Panel held as part of the third annual Platypus International Convention, on Saturday, April 30, 2011, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Audio Recording
A transcript of Bret Schneider’s remarks appears in Platypus Review #37
Panelists
Omair Hussain
Lucy Parker
Pac Pobric
Bret Schneider
Description
After its apparent exhaustion as a project of social transformation, Marxism seems to remain alive as a cultural and hermeneutic endeavor. Self-avowedly Marxist theorists – Žižek, Badiou, Ranciere – exert a heavy, if opaque, influence on the self-understanding and practice of contemporary art and inspire research programs in the humanities. Despite its radical appeal, “Marxist” theory may ultimately flatter the political and aesthetic claims of the present. Could investigation of of the now obscure historical Marxist cultural critique of Leon Trotsky, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin bring to recognition, and therein challenge the inadaquecies of the present? What opaque historical transformations does the difficulty of such work indicate? How might the long-abused concepts of autonomy, medium specificity, kitsch, avant garde – form part of what Marx called the “ruthless critique of the present.” What might the problems of aesthetics and culture have to do with the political project of the self-education of the Left?