Prompts for the Final

Prompt One:

To be recognized as human is to be accorded a special status, an “authentic” ethical standing, while to be dismissed as nonhuman, as subhuman, as infrahuman through racializing, sexualizing, pathologizing, infantilizing, primitivizing, or bestializing discourses is to be cast outside of culture and history, and so rendered precarious, abject. Discuss what you take to be the role of this proposition in any of the pieces we engaged with in class, especially by Adams, Althusser, Arendt, Burroughs, Butler, Carpenter ("They Live"), Fanon, Foucault, Gilroy, Haraway, Latour, Lewis, or Solanas.

Prompt Two:

The conviction that technoscientific development might achieve a level through which universal human emancipation might finally be accomplished keeps re-appearing in a number of the texts we have read over the course of the term -- from Wilde, to Marx, to Solanas (and you may well think others). The conviction that technoscientific development has arrived already at such a level but that its emancipatory promise has been diverted to the service of unjust ends re-appears in a number of others -- from Adorno, to Benjamin, to Debord, to Klein (and you may well think others). In still others -- in Barthes, again, in Adorno, in Arendt, in Fanon, in Latour, in Lewis (and you may well think others) -- we discern the concern that framing human emancipation in the instrumental terms of technoscientific development in the first place fatally deranges our grasp of and hopes for such emancipation. Through a comparison of two pieces from the course that seem to offer up conflicting views on the question, or through a reading of a single text that seems to you to exhibit ambivalence on this question, make a case that the text(s) provide an essentially progressive or an essentially reactionary view of technoscience (or instrumentality) in relation to emancipatory politics.