POST 172 PZ -Power, Identity, and Culture

Institution: Pitzer College

Description: This is a course about power-power close to the bone, power made sublime, made and unmade in the fullness of time. The course takes as its central thesis the claim that physical and coercive power meets its match in power that is immaterial and subjective, working invisibly, quietly, to shape understandings of who we are. Far beyond the bureaucratic rites and rituals of states and governments that comprise the traditional concerns of political scientists, alternating between case and theory, we will examine the struggle by state and elite actors to shape the subjectivities of the ?ordinary? through culture and identity in order to secure quiescence and rule. Close attention will be paid to how socializing agents, including schools and educational systems, media and film, families and local communities, shape and reshape efforts to have ordinary citizens internalize what Stuart Hall describes as “the horizon of the taken-for- granted,” those ruling ideas and beliefs that consist “of things that go without saying because they come without saying.”

The course is set up as a deliberate conversation between the works of Antonio Gramsci and James C. Scott, as well as their interlocutors and critics, most notably the late (and incomparable) Stuart Hall. The trajectory of this literature carries us from domination ?thinly? centered in class and mediated by culture, to power completely de-centered from material forms of rule. Though each author is distinct, if heterodox, in his or her approach to the question of power, they are for the most part bound together by the shared belief that power is relationship, between class and culture, culture and identity, state and society.

As we move through the readings, we’ll ask, Does there come a moment in which complex, radical elaborations of power produces diminishing returns? The movement away from class and “crude economism” in Gramsci clears the way for a more complex and nuanced considerations of power as it relates to other real-world categories, including gender, ethnicity, and race. Yet this development comes with its own risks. By producing a fractured, even incoherent mapping of power, the subsequent cultural studies and power literatures (potentially) obscures more than it clarifies.

Moving from theory to specific cases of identity formation at work in Mexico, Iran, Syria, the former Czechoslovakia, on the factory floor in Nebraska and in the torture chambers of Chile and Brazil, my hope is to provoke you to theory build, to introduce new horizons of your own making.