Wage stagnation is a defining dynamic of the K-shaped economy, but millions of Americans work beneath the wage – they pay for the privilege of working, work in tip-dependent industries (service), or work in decommodified wageless modes (content generation). How has culture in the age of service work, including reality tv and literature, crafted the myth that precarious labor is freedom? Annie McClanahan’s new book rigorously charts these degradations and distortions. Join us for a reading session on “Control and the Culture of Circulation Gigwork”.
Thursday 3 September, 5pm
UIC University Hall room 2028 (20th floor) 601 S Morgan St (Blue Line: UIC Halsted)
RSVP to interccect at gmail for PDF.
What’s on your fall theory calendar?
opening party for our curated show Art in These Times Friday October 2 (more details soon)
In conjunction with Fall of Freedom, which calls on artists to unite as a constituency specifically challenged by ascending authoritarian attacks on the freedom to learn and free association, InterCcECT undertakes to theorize yet againas always the politics of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics. This time our theorizing will materialize in our first curated exhibition: ART IN THESE TIMES.
“Political art” has an all too familiar repertoire, but uncertain effects. What media, modes, styles, and ideas activate political critique and political organization today? How can we collect and sustain forms and experiences that refuse profit laundering and prestige mining?
Lots more to come about events and festivities around the exhibit (opening party! closing poetry reading with Daniel Borzutzky and more! refreshments by Nabal Cafe! commemorating 50 years of Chicago left media at In These Times! political stand-up after hours downstairs!) But today’s notice on this channel: proposals from interested artists are due August 10!
Selected artists will be paid, which is but one little way to build in some political effect. Spread the word to artist friends, mark your calendars, get in formation!
-Discrete 2D works or small 3D works suitable for a small, untraditional gallery space
-Moveable via public transport for installation or easily transportable to gallery space in Logan Square/Bucktown
-Chicago or midwest themes encouraged
-No artworks featuring words with explicit, didactic political messages/slogans
-No generative AI in any phase of the work, attested by artist
Prospective participants should email brief statements of interest, and photos of proposed piece(s), to interccect@gmail.com by Aug 10, for invitation by Aug 31.
Since summer 2011, the Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory has convened big heads for adventures in abstraction. America’s birthday blares the need for big ideas to propel a new founding. Grateful for the many years of wild speculation and vivifying conversation, we’ll use our birthday to double the big ideas: two events in July on the art of theory.
First: extending our exploration of the modernist turn in art with TJ Clark, in his new essay on de Kooning and a field trip to the Art Institute’s special exhibit Willem de Kooning Drawing. (above: Untitled III) 4pm Thursday 16 July. Meet at the entrance to the Modern Wing. RSVP for the readings and to let us know to look for you. Special tickets are required.
Second: when fascism aestheticizes politics, communism responds by politicizing art. or so Benjamin said. What’s happening politically in art today? Join us for a reading session on Angela Dimitrakaki’s Feminism. Art. Capitalism. (Introduction and Chapter 5). 5pm Monday 27 July. Special venue: In These Times, which is expanding its political education programming. More on that soon, including an October partnership with InterCcECT on political art! 2040 N Milwaukee, upstairs. Blue Line: Western. RSVP to interccect at gmail for PDFs (please do not use the wordpress comment function).
As always, send us proposals for events. Theorists visiting Chicago, book touring, and more are warmly invited to get in touch.
Want an InterCcECT near you? Be like Saint Louis, Columbus, Knoxville, and Columbia, SC and start an InterCcECT satellite. Handbook and consult available upon request.
Precisely 70 years ago, Jacques Lacan conducted his 4th seminar, La Relation d’Objet et les Structures Freudienne, criticizing the then prominent Object Relations school for its failure to encounter the definitive lack of the object. There are varieties of lacking the object – frustration, deprivation, castration – but lack itself is primary. Since objectal ontologies have multiplied in the interim, and ideologies of presence prevail, how are we to theorize absent objects, negative objects, and radical lack today?
InterCcECT resident Summer Lacanian Chris Breu joins us once again to facilitate a special session on the seminar. We’ll aim to read the whole first section, pages 3-84 – but those new to Lacan or working at summer speed should prioritize parts i, ii, and iii (ie through page 51).
Monday 29 June, 5pm, also at THE PUB, most excellent new third space with a print newspaper attached! 2150 W Armitage (Blue Line: Western; Armitage, Western, Damen, Milwaukee buses)
RSVP to interccect at gmail for PDFs (please do not use the wordpress comment function).
Now welcoming summer proposals for future events, including on a more frequent schedule or of the longer-term sort (nothing compares 2U, Hot Adorno Summer). And colleagues outside Chicago are of course warmly invited to visit anytime, or be like Saint Louis, Columbus, Knoxville, and Columbia, SC and start an InterCcECT satellite. Handbook and consult available upon request.
Did the style of modern painting emerge to celebrate the wonders of nineteenth century Paris, or to critique industrial urbanization, consumer culture, and false gods of progress? If Modernism was this duality, what would leaving it for another paradigm of artistic production require?
Join InterCcECT for a reading session on TJ Clark’s classic work The Painting of Modern Life, along with his updated short essay “The Painting of Postmodern Life.” Along the way we’ll take stock of Chicago’s contemporary urban aesthetic opportunities by partnering with a new social infrastructure, The Pub – a print-only newspaper anchoring a community third space. Subscribe and submit to print; check out their events page for a range of good things!
Wednesday 27 May 4pm
The Pub 2150 W Armitage Ave (Blue Line: Western)
RSVP to interccect at gmail for PDFs. (We’re using the Revised Second Edition; read the Preface, Introduction, and Chapter One.)
now welcoming summer proposals! on our calendar:
InterCcECT on Lacan’s Seminar 4, with special guest Professor Chris Breu, 29 June
“Imaginary” has become a ubiquitous noun in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades. Even the law professors are in on the lingo. What is signified by the substantive, what kind of analysis does it enable, what kind of ideologies might it encode? A new essay by Yves Winter, “What is an Imaginary?” schematizes these questions.
Join us for discussion – and come ready to propose summer theory ambitions!
Tuesday 14 April, 4pm
Lincoln Park Public Library “study room”
1150 W Fullerton
Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton
(The library has a parking lot.)
RSVP to interccect at gmail for PDF
on our calendar:
InterCcECT seminar on Lacan’s Seminar 4, with special guest Professor Chris Breu, 29 June
“Lenin With Du Bois: Theorizing the Revolutionary Counter-Mood” Jonathan Flatley, 15 April UIC English (2028 University Hall), 3pm
“Free Gifts” Alyssa Battistoni 4 May, U Chicago 3CT, 4pm
In collaboration with the new Chicago branch of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, InterCcECT welcomes you to a moderated discussion on immoderate SLOP.
From the bulldozing of the White House to the rise of ICE Barbie, the visual regime of contemporary American fascism merges violent delight in destruction with nouveau riche vulgarity, middle class mediocrity, and internet meme culture. Despite incessant callbacks to the 1930s and continued deployment of classic fascist themes, contemporary fascism distinguishes itself from its historical predecessors by its speed, virulence, sites of production, and mode of distribution. Hyper-capitalized, decentralized, and algorithmically determined, the big beautiful slop machine and its army of broligarchs, podcasters, tradwife influencers, and internet trolls are rewriting the fascist rulebook, rewiring the libidinal economy of the present, and stacking the deck for capital.
How does the aesthetic regime of contemporary fascism function? What marks the specificity of fascism 2.0 and what does it reveal about the transformations of American and global political life in the age of polycrisis? How does the technical apparatus of postmodern capitalism influence the production, circulation, and consumption of fascist aesthetics? And what, under these conditions, would it mean to resist by “politicizing aesthetics” as Walter Benjamin once enjoined us to?
Twelve Ten Gallery 1104 West Thorndale Avenue Chicago, IL 60660
This event is co-presented by the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and Twelve Ten Gallery and is free to attend. $10 suggested donation. Complimentary refreshments will be provided. Please RSVP.
ON OUR CALENDAR:
(with apologies for the unfortunate unusual winter gap, and in anticipation of more InterCcECT mainline events in spring)
Is too-late capitalism evolving a new mode of production? A new mode of accumulation? Or just a new political and ideological dispensation of the main forces and relations that have defined modernity? InterCcECT is thrilled to host very special guest Professor Matt Seybold, Director of the Center for Mark Twain Studies and host of The American Vandal , for a miniseminar reckoning with the surging neofeudalism hypothesis.
Join us Wednesday 3 December, 5:30pm at UIC (University Hall, 601 S Morgan, 20th floor, Room 2028). RSVP for PDFs.
While in Chicago Dr. Seybold will also participate in Theory at the Bargaining Table, a conversation with Professor Dominique Baker and the Committee on Political Education of UIC United Faculty, about how to strategize faculty power in technofeudal times. Thursday 4 December, 3pm, UIC Daley Library room 1-470.
For only the second time in our fourteen years, InterCcECT hosts an event centered on the novel’s unique faculty for theorizing capitalism. The Payback is a comic critique of contemporary life, a red-hot indictment of offloading social maintenance costs onto individual students, and a rousing entry in the heist genre canon.
InterCcECT is extremely excited to welcome novelist Kashana Cauley to Chicago, courtesy of the UIC English Department and the UIC Institute for the Humanities, as well as Simon&Schuster. She’ll be in conversation with bona fide scholar of heists Anna Kornbluh, and fellow in The Debt Collective, Professor Jason Wozniak. We’ll read the novel alongside selections from Dr. Wozniak’s co-authored book Lend and Rule: Fighting the Shadow Financialization of Public Universities.
Join us Wednesday 29 October, 4pm, at the Institute, 1007 W Harrison Street (Blue Line: UIC).
Free copies of the novel are available to UIC students via the English Major Club. Signed copies will be for sale on site thanks to Madison St Books.
Even after a long, intense, Hot Adorno Summer, we still can’t let go. Hang on to Hegel with a session on Adorno’s Three Studies. We’ll tackle the third study, Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel, for Thursday September 25th, at 4pm. Lincoln Park Public Library Large Meeting Room (1150 W Fullerton Ave).
RSVP to interccect at gmail for PDF.
The year’s slate is open! As theory nerds confront back-to-school, be in touch with proposals for events. InterCcECT hosts mini-seminars, field trips, book talks, works-in-progress sessions, and reading groups, as well as hitherto unimagined formats. Contact us to propose events.
On our calendar:
Oct 29: What’s Funny About Student Debt? A conversation with novelist Kashana Cauley about her excellent new book The Payback, with Anna Kornbluh and Jason Wozniak of The Debt Collective
InterCcECT 