Talk:History of Consciousness

Suggestion for omission
Wikipedia is not a reference page exclusively for or about the University of California at Santa Cruz. This page describing their program should not exist, particularly when the history of consciousness is a discipline in its own right.

Activities?
There is no single mention of what this graduate program actually does or has done. This is perhaps the single most important piece of information one might want about it. A good second would be the general standpoint they have on several issues. What is the "History of Consciousness"?

Generally the activities include talking nonsense, making up words and generally making themselves feel important via a small clique of mutual citations. Many people on campus consider HistCon to be a joke or worse an embarrassment. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.55.220.84 (talk) 07:26, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

History of the program
I'm new to Wikipedia and don't have the chops to fix the page, but this needs work. The program was actually started in the '60s by the phenomenologists Maurice Natanson and Albert Hofstadter and was one of the very few graduate programs in the humanities on the UC Santa Cruz campus for several years. The program fell on hard times after the retirements of Natanson and Hofstadter, with allegations that academic standards had devolved to a level unacceptable even by the tolerant standards of Santa Cruz in the '70s.

Hayden White was brought in as Chair to remake the program. It may be true that James Clifford was the first new hire made after White became chair - it would have been either Clifford or Donna Haraway.

I don't have sources at hand that I can officially cite to; I just know all of this from having been a student of Hayden's, but I imagine that the HistCon website might have some of the ancient history. --Pinverarity 10:20, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

After checking out the removal of 'in' by another user, I realized that the 'California' at the end of the intro paragraph was redundant, insofar as the name of the university is "University of California". Also, the official naming convention for UC campuses is "University of California at ______", so this cleanup brings it into alignment with proper citation as well. --Pinverarity 05:51, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

I think that info would help. We need a year. We also need to know the original motivations and/or mission statement. What is the role of consciousness in the program? I think some UCSC alums and students and profs need to get on board here. Come on you Slugs. :) --Dylanfly 01:36, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't have any citations but I thought the program was created by Harry Berger Jr and Bert Kaplan. I could have sworn that Harry said as much to me in the 80s. The name was taken from Eric Neumann's book The Origins and History of Consciousness. I was an UG in the 70s who hung out with HisCon types then, and I don't recall either Natanson or Hofstadter being part of HisCon (later HistCon to distinguish it from His Con which we used to joke about when I was in the program in the 80s). But in the early period faculty were not attached to it as a program anyway. Only later in the 80s when Hayden took over were there actual faculty hired for the program.

I just checked the citation from the interview with McHenry and he mentions "Berger" being taken from Literature to do stuff in HisCon, so that's Harry Berger Jr.

Katie King Katking 18:28, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

I checked with Harry Berger, Jr. too and added his name to the list of founders. He is mentioned in the McHenry document so its citation includes him. Katie King Katking 15:19, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

IPA pronunciation?
Anyone know how to do the IPA Pronunciation for "Hiss-Kahn?" --Dylanfly 18:44, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Legitimate links
I have re-added the links deleted by GordonRoss to: Critical Race Theory, Feminist Theory, Film Theory, Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Visual Studies.

I have re-added them because they basically constitute or constituted much of the core of what was/is studied and taught in the HistCon program. It is simply impossible to discuss HistCon in the 1980s, for instance, without mentioning postmodernism: Fredric Jameson's seminal article "Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" was written during the period he was in HistCon and HistCon was one of the centers of postmodernist theory in the world.

Similarly, HistCon since the 1990s has been one of the centers of critical race theory, and it is wholly appropriate to link to that subject. The study of Lacan and Lacanian-inspired theory has been part of HistCon for many years. Film theory has been a major part of HistCon dating back to the arrival of Teresa DeLauretis in the mid-1980s. And so on and so on.

The deletion was puzzling and left only philosophy, science studies and social movements as "legitimate" subject linkages. There is no reason whatsoever for leaving those and deleting the others. Indeed, one could argue that cultural anthropology and historiography ought to be added, if anything. --Pinverarity 22:51, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

The list of links shouldnt be almost the same length as the article. I think its best to pick the 3-4 most relevant relevant links and remove the rest; you dont have to link to every subject even tangibly related to the article. At the moment it looks like someone has just added pretty much every fashionable liberal arts movement which came to mind. I'm sure that the mathematics department at MIT has been involved in many different subfields its subject, but you wouldnt fill its links page with the name of every branch of mathematics under the sun.

Also, the links should have some relevance to the article. Theres nothing in the article that directly relates to most of links, hence they shouldnt really be there. .GordonRoss 02:14, 13 September 2007 (UTC)