Jeff Wall: The Return of the Modern? (a Review)

 February 2, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

ONE OF THE HIGHLIGHT EXHIBITIONS of the summer of 2007 in Chicago was The Art Institute’s retrospective exhibition on the work of Jeff Wall. This occasion marked the first time that the Art Institute exhibited a solo show of a photographer. Jeff Wall’s large-scale color transparencies, mounted in light boxes, covered the same walls that have previously displayed Rembrandts, Girodets, and Manets. The exhibition provided the opportunity to reconsider the present condition of photography as art. [Read More]
1960s  19th Century  /20th Century  Aesthetic  Art  Bourbaki Panorama  Edouard Castres  Eduard Manet  Eugène Delacroix  Exhibition  Franco-Prussian war  French Revolution  History  Jacques-Louis David  Jeff Wall  Modernism  Painting  Panorama  Photography  Postmodernism  Restoration 

Who Needs the Left?

Reflections on Joining the Industrial Workers of the World

 February 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

IN THE SPRING OF 2006, after years of activity on the Left, I joined the IWW. I joined because it cared little for Leftism. And because it began every meeting with a song. After years of dodging the crossfire of competing claims to revolutionary truth, I breathed happily at last in meetings where no one tested my position on Cuba or the Green Party or state capitalism vs. deformed workers states. [Read More]
/20th Century  Capitalism  Copernican Revolution  German Revolution  IWW  Movements  Organization  People  Socialism  Soviet Revolution  The Left  Transformation  Workers 

The Failure of Pakistan

A Concise History of the Left

 February 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE PRESENT-DAY CRISIS IN PAKISTAN resists adequate historicisation in pithy news headlines. Yet its concrete expressions include the autocratic state-of-emergency imposed by General Musharraf; the violent rise of Islamic fundamentalism, first in the anarchic north-west, but increasingly also in the cities; the over-dependence on economic as well as military assistance from the U.S.; the massive expansion of the army into civilian sectors, especially commerce; and the ever growing socioeconomic disparities – in short: the failure of Pakistan. [Read More]
History of the Left  Pakistan 

Review: "The Past and Future of Militant Anti-Capitalist Street Protest in North America" Discussion at Mess Hall.

 February 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

THERE WAS A GATHERING of about fifteen people on the evening of December the 13th at Mess Hall, a small artist-run storefront in Rogers Park dedicated to community education and organizing. Sponsored by the 49th St. Underground and the Industrial Workers of the World, the topic of the event was described as “anti-capitalist street protest,” but the presenter made it clear from the beginning that he was going to talk about the Seattle anti-WTO summit protests of 1999 and their aftermath. [Read More]
Protests 

Organization, political action, history, and consciousness

On anarchism and Marxism

 February 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Socialism is the first popular movement in world history that has set itself the goal of bringing human consciousness, and thereby free will, into play in the social actions of mankind… to try to take its history into its own hands; instead of remaining a will-less football, it will take the tiller of social life and become the pilot to the goal of its own history. —Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1915) [Read More]
Anarchism  Consciousness  Exchanges  History  History of the Left  Marxism  Organization  Political action 

On the Relationship between Psychoanalysis and Emancipatory Politics

Castoriadis, Marx, and Freud on Time and Emancipation

 February 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON TWO OCCASIONS, Sigmund Freud observed that politics, pedagogy, and psychoanalysis are all impossible professions. Cornelius Castoriadis attempted to make sense of this cryptic observation in a 1994 essay entitled “Psychoanalysis and Politics,” in which he argued that, not only are these three “professions” structurally analogous, they are also entangled with each other such that the “impossible” realization of pedagogical or psychoanalytic aims is ultimately conditional upon an emancipatory political transformation. [Read More]
Castoriadis  Emancipation  Sigmund Freud  Karl Marx  Psychoanalysis 

Interview: Ernesto Laclau

 December 1, 2007  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

CONFRONTING THE CONFUSION and fragmentation that wrought progressive politics in recent decades, Ernesto Laclau’s work attempts to theorize the path to the construction of a radical democratic politics. Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to devise his own theory by that name, Laclau describes the processes of social articulation that creates popular political identities. By redefining democratic politics as the construction of hegemony, Laclau reminds political actors of the work necessary to construct the plurality of democratic structures vital to any emancipatory political project. [Read More]
1930s  Anti-globalization  Capitalism  Co-optation  Commodity form  Communist party  Culture  De-radicalization  Democratic  Economics  Emancipation  Emancipatory  Equivalential  Ernesto Laclau  Feminism  Freedom  Hegemony  History  Identity  Industrial  Institutionalization  Italy  Labor  Vladimir Lenin  Karl Marx  Marxism  Movements  Participation  Particularity  Plurality  Politics  Popular  Production  Progressive  Proletarian  Radical  Reification  Revolution  Surplus value  Theory  Union  Universality  Workers  Working class  WWII