The Platypus Synthesis

Transcript of the discussion following the plenary presentations at the 1st annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, Chicago, June 12–14, 2009. See the above link for an audio recording. Audience Q & A Question 1 (Laurie Rojas): Ian just spoke about membership, and I wanted to expand on that, but, mostly to Chris and Richard, who have given very different, less concrete, presentations, now that Ian has raised the issue of membership, how is the membership to understand what the two of you just presented? [Read More]

Transcript of the plenary presentation by Ian Morrison at the 1st annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, Chicago, June 12–14, 2009. See the above link for an audio recording. J. P. CANNON SAID that, If the group misunderstands the task set for it by conditions of the day, if it does not know how to answer the most important of all questions in politics – that is, the question of what to do next – then the group, no matter what its merits may otherwise be, can wear itself out in misdirected efforts and futile activities and come to grief. [Read More]

Transcript of the plenary presentation by Chris Cutrone at the 1st annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, Chicago, June 12–14, 2009. See the above link for an audio recording. I WANT TO BEGIN, straightaway, with something Richard raised, on which I would like to try to elaborate, by way of properly motivating the more “positive” aspect of Platypus’s theory. Not how we are misrecognized, as either neoconservatives, crypto-Spartacists or academic Left-liberals, and what this says “negatively” about our project, as if in a photonegative, as Richard has discussed, but rather how we positively think about the intellectual content of our project. [Read More]

Transcript of the plenary presentation by Richard Rubin at the 1st annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, Chicago, June 12–14, 2009. See the above link for an audio recording. THE TITLE OF THIS TALK, “Four Types of Ambiguity,” is, of course, a take-off on William Empson’s classic 1930 book Seven Types of Ambiguity, which is heralded with launching the New Criticism. The thesis of it is that Platypus as a project can best be understood by considering the plausible misreadings of Platypus and how Platypus both is and is not like the ways it might be misunderstood. [Read More]

Transcript of the introduction to the plenary presentations at the 1st annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, Chicago, June 12–14, 2009. See the above link for an audio recording. What is Platypus? Platypus was set up as an attack on thought-taboos. From the start, we’ve rejected the usual Left culture, which preaches the struggle against the common enemy and focuses all of its energy on demonizing this or that Right-wing clique. [Read More]