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Theory

April 26, 2004 - 9:14pm -- jim
Announcements
Theory

"Deleuze and The Social"

An Edited Anthology, Call for Papers

As a popular field of study and an increasingly utilized tool for social
research, the work of Gilles Deleuze has perhaps come to fulfil
Foucault's prophecy that one day we would see a Deleuzian century.
However, the nature of this century which is becoming so Deleuzian is
arguably plagued by problematics surrounding what becoming 'Deleuzian'
might mean. Studies of Deleuze in relation to philosophy,
psychoanalysis, literary theory, moral reasoning and critical theory
offer insight into the work of this eminent scholar and place Deleuze's
writings in an historical academic context. Simultaneously,
sociological, cultural, architectural, artistic and educational studies
have, particularly over the past decade, become increasingly popularized
by references to Deleuze and his fantastic neologisms. Yet, the space
between these two trajectories; that is, the spaces between Deleuze's
conceptual philosophy, the ethics that underlie them, and everyday
community practices, politics and social relations, remain relatively
unmapped.

April 20, 2004 - 12:03pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Introduction to the Johnson-Forest Tendency

and the Background to Facing Reality"

Loren Goldner, Break Their Haughty Power

[Loren Goldner notes: The following text was written as a preface to a German translation of the 2002 text (cf. below)
to situate the background of the book Facing Reality and to present a short history of the Johnson-Forest
Tendency for the German context where it, as well as James, Dunayevskaya and Lee, are largely unknown.
It should therefore be understood as "Johnson-Forest For Beginners". I thank 6-7 friends and comrades who vetted the rough
draft for factual errors and omissions. Comment and critique are invited.]

While C.L.R. James (“Johnson”) (1901-1989) has become an academic fashion in the U.S. in the past 15 years (1), and is widely known in Britain and in the Caribbean, his name evokes little recognition in most of continental Europe except perhaps as the author of the classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938).


Raya Dunayevskaya (“Forest”) (1910-1987), intimately associated with James from ca. 1940 until 1955, is still less known, aside from translations of her books Marxism and Freedom, Philosophy and Revolution, and Rosa Luxemburg.


Least known of all is Grace Lee Boggs, (1915-   ), a Chinese-American woman who was the third founder and theoretician of what came to be known as the “Johnson-Forest tendency” of the Workers’ Party and the Socialist Workers’ Party in the U.S., a tendency whose influence has rippled far beyond its original small forces within two American Trotskyist groups before, during and after World War II.

April 20, 2004 - 7:59am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"The Metamorphosis of Telos:

A Splintered Journal Pokes Into Its Own Contradictions"

Danny Postel, In These Times (April 24-30, 1991)

Why would a journal that has described itself as "the philosophical conscience of the American left" and "a journal of radical thought" invite a senior contributing editor of The World & I — a publication of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times corporation—into its editorial circle? The journal is Telos, and its new comrade is Paul Gottfried, a self-described "reactionary" who has also written for such publications as Policy Review, the official magazine of the Heritage Foundation. Why would someone with Gottfried's politics be interested in a journal like Telos?

April 16, 2004 - 11:51am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics

Alan Wolfe, Chronicle of Higher Education

To understand what is distinctive about today's Republican Party, you first need to know about an obscure and very conservative German political philosopher. His name, however, is not Leo Strauss, who has been widely cited as the intellectual guru of the Bush administration. It belongs, instead, to a lesser known, but in many ways more important, thinker named Carl Schmitt.

April 10, 2004 - 3:16am -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

nolympics writes The Phonenix Program
 was a CIA project in South Vietnam from 1967 which set out to eliminate popular support for the Viet Cong through assasination, kidnapping, torture, psychological operations, propaganda and general terror. The link above provides some original documents and some analysis of the operation.

What with Blackwater and the pressing need for counterinsurgency, as well as a voracious appetite for the usual slaughter, there is little doubt that Cheney, Bremer and dracula man Rumsfeld will be leafing through its archives.

April 5, 2004 - 1:35am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"On Security and Terror"

Giorgio Agamben, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 20, 2001

Security as leading principle of state politics dates back to the the birth of the modern state. Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of fear, which compels human beings to come together within a society. But not until the 18th century does a thought of security come into its own. In a 1978 lecture at the College de France (which has yet to be published) Michel Foucault has shown how the political and economic practice of the Physiocrats opposes security to discipline and the law as instruments of governance.

April 4, 2004 - 6:25pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Existential Marxism in Postwar France

Mark Poster (originally published in 1975)


My purpose in this study has been to trace the relationship of Marxism and existentialism as the dominant theme in recent French social thought. My thesis is that the two doctrines converged in Sartre and in the Arguments group, establishing the beginnings of a social theory of the New Left. Starting from the period right after World War II, when Marxism and existentialism were competing doctrines, I have described the movement of Sartre and his circle toward Marxism and the movement of Marxists away from Stalinism. By the mid-1960s there had been various attempts at a synthetic existential Marxism, all of which should be seen as tentative beginnings that might result in a major new social theory. In the final chapter, I test the new theory by using it to help us comprehend the events of May-June, 1968.


Existential Marxism emerges as a social theory suited to comprehend the conditions and the contradictions of advanced industrial society, to articulate the situation of various groups in this society, and to provide a new kind of theory for the human sciences that sees the scientist not as value-free or objective but as implicated in the object of his knowledge. Existential Marxism might thus be considered both as the "ideology" of an emerging radical coalition and as a theoretical advance in its own right.


My disciplinary orientation is that of the history of ideas which describes changing intellectual patterns with more concern for the relation of ideas to society than for the logical consistency of the ideas themselves. Hence I have not attempted a systematic exposition of New Left social theory, but have restricted myself, with minor exceptions, to articulating the theories of the French. It will be clear to the reader that I am sympathetic to the effort of the existential Marxists, although I am not committed to any particular version of their thinking. I adhere to their commitment to a radical restructuring of relations and institutions in advanced industrial society, and I am especially convinced of the value of their efforts to redefine the nature of the human sciences.


My study of their positions has challenged me to consider the limitations of intellectual history, but I have not deviated very far, in this work, from its traditional methodological boundaries. Finally, it is my hope that the study of the theoretical advances of the French will be of value to all those concerned about the present state of social theory in the human sciences and to all those in the United States who are beginning to confront their situation on a theoretical level.


This whole book is available online here.

April 1, 2004 - 2:06pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Foucault, Marxism and History

Mark Poster (First published, 1984)

This book is intended as a set of essays examining the value of the recent works of Michel Foucault for social theory and social history. Foucault's works written since 1968 (Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality and numerous shorter pieces) contain some important advances in social theory and in the writing of social history. My purpose is to separate out those advances from other features of Foucault's thought which I find less beneficial. I am not attempting to give an assessment of Foucault's work as a whole but to focus on and analyze certain features of it.


To that end I situate Foucault's work in a double problematic: those of critical social theory and a new social formation that I call the mode of information. Although Foucault's politics may be ambiguous, his works are profitably situated in relation to critical theory. He provides, I will argue, models of analysis that contain theoretical elements which, properly interpreted, open up new directions for critical theory, directions that can lead it out of its current impasses. But these new directions only become apparent when certain important changes in the social formation of advanced trial society are recognized. To that end I have coined the somewhat infelicitous phrase 'mode of information' to represent these changes and to contrast the current situation to Marx's concept of the mode of production.

Whole book is online here.

April 1, 2004 - 1:28pm -- jim
Events
Theory

NY News and Letters invites you to join a series of classes on:

"Alternatives to Capitalism" Classes

Sundays in Spring, 2004, New York City

39 West 14th Street, Rm. 205 (Ring bell #3, Identity House), Manhattan

Free admission; free and open discussion. Most readings can be purchased from us. Call (212) 663-3631 for more information, or e-mail nandl@ igc.org and ask about
New York classes. You can visit our website at www.newsandletters.org. Classes continue every other Sunday.

Class 2: Value, Exchange Value, and Freely Associated Labor? — April 4
Speaker: Andrew Kliman, 7:00-9:15 p.m. (Daylight Savings Time)

"Socialism" is often posed in terms of whether "capital should be individual or common." Marx's rejection to this way of posing the issue is discussed in The Poverty of Philosophy and "Critique of the Gotha Program." Marx's view that, "It is totally impossible to reconstitute a society on the basis of what is merely an embellished shadow of it," permeates his 1875 "Critique," which is taken up in Dunayevskaya's "A New Revision of Marxian Economics."

March 28, 2004 - 7:04am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"A Universal History of Contingency:

Deleuze and Guattari on the History of Capitalism"

Jason Read, Borderlands

 

It would be a mistake to read Anti-Oedipus as the new theoretical reference (you know, that much heralded theory that finally encompasses everything, that finally totalizes and reassures, the one that we are told we 'need so badly' in our age of dispersion and specialization where 'hope' is lacking). One must not look for a 'philosophy' amid the extraordinary profusion of new notions and surprise concepts: Anti-Oedipus is not a flashy Hegel. —Michel Foucault (1983)

Retrospective

1. One of the difficult characteristics of the writing of Gilles Deleuze, alone and in collaboration with Félix Guattari, is, in Deleuze's terms, its extremely "untimely" nature. Philosophical and theoretical positions that have generally been abandoned or rendered untenable by the passage of time are advocated by Deleuze and Guattari only to be subsequently twisted so as to be rendered unrecognizable. There are multiple specific examples of this: the turn to vitalism, to naturalism, or to pre-critical philosophical positions, but more generally it is possible to say that Deleuze and Guattari write as if the general breakdown of the lofty aspirations of philosophy, the critique of metaphysics and of the systematizing pretensions of philosophy, had not happened. Or do they? Even as Deleuze and Guattari seem to produce a metaphysics and even a cosmology that encompasses everything from the geological history of the earth to the contemporary technological and political transformations of capital they do so with such a perverse humor that it is impossible to assume what is at stake in such writing. Is this simply the worst sort of totalizing metaphysical philosophizing, or is it all just some sort of joke? Or is something altogether different happening — another practice of philosophy, that is neither a return of the grand systematic aspirations of philosophy nor the dismantling of it?


Full article continues here.

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