Conference 2005
Grave ReMarx: The Accumulating Dead
Keynote Speakers: Warren Montag and Mark Neocleous
March 24-26 at University of Florida

Sponsored by: The Department of English, ACCENT, BOCC, CLASSC,Center for European Studies,
and The Marxist Reading Group

Abstracts for Conference Presentations

James McDougall--Revolution on the Way to Hell in Ezra Poundís Cantos
In this paper I hope to discuss the ìDraft of XXX Cantos,î the depiction of the naming of the Bolshevik Revolution, the representation of Marx, and how these representations reveal Poundís innovative Zheng-Ming, and the aesthetics of the image text. The paper will conclude with a discussion on how the image text works in the Cantos, and the ethical considerations of Poundís project. These Cantos written between 1915 and 1922, which were subsequently revised, reveal the political and economic concerns within a work of ìhigh modernismîóa category often identified as ìaestheticî and not political.

In a few interesting passages Pound creates in addition to the Hell Cantos a news report from the Western Front in World War I in which German troops redeployed from the Eastern Front to the Western Front have been infected with ìrevolution.î The narratives also depicts a scene in the Bolshevik revolution that offers a theory of naming that is fundamental for the process of historiography. Through the representations of not only the Russian Revolution, the naming of the revolution, and the depiction of the readers of Marx, we can see in Pound what Perry Anderson calls the imaginative proximity to revolution. This to Anderson is a hallmark of modernist texts. That is to say that the experimentation of modernism is not as much out of aesthetic-boredom but out of a belief in the urgency in revolutionizing poetry, because poetry is the embodiment of cultural properties that can transform society. This is to a certain extent, as Raymond Williams points out, a residue of Romanticism that is often misunderstood (one then shouldnít be surprised to see in the modernist undertaking of the Chinese Revolution, a Maoist literary style of revolutionary romanticism).

In the Cantos we find that the act of ìnamingî and ìrectifying namesî becomes one of Poundís political tasks that is carried forth from what he sees as evident in the medieval writings of Dante, and the Provincial poets, in addition to his confounding ideas of Confucianism. It is from Confucius that Pound uses the concept Zheng-Ming or ìrectifying names.î Therefore, one of the key aesthetic signatures of the Cantosóthe heuristic of defining terms, as well as defining the names of various people and their place in historyóis actually Poundís political ideals within a framework of ìan actual revolution.î One of the results from this poetics of ìnamingî is a transformation of poetry as aural text, to poetry as image text. This is one of the ruptures in traditional English language verse, and it is a rupture to which Pound maintains fidelity in the sense of Badiouís ethics. This play on images connects not only to Poundís imaginative proximity to revolution, but also to what might be seen as an organizing principle of the Cantos. 
 

Christopher Lantz --A Japanese Ghost Story in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Lafcadio Hearnís Yuki Onna
The story ìYuki Onnaî adapted by Lafcadio Hearn, is analyzed according to the model set down by Walter Benjamin in ìThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.î ìYuki Onnaî (ìThe Snow Womanî) is the story of an otherworldly figure who spares the life of a young woodcutter caught in a snowstorm, on the condition that he keep the incident secret. The woodcutter later marries a woman without recognizing that she is a mundane incarnation of Yuki Onna, and describes his encounter to her. Enraged, she reveals her true identity and vanishes.

According to that model set down in Walter Benjaminís essay, which deals primarily with visual art (but can be applied more broadly to such works as literary texts), it is conceded to Marx that art changes drastically corresponding to changes in relations of production and technology. With the advent of photographic reproduction of art, art becomes independent of the authentic original, whose function was a religious one. With mechanical reproduction, art becomes intended for exhibition, its value largely lying in its form. At the same time, its practical value to a particular community is transcended, and it becomes meaningful to anyone who might receive it. A religious object, the singular, communal value of which initially resists commodification is transformed into an object the value of which lies in general formal principles. Art is thereby rendered commensurable.

However, with ìYuki Onna,î in its premodern form, we have a Shinto deity, indispensable to the story, yet meaningful only to the community that found cult value in the story. Therefore, we have, in Hearnís modern adaptation, a commodified, formally sculpted world, in the midst of which is a character who resists such commodification. The character of Yuki Onna remains embedded in the story, but becomes a homeless creature, drifting through Hearnís alien, commodified world. She becomes a character demonized as an impediment to the expansion of western bourgeois culture. Thus she becomes a ghost and, all at once, something recognizable even to western readers. 

Joe Rockelmann--Das Rheingold: Wagnerís depiction of capitalism; visionary or pessimist?
This paper will examine how accurate Wagnerís depiction of capitalism is and if he in fact foresaw globalization based on societyís behavior and actions in the 19th century or if his negative depiction of capitalism was elicited by his lifelong financial problems. In Wagnerís Rheingold unethical and unmoral behaviors are elicited by the ring Albrecht makes out of the stolen Rheingold. The ring symbolizes capitalism in the opera and depicts how quickly capital becomes societyís priority and induces people to compete for economic power. Competition is an important component of an economy, because it motivates suppliers to always find ways to produce better and cheaper products. Price drops follow, resulting in consumers buying power increasing. However, the introduction of capital creates a society in Wagnerís opera that is obsessed with consumerism and power and is willing to use any mean in order to achieve it.

Christian P. Haines-- Born Again Nation: reading national anxiety in cyberpunk fictions
Cyberpunk fiction was born out of national anxieties in the United States stemming from international threats to U.S. hegemony. Threats such as the rise of Asian powers in technology markets, punk subcultures, corporate power abuses, and government dissolution are contained within cyberpunk fictions in order to dissolve the political danger they present into a surface aesthetic of dystopian pleasure. Radical politics and punk rebellions become a threat to the value of life and resolutions involve the near miss of an always elusive and utopian-rendered heterosexual monogamy. The question, however, is what comes of reading cyberpunk out of this initial environment, in a post 9/11 environment: is Cyberpunk dead since the conditions it was born in are dead? 
 

Aron Pease--Time is Money, Money is
ext John Johnston observes that perhaps the most striking fact about JR is that ìit consists almost entirely of talk.î Another striking fact about the novel is that it consists almost entirely of text. This, of course, usually goes without saying for novels, but saying so highlights Gaddis's remarkable achievement of writing a variety of media and flows of speech into a single stream of text. This is especially remarkable since we know, thanks to Joseph Tabbi's study of Gaddis's archive, that Gaddis's method of writing was especially physical. Yet, even if Gaddis's technique seems especially interesting for its materiality, that materiality ends in a single stream of talk, or of text, the media type that represents the noise from all of Gaddis's talking machines.

And ìtext,î Lev Manovich says, ìis unique among media types. . . . On the one hand, it is one media type among others. But, on the other hand, it is a metalanguage of computer media, a code in which all other media are represented.î Here Manovich suggestively alludes to Marx's analysis of JR's subject matter. Money is unique among commodities. On the one hand, it is one commodity among others. But, on the other, it is the general medium in which all other commodities are represented. And in the age of postmodern finance capital, Gaddis's stream of text is akin to the stream of digital capital, in which the circulation time that obstructs labor's productivity is reduced to a stream of instants.

Indeed, time is money, but text is also money, the money of digital media production. Looking at JR this way, I examine money in a state of finance capital as the content of JR (and Gaddis is writing at the takeoff point of this metamorphosis of capital) and the streaming flow of text as its form. Similarly, then, I look at Manovich's analysis of computer multimedia, in which this flow of text constitutes the metalanguage, the money of postmodern media production. But content and form, as usual, turn out to be not so easily separated. Gaddis's stream of text turns out to be the content of contemporary multimedia organization, as well as the organization of post-Fordist capitalism, itself a network of conversations. What can we learn, then, about post-Fordist capital from Gaddis's ìlastî archive? If money is text, what happens when we become hypertextual? 
 

Masood Raja--Doctorowís Ragtime: Inserting Class in a Literary Discussion
As the world has moved into the neoliberal globalized order, the question of class, especially in the U.S, has either been replaced by the notions of individual freedom, meritocracy, entrepreneurship. As the public functions of the nation-state have been radically privatized, the chances of creating class consciousness have also diminished along with available public spaces in a non-unionized, part-time work force.

Resultantly, most of the slogans and ideological assertions of the traditional left have been appropriated by the right in the name of individual freedom. Under such circumstances, the formerly liberal and radical texts, if read without new critical insights, tend to support the very class distinctions that they might have opposed at the time of their production. Hence, there is a need to evaluate our critical stances in order to reinsert the issue of class, as opposed to the neoliberal economic order, in the critical engagement of certain canonical liberal texts.

E. L. Doctorowís Ragtime is an ideal text for such critical engagement. Especially since it has always been considered a transgressive text by most critics. Here is how Linda Hutcheon1 describes it:
Think of Doctorowís Ragtime with its three parallel families: The Anglo-American establishment one and the marginal immigrant European and American black ones. The novelís action disperses the center of the first and moves the margins into the multiple centers of the narrative, in formal allegory of the social demographics of urban America. In addition, there is an extended critique of American democratic ideals through the presentation of class conflict rooted in capitalist property and moneyed power. The black Coalhouse, the white Houdini, the immigrant Tateh are all working class and because of thisónot in spite of itóall can therefore work together to create new aesthetic forms. (62)
Despite Hutcheonís important critical insights, the only instance of upward mobility and success in the text does not come through solidarity, in fact the novel provides comic relief in terms of feminist movement and labor strikes, but rather through the discovery of the artistóTatehóby the petty bourgeois who can commodify his art: hence the only form of redemption and mobility is offered through the market and not through lateral solidarity.

I intend to read Ragtime with a special emphasis on class to suggest that if this text is read and taught without new critical insights (like the ones provided by Robin Goodman and Kenneth Saltman in their joint work2) about the dominant neoliberal order, the text, as a pedagogical tool, would end up reinforcing the very paradigm one might aspire to challenge in terms of class and global division of labor. I think such readings of canonical transgressive texts are important to ensure that our engagement with the texts stays consistent with the changing economic paradigms. This, I think, is one of the ways we as academics and teachers can ensure that class is never totally elided from our class discussions, for a total elision of class from our critical engagement would end in destroying any kind of class consciousness, and hence the last remaining rampart against the rising tide of neoliberal globalization. 

Sarah Hoglund--Memorials and Mirrors: Death and the Construction of British Class Identities
In the early-nineteenth century British physicians, theologians, landscape gardeners, urban planners, public health officials, and barristers of every political persuasion, each for their own reasons, were convinced that the reformation of burial practices was a matter of grave significance. Many were convinced, as George Alfred Walker wrote in 1839, that ìburial places in the neighborhood of the livingî were a ìnational evil??the harbingers, if not the originators of pestilence; the cause, direct or indirect, of inhumanity, immorality, and irreligion.î Walker, and many like him, felt that the creation of new institutions of burial was an obligation ìno less to the sacred ashes of the dead than to the health of the living. Entrepreneurs throughout the country saw these arguments and sentiments as an opportunity, and began constructing a spate of for-profit ìgarden cemeteries.î In these new burial grounds, the middle classes, for a price, could purchase a plot that would ensure them a peaceful, eternal slumber. Curiously enough, however, though they were designed to hold the masses at bay, the cemeteries invited the lower classes in by offering them recreational space. The working classes were encouraged to spend their leisure time in these cemeteries, learning from the landscape, architecture, horticulture, etc., just what Britishness entailed. Yet this ìrational recreation,î in spite of the purported magnanimity of those offering it, in effect served only to further distance those who could actually afford a garden cemetery plot from the inhabitants of the modern city, albeit through a far more subtle maneuver in which the hand extended to the other merely confirmed oneís own identity. Thus, more than mere business ventures capitalizing on a scarcity of parochial burial ground, commercial cemeteries, with their exclusively inclusive relationship to the masses of British people, functioned as cultural spaces in which the present and future of what it might mean to be British and middle class could be figured and performed. 
 

Mark Allison--Modernity's Ruling Class?: Marx, the Bourgeoisie, and Political Power Then and Now

In this essay, I seek to provide the historical ground for an understanding of the American political present by returning to classical Marxism: particularly, the period immediately following the failure of the European revolutions of 1848-49.  During the early 1850s, economic prosperity and (relative) political calm set in throughout Europe.  I am particularly interested in exploring two decisive—and closely interrelated—shifts in Marxian theory pioneered during the post-revolutionary period: first, the evolving understanding of the character of the bourgeoisie; second, the reassessment of the nature of the historical present.  

 Through a synoptic reading of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), and several pivotal articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, I argue that this period of Marx’s thought is distinguished by a re-conceptualization of modernity’s ruling class.  While Marx had previously considered the bourgeoisie a “necessarily revolutionary class,” (The Communist Manifesto),  he now maintains that it is so invested in preserving the economic status quo that it is willing to compromise its own political power.  Put in different terms, Marx discovers that by ceding power, the bourgeoisie is capable of prolonging qualitative economic change without instantiating quantitative transformation in the political sphere.  This revised understanding is encapsulated by Marx’s paradoxical declaration that “the only possible solution in the sense of the bourgeoisie is the postponement of the solution.”

 I am interested in connecting this attitude toward the bourgeoisie to Marx’s own shifting conception of the historical present.  The epoch that promised to be the end of human prehistory now seems to be indefinitely prolonged.  I conclude by suggesting that by heeding this eminent “voice from our past,” we may get an enhanced understanding of the American present, where the middle classes again seem willing to sacrifice their own civil liberties and political agency in order to safeguard the conditions for continuing capital accumulation.      

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Todd Reynolds--Passing Through Time: The Factory, The Penitentiary, and the Motion Picture at the Turn-of-the-Century
This paper is interested in investigating the rise of time-as-punishment for certain crimes at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Put another way, I hope to interrogate the collapse of specific modern apparatuses and spaces of "justice"-- i.e. the penitentiary-- into a model that resembles the industrial factory of the gilded age. Whereas gaols and dungeons often served as locations to hold the offender until a specific (corporal or capital) punishment could be inflicted, why did new structures like the penitentiary emerge in the era of industrial capitalism, and what does that reveal about a broader cultural shift in the comprehension of what counted as "productive labor"? How has time become an object-- in this case an object of punishment-- within modernity?

I hope to argue that this objectification of time participates in the increased subordination of living labor within a technocratic culture, in which machine technology drives productivity. In effect, the objectification of time grounds a turn-of-the-century formulation of what will count culturally as "technology"; the phenomenon of the emergence of the motion picture seems to me to be one clear example. Thus, my method for interrogating these cultural formations and logics will be Thomas Edison's/Edwin Porter's _The Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison_-- a film which reenacts the electrocution of Leon Franz Czolgosz, labor radical and assassin of William McKinley. How do these various technologies represented by this Edison/Porter text (the electric chair and the kinetoscope were both inventions of the same corporate entity--Edison Labs) channel the intense political struggles in this period? 
 

Ryan Poll--The Ghostly Presence of Prisoners: Fiona Tanís Correction
Fiona Tan, the Indonesian-born artist, recently worked in America for the first time, choosing as her subject the American prison system. Tan visited four federal prisonsótwo in Illinois and two in Californiaóand filmed over 300 prisoners and guards. Her completed project, Correction, is a complex video installation that examines the hidden presence of the 2.2 million people incarcerated in our country. This staggering number of people constitutes a small nation, and yet, this nation remainsóespecially in cultural productionóan invisible, ghostly presence, excluded not only from participating in any form of public sphere, but also barred from the capitalist system that systematically prevents ex-convicts from any dignified form of labor. My paper, ìThe Ghostly Presence of Prisoners: Fiona Tanís Correction,î analyzes the intervention of Tanís video installation in rethinking the position of prisoners within our capitalist system. I am interested in how Tan conceptualizes prisoners as ghosts both within and without our current hegemonic system, and the potential power of these ghosts in challenging the system. The space in which Tanís video project is constructed is reminiscent of Benthamís Panopticon, but Tan inverts Benthamís design for social control in an uncanny, Hegelian twist. Tan visualizes prisoners as ghosts that not only haunt the surveillance state, but more, challenge the capitalist system as an external pressure that refuses to remain external. My paper continues the project begun by theorists such as Walter Montag and Nancy Fraser in their critique of Habermasís public sphere, and draws on the work of Mark Neocleousí work on ìthe fabrication of social order.î Tanís work, I contend, not only makes visible the monstrous, symbolic fiction of our social system, but more, makes visible a silent, ghostly embodiment of a potentially revolutionary force 
 

Gothic Jameson--prearranged panel
 Marxismís affinity with the Gothic is well known. Capital itself, to look no further than the obvious, often reads like a shock novel, full of vampires and werewolves and spectral commodities and the factoryís killing floor. Adorno and Horkheimer summon ghosts in the final, fragmentary pages of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Benjamin invites us into solidarity with the dead. And beyond these tropes, which some may shrug off as merely literary, lies Marxismís pervasive preoccupation with suffering and historical catastrophe.

Fredric Jameson is generally taken to be different. His deepest philosophical debts are to Adorno and Benjamin, but his is a markedly un-Gothic Marxism, un-haunted, the Frankfurt School exorcised. In philosophical Marxismís usual dialectic between utopianism and Gothic negativity, Jameson sets the accent on the former, preferring the open possibilities of science fiction to the pooling blood of a horror movie. Jameson would rather summon the future than summon ghosts.

It is all the more intriguing, then, to trace the affiliations between Jameson and the Gothic. To set the dialectical accent differently is not to abolish the poles of the antithesis. The Gothic is preserved in Jameson, every bit as much as utopia finds its place in Adorno. This panel, then, will sketch the contours of a Jamesonian Gothic, by providing both a Jamesonian account of Gothic writing, and a Gothic account of Jamesonís thought.

Simon Hay (Connecticut College) gives a Jamesonian account of the ghost story, specifying the historicity of the genreís conventions, its setting-loose ? its making walk ? of a past that the historical novel, the ghost storyís generic contemporary, would cheerfully contain. Vivasvan Soni (University of Michigan ? Ann Arbor) takes Jamesonian genre theory to the ancient Greek funeral oration, arguing that any properly radical ethics depends on narrative, the total recounting, from the moment of death, of a personís life. Christian Thorne (Williams College) gives a new account of Marxist philosophy, arguing, with reference to Jamesonís writings, that its epistemology is neither idealist nor materialist ? these sundered, undialectical halves ? but precisely traumatic, which turns out to mean idealist and materialist at once; suffering is the key category of dialectical thought. 
 

Stephanie Smith--Love, Loss and ìThe Metropolitan Spiritî of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Why do so many readers seem to fall in love with Jay Gatsby? In his essay, ìMy Lost City,î F.Scott Fitzgerald offers us a tantalizing, if (as Emily Dickinson might have said) slant reason for our passion. ìNew York,î he said, ìhad all the iridescence of the beginning of the world,î a description echoed by Nick Carraway at the end of The Great Gatsby, when his vision takes him back to the shores of New York in the days before capitalism and colonization, to a moment when the ìgreen breast of the worldî had yet to be spoiled. This is the voice of a man who sees his own desire to touch eternity realized in an instant. For Fitzgerald, that desire was realized in his vision of a lost cityóand not the fabled European City of Light to whom so many have paid court, but rather the new worldís hub, New York, the great capitalist apple of Fitzgeraldís ambiguous Eden. In this paper, I will argue that what Jay Gatsby is to Nick, New York City is to The Great Gatsby: that ìmetropolitan spiritî Fitzgerald saw at the heart of his lost city. It is not Gatsby for whom readers yearn, but for what he embodies: the sheer possibility of the ìbeginning of the worldî that was, for Fitzgerald, New York. Because if you strip away Nick Carrawayís voiceódifficult as that may beóand try to see past his barely concealed scrim of romantic invention, Jay Gatsby is nothing more than a stock-market shyster, a liar, and a thief, given how he ìtakesî young Daisy, when, by his own lightsóor rather, by Nick Carrawayís assessment of a young Gatsbyís viewóhe had no right to her. Of course, from Nickís perspective, Gatsby didnít ìtakeî Daisy at all, but rather wedded his own fabulous dreams to her visceral being, a beautiful mistake that will cost three lives. Still, despite Gatsbyís criminal fatality, year after year readers return to him and to his essential, deranged optimism, to the ìlost cityî of Gatsbyís belief in the ability to create an eternal moment of such wonder that all moments collapse back into it.

However, as Iíve said, I will argue that it is not Gatsby himself who generates longing, but rather the ghostly ìMetropolitan spiritî he embodies, and it is in fact Nick Carrawayís knowing love for that same Metropolitan spirit that mirrors Fitzgeraldís knowledge of the necessity of loss to love. This knowledge is what allows the reader his or her safe fall into and back out of an ecstasy of capitalist optimism: in other words, since Nick Carraway both does and does not share in the peculiar, New York City spirit that is Jay Gatsby (a psychic space in which ìanything can happenî), he is able to bear, for us as readers, the loss upon which love is predicated. 
 

Marc Zagelbaum--The Disastrous Dream of Capitalism: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Use of Ambivalence and Irony in The Great Gatsby
My paper offers an analysis of the Marxist undertones employed by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his depiction of a corrupt capitalist society on the verge of destruction. My interpretation dissects the deterministic methods that are elicited upon the working class in a means that upholds a capitalistic order of fascism. In this way, I argue that as the aristocracy sustain a false notion of elitism they simultaneously embrace a dead world or consciousness of unawareness that supports their fatalistic vision of humanity. I apply the theoretical visions of Marx, Gramsci and Eagleton to the novel in a means that supports my contention with regard to the inevitability of incoherence, deception and social confusions within the political structure of capitalism that destroys the values of both classes in a battle of materialistic possession. The paper also focuses upon the symbols and signs that denote distinctions, maintain divisions, promote brutalities and embrace an indifferent mindset to inhumane behavior. This further cripples social systems such as marriage and capitalistic agencies that uphold economic illegalities and the discordant fantasies of possession. 
 

Joseph G. Ramsey--Radical Calendars of Horror:
The Emergent Communist Genre Fiction of (Samuel) Guy Endore ìThe working menís Paris, in the act of its heroic self-holocaust, involved in its flames buildings and monuments...The Government of Versailles cries, ëIncendiarism!íÖ The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar.î Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, 1871

 ìThe Commune shot fifty-seven from the prison of La Roquette. Versailles retaliated with nineteen hundred. To that comparison add this one. The whole famous Reign of Terror in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists executed 20,000 before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficiency of the guillotine and modern rifle, or the comparative cruelty of upper and lower class mobs?

Betrand, it now seemed to Aymar, was but a mild case. What was a werewolf who had killed a couple of prostitutes, who had dug up a few corpses, compared with these thousands of tigers slashing at each other with daily increasing ferocity. ëAnd thereíll be worse,í he said, and again he had that marvelous rising of heart. Instead of thousands, future ages will kill millions. It will go on, the figures will rise and the process will accelerate. Hurrah for the race of werewolves!î (287) Guy Endore, Werewolf of Paris, 1933

This paper will examine the nascent radicalism, and early literary production of Samuel Guy Endore (1900-1970), a recently recovered cosmopolitan Jewish-American writer who for a prolonged period was all of the following: a best-selling author of sensational historical and horror fiction, a successful Hollywood screenwriter (and later, blacklistee), a popular and prolific pamphleteer against the racist and class nature of the US criminal (in)justice system, a student of Marxism as well as of psychoanalysis, andófor nearly twenty years--a Communist (with a capital ìCî)óall the while remaining something of a recluse, a vegetarian, and a mystic continually smitten by the fetishistic, the sensational, and the horrific.

Taken from a portion of my dissertation-in-progress, (entitled Red Pulp: radicalism and repression in left-wing mass-genre fiction 1929-1960) and based on both close readings of Endoreís published works and my own archival research at the Guy Endore files at the UCLA Department of Special Collections, as well as the recent ground-breaking scholarship of Alan Wald, Barbara Foley, and Michael Denning, my presentation will focus specifically on Endoreís literary production during the early to mid-1930s, the decade of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe, as well as of Endoreís own radicalization.

I will discuss principally Endoreís 1933 Werewolf of Paris, a book frequently called the ìclassic werewolf novel,î-- ìthe Draculaî of the werewolf genre-- but will also consider his lesser known but recently republished experimental horror-history novel, Babouk (1934). Werewolf is set provocatively during the period of the Paris Commune of 1871, while Babouk explores the roots and the early days of the Haitian revolution of the 1790s. The former, a New York Times national best-seller, the latter a popular flop that sold only 300 copies before going out of print, both of these seldom read works keep the ìspirit of revolutionÖalive throughÖcritique of the monstrous side of capitalismî AND at times ìassume a monstrous or ghostly faceî themselves as your Call for Papers requests. Together they articulate a radical challenge to the bourgeois ìhistoryî in which they are set, the capitalist societies in which they are read, as well as the very genre-forms in which they themselves have perversely emerged.

I will contextualize my close reading of these novels by way of biographical information about Endoreís early years, an examination of the critical reception of his novels, and a foregrounding of the aesthetic and political debates prominent on the US Left during the early 1930s, itself a decade only recentlyóand vitallyóre- emerging from its premature burial at the hands of anti-communist Cold War repression.

Endoreís developing views on such topics as the repressive role of ìlaw and orderî in capitalist society, the relation between racism and colonialism, the hypocritical and contradictory nature of ruling class and Western historiography and ìEnlightenmentî philosophy, and the political potential and limitations of popular genre fiction as a vector for political agitation, will all be considered via these 1930s texts.

I will detail how these works function not only as meticulously documented ìcalendar[s] of horrorsî (as the Saturday Evening Post said of Werewolf at the time), but as radically anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and even anti-militarist mass culture that still resonates today. Also I will examine the degree to which Endoreís depiction of the Paris Commune and his commentary about it were influenced by his recent reading of Marxís own classic pamphlet, The Civil War in France.

In short, my paper closely considers of a radical writer whose work, though now unearthed, is yet to be closely examined by the radical ìrenaissanceî in left-cultural studies, a movement to which I hope at your conference to contribute. 
 

Roger Witson 
 

Scott Nygren--Deleuze and Marx
Deleuzeís relation to Marx is complicated, and doesnít lend itself to any easy summary. Accordingly, it might be interesting to work through some of the intersections and contestations that these two names provoke when placed next to each other.

On the one hand, Michael Hardt has responded positively and extensively to Deleuze and Guattariís Anti-Oedipus and Mille Plateaux, and his notes on these texts are available on-line. Hardt and Negriís Empire then freely combines Marxism with the work of Deleuze and Guattari. On the other hand, Geoff Waite and Perry Anderson denounce any consideration of Nietzsche as the anti-Marx, a line of thought they feel infects postmodern theory and leads inevitably to Hitler. In this context, Deleuze re-introduced Nietzsche to French thought in 1962-65, and is perhaps more responsible than anyone else for the important role Nietzsche played in the emergence of post-structuralism.

Part of the problem is the French postwar critique of Communism from the Left, a position that seems almost unimagineable from the context of the US, where the 1950s critique of Communism is assumed to be identical with McCarthyism and a politics of the extreme Right. Insofar as Marxism is understood in terms of a dialectical model, one must presumably either position oneself within a Marxist discourse or be opposed to it. On these terms, Deleuze becomes unintelligible, since he insistently opposes dialecticism while continuing a criique of capital.

The difference could in part be contextualized through the difference between French and U.S. political institutions since the 80s. In France, an alliance of Socialists and Communists came to power in 1981, and hence became identified with the dominant system that radical critique resists. In the U.S., the Extreme Right from Reagan and Gingrich to G.W. Bush have so demonized Marxism that it remains a powerful discourse of resistance.

Beyond these preliminary contextualizations, however, are a series of provocative questions. What is the role of the dialectic, empiricism, schizophrenia, and cinema in relation to the Marxist theorization of capital? Is a Nietzschean Marxism possible or productive, as an alternative to dialectical negation? If so, what would it mean today, in the context of the Fox propaganda channel, the Iraq disaster, and an extreme right US government?

This paper will consider Deleuzeís potential relation to Marx across a number of texts. Among Deleuzeís texts to be considered will be:
 1. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature (1953). At the moment when Merleau-Ponty and Sartre were defending Soviet Marxism, and structuralism was beginning to emerge as a movement, Deleuze initiates his project with an investigation of Humeís empiricism. What are the implications of this move in a Marxist context?
2. Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and his subsequent essay on Nietzsche (1965). Is Deleuzeís understanding of Nietzsche incompatible with Marxism, or only with the dialectic? Is Marxism possible without Hegelís dialectical framework?
3. Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, The Logic of Sense, and (with Guattari) Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol. 1, which together work through an anti-psychiatric project, based on the premise that the unconscious is bound up with the social field. How does this project conceive of a relationship between libidinal forces and a Marxist political economy?
4. A Thousand Plateaus. How does Deleuze and Guattariís second volume on Capitalism and Schizophrenia reconfigure science, history and social agency? In what sense does their project break with past models of Left politics, and mobilize a radical potential in current conditions? Is their proposal now irrelevent, or remain to be discovered?
5. Kafka: For a Minor Literature, Cinema I and II, Foucault, and What is Philosophy? Are Deleuzeís works on art and philosophy productive for Left activism after 9-11? 
 

Michael Marder--"End Elaboration Now! Two New Lessons of Leninism"
After a long period of oblivion, Leninís corpus is again broached thanks to the vicissitudes of political theoretical discourses on the Left. Two notable examples of a revised and, ostensibly, a more ìsympatheticî reading of Lenin are Slavoj Zizekís highly provocative compilation Revolution at the Gates and Hardt and Negriís sequel to Empire, titled Multitude. One can hardly imagine two appropriations of the same thinker that would diverge more drastically from each other and from the revenant called forth to lend if not support, then at least credibility. Multitude concludes with an appeal to recover the thoroughly purified anarchism of State and Revolution placed in an unusual conjunction with Madisonian federalism. This appeal is, however, presaged by Zizekís ironic diagnosis of the Kleinian split in Lenin-the-object into the ìëbadí Jacobinóelitist Lenin of What Is To Be Done?Ö[and] the ëgoodí Lenin of State and Revolutionî, such that the latter figure is valorized at the expense of the former. In his turn, Zizek intends to ìrepeat Leninî in a way that will permit us to recover the Leninist legacy in the form of ìthe politics of truthî, only to admit at the end of his ìAfterwordî that what he retains from Lenin is ìmore or less just the name itselfî.

I consider neither of these alternatives to be satisfactory, becauseóand this is the dim area in which they effectively overlapóthey both endeavor to make use of Leninís 1917 theoretical writings in a somewhat unmediated fashion by bringing it into startling proximity with todayís political situation. But what if these writings cannot lend themselves to a ìmaking use ofîónot in the sense that they are utterly peculiar and useless, but in the sense of their dense un-usability undergirding all pragmatic concerns and supplying their conditions of possibility? If this is so, then by way of prefacing the ìapplicationsî of Leninís texts, we should perhaps learn from them what it means to ìlearnî, to make use of a situation, of an intellectual tradition, of a following without indulging in the opportunistic reduction of that which is used to the status of an abused object. The task at hand, then, is to begin to understand the stakes of the tremendous ìworkî that needs to be done before work or usage might actually begin; the complexity of the present as the time-place of revolutionary struggles; the importance of the interlaced attunement to and attunement of the given situation; and the lifting of quotation marks from work, order, politics, etc. that might instantiate everything that is of use. These are the most pressing lessons of Leninism today 
 

Dennis Badeen--General Equilibrium Theory as a Normative Ideal Social Order.
The question concerning neo-classical economics is: How can an economy inhabited by self-regarding agents operate in an efficient and orderly manner? Kenneth Arrowís General Equilibrium Theory provides a mathematically formalized answer to this question. It is a coherent system and when economic agents act rationally, general equilibrium and Pareto Optimality obtain. In a sense General Equilibrium Theory acts as a normative ideal social order guaranteeing that humans can fulfill their nature as beings of utility in a self-interested manner, while providing for a socially optimal outcome. However the model, while coherent, is divorced from the realities of the capitalist economy. Specifically, it is a model of simple reproduction and as such does not account for the structural logic of capitalist production. The purpose of this paper is twofold. In the first instance I shall articulate an alternative approach to economic theory, based upon a fundamentally different ontological and epistemological basis provided by Karl Marxís method and model of accumulation heuristically interpreted through Roy Bhaskarís Critical Realism, in such a way that accounts for and surpasses the methodological weaknesses of neo-classical economics. The second is to disrupt the normative ideal social order by including the structural logic of capitalist production through the employment of Marxís model of ìcapital accumulation.î 
 

Jude Welburn--The Metamorphosis of the Commodity Fetish
Lukács builds on Marx's account of commodity fetishism but also extends and modifies it in significant ways. While Marx conceives the commodity as the "elementary form" of capitalist production which gains a "phantom objectivity" or fetish character through exchange, for Lukács it is an organizing principle that is realized through the rationalized processes and reified consciousness of the subject of production. The image each constructs of the commodity-form reveals it to be both a mystification and rationalization of the social relations underlying production, although each conceives this relationship differently. This paper will examine two images created by these theorists which attempt to represent the abstract and protean phenomenon of the commodity-form. Marx's grotesque "dancing table" and Lukács' "third miraculous animal" mirror each other and also provide a means for understanding the differing trajectories of their thought. A short introduction is attached. 
 

Carl Miller--The Future of Archaeology: Fredric Jameson's A Singular Modernity
This presentation provides both a general overview and critique of Fredric Jameson's latest book, A Singular Modernity, and looks at the myriad ways in which this new text both builds on and reconsiders Jameson's notions of periodization up to this point. In analyzing the concept of late modernism, this presentation draws attention to its role in providing a useful buffer period amidst the traditionally disputed boundary between modernism and postmodernism. This presentation also critiques Jameson's assertion of the inherent lag between practice and ideology in twentieth century aesthetics, and looks at the role that traditional Marxist scholarship plays in this theory (i.e. does this increased turn toward the overtly aesthetic correspond with a de-emphasis on economic analysis?). Ultimately, the talk demonstrates how Jameson's theories of aesthetic periodization in this book represent not the death of periodization, narrative, or broad-scale Marxist theory, but rather a practical nod to the future roles of each of these theoretical techniques. 
 

Susan HegemanóThe Cultural Theory of Samuel Huntington
In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington proposed that the worldís new conflicts were no longer going to be ideological, or even economic in nature, but ìcultural.î In that work, the fundamental clash was over the different ìcivilizations,î as he calls cultures writ large, of the ìwestî and ìIslam.î In his new work, Who Are We?, the cultural struggle is internal to the U.S., and Latino immigrants represent the newest threat to an apparently coherent national culture. In this paper, I am less interested in interrogating the relative merits of Huntingtonís ideas, than in using him as a figure to think about the current state of our theoretical understanding of ìculture.î In a moment when others, including anthropologists and many literary scholars, are turning away from the project of cultural analysis and sometimes even the very discourse of ìculture,î what can we learn from Huntingtonís prominence as a public intellectual? Is his embrace of ìcultureî an indicator of precisely the bankruptcy of cultural discourse that some scholars have identified, or is it that the field of ìculturalî struggle has been ceded to the kind of conservatism represented by Huntington and his supporters? 
 

Paul Stasi--Against the Cultural Heritage: Horkheimer and Adorno's Critique of Nostalgia
 One of the many tasks facing the reader of Horkheimer and Adornoís Dialectic of Enlightenment is uncovering the kind of claim the authors are making about Enlightenment. Is the book a critique of instrumental thinking generally or of a particular epoch in the history of the West? If Odysseus is really the prototype of the bourgeoisie, are we being asked to re-think the historical origins of the bourgeoisie? Or has the book taken itself outside the provenance of Marxist analysis in making such a seemingly ahistorical claim?

Rather than choose between these two options I argue, that we must understand them as dialectically intertwined. In this paper, I read Dialectic of Enlightenment as a two-front attack on both the concept of progress embedded within Enlightenment and those nostalgic idealizations which seek to mobilize some pre-capitalist past in order to critique Enlightenmentís pretensions, particularly as these concepts are found in the work of Georg Lukács. Indeed I would maintain that Adornoís whole career arises out of a desire to purge the Lukácsian analysis ? whose basic structure Adorno seems to have accepted ? of its teleological tendencies. For Lukacsí important discussions of alienation ? not only in Theory of the Novel but in crucial sections of History and Class Consciousness ? often posit earlier historical moments as unalienated and, more troublingly, use these moments as the springboard for the utopian longings of the unrealized communist future. Adornoís response to this concept is typically curt: the only ìuniversal history,î he writes, is one ìleading from the slingshot to the megaton bombî (ND 320). We cannot, then, pin our hopes for the future on a cultural heritage whose only constant is the absence of freedom.

Dialectic of Enlightenmentís use of Greek culture needs to be read against the striking range of 20th Century thinkers (Pound, Heidegger, Lukács) who imagined the Greek world as the very image of an unalienated social arrangement. Horkheimer and Adorno are engaging in a typically Marxian use of the past: as a polemical element in a discussion of the present, rather than a placeholder for an unrealized future. This philosophical rigor, however, creates an image of the future that is entirely negative. In their refusal to betray the future by associating it with the continuous history of oppression, Horkheimer and Adorno are unable even to identify potentially liberatory moments within the present-day. Lukács and Horkheimer/Adorno thus present a kind of aporia for Marxist thought: one can either betray the future by specifying its boundaries, or one can refuse to even outline any of its possibilities, making the way towards that future impossible to see. I conclude my paper with a discussion of Frederic Jamesonís recent turn towards utopia, as an attempt to think his way around the aporia bequeathed by the Marxist tradition. 
 

Craig Peariso-- The Disappearance of Politics, or the Politics of Disappearance: Activism in the Face of Tolerance
My paper will discuss the self-conscious performance of violence, or threats of violence, as a standardized and stigmatized trope of political activism in late-1960s America. In it I will analyze the forms assumed by political and cultural protest in this period as attempts to grapple with the difficulty of articulating opposition in an historical moment marked by what Herbert Marcuse called ìrepressive tolerance.î At a time when the very possibility of resistance had been theoretically foreclosed, I will argue, the enactment of negative stereotypes seemed to offer a viable alternative for the work of political and cultural opposition. As a series of examples, I will look briefly at the work of the Black Panther Party, the Youth International Party, and the Gay Activist Alliance. The verbal and visual media games of Eldridge Cleaver, Abbie Hoffman, Arthur Bell, etc., must be understood in the context of two seemingly contradictory social-historical analyses: on one hand, Marcuseís theories of ìrepressive desublimationî and the ìconquest of freedom,î developed primarily in his work One-Dimensional Man; and on the other, Jacob Brackmanís 1967 text The Put-On, in which he claimed that ìkiddingî had become ìthe very basis of a new form of communication.î Beginning with this juxtaposition, I will then outline the ways in which one can see in Hoffmanís threat to taint Chicagoís water supply with LSD, to give just one example, the emergence of a radically different form of political activism, one based not on a belief in the adequacy of rational argumentation, but on what Linda Hutcheon has called the ìtransideological politics of irony.î 
 

Steven Scheuler--The Search for Santuchoís Grave: The Argentine Militaryís Reluctance to Provide Information Concerning the Disappeared
The fate of Argentinaís disappeared is a painful part of the debate about the dark crimes committed during the military regime's bloody rule in the 1970s, crimes that continue to haunt the nation. The Argentine military has recognized no wrongdoing in their so-called anti-terrorist activities. The extraordinary nature of guerrilla war demanded, the military said, extraordinary measures.

In September of 1996 the daughter of Mario Roberto Santucho, leader of a powerful Marxist urban guerrilla group in the 1970s, initiated a writ of hábeas data to find the remains of her father. The hábeas data law was first laid out in Argentina's 1994 constitutional reform. It allows individuals to find information held on his or her person or immediate relatives. Public court hearings to find Santuchoís grave unleashed a backlash from the Argentine military. The ëdirty warriorsí demonstrated that they were unrepentant about their actions. The military flatly refused to cooperate despite a comprehensive and legal investigation. Moreover their reactions to investigations into finding the grave of their most despised enemy aroused the military to not only defend past actions but to justify future similar actions. 
 

Kate Kaul--Monstrous Subjectivity: Disability and Radical Critique
This paper is part of a larger project which considers disability studies and disability politics as a possible site of radical critique and of political change. The paper treats the historical overlap of the categories of ìmonstrousî and ìdisabledî as problematic, in considering disability as a class, disability as a phenomenon of representation, and categorization as a persistent stumbling-block for efforts at social change. Michel Foucault calls writers and thinkers ìmonstersî who are working ìoutside the trueî ? before their time, so that their critique is not yet comprehensible, not yet useful. The monster is in this sense a pivot figure, one which signifies the possibility of change. In Abnormal, Foucault treats as monstrous the figures whose crimes question the applicability of the law. His historical case studies present crimes which are not just monstrous in the sense of disgusting or excessive, but which are also monstrously significant, pointing to changes in the function of French law and in the administration, production and recognition of subjects. Abnormal demonstrates an odd relationship between tropology and teratology, form and content. This work introduces some interesting doublings and complications in the work of the monstrous, and it recalls the tactical suggestions of Marxist aesthetic theory. For George Lukacs, the working class is the impossible yet necessary subject of revolutionary change, the subject which enacts its own annihilation. In Walter Benjaminís ìCritique of Violence,î labour presents the general strike as, in a sense, the only possible subject, acting in internal opposition to the state. These Marxist inquiries into subjectivity and the need for change not only offer something to disability theory and politics; they could benefit from the disability movementís difficult mobilization of disability as an unstable yet effective political identity. In treating disability as a monstrous category, one which points to radical change yet seems never entirely to escape tropology, my paper considers the potential of disability theory to ground an understanding of the politics of subjectivity and categorization. 
 

Nicholas Ruiz-- The Resurrection of Capital
If the imperial project in the broadest sense was always a matter between the colonizer and the colonized, we might say that the narrative of Empire is but a discussion among transnational elites over the increasing expanse of the Network. Today, the anticipated effacement of sovereign Empire rests upon the expansion and agency of the Network, but as it stands, does not preclude the erasure of the ineluctable concentration of Capital. Hardt and Negri describe how the multitude, that term they use to denote a social body of singularities, that unlike the previous condition of the masses before them, retain their genders, classes, cultures, races, sexual orientations, etc., might in theory hold the antithesis to Empire in its diffuse, yet networked, power.1 The truth of the situation is that the velocity of the expansion of the Network portends the vertiginous relocation of singular ontologies, and at limited times for the better, but this expansion does not contain the redistribution of representative capacity necessary to reorganize the human Code in a new or differing way from yesterday. Aristocracy reifies itselfócontinually.

However, where Deity has failed to unite us all, materializing Crusades, Jihads and the like, and where political rhetoricism has failed to united us all, materializing treaties, alliances and organizations of little import, it appears that there is something that is operating, if violently, to efface all previous cultural and ideological boundaries because it speaks to us all, and in a metalanguage that for better or worse, we can all understand and respond toó the operational logic of the market and the metaphysics of Capital.

Resurrections have long been en vogue. The most spectacular Resurrection was always that of the Christ. We might say this resurrection portended the deposition of what Baudrillard has recently called líeffacement de Dieu, et líeffacement de la réalité2, or as Debray has written, we could say that ìthe retreat of the Ancestor, deposed by the son, reflects in the supernatural order a mechanism with which we are familiar in another context: the supremacy of the mediator, which vassalizes everything it mediatesîó the paradox of reproduced transcendence on any plateau.3 In our modern era of productions, indeed of postmodern reproductions and globalizing mediated bodies, we encounter the burgeoning presence of a conspicuous absence of a Cartesian point of reference. Fundamentalism rises, as previous metaphysical scaffoldings collapse, and factions of Code scramble for any psychotectural apparatus that feigns to offer the certainty of a tether.

After the Cold War many believed that Capital had finally been exterminated along with its AntiChrists, like communism and the like, leaving the world ëliberatedí and open to all of the flows and circulations of the mythical ëfree trade.í However, what many have tried to bury has risen againóand it is the resurrection of Capital that today casts the largest metaphysical shadow upon the world that humanity has ever seen. Cíest inéluctable.
Notes 1 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, Multitudes, New York; Penguin (2004), p.xiv
2 Jean Baudrillard, Le Pacte du Lucidité ou líintelligence du Mal, Paris; Galilée (2004), p14
3 Régis Debray, God: An Itinerary, New York; Verso (2004), p209 

Beverly Ann Gaddy and Andrew Franz, Esq--Repressing the Dream: Marx and a Politics of the Impossible
has stated that Marx ceased to practice philosophy once he formulated the materialist concepts of the German Ideology. This, says MacIntyre, was Marx's gravest error. What MacIntrye does not address is that German Ideology was largely inspired out of Marx's critique against Stirner's radical nihilism; lumping Stirner in with the idealism of the other Young Hegelian's--including particularly--influences of Feuerbachian theology and, thereby, forever closing the Marxist bridge to any authentic, radical idealism. We intend to reference the work of Derrida (especially his Specters of Marx), Stirner, Feuerbach, Bataille, Hegel, MacIntyre, Husserl, Hume, Kant, Lenin, and (of course) Marx (with special emphasis on his materialist rejection of Hegelian idealism), in order to demonstrate what a politics and a philosophy of the impossible might be, what it might look like, how it might feel and thus indicate why a passion for the impossible is indispensable. We propose that it is only through an absurd process of dreaming pursued (generally) with an artistic and inventive passion not lending itself to genre or any other type of systematization, and not through classic modes of representational imagination-themselves market-driven sublations by effect of the dual rationalities of genre and commodity--that a politics of the impossible (possibly) emerges.

Fixing our gaze on the horizon of the possible and impossible, where the thin line between them meets, we may, outside of the confines of rational imagination (beyond the realm of both Hegel and Marx), inventively bring the impossible into the realm of possibility. The history of man's achievements is a history of this otherwise unnamable process: the possible arising out of the impossible. Such metaphysical and ideal achievements, to be considered real inventions within the classic terminology of invention, simply cannot occur through either a rational or a materialist based imagination; an imagination which posits something based on (and thereby subservient to) an already institutionalized; already invented rationality. Imagination in the hands of those seeking rationalism (even in its idealistic forms), scientific method and materialistic certainty has become, in fact, mere "wishful thinking"; a diseased and addictive method of quasi-philosophizing. Ironically, the concept of imagination, in service of representational economies, has seen its artistic value as a commodity rise, while the literary concept of the dream, has seen itself devalued to the point where it's considered antithetical to serious philosophical (and even social science) considerations. Necessarily, however, materialist/rationalist imagining (in the Hume/Marx/Kant sense of it) sacrifices the very thing imagined, making it (whether be it: rationality, socialist revolution, categorical imperatives, etc.) "impossible" in the most Hegelian sense of the term. The painful process of Dreaming (this literary-artistic, unnamable and passionate, activity), on the other hand, is the only available, non-commodifiable manner of welcoming the absurdness of the taut autre into our lives--wherein the compulsive ability to move against the anti-inventive grain of all institutions can liberate us. Only dreams can "invent," thereby bringing the impossible into the possible. As such, we insist that philosophy cannot be practiced with concern to either interpreting the world or changing it, as such "inventions" can never be "ideas" that will not, of necessity, be put squarely to use by the authority structures, and for militaristic purposes. 
 

Will Roberts--World-Historical Comedy and the Specter of Revolution
Although communism is the ìmovement of the overcoming of the presentî, Marx is always careful to point out, ìThe conditions of this movement arise from the presuppositions present at hand.î1 The question therefore arises: What are these presuppositions, and how does communism arise from them? How does the movement of the overcoming of the present arise from the present itself? I think Marx tried to answer this question by reflecting upon the revolutionsóapparent and real, failed and partialóthrough which he himself lived. The revolutionary struggles of 1848, and the long period of exile, frustration, and repression that followed, provided a constantly developing backdrop for Marxís efforts to practice the life he had first indicated in his dissertation, the self-aware making of history. Marxís confrontation with the difficulties of this period comes to a head in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In the words of that text: ìMen make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited. Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.î2

As Marx develops this theme, it becomes clear that revolutionary practice actually confronts two problems of inheritance, or at least two intensities of the same problem. First, there is the question of a revolutionís proper relation to its inheritance in general, the given social, economic, and technological circumstances. Here the danger seems to be one of either fear or anesthesia, for we might conjure and re-conjure some aspect of the past in order either to hide from ourselves the frightful novelty of our undertaking, or to hide from ourselves the dreary nothingness of our counter-revolutionary urges. A disjunctionóa widening gulf evenóarises thereby between what we are doing and what we think we are doing (oróand here the chasm becomes vertiginousówhat we pretend to think we are doing). This disjunction arises from our invocation of the dead.

But there is another question as wellóreally an intensification or redoubling of the firstónamely, the question of how we relate ourselves to the past-ness of revolution itself. Revolution has occurred; it is part of our inheritance. But as part of our inheritance, revolution is itself dead. Marx does not shy away from the strongest possible formulation of this revolutionary dilemma; chronicling the run-up to Bonaparteís coup in Class Struggle in France, he proclaims, ìThe revolution is dead!óLong live the revolution!î3 The living-dead revolution, which must be constantly resuscitated, is a persistentóand, yes, hauntingófeature of Marxís writings from the Manifesto to the Brumaire. There is a movement, always already underway, between revolutionary communism as threat or prophesyóìthe red specterîóand revolutionary communism as something dead, as a ghost that haunts the scene, and continues to act precisely as a dead body, that works underground.

This paper will trace these problems as Marx develops them in his 1848-1852 writings. Of course, it is impossible to address these themes without also addressing the specter of Derrida, and his Specters of Marx. Although Derridaís reading of Marx elicited loud protests from many Marxists and Marxologists, I think the vast majority of this criticism was badly misplaced. The reservation I would register with Derridaís line of questioning is only that it does not go so far as it ought.
1 German Ideology, MECW 5, p. 49; translation modified.
2 Eighteenth Brumaire, Later Political Writings, p. 32.
3 Class Struggle in France, MECW 10, p. 70. 
 

Paul Reynolds--Spectre's, Mythos and Materialist History: The Accumulated 'Muck of Ages' and Dialectics in Understanding Marxism
Marxism - or more specifically the principles and values given identity as a school of thought through the work of Karl Marx - has, despite his entreaties, become a thing of spectre's and mythos - not unlike a faith - with its own accumulated weight of historical 'muck' to obscure, atrophy and interpret (laying interpretation upon interpretations). If, as Derrida amongst others has acknowledged, the Spectre of Marx hangs over much contemporary social and political thought, this Spectre conforms to a paraphrase of Marx's claims at the beginning of the 18th Brumaire: Marxists make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things........ they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. The questions, then, is what we conjure for a marxism of the C21st, and how we conjure it from the past without that spectral past suffocating us. 
 

Roger Beebe--Zombie Utopias and the Dream of Automation
I'm interested in (and will be looking at) the scene that occurs in almost every zombie/last man on earth film where the ragtag group of survivors takes a timeout from their battles with the zombies to go to a shopping mall/grocery store/etc. where they enjoy a few minutes of reprieve in the form of a shopping spree. These scenes, it seems to me, are really the key to understanding the work that these films are doing (something like the [momentary] fantasy of consumption without production followed by a prolonged return of the repressed dead labor in the form of the zombies themselves). So that's a first section. Then I want to turn and look at /Night of the Comet/ (a lousy 80s teen zombie film) as a rare example of a film where the return of the repressed is itself superseded by what appears to be a happy ending. I'm specifically interested in the way the figure of automation (represented primarily by a radio station that continues to play pre-recorded broadcasts throughout the movie) enables this rare happy ending, and what that might mean as a picture of a utopian fantasy of "successful" capitalism (i.e., where the repressed never returns). 

James McFarland--Profane Apocalypse in the Hell of Commodities: George Romeroís Dawn of the Dead and the Haruspicy of the Present
ìA commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological nicetiesî (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. 1).

George A. Romeroís 1978 horror film Dawn of the Dead, which takes place in a shopping-mall overrun by flesh-eating zombies, can prove surprisingly helpful in understanding those ìtheological niceties.î Discussions of this cult film, both academic and promotional, have frequently called its scenario ìapocalyptic,î in the vague sense of catastrophic and terminal. Here we take that term more seriously and situate Romeroís film in the Biblical tradition of apocalyptic writings in order to identify a political theology implicit in its image of the resurrection of the dead. Borrowing a notion from Walter Benjamin, the analysis identifies the film as a ìprofaneî apocalypse, a local and transitory revelation occurring among the detritus of recognizable mortal endeavor. The two transcendent poles that sustained dogmatic apocalyses, in their Christian versions the Anti-Christ as principle of present desecration and the After-Life as principle of future justification, collapse in Dawn of the Dead into the obscene excess of death over life and life over death that is the zombie interlude in human mortality. The zombie becomes the figure of unmournable death, the stand-in for a genocidal potential in the contemporary state of emergency. The desecrated landscape of unmournable death is a landscape of homicidal life, a life that comes to itself only in the act of killing. As Romeroís film unfolds, its scenario stabilizes into a dialectic of violence in which the omnipresent threat of an opaque terrorist violence occasions in response an intentional violence asserting sovereignty over and against it. This dialectic of violence in which life as inconsolable survival is senselessly maintained through constant tactical killing orchestrates the presentation of the shopping-mall as a realm of priceless commodities. The unmournable zombie and the priceless commodity thus confront one another as each otherís truth. It is on this desecrated landscape ? the hell of commodities ? that contemporary political resistance must orient itself. 

Jessica Livingston --ìBut today I bitî: Exploitation and Resistance in Dirty Pretty Things
Within the past year the New York Times has published articles about businesses who force employees to work overtime off the clock, Wal-Mart locking employees in the store overnight, and immigrant workers earning less than minimum wage. While the service industry continues to grow faster than any other sector of the economy, these jobs remain low-paying, highly-exploited, and nearly invisible. These New York Times exposes have not attracted the anger that stories about the outsourcing of white-collar jobs have and certainly not the popular attention of a sensationalist story such as the Scott Peterson trial. The combination of the political importance yet general lack of attention to these working-class stories makes the film Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, 2003) particularly interesting. This film addresses the invisibility of service labor and its role in the global economy but does not utilize the documentary or social protest forms traditionally used for such subjects. Dirty Pretty Things begins seemingly as a murder mystery when a human heart is found in a hotel toilet. In the process of solving this mystery the film exposes the dark underside of the global economy, portraying the hardships of immigrants working in a ritzy hotel in London. The sleazy hotel managerówho takes labor, sex, and even body organs from the exploited immigrant employeesóembodies the corporate logic of the neoliberal economy. The film has been criticized for its unrealistic Hollywood ending. In actuality, the film ends with the main characters heading off alone into futures that are bleak if not doomed. What the critics are referring to is the revenge scheme that the characters carry out against the hotel manager that enables them to leave London with passports. Rather than dismissing this ending as unrealistic, this paper analyzes the importance of this narrative of labor agency as well as the formóelements of social commentary combined with the traditional thrillerówhich it takes. 

Trish Ventura--EBay as Global Monstrosity: The ìNew Economyî Corporation and/as the Nation
This paper explores the global behemoth that is eBay. Arguing that eBay is the apotheosis of the corporation in the digital era of the so-called new economy, the paper posits that the company usurps and thereby erodes modern notions of national affiliation. As the sovereignty of the nation-state transforms in the wake of trans- and multinational powers such as the European Union and the World Trade Organizationónot to mention the unbalanced super-national power exercised by the United StatesóI posit that we are entering an era in which the camaraderie of national citizenship is beginning to migrate ìbelowî the nation to the family and the local community and ìaboveî the nation to the multinational and supranational institutions. For its part, eBay represents itself as simultaneously occupying both positionsóhence eBayís characterization of its users as ìmom and pop,î while aggressively touting its global leadership position and calling itself ìthe worldís online marketplace.î I suggest that eBay and other global corporations are trying and in some cases succeeding in reinscribing the longings associated with nationalism. Corporate literature actually describes the community as ìthe eleventh most populous nation.î

In this capacity, eBay becomes a monstrous entity. Not nation, not simply corporation, eBay is the archetype of a new kind of virtual, global figure marshalling devotion by its users while inscribing them in a transnational community. This community is redirecting the energies connected to national affiliation to increase its so-called "network power." That is to say, in the new economy, the network-oriented corporation is both the site of production and circulation; it is its own product, in a sense. But eBay and a few other monstrous corporations have been able to make themselves something more: they are also the site of kind-of national affiliation.

No longer characterized as public citizens, workers, raced, sexed, classed, we are all reinscribed as sellers or buyers. EBay even has its own "laws" and "citizen" responsibilities. With eBayís holdings covering half the globeís land mass, geographic and language barriers matter less and less to the formation of this new "nation"óas long as there is Internet access. 

Asma Abbas --Injury is dead suffering.
There is a process and pattern to the deaths and then there are survivors. Marxís ethnography of capitalism proffers a way of understanding the commodification, and mortification, of suffering in liberalism through its central category of injury. Reading injury as value, and presenting the notion of the labour of suffering, the paper finds that a critique of liberalismís approach to suffering coextensive with, and even basic to, his critique of labour in capitalism. Arguing against utilitarian readings of Marx, as well as those that consider the labour theory of value a truism rather than a critique, and still against those that espouse productivist framings of the imperative to revolutionary activity, the paper strongly proposes that Marxís trenchant critique of capital and its socio-political accoutrements ought to be read, along with Nietzsche, as a critique of how our bodies as liberal capitalist subjects figure in predetermined calculuses of pain and pleasure. Marx allows us to liberate the question of justice from its age-old preoccupation with death (whether in Plato or Hegel), and to reattach it to the suffering, memory and hope of living bodies, and the suffering of death itself. 

Richard Burt--Alie-nation and the Hybrid Political Thriller: Forgetting the Foreign, Securing the Archive in The Forgotten and National Treasure
My paper will read both the lack of generic coherence in films symptomatically in relation to post-9/11 twin anxieties about homeland security and about the threat to civil liberties posed by those who claim to do do the securing as well as about the use of unevenly developed technologies and media of detection and evidence (photography, the internet (google), special glasses. The Forgotten morphs from being a political thriller into an X-Files like sci-fi film as both the alien, figured by a large O in the sky (Osama, anyone?) and the FBI become unknowable, untrustworthy threats to the family and domestic space (roofs are literally blown off). National Treasure is an adventure film that directly invokes Indian Jones and the Last Crusade and also takes the form of a political thriller. The hero is an American, the villain a Brit; the hero teams up with a blonde German born American with a slight accent (like the Nazi blonde in Indiana Jones, but this time a true heroine) paradoxically to steal the Declaration of Independence (on the back of which is supposed to be a map to the treasure) in order to save it form being stolen. Heroism and treason become indistinguishable when the hero toasts the Founding Fathers as traitors for signing the Declaration of Independence. In contrast to th e credible sequence in Three Days of the Condor where the hero taps into an underground phoneline, both hero and villain make completely incredible use of the internet to follow clues leading to a treasure buriedósurpriseónear Wall Street and the library of Congress (will contrast the scene set in same in All the Presidentís Men) to figure out how to steal the Declaration of Independence. The placelessness of the cyberdetectioncrimespace is dialectically set against the crucial importance of residence and archival documents. Scans are duplicates arenít sufficient. The film has four flase endings and two epilogues as it tries to sort out the different generic expectations set up by its use of both adventure film and political thriller. The Brit foreigner goes to prison, while the criminal hero and his father reconcile and the hero and semi-foreign (and also criminal) heroine marry. Following the documents is increasingly identified with following the money (the dollar bill and the 100 dollars bill), and during the film's closing credits, the camera pivots from close ups of words from the Declaration if Independence to their reverse side at the exact moment we see the Walt Disney Pictures logo. 
 

Dina Smith--History as Prefabrication: the Flashback in Raising Arizona
Ethan and Joel Coenís Raising Arizona (1987) focuses on the ways in which 1980s, class immobility is produced by, to use the main characterís (H.I. McDonoughís) words, ìthat son of a bitch Reagan in the White House.î The film utilizes the metaphor of abduction through the image of the kidnapped child, Nathan Arizona, Jr., or the ìstateís child.î A product of expensive fertilization treatments, Nathan Arizona, Jr. is one of several Arizona babies. While H.I.ís ìseed can find no purchase,î Nathan Sr. can indeed purchase all the seeds necessary to produce. The film suggests that those with capital can ultimately control the body, the child, and, thus, the state ? and reproductivity itself. Poor and married to an ex-con, Edwina cannot adopt nor can she afford the fertility treatments. What Ed and H.I. desire is one of (the) Arizonaís surplus babies, thereby becoming upwardly mobile through the rubric of family. Raising Arizona then critiques Reagan-era child welfare policies which, as Evan Watkins argues, ìbecame the perfect summary vehicle and image of Reaganismís developed form, the point of congruence between economics and morality, individual freedoms and state intervention, as the bearer of a future yet to come.î The film reminds us that, in the United States, family values are middle class luxuries.

While the first section begins with an historical reading of the film, the second section turns to a formal analysis, connecting the filmís mobility narrative to its use of spatial/temporal rifts. The film interestingly problematizes the wish for mobility through the mobilization of a nostalgic flashback that is a flashforward (a.k.a. ìflashfrontî). The filmís final sequence reminds us that, for H.I., true security, always illusory, only exists in dreams as wish-fulfillment. As H.I. sleeps in his trailer homeís bed, he dreams of the future, one with children and grandchildren, very reminiscent of an Ozzie and Harriet episode. We find a table full of Technicolor food where the family gathers, a mise-en-scene evoking 1950s abundance. And it is a future in which H.I. and Ed still live in their starter home, but one whose space has been dramatically altered. H.I. and Edís future, it would seem, belongs to the past.

The final scene tracks forward and backward, following the temporal shifts of H.I.ís voiceover, tracing the ebb and flow of memory and desire. ìFlashbacks in film,î as Maureen Turim argues, ìoften merge two levels of remembering the past, giving large-scale social and political history the subjective mode of a single, fictional individualís remembered or projected experience.î This paper then uses Raising Arizona as a way of entering into the discourse of the flashback/flashforward as an expression of postmodern space/time compression. Such flashbacks question the reconstruction of the historical, alluding to the ways in which the body is imagined as lost in time and space, suspended in the continuous flow of late-capital. I have in mind here the ways in which the reproductive body, or Edís body, is constantly bartered in the film, as when H.I.ís fellow line-mate wants to swap his wife for her.

Given todayís nostalgia for the Reagan era, by both the Right and the Left (evoked as a kinder and gentler global, imperial capital compared to the new Bush administration), as well as the repeated return to the U.S. Postwar era as an originary moment in U.S. media/social history, the interrogation of the flashback, which came of age in the Cold War, as a form of political commentary becomes especially pressing. In Raising Arizonaís final flashback/flashforward, H.I. and Ed exist in their past, in their future, in their house-trailer. This is a liminal space/time where the utopic possibilities of the future may be imagined but not lived. Such possibilities are momentarily abducted, like the stateís child, only to be returned. 
 

Phil Wegner Living Between Two Deaths: 9/11 and Periodizing the 1990s
In his celebrated final essay, ìOn the Concept of History,î Walter Benjamin suggests that history be understood as a series of repetitions. These repetitions are not, however, signs of stasis or an eternal return; rather, they are the very motor of historical movement itself. The exploration of 1990s culture in the United States that I develop in my current book project deploys a similar notion of repetition as fundamental to any understanding of historical change. What unify my analyses are two overarching and deceptively simple questions. First, what happened on September 11, 2001? And second, what would be involved in thinking of the 1990s, or the span between November 1989 and September 2001, as a specific cultural period?
 

In order to begin to address my first question, I draw upon the concept of Event described by the philosopher Alain Badiou. An Event, Badiou argues, is something that happens ìthat cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in ëwhat there isíî (41). ìIt takes place in a situation but is not of that situation,î and hence the Event is the ìvoid of the situation, that aspect of the situation that has absolutely no interest in preserving the status quo as suchî (Hallward, xxv and 114). In short, the Event is the very possibility of a radical new beginning, the inauguration of that which was unexpected, unknown, and uncounted. Thus, in the sense given by Badiou, we can say that no Event occurs on September 11, 2001. Rather than an Evental encounter with the incalculable Real, September 11 is itself a repetition of an earlier such encounter. Slavoj Zizek maintains that every true Event must occur twice: ìThe crucial point here is the changed symbolic status of an event: when it erupts for the first time it is experienced as a contingent trauma, as an intrusion of a certain non-symbolized Real; only through repetition is this event recognized in its symbolic necessityóit finds its place in the symbolic network; it is realized in the symbolic orderî (61). Similarly, every death, every ending point in history, must happen a second time before its real import can be felt. Indeed, until this ìsecond death,î the past will continue to live on in a twilight existence, not ìknowingî that it is over. This second death is ìabsolute deathî (as opposed to the first, ìnatural,î or Real death), precisely because it is ìalways the destruction of the symbolic universeî (135).

The toppling of the World Trade Center buildings can be understood as a form of second death, an event that repeats an earlier ìfall,î that of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This first fall was a true Event: unexpected and unplanned for, an encounter with a traumatic Real, it instigated a sequence that would culminate two years later in the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent ìendî of the Cold War. But to describe 9-11 as a repetition rather than an Event is not to deny its significance. Rather, it is to make just the opposite claim: for endings or Events are not in themselves beginnings, and it is only with the fall of the Towers that the destruction of the ìsymbolic universeî of the Cold War, lingering on as it did in strange twisted forms in the first Gulf War and through the subsequent decade, is finally and definitively accomplished, and a true ìNew World Orderî put into place. September 11 enables the U.S., in ways that were not possible in the immediate uncertain aftermath of the Cold War, to assume this global mantle, giving rise to the Bush Doctrine of unilateralism and preemptive military violence, thereby marking both the closure of the world historical situation of the Cold War and the opening of a new period in global history. Moreover, it is by making possible the constitution of this new Symbolic Order that the "sacrifice" of those who died that terrible September morning has become so valuable to this emerging global hegemony, a logic made brilliantly evident in the post-9-11 thirller Phone Booth, a film I will discuss briefly here.

To mark these kinds of endings and beginnings and to think in terms of ìbeforeî and ìafterî necessitates as well that we rethink the 1990sóor more precisely the span between November 9, 1989, 10:30 p.m. (the opening of the border crossing at Bornholmer Strasse in Berlin) and September 11, 2001, 9:02:54 a.m. (the moment Flight 175 struck the south tower of the World Trade Center)óas a coherent cultural period. If the 1990s is a period, how might we best characterize it? I have already described the counter-intuitive asymmetry between the beginnings and endings of this period: its beginning is in fact an ending, the Event of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the eruption of the Real in history and a punctual break with the history of the Cold War; while its ending occurs with the 2001 repetition of this Event and the beginning of a new global situation. The 1990s then are the strange space between this ending (of the Cold War) and beginning (of our post-September 11 world), one of those transitional phases that, once again following Zizekís lead, we can call the ìplace ëbetween two deathsí, a place of sublime beauty as well as terrifying monstersî (135). This place between two deaths, the location between the Real Event and its Symbolic repetition, is strictly speaking ìnon-historical,î precisely because it is open to any number of possible ìsymbolizations/ historicizations.î Such an ìempty placeî is experienced in its lived reality, as the Zizek passage cited a moment ago suggests, in a Janus-faced fashion. On the one hand, it feels like a moment of ìterrifying monsters,î of hauntings by a living dead past, and the ìcompulsion to repeat.î Yet, it is also experienced as a moment of ìsublime beauty,î of openness and instability, of experimentation and opportunity, of conflict and insecurityóa place, in other words, wherein history might move in a number of very different directions. The 1990s I argue represents a unique moment of struggle, one enabled by the Event of the collapse of the Soviet Union and waged over the significance of this Event. This Event in effect ended for the global left the legacy of the twentieth century, and opened up the space for new kinds of political experimentation. And crucially in this decade, no outcome was determined outside of this struggle: there was no way a priori to know what the repetition of the Event might be. September 11 then came like a godsend to the forces of global capitalism, interrupting the consolidation and maturation of the emergent oppositional movements and enabling the installation of a new hegemonic logic (one, needless to say, that is still contested on a number of fronts). Indeed, Jameson points out, ìThe opponents of an antiglobalization politics will certainly be quick to identify bin Ladenís politics with the antiglobalization movement generally and to posit ëterrorismí as the horrible outcome of that misguided antagonism to the logic of late capitalism and its world market. In this sense, bin Ladenís most substantial political achievement has been to cripple a nascent left opposition in the West.î One of my real hopes in writing this book is to fight this trend and to keep faith with the original counter-globalization movements that emerged in this decade, movements whose radicality have in the moment following September 11 come under question, not only as we would expect from a ferocious chorus on the right, but even from some on the left. If the changed global field of the post-9-11 situation will require a rethinking of some specific tactics and strategies, the forms that came into being in this decade are still extremely valuable, and we would do well to do all we can to sustain their energies and potentialities into the future.