Time And Social Transformation Summer Seminar Part I.

This first seminar of a planned series on time and social transformation will consider Marx’s Temporalities by Massimiliano Tomba, The Society Of The Spectacle and Mémoires by Guy Debord, Debord’s films: Refutation of All the Judgements, Pro or Con, Thus Far Rendered on the Film "The Society of the Spectacle” Critique of Separation On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time The Arcades Project, “The Work Of Art In. The Age Of Technological Reproducibility,” and “Theses on The Philosophy Of History” Walter Benjamin We will meet for 1 1/2-2 hours a week. I will give an outline of the material for 30-45 minutes and the balance of the time will be discussion, and other presentations if anyone wants to put something together. Ideally, we will be able to read these works collectively, and develop a sense of what they say and how they might be useful to our various life projects. I’m planning to confine my outlines and introduction to a content summary, and make them as nurtural as possible. Since I will have to make decisions about which aspects to emphasize, and how to frame them, I will rely on my sense of why all these books have been important to me, and leave it to others to bring out other aspects. In my previous readings, all these texts ask whether it is possible to conceive of time in a way that allows us to imagine total social social transformation enacted by the proletariat - is there revolutionary temporality? I haven’t selected any of these books on the basis of some canon or judgement about their greatness, but because they seem to address the question. The Tomba provides a lucid vocabulary question of the temporality of social transformation. Although this is often ignored, Society of The Spectacle is largely about my question, and even has chapter titles such as “Time and History,” and “Spectacular Time.” While I remain fascinated by late 20th century readings of Benjamin as a mystic, theologian, strictly literary critic, and Judeo-pessimist, for this class I'll be focusing on the collective viewing practice Benjamin calls the ‘politicization of aesthetics’ at the end of the Work of Art essay and the method in The Arcades Project, which allows us to read his writing about the angel of history and the phantasmagoria as in part a criticism of the passivity shared by those two figures. If things go well, I will propose to move on to a reading of parts of the Black Radical Tradition and especially Joy James as those texts also speak to my question. All of this is up for discussion at a preliminary meeting where folks can say what they really want from the group. I am doing this as a fundraiser for my community farming project which is on its last legs. Suggested donation is $175 per participant. This will take several months of weekly meetings, so it’s a ‘good deal’ on that basis. I’m not a cop, so no one will be excluded because they can’t or don’t want to donate. Bigger donations are welcome. I’d like to start this sometime around May 15.