Walter Benn Michaels

The opening plenary of the Platypus International Convention VII. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Walter Benn Michaels (University of Illinois, Chicago) Toby Chow (University of Chicago) Donald Parkinson (Communist League of Tampa) Margaret Power (Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago) Moderated by Pam Nogales. Description Leftists today lament the strength of neoliberal hegemony. The use of “hegemony” underlines the ideological dimension of the neoliberal order; it suggests that mass ideological legitimacy – and not the triumph of pure force or of back-door machinations – has made neoliberalism politically possible. [Read More]

A moderated panel discussion held at the Platypus International Convention VII. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Walter Benn Michaels (University of Illinois, Chicago) Juan Conatz, Recomposition (USA) Paul Elitzik (FNewsMagazine, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA) Jacob Denz (Graduate Student Organizing Committee, GSOC-UAW local 2110 (NYU, USA)) Moderated by Jocelyn Li. Description The 20th century left gave rise to the recurring idea that a homogeneous working class experience could culminate in a revolutionary “working class culture. [Read More]

A panel event held at the University of Illinois, Chicago, on September 24, 2014. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Walter Benn Michaels, UIC professor, English John Bachtell, chairman, Communist Party USA Judith K. Gardiner, UIC professor, Gender and Women’s Studies, English Description [After the 1960s, the] underlying despair with regard to the real efficacy of political will, of political agency… in a historical situation of heightened helplessness… became a self-constitution as outsider, as other… focused on the bureaucratic stasis of the [Fordist/late 20th century] world: it echoed the destruction of that world by the dynamics of capital [with the neo-liberal turn after 1973, and especially after 1989]. [Read More]

Panel held on March 31st, 2012 at the Fourth Annual Platypus International Convention, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Video Recording Transcript in Platypus Review #46 Panelists Mary Jane Jacob (School of the Art Institute) Walter Benn Michaels (University of Illinois Chicago) Robert Pippin (University of Chicago) Description Hegel famously remarked that the task of philosophy was to “comprehend its own time in thought.” In a sense, we can extend this as the raison d’etre for artistic production, albeit in a modified way: art’s task is to “comprehend its own time in form. [Read More]