2004 CFP

The 6th Annual Conference of the Marxist Reading Group

"Catastrophe Now: The Wreckage of Utopia"

Featuring: Susan Buck-Morss and Christian Parenti

March 25-27 at the University of Florida

"In the wake of the failed utopia of industrial modernity, where the promises of mass sovereignty, mass production, and mass culture have led not to abundance and more freedoms, but instead to ecological devastation, catastrophes of war, exploitation, dictatorship, and technological destruction and to a panoply of phantasmagoric effects that aestheticize the violence of modernity and anaesthetize its victims, how do we re-conceive collective political action and a present utopia?" (Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West)

This conference seeks papers that address how pedagogy, activism, aesthetics, and theory help constitute positions against the hegemony of Global Capital. To be precise, how do we disrupt the seemingly undisruptable: a Capitalist system that conjures up a communal unity that eventually obscures the social tensions of class conflict? How do we re-constitute past modes of (modernist) discourse into oppositional modes of engagement against the State? By dissolving the boundaries of disparate modes of discourse e.g., Islamism, aesthetics, Marxism, can we produce new forms of engagement against Global Capital? How do we turn the dreamworld of consumerism into a state of desertion and engagement? How can we imagine a progressive globalization? How do we construct a progressive global left?

Susan Buck-Morss, a professor of political philosophy and social theory at Cornell University, is the author of Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. Buck-Morss has written a number of innovative essays on aesthetics, politics, and the work of art, including: "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered" and "The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe."

Christian Parenti is the author of Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, Taking Liberties: Prisons, Policing, and Surveillance in an Age of Crisis, and The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror. He is a Soros Senior Justice Fellow of the Open Society Institute and a Visiting Fellow at the CUNY Graduate School's Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. He teaches at the New College of California in San Francisco and works as a radio journalist in Central America, New York and California. Parenti is a regular contributor to numerous publications, including: Salon,The Nation, San Diego Union Tribune, Washington Post, The Progressive, In These Times, Christian Science Monitor, and The New York News Day.

Prospective papers may address (but are not limited to) the following:

Anti-humanism/post-humanism in Empire
Reification of history
Narrative mappings of the political
What counts as labor?
Re-thinking subjectivities through singularity
Society of control and new forms of policing/discipline
The aesthetics of security
Re-writing the frontiers of the nation-state
Exploiting security: crime and the warehousing of the poor
Prosthetics, Clones, Cyborgs: The body and technological ontologies
Strategies of containing revolutionary practices
Gender and the place of work
Global capital and imagining the apocalypse
Pedagogies and reorganizing relations of space
Literature and collectivity
Insurgent spatial practices: sites for alternative production
Professionalization and the corporate university
Media and formulations of collectivity
Constructions of a revolutionary identity
"National Dreams" of Prosperity and Poverty
Politics of zoning
US policy, war, and terrorism