I have been teaching critical theory, argumentation, literature and media in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley for ten years, and I have been teaching composition, critical theory, and media criticism as a member of the Visiting Faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute since 2004.
I have had the chance to draw on a classical education in philosophy, literary and cultural theory, while learning on the job what it means to teach mass culture and deliberative discourse from an interdisciplinary perspective. Over the course of these years I have had the opportunity to focus ever more conspicuously on teaching the problems and preoccupations of technocriticism, and especially media criticism and network politics. I began my career teaching composition, basic argumentation, and public speaking courses, and also assisted with several lecture classes that surveyed the canon of philosophy and critical theory. Later, I had the opportunity to teach a number of upper-division courses in advanced argumentation and critical theory, usually organized around topics of technocultural theory or technoethical discourse.
But whatever the subject matter, in teaching I recognize a broader urgency to ensure that my classes are accessible and relevant to the concerns and interests of a diverse student body. The Rhetoric Department at Berkeley is a remarkably diverse program, committed to interdisciplinary study and research, and I have had the pleasure of teaching students who are not only culturally diverse, but also from an extraordinary range of majors, exhibiting a wide breadth of differing backgrounds, skill-sets, interests, and concerns. It is crucial to my own practice of teaching that students actively participate in the project to connect up whatever subject matter is the proximate focus of the course to their own personal concerns and to the broader worlds of work and social responsibility they inhabit outside the classroom. To this end, I always attempt to draw on a real diversity of texts, to balance literary and critical writing with more mainstream popular narratives, to balance policy discourse with polemics, to balance written texts with visual and interactive texts, all the while trying to draw connections between these texts and the contexts in which they are embedded, to render what is familiar in them unfamiliar, and to find the unique connections between any given text and each particular student that will provide them the occasion to discern in it its aliveness, its provocation, and its pleasure. Every class is a conversation, and my first responsibility in any class is to facilitate the emergence of the unique community of the classroom on which all the participants in a course, including myself, depend to learn what is available to us in the absolutely unrepeatable occasion of every course.
The focus of my work, both of my writing and my teaching, has been the ongoing provocation of technological development on personal and public life. Although it is a commonplace to hear technological development described as though it were monolithically "progressing," "accelerating," "emerging," "disrupting," "converging," or what have you, the truth is that the prosthetic practices in which people individually and collectively invent, employ, and otherwise variously take up and make sense of our tools and techniques are of course unutterably multiform. Technocriticism involves the documentation and analysis of as well as critical engagements with such prosthetic practices.
I write and teach technocritical theory, both in its technocultural and technoethical aspects. The technocultural dimension of technocriticism documents and interprets prosthetic practices and technocultures as they emerge and transform under pressure of ongoing technological developments and their resignifications. The technoethical dimension of technocriticism undertakes the public deliberative engagement of multiple contending stakeholders to the problems of technological development, and subsumes media criticism, bioethics, neuroethics, roboethics, existential risk assessment and some elements of environmental criticism and design theory.
Created 1-12-05. Last Modified 4-8-05.
The opinions or statements expressed herein should not be taken as a position or endorsement of the University of California, Berkeley.
Dale Carrico, dalec@berkeley.edu