Review: Vincent Czyz, Adrift in a Vanishing City, Rain Mountain Press, New York City 2015
Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling.
—Walter Benjamin
“Nothing is careless about this writing at all,” declares Samuel R. Delany in the introduction to Vincent Czyz’s Adrift in a Vanishing City, a robust collection of stories, each as ferociously poetic as they are distinctly structured. Read Moreâ¦
April 13, 2017 Comments Off on Review: Vincent Czyz, Adrift in a Vanishing City, Rain Mountain Press, New York City 2015
Review: Henry A. Giroux, America at War with Itself. City Lights Books, 2016
Henry A. Giroux is a prolific scholar and public intellectual best known for his work in the field of “critical pedagogy” and on issues commonly grouped under the hypernym: “social justice.” His latest book, America at War with Itself, offers readers a way to “see through” the “dark clouds of authoritarianism” gathering over America, Europe, and the world, while “point[ing] to alternative pathways offered by critical pedagogy, insurrectional democracy, and international solidarity.” In a brief Foreword written by Robin D.G. Kelley, Giroux is described as “the intellectual descendant of Antonio Gramsci,” a revolutionary thinker who diagnoses the ills of neoliberalism, militarism, authoritarianism, environmental degradation, racism, nationalism, violence, civic illiteracy, and the collapse of the public sphere. While such claims may be a dash hyperbolic, there is real value to be found in America at War with Itself, particularly as a readable summary of some of our most pressing social, economic, and political problems. Read Moreâ¦
April 13, 2017 Comments Off on Review: Henry A. Giroux, America at War with Itself. City Lights Books, 2016
Review: Stuart Jeffries. Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2016)
In Hail, Caesar! the Coen Brother’s recent paean to 1950s Hollywood, there is a curiously political scene in a later part of the film: Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) a popular cinematic heartthrob is kidnapped by a group of disgruntled (and secretly communist) screenwriters. Having hidden him in a well-appointed beach-front property, the kidnappers add insult to injury when they force the leading-man to attend their interminably boring Marxist discussion group. Initially confused, Baird Whitlock falls under the spell of the circle’s philosophical guru, a vaguely mitteleuropäische academic named Prof. Marcuse and is soon speaking a leftist lingo, spouting talk of “theories generating their own anti-theories”. For those in the know, “Prof. Marcuse” was a recognizable figure, a barely concealed remake of Herbert Marcuse, the radical German-Jewish social theorist. And Marcuse’s densely-worded philosophy is accorded a similar status as the sword-and-sandal epics and camp musicals pastiched in Hail, Caesar!; all are cultural artifacts from a distant past. For sure they are presented with a fairly gentle nostalgia. But it is a nostalgia that reinforces how old-fashioned this all is for twenty-first-century viewers. Densely Hegelian Marxist philosophy is a lot like technicolor cinema; they don’t make them like that any more. Read Moreâ¦
April 13, 2017 Comments Off on Review: Stuart Jeffries. Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2016)
Review: Martin Jay, Reason After It’s Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016.
Martin Jay begins his reflections on the critique of reason by the first-generation Frankfurt school with the question: What did Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno mean by their notion of an emphatic conception of reason? Why was it necessary and what is its role? This is no doubt the right question to ask to begin an inquiry into what he calls late critical theory. While this book is an excellent introduction to the topic in the end I was not fully convinced he provided the best answer. The questions of truth and, as Habermas added, validity are central to problems of emancipatory social theory. Is there some ontological or epistemological baseline that we can ascertain that justifies the critical project? Contemporary radical theories such as those derived from Foucault, are skeptical of such attempts and question notions of emancipatory social theory. Read Moreâ¦
April 13, 2017 Comments Off on Review: Martin Jay, Reason After It’s Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016.
Review: Andy Blunden, The Origins of Collective Decision Making. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016.
There is something way too flat about horizontalism. The political style associated with Occupy Wall Street has its defenders, including writers like Marianne Maeckelbergh and David Graeber, who find something lively and colorful in the horizontalist enthusiasm for long consensus-seeking meetings, rejection of “vertical” structures like representation or formal leadership, and conviction that a group’s actions can outline in advance (“prefigure”) the future that those actions seek to bring about. Why then does horizontalism strike me, and I think some others, as being dull, unresonant, shallow—that is to say, one-dimensional? Read Moreâ¦
April 13, 2017 Comments Off on Review: Andy Blunden, The Origins of Collective Decision Making. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016.
Review: Black Subjugation in America
Books Reviewed in this Essay: Read Moreâ¦
April 13, 2017 Comments Off on Review: Black Subjugation in America
Review Essay: White Like Them
Books Reviewed in this Essay: Read Moreâ¦
April 13, 2017 Comments Off on Review Essay: White Like Them
Alt-Right: A Primer on the Online Brownshirts
Alt-Right began as an online phenomenon that mushroomed into a poisonous cloud of misogynist, white nationalist, and anti-Left propaganda. Its basic thrust was aimed at collapsing democracy and human rights in the United States on behalf of economic and political elites.[1] Read Moreâ¦
April 13, 2017 Comments Off on Alt-Right: A Primer on the Online Brownshirts
Explaining ‘Cult45’: What Can WWII-Era Research on Authoritarianism Tell Us about the Political Rise of Trump?
Introduction Read Moreâ¦
April 13, 2017 Comments Off on Explaining ‘Cult45’: What Can WWII-Era Research on Authoritarianism Tell Us about the Political Rise of Trump?
Right-Wing Populism and the Limits of Normative Critical Theory
If one wants to address the question of what Frankfurt School Critical Theory can still teach us about the resurgence of right-wing populism in Europe and the United States in recent times, one must call the very concept of the “Frankfurt School” into question and look more closely at how Jürgen Habermas’s efforts to “reconstruct” Critical Theory on normative foundations transformed the intellectual tradition he inherited from Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and the other members of the Institute for Social Research. Read Moreâ¦
April 13, 2017 Comments Off on Right-Wing Populism and the Limits of Normative Critical Theory