Sunday, April 24, 2011
Course description?
soooooooo heidi and I got together to talk about this.. Stop rolling your eyes Ben! You should be happy you created such a beautiful friendship between two people because of your skit. It did take some effort though to stay on topic of discussing the reading because we kept getting side tracked as we updated each other on our weekends. Anyways, we both realized as we were reading that this could be a (VERY) long, in-depth course description for our class. It shows the distinction between theory and practice on page 14- very useful to describe the course title, and also mentions the running theme of our class on page 27, "wie es eigentlich gewesen" While reading I had many aha moments where I realized how Ben got all of the ideas for our class, and that all semester it seems like we have been working ourselves up for this piece. Very Climactic. We also found it interesting Fasolt's distinction between present and past and how you can't really draw a firm line to separate them because it is constantly changing from moment to moment. We thought that a lot of what he was saying sort of seemed like common sense to us, but I made the point that it probably wouldn't have made as much sense if we read this at the beginning of class instead of towards the end, which I attribute to Ben's master plan that all of our work is building on each other.
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Mandi, you found me out. Our course has, in some ways, been meant to prepare you to be able to read and understand this text. (And I realize, based on these posts, that I've kindasorta achieved this goal. We'll have some work to do this week!) Lest you think I've gotten ALL of my ideas from my old mentor, however, you may note certain aspects of this text that I might (and do) take issue with. It deals, from the 19th century onward, with academic history only. "Politics," in Fasolt's understanding, has a very specific meaning -- an important one, to be sure (which no one has dealt with yet!), but not the only one. The relationship between these academic ideas and what Karl Marx called the "material conditions of existence" of most people -- work/labor, economics, and everyday politics -- do not make an appearance in his text. Capitalism is more or less left out entirely. Instead, he ascribes agency to a series of ghosts: most importantly, the Shadow of the Emperor (also absent from everyone's posts). This imagery has a lot of explanatory power, but it doesn't leave much room for people to do things to change their world. These are some of the important interventions I have been making on Fasolt's arguments throughout the semester -- some of the same stuff Constantin and I argue about when we see each other.
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