Sergio Benvenuto Interviews Cornelius Castoriadis (1)

Psychomedia

Benvenuto: You are a philosopher of politics, but you are also a practicing psychoanalyst. Does your profession of analysis have an influence on your philosophical concepts?

Castoriadis: There is a very strong bond between my concept of psychoanalysis and my concept of politics. The aim of both is human autonomy, albeit via different processes. Politics aims at freeing the human being, making it possible for him to accede to his own autonomy through collective action. The prevailing concept during the 18th and 19th centuries (including that of Marx), according to which the object of politics was happiness, is a mistaken, even catastrophic, one. The object of politics is freedom. And politics is collectiveconscious and consideredaction, aimed at transforming institutions into institutions of freedom and autonomy.

"Organized Networks"

Ned Rossiter, Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster

[Presented at The Life of Mobile Data: Technology, Mobility and Data Subjectivity conference, April 15-16, 2004, University of Surrey, England

Abstract

This paper is interested in how networks using ICTs as their primary
mode of organisation can be considered as new institutional forms.
The paper suggests that organised networks are emergent
socio-technical forms that arise from the limits of both tactical
media and more traditional institutional structures and architectonic
forms. Organised networks are peculiar for the ways in which they
address problems situated within the media form itself. The
organised network is thus one whose socio-technical relations are
immanent to, rather than supplements of, communications media. The
paper argues that the problematics of scale and sustainability are
the two key challenges faced by various forms of networks. The
organised network is distinct for the ways in which it has managed to
address such problematics in order to imbue informational relations
with a strategic potential.

"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.