300569 Territory, Authority, Rights: Emerging global assemblages (S) (SoSe 2011)

GENERAL DESCRIPTION.

The organizing proposition of this class is that we need to go beyond the categories of the national and the global to understand the specifics of our global modernity. The latter begins to take shape in the 1980s and 1990s and needs to be distinguished from the modernity of the nation-state, which reaches its high point in the early and mid-20th century.

Depth of inquiry and relentless pursuit of particular issues is more important in this class than breadth of literature covered. Experimenting and thinking aloud is going to matter more than number of authors studied. At the heart of the effort, the project, represented by this class is a collective inquiry about questions of method and theorization.

Required readings for each class will cover few pages. But they need to be read and studied carefully. Ideally students would enter into a sort of dialogical relation to those readings: interrogate and ruminate rather than summarize. For me this is a special occasion: My aim is to have a conversation with Luhmann, focusing on just a few critical issues in a few of his writings.

I am counting on some of the students being “Luhmannites,” and thus experts on his scholarship: you will add to our conversation by bringing up key points that you know are central to Luhmann and he might raise were he to sit around the table with us. You can contribute such points even if you do not agree with Luhmann on these points. You can also bring in some additional texts –but short extracts so that we can all spend time in the class reading those texts and then discuss them.

A seminar is meant to make us active participants in the conversation, not merely summarizers of a given text. So if you know little about Luhmann, that is perfectly fine. A seminar is also a device to advance one’s and the group’s thinking by using a scholar’s work. That work becomes the instrument through which we can think about key issues even if we do not agree with the author.