InterCcECT

How does art think? What kind of conceptuality inheres in the aesthetic? What artistic revolutions and political-economic transformations help account for the contemporary preponderance of “conceptual art” and “autofiction”? Between immanently critical works and postcritical trends, is interpretation obsolete?

InterCcECT kicks off summer with a reading group session on Peter Osborne’s Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. We’ll focus on the introduction and chapters 1-2; contact us for the readings. Join us Thursday June 7th, 4pm, at the Red Lion Pub 2446 N Lincoln (Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton).

As always, InterCcECT welcomes your proposals for events including mini seminars, field trips, and lectures. Summer ramps up frequency, so propose away! Follow us on Facebook for frequent links.

On our Chicago calendar:
The Debt of the Living
Adam Phillips and Leo Bersani
Work, Blackness, Sex
Political Futures

Service economy, helping professions, care work, affective labor.  For at least two hundred years, feminist and marxist theories of social reproduction have underscored the unwaged, unvalorized, unappreciated exertions that make the quotidian happen, that uphold the infrastructures of the present for the future, that give life. Now the contemporary finds that labor not only unofficial, but delegitimized, not only under-compensated but over-burdened to the point of disaster.  Whence arises the image of the lazy greedy feminine public employee, welfare queen, unfireable teacher?  How long can dystopia hold?

This International Women’s Day, InterCcECT invites you to commune with us over feminist words.  We’ll read Tithi Battacharya’s Social Reproduction Theory primer, and selections from Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, and discuss Thursday April 19th, 5pm-7pm, at Ambassador Public House (back room), 310 S Halsted (Blue Line: UIC Halsted).  Contact us for PDFs.

As always,  send us proposals for events, field trips, works-in-progress, techniques of survival.

On our calendar:

10 March The Withering of the State, with Corey Robin keynote

16 April Eduardo Cadava, Learning to See

18 April Maria Acosta and Fanny Soderback, Underrepresented Groups in Philosophy 

photo: Amy De’Ath

In an era of racist violence and economic refeudalization and their entwinement, what lessons can be drawn anew from  reconstruction, the black radical tradition, and the early twentieth-century political novel?

Join InterCcECT for a reading group on Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, Monday 15 January, 2018, 4pm-6pm at O’Shaughnessy’s Public House (Brown Line: Montrose).   We’ll focus on Part 3: “Black Radicalism and Marxist Theory.” Contact us for PDFs.  Special guest Andrew Leong will facilitate discussion.

Please note:  online conversations about Parts 1 and 2 of Black Marxism will be held on Wednesday, January 10, 5-7pm (CT), and Friday, January 12, 5-7pm (CT). For participants outside the Chicago area, an online conversation on Part 3 will be held on Monday, January 15, 5-7pm (CT). Please contact Andrew Leong at andrew.leong@northwestern.edu by January 8 if you would like to participate in any of these conversations, or require PDFs of the reading. Participants may also find it fruitful to read the online articles in the African American Intellectual History Society’s roundtable on Black Marxism (http://www.aaihs.org/announcement-aaihs-online-roundtable-on-cedric-robinsons-black-marxism/).

The January 12 and 15 online conversations will be facilitated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (http://ealc.berkeley.edu/people/hofmann-kuroda-lisa)

The January 10 conversation will be facilitated by Andrew Leong.

As always, like us on Facebook for frequent links, and get in touch to propose events.

What’s on your new year theory calendar?

A bit of ours:

12 January The Mana of Mass Society

16 January Chicago Works

Amidst its present Russian turmoil, 2017 is also distinct as the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1.

Join InterCcECT for 2 linked sessions on what is to be done.

Session 1 reads the novelist/critic China Mieville’s new narrative history of the Russian revolution, October (excerpts) alongside Lenin’s The State and Revolution (chapters 1 and 5).

Session 2 reads Capital (Chapters 25 and 26) alongside William Clare Roberts’s recent brilliant polemic
Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital.

Thursday 15 June, 4pm, HandleBar 2311 W North Ave

Wednesday 12 July, 4pm, Parts&Labor

Contact us (interccect at gmail) for the readings, like us on the facebooks for frequent links, and, as always, send proposals for group endeavors!

On our calendar:

26 May, Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction

28 May, Mieville himself at Seminary Coop

9 June, Poems, Prose, & Possibility

15 June, Summer of Cage

21 June, The Political Conscious