Culture

"On Neoconservatives and Trotskyism"

Louis Proyect

Reviewing "Arguing the World": a movie about the journey from Marxism to neoconservatism


Joseph Dorman's "Arguing the World" is a documentary study of the careers of four celebrated Jewish intellectuals from immigrant working class families who went to City College in the 1930s. While one of them, Irving Howe, stayed more or less critical of American society, the other three -- Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell -- evolved from establishment liberalism in the 1950s to neoconservativism in the Reagan era. I use the word career advisedly in describing their paths. Perhaps the most honest account of what it meant to belong to this group is found in Norman Podhoretz's Making It, where he admits that what motivated each shift in his political or cultural affiliation was how it would it advance his career.

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Laugh It Off in yet another copyright infringement battle

South African culturejammers face more legal battles


Cape Town based South African controversial design and media company is involved in yet another copyright infringement battle.


The company creates culture jamming oriented t-shirts and print media that makes satirical commentary on social and political issues, primarily focusing on local concerns.


"Struggle, Event, Media"


Maurizio Lazzarato

Why can the
paradigm of representation not function in politics, nor
in artistic modes of expression, and here especially in
the production of works that employ moving images?

I will attempt to
answer these questions by using the paradigm that imagines
the constitution of the world from the relationship
between event and multiplicity. Representation is conversely
founded on the subject-work paradigm. In this paradigm
the images, the signs and the statements have the function
of representing the object, the world, whereas in the
paradigm of the event, images, signs and statements
contribute to allowing the world to happen. Images,
signs and statements do not represent something, but
rather create possible worlds. I would like to explain
this paradigm using two concrete examples: the dynamic
of the emergence and the constitution of post-socialist
political movements and the way television functions,
in other words, signs, images and statements in contemporary
economy.

"Globalization"

Joseph Addison

The celebratory rhetoric of cosmopolitanism of commodities was
already perfected nearly three centuries ago:


There is no Place in the Town which I so much love to
frequent as the _Royal-Exchange_. It gives me a secret Satisfaction,
and, in some measure, gratifies my Vanity, as I am an _Englishman_,
to see so rich an Assembly of Country-men and Foreigners consulting
together upon the private Business of Mankind, and making this
Metropolis a kind of _Emporium_ for the whole Earth. I must confess I
look upon High-Change to be a great Council, in which all
considerable Nations have their Representatives. Factors in the
Trading World are what Ambassadors are in the Politick World; they
negotiate Affairs, conclude Treaties, and maintain a good
Correspondence between those wealthy Societies of Men that are
divided from one another by Seas and Oceans, or live on the different
Extremities of a Continent.

"Passion: Regular or Decaf?"

Slavoj Zizek, In These Times


Reviewing Mel Gibson's film, "The Passion of the Christ"

Those who virulently criticized Mel Gibson's "The Passion" even before
its release seem unassailable: Are they not justified to worry that
the film, made by a fanatic Catholic known for occasional
anti-Semitic outbursts, may ignite anti-Semitic sentiments?

"Bakhtin as Anarchist"

Caryl Emerson

[An excerpt from "Bakhtin After the Boom: Pro and Contra," Journal of
European Studies,
March 2002 v32 i1 p3(24).]

[T]he question of Bakhtin's Russianness is highly contested, and in
closing I will touch only on two areas where I think he partakes of a recognizably
mainstream Russian tradition.


First, there is much in Bakhtin's thought that is anarchist. By which I mean:
if Bakhtin can dispense with an institution, an impersonal norm, a mechanical
causality, he will do so. For all his formal style as a professor and for all
the reverence with which he approached the culture of the past, he had a
powerful animosity against 'official life', 'officialese', lobbying for
hierarchical recognition, all of which he perceived as cowardly alienation
and
irresponsibility. This animus fed both his fondness for carnival and
sustained
him during his long years of not being read and not being heard.

"Participatory Detournement:

A Collaborative Evisceration of Jack T. Chick's 'Charlie's Ants'"

Detourn, deploy, detourn again:


http://aphid.org/CA

Anonymous Comrade writes

This review evidences the attempts by the spirit-minded (aka New Age) (dis)establshment to come to terms with the necessity for political change. It's an intriguing perspective, from Lapis Magazine

Lessons Still Unlearned:

"The Weather Underground," Thirty Years Later

Jay Kinney

Every now and then, a film appears that has special resonance with the issues of the moment. The recent documentary, "The Weather Underground," is such a film.


At first glance it might seem unlikely that a film about a cult-like '60s New Left sect that fell apart by 1976 would have much light to shed upon the present. Yet, it is hard to walk away from seeing this film without reflecting on the curious parallels (and differences) between then and now.


From
http://lapismagazine.org

Lessons Still Unlearned:
"The Weather Underground," Thirty Years Later
BY JAY KINNEY


Every now and then, a film appears that has special resonance with the issues of the moment. The recent documentary, "The Weather Underground," is such a film.


At first glance it might seem unlikely that a film about a cult-like '60s New Left sect that fell apart by 1976 would have much light to shed upon the present. Yet, it is hard to walk away from seeing this film without reflecting on the curious parallels (and differences) between then and now.


From
http://lapismagazine.org

Lessons Still Unlearned:
"The Weather Underground," Thirty Years Later
BY JAY KINNEY


Every now and then, a film appears that has special resonance with the issues of the moment. The recent documentary, "The Weather Underground," is such a film.


At first glance it might seem unlikely that a film about a cult-like '60s New Left sect that fell apart by 1976 would have much light to shed upon the present. Yet, it is hard to walk away from seeing this film without reflecting on the curious parallels (and differences) between then and now.

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