Category Archives: Reading Groups

How can he not have been immortal? The death of Fredric Jameson this fall leaves us a tremendous life’s work, and the charge to uphold it. In the new year, InterCcECT convenes to begin to find language for what has been given, and what has been lost. The conversation will be rooted in the foundational short text, the original talk and q&a titled “Cognitive Mapping,” printed in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. An optional on-ramp some might like is the posthumous (and long) article “Agon: The Iliad.” With special host Jonathan Flatley, we welcome all Chicago Jamesonians, friends of Fred, and first-timers.

Join us Thursday, 16 January, 5pm, at UIC University Hall, 601 S Morgan St, 20th floor, room 2028 (Blue Line: UIC Halsted). RSVP for pdfs.

ALSO! InterCcECT is delighted to announce the launch of StLSECT, a satellite in Saint Louis! Tell your southern comrades, and email stlsect@mailbox.org to sign up for event announcements. Columbus is also in the works. Other locations looking to start their own satellite can reach out for our handbook!

As always, contact us to propose events. Mark your calendars now for a session with special guest Erin Graff Zivin 20 March, and stay tuned for Feb plans.

Happy back to school! Join InterCcECT for an introduction to the philosophy of Hans Blumenberg and his genealogies of ontology and political theology, “Imitation of Nature: Toward A Prehistory of The Creative Being” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20686110 or Contact us for PDF).

Tuesday 15 October, 4pm, Wicker Park Bucktown Public Library Meeting Room (Blue Line: Damen).

Mark your calendars now for What’s That Smell? , a conversation with special guests Professors Simon Hajdini and William Mazzarella, Tuesday 12 November, 4pm, UIC University Hall Room 2028.

Where does the marxist interpretative imperative of cognitive mapping meet the ecocritical palpation of energy? In the latest issue of Representations, Harry Pitt Scott’s article “Figures of Separation: Cognitive Mapping and Oil’s Declining Slope” promises some useful synthesis. Join us at 4pm Thursday 25 July outdoors at Sheffield’s. Contact us for PDF and to propose additional summer events!

We’ve read the admin memos, we’ve heard from the LLM classroom enthusiasts, we’ve received the scabgpt threats; let’s sit down for some reading on the social history of artificial intelligence. Join InterCcECT Weds 5 June to discuss Matteo Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master . We recommend reading the whole book, but at least the intro, first chapter, and conclusion. RSVP for PDFs, and rendezvous 4pm at the Lincoln Park Public Library Meeting Room (Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton).

Social theorist Melinda Cooper frames 20th and 21st century economic activity as the responsibilization of individuals for the costs of social reproduction, and the plundering of public coffers for private gain – two different but complementary mechanisms for contemporary accumulation. We’ll explore the latter mechanism in a reading session on Cooper’s latest book Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (Princeton UP 2024). Focus on the Introduction and Chapter Five. Join us Monday May 6, 4pm at the Lincoln Park Public Library Meeting Room (Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton). RSVP for PDFs.

Summer is upon us! Propose events, field trips, Hegel close-read ambitions and more to interccect at gmail.

In Late Fascism, old InterCcECTer Alberto Toscano offers a new intervention in what has come to be known as “the fascism debate.” How do we robustly conceptualize and historicize the authoritarian tendencies of the present and their activation of racism and sexism? 

Join InterCcECT for a reading session, focusing on chapters 1-3. 

Monday, 12 Feb, 4pm, at The Bourgeois Pig (red line: Fullerton)

RSVP for PDF. 

Mark your calendars now for two very special upcoming InterCcECT events this winter! 

11 March with special guest Elizabeth Anker, author of On Paradox!

8-12 April with special guest Gregor Moder! (exact date TBD very soon)

and if it floats your boat:

5 Feb Seminary Coop new book salon for Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism

Break goals at once over-ambitious and under-achieving? Nation-wide war on education got you down? Lee Edelman will not cheer you up!

But join InterCcECT anyway, for a reading session on the formidable queer theorist’s recent release, Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing. We’ll read the intro and chapter two.

Monday 18 December

4pm at The Map Room

(Blue Line: Western)

RSVP for PDFs. Fire up your Theory New Year’s Resolutions! Traditionally we host an MLK day session; mark your calendars and send along reading recs.

With LLMs perpetrating a massive new enclosure, and creative labor struggling militantly, the times are ripe to debate intelligence, creativity, pattern recognition, and counting. If quantification is the fundamental episteme of our times, does it follow that all forms of digital reason are alike? How do computational mediascapes draw upon the infrastructural logics of long ago centuries? What is the difference between adding up and speculation? The recent Critical Inquiry essay “On Addressability, Or What Even Is Computation?” offers some important distinctions and historicizations that ramify for cultural theory.

Stave off fall just a little longer! Join us Tues 29 Aug, 4pm, at The Map Room (Blue Line: Western).

Contact us for pdfs and to propose back-to-school events; mark your calendars for a visit from special guest Christian Sorace, “Spherical Apartheid” 21 Sept!

Would-be visitors please get in touch; InterCcECT hosts lectures, mini seminars, works-in-progress, and dinner/overnights.

Is critical theory equipped to evaluate the promise of geoenginnering? What is real cause for hope about the near future and what is real fantasy? InterCcECT continues hot ecomarx summer with Andreas Malm’s recent two part series The Future Is the Termination Shock: On the Antinomies and Psychopathologies of Geoengineering.

Join us Tuesday 20 June, 4pm, Half Sour.

Contact us for pdfs or to propose summer plans.

Mark your calendars for a visit from special guest Christian Sorace, 21 Sept! Would-be visitors please get in touch; InterCcECT hosts lectures, mini seminars, works-in-progress, and dinner/overnights.

As a complement to our last session, we’ll roll towards summer with selections from Soren Mau’s Mute Compulsion. What is in us more than us? What are the modes of repetition in social reproduction, and are those evidence of a capitalist trieb?

Join us Monday 15 May, 4pm, at The Red Lion (Red Line: Fullerton).

Contact us for PDFs. Aim for all of Part I, but focus on Intro and Chapters 1 and 2.

We’ll also be moving towards more summer plans, so bring your reading lists and field trip itineraries!