Sign-Up for Mid-Term Office Hour Marathon

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

12.00 Barrett

12.30 Anna

1.00 Cheo

1.30 England

2.00 Bells

2.30 Eri

3.00 Kellen

3.30 Soheil

Mid-Term Precis Assignment and the Toulmin Schema

 For your mid-term assignment, I am expecting everybody to hand in a 2-3pp. precis next Friday (October 23, 2021) summarizing the key moves of an argument you encountered in one of the assigned texts for our course together so far. I am providing you with a written description of the Toulmin schema which we discussed at length at the beginning of yesterday’s lecture to help facilitate your efforts.

As I said in class this week, a “precis” is simply the concise recapitulation of a complex argument. You are expected to capture what you take to be the argument and its essential elements for any one of the texts assigned in class so far. The purpose of the precis is not to argue for an interpretation of the work you choose, but to summarize in your own words what you take to be the argument of the work you choose. Reproducing your chosen text's argument will involve identifying what you take to be its thesis, any qualification or exceptions to that thesis, definitions of terms, supportive reasons and data, implicit warrants, and efforts to anticipate and circumvent objections. You may also want to discuss the illustrative force of metaphors and other figures.

Since so many of these elements are also at the heart of the Toulmin analysis of argument we discussed this week, I am asking that you apply a simple Toulmin Schema to your chosen text, identifying as many elements in your chosen argument as seem useful (do not worry if not all of the elements of the Schema we discussed appear to be in evidence in your chosen text, that happens all the time). In highly simplified terms, the Toulmin schema models an argument in terms familiar from the adversarial way arguments play out in courtrooms and similar settings, but useful for understanding all sorts of argumentative discourse as well. The Toulmin schema distinguishes three basic functions in an effective argument:

I. The Claim

a. Thesis

b. Qualification of the thesis

c. Exceptions to the thesis?

II. The Support (of the Claim)

a. Reasons

b. Data/Evidence

c. Warrants (implicit general assumptions on which explicit reasons and conclusions depend)

III. The Refutation (of anticipated objections to the Claim and its Support)

a. Anticipation of Objections

b. Efforts to Rebut these Objections

c. Efforts to Circumvent these Objections

(Note: these are not YOUR objections to the argument, but the author's effort to respond to objections they anticipate.)

In class, I illustrated the elements of the Toulmin Schema by applying them to parts of a simple editorial argument about banning (nonhuman) animal testing of cosmetics. I’ll reproduce that example in case you didn’t get it in your notes already:

Congress should ban animal research. [thesis] More than a million nonhuman animals are killed in cosmetic company labs each year. [data] Non-harmful alternatives usually exist but are more costly. [evidence… for:] Cosmetic companies only test on animals to save money. [reason] ***This is an unstated/implicit [warrant]: The well-being of nonhuman animals matters more than corporate profits.*** After providing sound scientific result for centuries, however, perhaps some would argue that a complete ban may go too far for now -- perhaps it should not apply to life-saving medical research for which no non-harmful alternative means seem yet available? [anticipation of objections] And so: Congress should ban MOST [qualification] animal research, UNLESS it is the only way to save lives. [exception]

I hope the Schema will be a useful guide to organize and clarify your precis. Good luck and remember to ask me any questions that might occur to you!

PS: Just in case you were looking for more practice with the Toulmin Schema, here is a short essay written by a bioethicist. This is an argument I disagree with quite vehemently but I think Toulmin clarifies how it operates.

William F. May, Rising to the Occasion of Our Death

For many parents, a Volkswagen van is associated with putting children to sleep on a camping trip.  Jack Kevorkian, a Detroit pathologist, has now linked the van with the veterinarian's meaning of "putting to sleep." Kevorkian conducted a dinner interview with Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old Alzheimer's patient, and her husband and then agreed to help her commit suicide in his VW van.  Kevorkian pressed beyond the more generally accepted practice of passive euthanasia (allowing a patient to die by withholding or withdrawing treatment) to active euthanasia (killing for mercy).

     Kevorkian, moreover, did not comply with the strict regulations that govern active euthanasia in, for example, the Netherlands. Holland requires that death be imminent (Adkins had beaten her son in tennis just a few days earlier); it demands a more professional review of the medical evidence and the patient's resolution than a dinner interview with a physician (who is a stranger and who does not treat patients) permits; and it calls for the final, endorsing signatures of two doctors.

     So Kevorkian-bashing is easy. But the question remains: Should we develop a judicious, regulated social policy permitting voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill? Some moralists argue that the distinction between allowing to die and killing for mercy is petty quibbling over technique. Since the patient in any event dies -- whether by acts of omission or commission -- the route to death doesn't really matter. The way modern procedures have made dying at the hands of experts and their machines such a prolonged and painful business has further fueled the euthanasia movement, which asserts not simply the right to die but the right to be killed.

     But other moralists believe that there is an important moral distinction between allowing to die and mercy killing. The euthanasia movement, these critics contend, wants to engineer death rather than face dying. Euthanasia would bypass dying to make one dead as quickly as possible. It aims to relieve suffering by knocking out the interval between life and death. It solves the problem of suffering by eliminating the sufferer.

     The impulse behind the euthanasia movement is understandable in an age when dying has become such an inhumanly endless business.  But the movement may fail to appreciate our human capacity to rise to the occasion of our death.  The best death is not always the sudden death.  Those forewarned of death and given time to prepare for it have time to engage in acts of reconciliation.  Also, advanced grieving by those about to be bereaved may ease some of their pain.  Psychiatrists have observed that those who lose a loved one accidentally have a more difficult time recovering from the loss than those who have suffered through an extended period of illness before the death.  Those who have lost a close relative by accident are more likely to experience what Geoffrey Gorer has called limitless grief.  The community, moreover, may need its aged and dependent, its sick and its dying, and the virtues which they sometimes evince -- the virtues of justice and love manifest in the agents of care.

     On the whole, our social policy should allow terminal patients to die but it should not regularize killing for mercy. Such a policy would recognize and respect that moment in illness when it no longer makes sense to bend every effort to cure or to prolong life and when one must allow patients to do their own dying. This policy seems most consonant with the obligations of the community to care and of the patient to finish his or her course.

     Advocates of active euthanasia appeal to the principle of patient autonomy -- as the use of the phrase "voluntary euthanasia" indicates. But emphasis on the patient's right to determine his or her destiny often harbors an extremely naïve view of the uncoerced nature of the decision. Patients who plead to be put to death hardly make unforced decisions if the terms and conditions under which they receive care already nudge them in the direction of the exit. If the elderly have stumbled around in their apartments, alone and frightened for years warehoused in geriatrics barracks, then the decision to be killed for mercy hardly reflects an uncoerced decision. The alternative may be so wretched as to push patients toward this escape. It is a huge irony and, in some cases, hypocrisy to talk suddenly about a compassionate killing when the aging and dying may have been starved for compassion for many years. To put it bluntly, a country has not earned the moral right to kill for mercy unless it has already sustained and supported life mercifully. Otherwise we kill for compassion only to reduce the demands on our compassion. This statement does not charge a given doctor or family member with impure motives. I am concerned here not with the individual case but with the cumulative impact of a social policy.

     I can, to be sure, imagine rare circumstances in which I hope I would have the courage to kill for mercy -- when the patient is utterly beyond human care, terminal, and in excruciating pain. A neurosurgeon once showed a group of physicians and an ethicist the picture of a Vietnam casualty who had lost all four limbs in a landmine explosion. The catastrophe had reduced the soldier to a trunk with his face transfixed in horror.  On the battlefield I would hope that I would have the courage to kill the sufferer with mercy.

     But hard cases do not always make good laws or wise social policies. Regularized mercy killings would too quickly relieve the community of its obligation to provide good care. Further, we should not always expect the law to provide us with full protection and coverage for what, in rare circumstances, we may morally need to do. Sometimes the moral life calls us out into a no-man's-land where we cannot expect total security and protection under the law. But no one said that the moral life is easy. (1990)

My personal reading through Toulmin:

I personally choose this as the thesis: “our social policy should allow terminal patients to die but it should not regularize killing for mercy.” “On the whole,” qualifies it. 

The support for the argument comes mostly in this paragraph, full of reasons, data, and evidence: “The best death is not always the sudden death.  Those forewarned of death and given time to prepare for it have time to engage in acts of reconciliation.  Also, advanced grieving by those about to be bereaved may ease some of their pain.  Psychiatrists have observed that those who lose a loved one accidentally have a more difficult time recovering from the loss than those who have suffered through an extended period of illness before the death.  Those who have lost a close relative by accident are more likely to experience what Geoffrey Gorer has called limitless grief.  The community, moreover, may need its aged and dependent, its sick and its dying, and the virtues which they sometimes evince -- the virtues of justice and love manifest in the agents of care.”

The anticipation and circumvention of objections follows from here: “Advocates of active euthanasia appeal to the principle of patient autonomy.” Remember I mentioned yesterday that there is a naïve but understandable intuition that the way to make an argument “strong” is to make a categorical assertion and then support it with as much evidence as you can pile on. But both of these intuitions are as likely to be wrong as right: A categorical assertion can be refuted with a single counterexample and undermined with the least doubt, and that makes it more brittle than strong. Similarly, the impulse to simply provide an orgy of evidence for your position may be less compelling argumentatively than taking the time to grant obvious objections to your argument and respond to them effectively in advance. This isn’t given voice to opponents so much as granting the real complexity of your object and revealing the personal stakes of your position. As I said, I don’t happen to agree with this argument – I think “patient autonomy” matters more than the author does. But in documenting how “patient autonomy” is often an illusion in capitalist societies the author provided what was to me the strongest and most compelling part of his argument. 

I think an implicit warrant of this piece is that “what a person wants to do with their own body (including ending it on their own terms when they feel that life is no longer worth living because of intense suffering) matters less than what I, William May, decide is better for society.” I think it is easy to see why this warrant remains implicit.

That second to last paragraph declaring “I hope I would have the courage to kill for mercy -- when the patient is utterly beyond human care, terminal, and in excruciating pain” sounds like an exception, but notice that it isn’t. The thesis is that there should be no legal form of euthanasia. In this “exception” May doesn’t argue that it should be legal in such extreme cases, he is saying it should remain illegal but he hopes activists will be willing to break the law and be punished as criminals for breaking a law he still defends even when he thinks it is so cruel he “hopes” he would be willing to break it!

Of course, your own application of the Toulmin Schema may lead to different choices and a different focus and interpretation. That is good news: the schema clarifies your reading but it doesn’t guarantee that there is only one good or meaningful way to interpret a text! Hope all this helps. Any questions or problems at all, as always, please e-mail me or talk to me after class, or we can schedule an office hour in person or via zoom to talk it through.

Our Syllabus

Critical Theory A: The Point Is To Change It

Fall, 2021, San Francisco Art Institute

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu; ndaleca@gmail.com

Course Blog: https://thepointistochangeit.blogspot.com/2021/08/our-syllabus.html
Fridays, 1-3.45pm, MCR, 8/30/21--12/6/19

Rough Basis for Grade: Att/Part, 20%, Reading Notebook, 20%; Midterm Precis/Toulmin Schema, 20%; Final Paper, 5-6pp., 40%

                Course Description:

"The philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." -- Karl Marx 

"Feminists are no more aware of different things than other people; they are aware of the same things differently. Feminist consciousness, it might be ventured, turns a 'fact' into a 'contradiction.'" -- Sandra Lee Bartky

"Artists inhabit the magical universe." -- William Burroughs

This course is a chronological and thematic survey of key texts in critical and cultural theory. A skirmish in the long rivalry of philosophy and rhetoric yielded a turn in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud into the post-philosophical discourse of critical theory. In the aftermath of world war, critical theory took a biopolitical turn in Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault -- a turn still reverberating in work on socially legible bodies by writers like Haraway, Lorde, Butler, Stone. And with the rise of the global precariat and climate catastrophe, critical theory is now turning again in STS (science and technology studies) and EJC (environmental justice critique) to articulate the problems and promises of an emerging planetarity. Theories of the fetish define the turn of the three threshold figures of critical theory -- Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (commodity, sexuality, and ressentimentality) -- and fetishisms ramify thereafter in critical accounts from Benjamin (aura), Adorno (culture industry), Barthes (myth), Debord (spectacle), Klein (logo), and Harvey ("tech") to Mulvey and Mercer (the sexed and raced gaze). We think of facts as found not made, but facts are made to be found and, once found, made to be foundational. Let us pursue the propositions that fetishes are figures we take to yield false facts, while facts are figures we have fetishized to yield paradoxical truths.

                Provisional Schedule of Meetings

                Week One | September 3 | Intro(se)ductions
Maps, Stories, Warnings by Way of Introduction

                Week Two | September 10 | Ancients and Moderns, Fontenelle and Wilde

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns -- Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism               

                Week Three | September 17 | Nietzsche and ressentiment as Fetish

Nietzsche, On Truth and the Lie in an Extramoral Sense -- Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: Preface -- Why I Am So Wise -- Why I Am So Clever -- Why I Am a Destiny

--supplemental Selections from The Gay Science 

                Week Four | September 24 | Marx and the Fetishism of Commodities

Marx on The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof from Capital

-- supplemental Marx and Engels, Theses on Feuerbach and Marx on Idealism and Materialism

                Week Five | October 1 | Freud and Sexual Fetishism
Sigmund Freud, Fetishism -- from Freud's Study of Schreber: 1, Psychoanalysis and Scientificity 2,  Storytelling  3, Psychoanalysis and Patriarchy (Homosociality and Homosexuality) 4. Psychoanalysis Brought to Crisis.

                Week Six | October 8 | Aura and the Culture Industry

Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility -- Adorno and Horkheimer, The Culture Industry 

                Week Seven | October 15 | Nature As Fetish; Or, Ideology Is Structured Like A Language

Roland Barthes, Mythologies ; Toulmin Schema Workshop. 

                Week Eight | October 22 | From Being to Having, Having to Appearing, Appearing to Branding

 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle -- Naomi Klein, Taking On the Brand Bullies from No Logo

                Week Nine | October 29 | Out With The Old, In With The New
William Burroughs, Immortality Screening and discussion of John Carpenter, dir. They Live.

                Week Ten | November 5 | The Eye of Power: Fanon, Mulvey, and Mercer 

Frantz Fanon, Selections from Black Skin, White Masks -- Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema -- Kobena Mercer On Mapplethorpe 
               
                Week Eleven | November 12 | The Carceral Archipelago and Abolition Democracy

Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish (this is a .pdf of the entire book from which you should read from the excerpts as far as you like) from "The Body of the Condemned" (pp. 3-31), "Docile Bodies" (pg. 135 +), and "Panoptism" (pg. 195 +) -- Angela Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete? (Chapters 1, 2, 6); Mariame Kaba, Yes, We Mean Literally Defund the Police 

                Week Twelve | November 19 | Intersectional Feminism   

Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference  -- The Combahee River Collective Statement -- Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs -- supplemental   Alison Kafer from Feminist, Queer, Crip

                Week Thirteen | November 19 | Thanksgiving Holiday, Workshopping the Final Paper at Home

                Week Fourteen | Queer Theories

Judith Butler, Intro. and Ch. One from Undoing Gender -- Sandy Stone, The Empire Strikes Back  – Sara Ahmed, A Killjoy Manifesto (handout)

                Week Fifteen | November 3 | Environmental Justice

John Bellamy Foster, The Four Lawsof Ecology and the Four Anti-Ecological Laws of Capitalism  -- Aldo Leopold Thinking Like A Mountain (handout) -- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor – Robert Bullard, Confronting Environmental Racism in the United States  -- Hazel Johnson, A Personal Story

                Course Objectives:

I. Contextualizing Contemporary Critical Theory: The inaugural Platonic repudiation of rhetoric and poetry, Vita Activa/Vita Contemplativa, Marx's last Thesis on Feuerbach, Kantian Critique, the Frankfurt School, Exegetical and Hermeneutic Traditions, Literary and Cultural Theory from the Restoration period through New Criticism, from Philosophy to Post-Philosophy: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud; the postwar biopolitical turn in Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault; and the emerging post-colonial, post-international, post-global planetarity of theory in an epoch of digital networked media formations, anthropogenic climate catastrophe, and polycultural assemblies.

II. Survey of Key Themes in Critical Theory: Abolition Democracy, Agency, Alienation, Assembly, Aura, Capitalism, Cisheteronormativity, Critique, Culture Industry, Discourse, Ecology, Equity-in-Diversity, Facticity, Fetish, Figurality, Humanism/Post-Humanism, Ideology, Intersectionality, Judgment, Normativity, Patriarchy, Performance, Planetarity, Post-Colonialism, Precarity, Queerness, Race, Recognition, Resistance, Scientificity, Sociality, Spectacle, Textuality, Violence, White Supremacy.

III. Survey of Key Critical Methodologies: Critique of Ideology, Marxism/Post-Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Justice.

IV. Connecting theoria and poiesis: thinking and acting, theory and practice, creative expressivity as aesthetic judgment and critical theory as poetic refiguration, etc.

We at SFAI believe that art-making and learning are community endeavors.  For this reason, class attendance is a crucial component of your education.  Being present and accountable to one another are the first steps in engaging your community, improving your work, and becoming artists and scholars. Therefore, attendance is mandatory for all classes.  Review each syllabus for specific course policies. Students who are unable to attend class due to illness, injury, or other compelling reasons must contact their instructor immediately.

Grades will be determined by the following numerical breakdown:          97-100: A+           93-96: A               

90-92: A-               87-89: B+              83-86: B                80-82: B-               77-79: C+              73-76: C                               

70-72: C-               67-69: D+              63-66 D                 60-62: D-               Below 60: NP 

ACADEMIC RESOURCE CENTER

The Academic Resource Center (ARC) provides free academic support to all SFAI students on any assignment or project. Because everyone benefits from discussing and developing their work in an individualized setting, SFAI recommends that all students make use of the ARC. Students are also welcome to drop by the ARC to study or meet with a group; the space has desks, computers, a printer, course textbooks, and other reference material. The ARC also holds workshops on writing techniques and study skills throughout the semester. The ARC is located in the Anne Bremer Memorial Library on the Chestnut Street campus. Students can make an appointment with a tutor by dropping in during our regular hours or by emailing arc@sfai.edu.

DISABILITY ACCOMMODATIONS

SFAI has a commitment to provide equal educational opportunities for qualified students with disabilities in accordance with state and federal laws and regulations; to provide equality of access for qualified students with disabilities; and to provide accommodations, auxiliary aids, and services that will specifically address those functional limitations of the disability which adversely affects equal educational opportunity. SFAI will assist qualified students with disabilities in securing such appropriate accommodations, auxiliary aids and services. The Accessibility Services Office at SFAI aims to promote self-awareness, self-determination, and self-advocacy for students through our policies and procedures. In the case of any complaint related to disability matters, a student may access the student grievance procedures; however, complaints regarding requests for accommodation are resolved pursuant to Section IV – Process for Requests for Accommodations: Eligibility, Determination and Appeal. The Accessibility Services Office can be reached at accessiblity@sfai.edu.

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY AND MISCONDUCT POLICY

The rights and responsibilities that accompany academic freedom are at the heart of the intellectual, artistic, and personal integrity of SFAI. At SFAI we value all aspects of the creative process, freedom of expression, risk-taking, and experimentation that adhere to the fundamental value of honesty in the making of one’s academic and studio work and in relationship to others and their work. Misunderstanding of the appropriate academic conduct will not be accepted as an excuse for academic dishonesty. If a student is unclear about appropriate academic conduct in relationship to a particular situation, assignment, or requirement, the student should consult with the instructor of the course, Department Chair, Program Directors, or the Dean of Students. 

FORMS OF ACADEMIC MISCONDUCT:

Plagiarism is the unacknowledged use of another’s words, ideas, or information. At SFAI academic writing must follow conventions of documentation and citation (6.1; MLA Handbook, Joseph Gibaldi ch.2). Students are advised to seek out this guideline in the Academic Support Center, to ask faculty when they are in doubt about standards, and to recognize they are ultimately responsible for proper citation. In the studio, appropriation, subversion, and other means of challenging convention complicate attempts to codify forms of acknowledgment and are often defined by disciplinary histories and practices and are best examined, with the faculty, in relationship to the specific studio course.

Cheating is the use or attempted use of unauthorized information including: looking at or using information from another person’s paper/exam; buying or selling quizzes, exams, or papers; possessing, referring to, or employing opened textbooks, notes, or other devices during a quiz or exam. It is the responsibility of all students to consult with their faculty, in a timely fashion, concerning what types of study aids and materials are permissible in their specific course.

Falsification and Fabrication are the use of identical or substantially the same assignment to fulfill the requirements for two or more courses without the approval of the faculty involved, or the use of identical or substantially the same assignment from a previously completed course to fulfill requirements for another course without the approval of the instructor of the later course. Students are expected to create new work in specific response to each assignment, unless expressly authorized by their faculty to do otherwise.

Unfair Academic Advantage is interference—including theft, concealment, defacement or destruction of other students’ works, resources, or material—for the purpose of gaining an academic advantage.

Noncompliance with Course Rules is the violation of specific course rules as outlined in the syllabus by the faculty or otherwise provided to the student.

Workshop Worksheets

Here is a copy of the workshop worksheets that you can use if you want to re-do the exercise (if you change your topic, for example) and for use in your future courses if you like. Remember, I expect you to include workshop worksheets when you hand in your final papers on the last day of class. Have a great weekend, and as I said in class yesterday, please e-mail me and talk to me if you want to run a thesis statement by me, or you are worried about any aspect of your paper or writing process. See you for the Symposium next week! d

Final Paper: Close Reading and Research Paper Workshop Worksheet

Your Name: __________________________________________________________________________________________

The Assigned Text (or object) You Are Reading Closely in Your Argument: 

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

BRAINSTORM! Take 15 mins. or so to write down 20-30 claims about your chosen text, topic, or question. Don't worry whether the claims are "deep," just write down claims you think are true and interesting. Be as clear and specific as you can.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

 

Continue on the back of the page if you like. The more claims you have to work with, the better.

 

---

 

Final Paper/Close Argumentative Reading Workshop Worksheet (PART TWO: In Class)

Your Name: __________________________________________________________________________________________

The Text (and/or Object) You Are Reading Closely in Your Argument: ___________________________

I. In groups of three: Discuss your BRAINSTORM and then PICK THE THREE BEST THESIS CANDIDATE CLAIMS and write them down in their best, clearest form here (Twenty-Four Minutes):

1.

2.

3.

II. Now on your own, for each of your three thesis candidate claims COME UP WITH THE STRONGEST OR MOST OBVIOUS OPPOSITION TO EACH THESIS (Ten Minutes):

1.

2.

3.

III. In NEW groups of three: Discuss your thesis candidates and their OPPOSITIONS and write down the results, reconsiderations, and re-edits here (Twenty-Four Minutes):

1.

2.

3.

IV. On your own, pick the strongest thesis and its best opposition and write them down in the template below (Five Minutes):

V. In NEW groups of three discuss your text/topic, thesis, opposition, and quotes/data that may support the thesis or provide a means to circumvent its objection. Also, determine whether any key terms need definitions (Thirty Minutes):

Thesis:

1. (textual/data support)

2. (textual/data support)

3. (textual/data support)

Opposition:

(textual/argumentative circumvention)

Terms requiring definition?