of its ‘natural origin,’ and the institutional effect of this transformation of the role and function of discourse — though still evident in all of the essays and the principal focus of some — was itself transformed in the course of the conferences, seminars, and discussions devoted to it.” Ultimately, “by the middle of the second year it had become clear that two areas of concentration had emerged ‘on their own’: the historical and the aesthetic. … The question of the nonnatural origin of the sign had thus become ‘The States of “Theory,”’ with a special emphasis given to the place of theories of discourse and language in the current rethinking of art and history.” |
The States of "Theory": History, Art, and Critical Discourse. Edited by David Carroll. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
April 24-25, 1987 States of Theory Colloquium: Jean-François Lyotard (Emeritus, Université de Paris/Vincennes-St. Denis, French, UCI) J. Hillis Miller (English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine) Murray Krieger (English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine) Carolyn Porter (English, UC, Berkeley) Jaques Derrida (Directeur d’Etudes, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) Frederic Jameson (Comparative Literature, Duke U) Jean-Luc Nancy (Philosophy, Université de Strasbourg, and Visiting Prof. UC, Berkeley) Claude Lefort (Directeur d’Etudes, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) |
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| The Aims of Representation (1982-1985) [top] | |||
| Then a Focused Research Program in Contemporary Critical Theory, the critical theory group proposed the above topic for a series of lectures and colloquia held over a three-year period. The group’s research resulted in the volume published as The Aims of Representation: Subject/Text/History, which includes most of the following lectures. | The Aims of Representation: Subject/Text/History. Edited byMurray Krieger. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.
Irvine Lectures in Critical Theory Robert Weimann (English and Literary Theory, Zentralinstitut für Literaturgeschichte, Berlin) Dominick LaCapra (European and Intellectual History, Cornell) Stephen Greenblatt (English, UC, Berkeley) John Carlos Rowe (English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine) Mark Poster (History, UC Irvine) Shoshana Felman (French and Comparative Literature, Yale) Anthony Giddens Jean-François Lyotard (Philosophy, U Paris, Vincennes/Saint-Denis) David Carroll (French, UC Irvine) Wolfgang Iser (English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine & Universitât Konstanz) |