Andrew Pickering’s Cyborg Sociology
SOC3072. Department of Sociology and Philosophy, University of Exeter, UK
Aims
The social sciences have traditionally been ‘humanist’ disciplines, inasmuch as their empirical and theoretical focus is on human individuals, their interactions with one aother, social groups and social structure. This module aims to develop a decentred and ‘posthumanist’ sensibility. With the figure of the cyborg - the cybernetic organism, the human/machine - as its icon, it explores the co-evolution of humans, machines, sciences and nature. It couples a discussion of posthumanist social theory and its moral and political implications with a very wide range of studies running from past and present science and technology to the arts, management. education. spirituality and the 60s counterculture.
Syllabus Plan
Introduction (from humans to cyborgs as the unit of analysis); industry, warfare and modernity; subjectivity and desire; theoretical interlude; the arts; nature, animals and the environment; politics
Indicative Basic Reading List
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)
Geiger, J. (2003) Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine (New York: Soft Skull Press)
Haraway, D. (1985) ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 80, 65-107. Reprinted in Haraway, The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 7-45.
Haraway, D. (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press).
Heidegger, M. (1976 [1954] ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ in D. Krell (ed), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row), pp. 287-317.
Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)
Pickering, A. (forthcoming) Sketches of Another Future: Cybernetics in Britain, 1940-2000.
