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).
Filed under Reading Groups
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.
Filed under Reading Groups
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
Filed under Reading Groups
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.
Filed under Reading Groups
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.
Filed under Reading Groups
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.
Filed under Reading Groups
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!
Filed under Reading Groups
After a too long interval powered by too good things, InterCcECT reconvenes! Chicago winter has hardly transpired – one of many burning signs that we’re already living the unevenly distributed collapse of the ecosphere. What does the Marxan corpus uniquely offer to the explosion of ecotheory in para- or non-marxist idioms in recent years? Find out with Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene! We’ll read the intro and chapter one (and optionally the rest of part one) for Thursday 30 March, 4pm, Map Room.
Contact us for PDFs.
Propose events, topics, field trips, and happenings! Like us on social media for frequent links and commentary.
Filed under Reading Groups
Often the simplest questions are the most theoretically fruitful. Alenka Zupančič’s What is Sex? works as both an introduction to psychoanalysis and an expert tour of its distance from competing (anti)philosophies. Join us for a special reading session led by Lakshmi Padmanabhan, on the new school holiday 8 November. We’ll read the intro, chapter 1, and chapter 4, and meet at 4pm at The Red Lion (Red Line: Fullerton).
Contact us for PDFs.
Propose events, topics, field trips, and happenings! Like us on social media for frequent links and commentary.
Filed under Reading Groups
How do we get out of this place? Why is geography the home discipline for one of the most powerful theorists of abolition? What do we build instead? Join us to discuss Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s new essay collection Abolition Geography. We’ll read the editor’s intro and chapter 1, and aspire to chapter 2.
Thursday 4 August
4pm
Moody’s Pub (Red Line: Thorndale)
Contact us for PDFs.
Also mark your calendars now for an event with special guest Alex Galloway, Tuesday 27 September!
Propose events, topics, field trips, and happenings! Like us on social media for frequent links and commentary.
Filed under Reading Groups
