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)

RSVP on Facebook

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.

I. What is the “Left?” — What is “Marxism?”

Saturdays 1–4PM

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
112 S. Michigan Ave. room 920

University of Chicago (UChicago)
The Reynolds Club 2nd floor South Lounge
5706 S. University Ave.

• required / + recommended reading

A. Sept. 11, 2010 (SAIC only)

• Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism”(2006)
+ Iraqi Communist Party, Letter about the Situation in Iraq (2006)
• Spartacist League, “The Senile Dementia of Post-Marxism” (2006)
+ Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti, “ ‘Action Will Be Taken’: Left Anti-Intellectualism and its Discontents” (2002)

 B. Sept. 18, 2010 (SAIC only)

• Karl Marx, To make the world philosophical (from Marx’s dissertation, 1839–41), For the ruthless criticism of everything existing (1843), Theses on Feuerbach (1845)

 C. Sept. 25, 2010 (SAIC only)

• epigraphs by James Miller (on Rousseau), Peter Preuss (on Nietzsche) and Louis Menand (on Edmund Wilson) on modern history and freedom
• Robert Pippin, “On Critical Theory” (2003)
• Chris Cutrone, “Capital in History” (2008)

 Week 1. Oct. 2, 2010

• Kant,  “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784)
+ Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754)
• Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns” (1819)
+ Rousseau, selection from The Social Contract (1762)

 Week 2. Oct. 9, 2010

• Leszek Kolakowski, “The Concept of the Left” (1968)

 Week 3. Oct. 16, 2010

• Max Horkheimer, selections from Dämmerung (1926–31)
• Theodor W. Adorno, “Imaginative Excesses” (1944–47)

 Week 4. Oct. 23, 2010

• Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament” (1927)
• Wilhelm Reich, “Ideology as Material Power” (1933/46)

Week 5. Oct. 30, 2010

• Marx, selections from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)
• Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

 Week 6. Nov. 6, 2010

• Georg Lukács, “The Phenomenon of Reification” (Part I of “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” History and Class Consciousness, 1923)

 Week 7. Nov. 13, 2010

• Lukács, “Preface” (1922) , “What is Orthodox Marxism?” (1919) , “Class Consciousness” (1920), History and Class Consciousness (1923)

 Week 8. Nov. 20, 2010

• Karl Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923)
+ Marx, To make the world philosophical (from Marx’s dissertation, 1839–41), For the ruthless criticism of everything existing (1843)
+ Korsch, “The Marxism of the First International” (1924)

 Week 9. Dec. 4, 2010 (SAIC) / Jan. 15, 2011 (UChicago)

• Juliet Mitchell, “Women: the Longest Revolution” (1966)
• Clara Zetkin and Vladimir Lenin, “An interview on the woman question” (1920)
• Adorno, “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today” (1963)
• John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity” (1983)

 Week 10. Dec. 11, 2010 (SAIC) / Jan. 22, 2011 (UChicago)

• Richard Fraser, “Two Lectures on the Black Question in America and Revolutionary
Integrationism” (1953)
• James Robertson and Shirley Stoute, “For Black Trotskyism” (1963)
+ Spartacist League, “Black and Red: Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom” (1966)
+ Bayard Rustin, “The Failure of Black Separatism” (1970) 
• Adolph Reed, “Black Particularity Reconsidered” (1979)
+ Reed, “Paths to Critical Theory” (1984)

 Week 11. Dec. 18, 2010 (SAIC) / Jan. 8, 2011 (UChicago)

+ Marx, selections from the Grundrisse (1857–61)
• Martin Nicolaus, “The Unknown Marx” (1968)
• Postone, “Necessity, Labor, and Time” (1978)
+ André Gorz, from Strategy for Labor (1964)
+ Murray Bookchin, Listen, Marxist! (1969)

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):