Tom McCarthy, Marko Daniel
(kãtæ-strõfi)
1. The change which produces the final event of a dramatic piece; the dénouement.
2. ‘A final event; a conclusion generally unhappy’ (J.); overthrow, ruin 1601.
3. An event producing a subversion of the order or system of things 1696. esp in Geol.
A sudden and violent physical change, such as an upheaval, depression, etc (See CATACYLSM, CATASTROPHISM.) 1882.
4. A sudden disaster. (Used very loosely.) 1748.
Catastrophe is both a central cultural narrative and the point at which all narratives and cultures implode and disappear. The destructive topos par excellence, it has also been instrumental in the development of many of our concepts and categories, from psychology to history, ethics to aesthetics. This course paces the epistemic disaster zone, reading its debris through sources as diverse as Aeschylus and Virilio, Kant and Beckett, seismology, financial risk analysis and nuclear reactor meltdown.
One: November 1st, 1755
The Lisbon Earthquake both destroyed countless cultural artefacts and became a major reference point for eighteenth century art. Kant’s notion of the Sublime was much indebted to it, as was Voltaire’s attack on Leibniz in Candide. This class examines the generative power of natural catastrophes from the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 to the Asian Tsunami of 2004.
Reading:
Haruki Murakami, After the Quake, trans. Jay Rubin (London: Harvill, 2002)
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986)
Two: August 6th, 1945
When Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the first atomic explosion he said: ‘We are become Shiva, destroyer of worlds.’ This class looks at the way the culture of science imposes its own landscape of trauma.
Reading/Viewing:
J.G.Ballard, Crash, London, 1973
Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Lecture 17 (The Sense of Symptoms) and Lecture 18 (Fixation to Traumas-The Unconscious). (296-326, i.e. 30 pages in the Penguin Complete Freud, Vol. 1, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis)
Three: April 14th, 1912
With the Titanic disaster, radio installed itself firmly in the public mind. This class looks at the relation between catastrophe, media and mourning.
Reading:
Jacques Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)
Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others, (London, 2003)
Four: September 11th, 1973
Chile: the other 9/11. This class looks at the instrumentalisation of catastrophe and its relation to notions of justice and democracy.
Reading:
Aeschylus, Oresteia
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Lament of the Images: Alfredo Jaar and the Ethics of Representation’, Aperture, 181 (2005): 36-47 (online at http://www.alfredojaar.net - follow links under ‘recent press’)
Five: 25-26 April 1986
The cultural fallout from the Chernobyl meltdown can be traced from Cornelia Hesse- Honneger to The Simpsons, and perhaps backwards in time too, through Tarkovsky to Ovid. This class considers apocalypse as a way of life, and being-in-the-world as being-polluted.
Reading:
Beckett, Endgame (1958) and Happy Days (1966) in Complete Dramatic Works
Six: 20 February 1909
With the publication of “The founding and manifesto of Futurism” on the front page of Le Figaro, the avant-garde took centre stage in public consciousness.
Reading:
Marinetti, The founding and manifesto of Futurism, 1909, online at http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/manifesto.html; Marinetti, Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings by F. T. Marinetti, (Los Angeles, 1991)
Extended General Reading List
Constance Penley, NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (New York and London: Verso, 1997)
Umberto Eco: ‘A Portrait of the Elder as a Young Pliny: How to Build Fame’, in On Signs: A Semiotics Reader, edited by Marshall Blonsky (Basil Blackwell, 1985)
Haruki Murakami, After The Quake (London, 2002)
Gene Ray, “Reading the Lisbon Earthquake: Adorno, Lyotard, and the Contemporary Sublime” Yale Journal of Criticism 17.1 (2004): pp. 1-18.
Kant on Lisbon in Gesammelte Werke.
Theodor Adorno on Lisbon in Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1990)
Paul Virilio on Lisbon in War and Cinema (London: Verso, 1989)
Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)
René Thom, Semiophysics: A Sketch (Redwood City, Calif: Addison Wesley, 1990)
Didier Sornette, Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)
Frank Knight: Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (Chicago: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921) (http://www.econlib.org/library/Knight/knRUP1.html)
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995)
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: a Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)
Freud, ‘The Wolf Man, Mourning and Melancholia’ in Collected Works
Aeschylus, Oresteia (various editions)
Sophocles, Oedipus (various editions)
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (various editions)
JG Ballard, Crash (various editions)
Samuel Beckett, Catastrophe (1982)
Emmanuel Levinas, A Levinas Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)
Laurence Rickels, Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988)
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000)
John Taylor, Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998)
Michel Ribon, Esthétique de la catastrophe: essai sur l’art et la catastrophe (Paris: Kimé, 1999)
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Lament of the images’, Aperture, 181 (2005): 36-47
Herbert Blau, ‘Arts and Crisis: Homeland Security and the Noble Savage’
PAJ, 25 (2003): 6-19
Gregor Jansen, ‘Versicherung der Unsicherheit: zum Werk von Dirk Skreber, Parkett, 68 (2003): 147-56
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (Paris: Olympia Press, 1959)
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition , first published 1970, rev. edn. (London, Harper Perennial, 2006)
Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (London: Penguin, 2006)
Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001).
