Bob Goldman
Albany 207
Office Hours: Tu 1:30-4:00 and by appointment
We live in a time of immense flux that seems difficult to chart.
There is talk about the transition from modernity to postmodernity.
Others speak of a shift from Fordism to Postfordism? But what does
that mean? Today's buzzwords include the Information Age, the Digital
Age, and Globalization. Institutions such as the nuclear family,
which once seemed so stable that many thought of them as eternal,
have eroded rapidly in recent years. But why? Because of changing
labor markets? Because of shifting conceptions of gender? Because of
growing individualism and the decline of community? Because of the
rampant commodification of everyday life?
Where once the subject of social change was driven by a faith in "progress" -- progress toward democracy, progress toward social justice, progress toward civility, progress toward control over the environment -- there are many today who have given up on "progress" as the measure of change. Can we direct or manage change? Or, are the forces of change so vast that we can only try to experience them? And what about conservative those forces that seek to block change, those driven by a faith in "regress"?
Any choice of materials for a course such as this is ultimately a bit arbitrary. Textbooks on the subject often seek to present unified theories of change that are so generalizable that they become completely abstract -- ripped out of historical, social and cultural contexts. An opposite approach takes a microscopic stance that identifies a change but can't explain it. In recent decades, it has been easy to drift toward technological determinism as an overarching explanation of change. Before that, theories of social change emphasized military power and conquest; or climate; or religion. Of course, probably the most famous theory of historical change was that offered by Karl Marx who explained that all history has been the product of class conflicts and relations of inequality.
Huge political conflicts are staged around competing accounts of how change has occurred and how we can intervene. One of the basic themes that I would like to keep in mind during this course concerns the tension between how much change is driven by institutional structures and impersonal forces, and how much change is subject to the intentional goals and interventions of historical actors like ourselves.
Of course, explanations (and ideologies) of change and the forces that actually impel change are two different beasts. In this course we will explore how much of our sense of change is caught up in what might be called "the politics of memory." A basic issue we will address in this course concerns our contemporary understandings of the role of change in society, and how these understandings shape our politics of change. Theories of change are incorporated into our everyday understandings of "society". In a sense, our conceptions of our own social and cultural identity depend on our views about both change and stasis.
We will begin with Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time -- a story about a Chicana woman who has been labeled insane, but who has the capacity to see into the future. Actually, she visits two competing futures: one a totalitarian nightmare, the other a communal paradise. Which shall it be? What are the possibilities as we look into our future and assess our past?
A film by Werner Herzog called Fitzcarraldo tells the story of a European man who dreams of opening an opera house on the Amazon. The story bears an uncanny resemblance to the heroic, yet tragic story of Faust as told by Marshall Berman in All that is Solid Melts into Air, a study of the traits of modernity. Berman begins by exploring the Faust story as an account of the modernist (or bourgeois) subject driven by the "desire for development" creating an "environment in which the past and present are continually sacrificed to clear the way for the future." Indeed, one of the most notable supporters of twentieth century capitalism, Joseph Schumpeter, declared that it works best as a system of "creative destruction."
There is a clear bias in this syllabus towards the social and cultural life of cities because they offer us a site where the forces of change are visible. Marshall Berman touches on the early modernist cities -- such as Paris and New York -- in his examination of modernity as a system of inexorable change. As we shift to the 20th century cities of Los Angeles and Miami, we will quickly read a broad general overview of social change in American society by Beth Rubin to familiarize with the big issues of our last half century. Our subsequent focus on Los Angeles and Miami tracks the changing social conditions that have shaped transitions from modernity to postmodernity. City of Quartz, about L.A., tells the history of social change through the multiple prisms of conflicting class and property relations, the politics of suburbanism, inner city control, and the organization of the Church in Southern California. City on the Edge, as told by Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick, follows the story of change of Miami in terms of Caribbean migrations and the ethnic power struggles that unfolded.
We will then conclude our journey through the contemporary urban landscape with Celeste Olalquiaga's dazzling reading of the contemporary "megalopolis" and the postmodern cultural formations that have been spawned there. It will be interesting to compare Fritz Lang's cinematic vision of the modern city, Metropolis, with Olalquiaga's way of picturing Megalopolis.
Following this, we will again broaden our focus to the emerging systems of global capitalism as a world-system composed of both modern and postmodern cities. Here we'll look at the forces of globalization that are restructuring relationships of capital and labor as well as the state. We'll also take up questions of transnationalism, time-space compression, and the role of migrant labor in the new international division of labor. The book by Malcolm Waters confronts these broad dimensions of globalizing change.
Marge Piercy. Woman on the edge of time. New York: Knopf, 1976.
Marshall Berman. All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
Beth Rubin. Social Change. Pine Forge Press. 1995.
Mike Davis; photographs by Robert Morrow. City of quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles. London; New York: Verso, 1990.
See also Mike Davis, The Urban Ecology of Fear.
Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick. City on the edge: the transformation of Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Celeste Olalquiaga. Megalopolis: contemporary cultural sensibilities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
Malcolm Waters. Globalization. Routledge, 1994.
Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo
Burden of Dreams: the making of Fitzcarraldo
Riddley Scott, Blade Runner
Fritz Lang, Metropolis
Three-quarters of your grade will be based on your class participation. Yep, that was no error. Three-quarters of your course grade is your participation. Holy cow! Before you jump out of your skins, read on and see how I am defining participation.
1) In general, I hope to conduct this class as a dialogue among active readers and writers, speakers and listeners. This class is predicated on student participation and student conversations both inside and outside of class. One overt measure of participation is whether a student is present or absent for class sessions. More than four absences will result in a grade reduction of one letter. Each additional absence will bring another grade reduction.
2) A second measure of participation will come from informal writing on a daily/weekly basis. This writing will take place in Pacerforum conversations about the readings that we do and the issues that they raise. Pacerforum is a computerized system that permits sharing our thinking in written form (although Pacerforum also permits the inclusion of images and sound) with one another in what amounts to an open public forum. It offers a place where students can raise questions that they have with the texts. The emphasis here is on thinking, and sharing our thoughts; the emphasis here is on being responsible to (and for) the class as a public intellectual space.
Pacerforum permits students who are not comfortable speaking in front of the full class to share their thinking in written form. Students who are uncomfortable about engaging in either written or oral discussion of the issues of social change should not be in this class. As a sociologist, I recognize that all groups are characterized by divisions-of-labor. Thus, if a student cannot find a comfort zone in terms of conventional forms of participation, he/she must negotiate with the group (including myself) to find other ways of contributing. We will organize Pacerforum by having groups of four or five persons. For those who have no prior experience with Pacerforum, we will provide quick and easy training.
Let me stress this point again. Each student is responsible for writing on Pacerforum as well as reading the posts of other class members. Thus a student who quietly attends class 90% of the time , but does not contribute in class and participates only rarely on Pacerforum will most likely fail the course.
3) The Pacerforum groups will also function as a reading team and a research team. A fundamental element of your course participation will involve responsibility for class discussions of the readings. This aspect of the course includes the task of framing questions about the readings. Groups will be responsible on a weekly basis. Being a discussion leader also carries the responsibility for doing background research where necessary -- e.g., looking up obscure terms.
4) Each group is expected to acquire a certain "expertise" in a field of social change that is not directly included in the prime-time readings, but which can be studied by applying thematerials we are covering.
As I have struggled to structure this course, I have been toying with the idea of a more collaborative approach to structuring our work. Over the past several years I have been moving steadily in this direction as I have become convinced that collaborative writing processes enhance the learning process. Now, I would like to put the "pedal to the metal" and push the window of collaborative learning further. Since this is a course on social change, it seems doubly appropriate to consider how we might become actors on the stage of social change. Though there is much to recommend the traditional liberal arts structure and organization of classes around readings, discussions, lectures, and exams and papers, this approach also presents a grading regime that grows tiresome with constant repetition. Further, when courses are structured to place the burden of evaluation on individuals, some individuals invariably shine, but too many do not and drift.
I propose that as a group we aim at constructing our own WEB site on the subject of social change. We could conceptualize the project as constructing a WEB site dedicated to our studies of social change, organized for an imagined audience of the succeeding groups of students who will undertake the study of Social Change. We can accomplish this by channeling the work done on your research projects into multimedia documents that can be placed and linked on the World Wide Web and linked to other site and materials. In a similar way, the Pacerforum conversations can not only become the seeds of topics on our WEB site, but also function as a workspace within which we can work through the many questions we will have about how to arrange our collective project.
This approach could offer a number of possible advantages. First, the nature of the WEB is such that we can cross-link or "hyper-link" materials to permit us to document and follow the complex connections between social, cultural, economic and political forces. Second, this would allow us to learn some new tools out there that most of us have thus far ignored. Third, I believe it will motivate all of us to raise the level of our work since none of us will want our names associated with mediocrity in such a public place as the Internet. Fourth, it will allow us to elevate the collaborative aspect of our learning by taking more responsibility for each other's work. This strategy would also require that we undertake a reasoned and thoughtful approach to our division of labor -- allowing some to specialize in research and discovery while others work on fashioning formats and interfaces; allowing some to write while others become editors; etc. Fifth, it will permit me to become involved with you on the production side of the coin rather not simply performing the evaluative function. Finally, I think it would be exciting to actively test the limits of this new technology by seeing if we can make it serve our purposes.
To summarize then, I am defining participation as including:
January 15 Opening day -- first pitchJanuary 18 Marge Piercy, pp.9-191.
January 22 Piercy, pp.192-376.
January 25 Marshall Berman, "Introduction," pp.15-36.
January 29 Berman, "Goethe's Faust: the tragedy of development," pp.37-86.
- Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo
- Burden of Dreams
February 1 Berman, "Marx, modernism and modernization," pp.87-129.
February 5 Berman, "Modernism in New York," pp.287-348
February 8 Rubin, pp.1-87.
February 12 Rubin, pp.89-188.
February 15 Mike Davis, "The view from futures past," pp.3-14.
"Sunshine or Noir?" pp.15-97.February 19 Davis, "Power lines," pp.101-149.
"Homegrown revolution," pp.153-219.February 22 Davis, "Fortress L.A.," pp.223-263.
- "The hammer & the rock," pp.267-322.
- Riddley Scott, Blade Runner
February 26 Davis, "New confessions pp.325-372.
February 29 Davis, "Junkyard of dreams," pp.375-435.
March 4 Portes & Stepick, "Change without a blueprint," pp.1-37.
"A year to remember: the riot & the Haitians," pp.38-60.March 7 Portes & Stepick, "The early years," pp.61-88.
- "Enter the Cubans," pp.89-107.
- "How the enclave was built," pp.123-149.
March 11 Portes & Stepick, "The Nicaraguan exodus," pp.150-175.
- "Lost in the fray: Miami's black minorities," pp.176-202.
- "Reprise," pp.203-221. "Postscript," pp.223-227.
March 14 Fritz Lang, Metropolis
SPRING BREAK
March 25 Celeste Olalquiaga, "Prologue," pp.xi-xii.
March 28 Olalquiaga, "Reach out and touch someone," pp.1-18.
April 1 Olalquiaga, "Lost in space," pp.19-35.
April 4 Olalquiaga, "Holy kitschen" p.36-55.
April 8 Olalquiaga, "Nature morte," pp.56-74.
April 11 Olalquiaga, "Tupinicopolis: the city of retrofuturistic Indians," pp.75-94.
April 15 Waters, Globalization, pp.1-64
April 18 Waters, Globalization, pp.65-157.
April 22 WEB project final push
April 25 WEB project final push
Final Group Research Presentations and viewing of our WEB pages