the object: a plea for suggested readings

Music: Pablo's EyeYou Have a Yearning for Perfection (1996)

Just when I thought I could barely keep my head above water---essays to write past due, a new course prep, job recommendation letters, guest lectures I stupidly agreed to deliver in the summer, revising essays for journals [insert more woe and self-pitying, self-centered and over-the-top whining]---I learn that I have to come up with a course description and book orders for a new graduate seminar next spring. The seminar is titled "The Object," and I am at this moment still rather clueless about what we should read.

I know what I want the course to accomplish: (1) we will survey anxieties over "the object" in modernity to postmodernity to better understand our own predicament as rhetorical scholars; (2) we will learn about and understand the histories of two disciplines: communication and cultural studies; (3) the example "object" we will examine will be "speech." (This will work nicely in tandem with the next course I offer, Rhetorical Criticism, for which the object is "text"). So far, so good.

In terms of the bigger picture, the course is really the counterpart to my course on subjectivity theory, "the Subject." This would imply the object is therefore, at some level, the Other, but that's only a small part of what I imagine the class to be. I'm blogging today about the ideas I have for the course in the hope that it will inspire some of you to suggest readings for the class.

I thought I would start with the onset of Modernity in the work of Kant, and in particular, is public feud with some neoplatonists over the object of "reason" (they get in a fight about which way of thinking "castrates" reason). This will feed nicely into psychoanalysis and object relations theory, where the object serves as a token of a person or figure. ("Phallus phallus here, phallus phallus there, everywhere a phallus phallus.") This is implies all objects---of desire, of the gaze, of criticism, and so on---serve an important, narcissistic function. [Insert more theoretical readings here]

Then, I thought we would, first, read about the history of the field of Speech Communication, and this in tandem with a book or two, or a handful of readings at least, on "speech" and "voice."

Second, I thought we could also do the same for cultural studies, tracing its history and anxieties about he object.

By course's end, we'll be into the dissolution of the object altogether in "postmodernity" (whatever that is)---Gaonkar on Object and Method, McGee on the textual fragment, Brummett on the mosaic, and so on---but also I want to focus on something in the wider humanities too. I'm thinking my course-line will be that postmodernity in the academy represents the lost object.

Lost objects, of course, lead to a sort of mournfulness or melancholia, and so the class will end with something like the critical act as mourning the object (even in the event of its constitution through criticism).

So, that's what I have got---not yet well defined, but it will be. I'll have it figured out over the winter break, for certain. Now, however, I need to think about what books I would like to assign. First, I need a good reader in cultural studies that addresses object anxiety and/or the field's history. Second, I need more theoretically oriented texts (readings or books) that take up the question, "what is the object?" or discuss anxieties about "the object." Any of you have suggestions out there?

Here's what I'm considering assigning (I won't assign all of this, it's just what I'm considering):

• Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema
• Herman Cohen, The History of Speech Communication
• Steven Conner, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism
• Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More
• Larry Grossberg et al., Cultural Studies
• William Keith, Democracy as Discussion
• Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word
• Roy Orbison, In Dreams (Compact Disk)
• Clifford Nass and Scott Brave, Wired for Speech
• Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror
• Skinny Puppy, Greater Wrong of the Right (Compact Disk)

My buddies are a smart bunch, so I know y'all have some things to suggest!