TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 9TH 6:00 PM
INTERNATIONAL HOUSE ASSEMBLY HALL
1414 EAST 59TH STREET
SPEAKERS:
Mark Rudd
Alan Spector
Osha Neumann
Tim Wohlforth
MODERATOR:
Spencer A. Leonard
The memory of the 1960s, which has long kindled contestation and debate on the means and ends of freedom politics, is rapidly fading into the political unconscious. The election of Barack Obama and the collapse of the anti-war movement mark the end of a period that has now come full circle. After a half-century of rebellion, many old New Left- ists now call for a “New New Deal” to return to welfare-statist and authoritarian society against which the New Left rebelled. History threatens to repeat itself, this time in an even more dimly recognized and ferocious form. “In the United States today there is no Left,” C. Wright Mills declaimed in the waning months of the 1950s, making him one of the most be- loved intellectuals of his generation, “political activities are monopolized by an irresponsible two-party system; cultural activities—though formally quite free, tend to become nationalis- tic or commercial—or merely private.” If Mills continues to speak to us, it is as a reminder of tasks long deferred, memories long repressed.
This panel attempts to address the current moment, in which many who participated in the moment of the New Left’s beginnings have survived a full cycle of history. Rather than a rehash of old debates or yet another nostalgia- ridden recap of the era, interventions which have ceased to offer critical perspective on the present, this panel seeks to ask the simple but fundamental question: What, if any, is significant for us today in the thwarted attempt by 1960s radicals to re-found emancipatory politics?
Lead-Up Events:
Teach-In Poetry Unfulfilled: The Beats and the New Left
Tuesday, November 2 @5:00pm
Rosenwald 405, 1101 E. 58th St.
What Was "New" in the New Left?
Presented by Ian Morrison
Sunday, November 7th @ 7:00pm
Wilder House, 5811 S. Kenwood Ave.
All events are free and open to the public.
RSVP on Facebook.
Postmodernism challenged the institutionalized modernism of the mid-20th century, offering more radical forms of social discontents and cultural practice. It meant unmasking the values of progress as involving ideologies of the political status-quo, the problems of which were manifest to a new generation in the 1960s. But, more recently, postmodernism itself has begun to age, and reveal its own concerns as those of the post-1960s situation of global capitalism rather than an emancipated End of History.
In 1980, Jurgen Habermas, on the occasion of receiving the Adorno prize in Frankfurt, predicted the exhaustion of postmodernism, characterizing its conservative tendencies. Habermas called this situation the “incomplete project” of modernity, a set of unresolved problems that have meant the eventual return of history, if not the return of “modernism.” How does Habermas’s note of dissent, from the moment of highest vitality of postmodernism, help us situate the concerns of contemporary art in light of society and politics today?
Join Platypus for a teach-in and conversation on Habermas's 1980 essay "Modernity-An Incomplete Project".
Tuesday, October 26, 2010 @ 4:30PM
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
112 S. Michigan, Room 920
Recommended Reading:
Jurgen Habermas "Modernity – An Incomplete Project" (1980)
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Join Platypus for a teach-in and group discussion on the historical character of sexual identity and the character of freedom that capitalism presents.
Thursday, October 21 at 6pm
Harper Library, University of Chicago, 1116 E. 59th St.
Suggested Reading: John D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity"
RSVP for the event on Facebook
Socialism, feminism and the New Left
Juliet Mitchell and the recovery of Marxism
A teach-in hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society
"Socialism will be a process of change, of becoming. A fixed image of the future is in the worst sense ahistorical. . . . As Marx wrote: 'What is progress if not the absolute elaboration of humanity's creative dispositions . . . unmeasured by any previously established yardstick[,] an end in itself . . . the absolute movement of becoming?' . . . The liberation of women under socialism will [be] . . . a human achievement, in the long passage from Nature to Culture which is the definition of history and society."
-- Juliet Mitchell, "Women: The Longest Revolution" (1966)
Wednesday, September 22, 2010 5PM
Univ. Illinois Chicago Stevenson Hall 701 S. Morgan St. room 319
Juliet Mitchell's groundbreaking essay, "Women: The Longest Revolution" (1966), brilliantly anticipated the feminist critique of Marxism. But Mitchell found feminism, too, to be lacking. Far from dismissing Marxism as some retrograde, patriarchal theory, Mitchell embarked on an effort to recover Marxism as a philosophy of freedom that could orient political activists' efforts to overturn sexism and revolutionize society. Unfortunately, women's liberation activists failed to heed Mitchell's call to attend critically to history to help get a better grasp of and clarity about the pursuit of gender and sexual liberation, and abandoned the utopian possibilities of socialism, in favor of the politics of established social identities. Join us to reconsider the potential paths of Marxism not taken by post-1960s radicalism, and discuss what could be involved in reformulating a theory of sexual freedom that answers the needs of the present.
Suggested reading - Juliet Mitchell's Women: The Longest Revolution
The Platypus Affiliated Society, established in 2006, focuses on problems and tasks inherited from the "Old" (1920s–'30s), "New" ('60s–'70s), and post-political ('80s–'90s) Left for the possibilities of emancipatory politics today.
The Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion on the Politics of the Contemporary Student Left at the U.S. Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit on June 26, 2010. Moderated by Laurie Rojas, assistant editor for the Platypus Review, the panel consisted of Will Klatt, member of the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and organizer for Service Employees International Union (SEIU); Luis Brennan, a student organizer at University of Chicago and former member of the new SDS; Aaron Petcov, formerly of the new SDS and currently a member of the Organization for a Free Society (OFS); and Ashley Weger, an organizer for Platypus and a former organizer for UNITE HERE.
Transcript in Platypus Review #27 (Click below):
