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Critical Theory Working Group

@crit_theory_grp

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resources & open reading groups for collective study of early critical theory / patreon:

Joined September 2023
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
literally though
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@noetic_emetic
matty matt
11 months
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
3 months
Happy birthday Walter Benjamin, who was, most importantly, a communist
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Horkheimer’s explanation of the core idea of the Dialectic of Enlightenment in three theses (letter to Pollock, 4/27/41)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
4 months
Deleuze, “The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat” (1983)
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@Helenreflects
Helen De Cruz
5 months
What are your thoughts on this philosopher?
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
9 months
Horkheimer’s letter wishing Marcuse a happy birthday in 1944, despite it all
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Habermas: noooooo you can’t do revolutionary theory after the integration of the proletariat you lost your addressee there’s no general radical interest you have to do pluralist discourse ethics now Marcuse: haha universal Eros of the oppressed for classless society goes burrrr
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
1925: a young Theodor Weisgrund-Adorno meets one of his philosophical heroes, Gyorgy Lukacs, who, in a 3 hr convo, disavows all his past work that Adorno loved & says the 3rd international was probably politically correct to denounce him but definitely dialectically backwards
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
9 months
the letter from Marx to Engels NYE 1861 everyone loves to quote the ending from is even more relatable if you don’t cut the parts about how he can’t pay rent, is handing out so many IOUs his friends have to vouch, & has to fight his jackass publishers & employers for every check
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
4 months
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
4 months
Horkheimer (& Adorno) 44/45 preemptively critiquing any postwar reconstruction for Germany that fails to take into account the long history of Nazi barbarism in European colonization
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
Happy Birthday to Karl Marx, aka Dr. Too Damn Dialectical aka the shrewdest contradiction-marking spirit to ever do it aka harbinger of the Old Mole aka prophet of the judgment of class society
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Pollock’s “Automation” (1955), a critical survey of optimistic economists, technocrats, & cybernetic theorists by confronting their visions of automated utopias with the reality of the relative surplus population under welfare state (mis)management
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
9 months
if you’re looking for a criterion that distinguishes early critical theory from later claimants, you can’t do much better than: “But whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.” - Horkheimer (1939)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
3 months
Horkheimer (1949) on his concept of reason as “Marxist reason, the free association of humanity”
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
Adorno fired from Radio Research Project for being right (called musicians claiming to bring ‘culture’ to high schoolers idiots; wrote 100+ p speculative ‘memos’ on how radio shld be an electronic musical instrument; dismissive of project as pointless in late capitalist society)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
Adorno’s Introduction to Dialectics, Lecture 12 (3 July 1958)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
in the grand tradition of first generation critical theory! Karl Korsch on the “work ethic” of the Frankfurt School / ISR in a letter to Mattick (1938)
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@postcyborg
KUBARK stare 🇵🇸🔻🪂
11 months
My vocation in life is hanging out and kind of just saying stuff. Nothing else has taken
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
for Marx-Freud’s bday, Adorno & Horkheimer (1939): “The [revolutionary] moment of analysis lies in the (…) conception of the individual as a stage. (…) [Psycho-]analytical categories (…) serve the insight that the individual himself is a ‘history of class struggles.’”
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
to be fair this is a great way to prove one of the core theses of the “dialectic of enlightenment”: “reenchanting the world” assumes & simplifies & repeats & intensifies enlightenment dualisms by cynically/instrumentally championing abstract images of the archaic
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
CTWG crash course on materialist dialectics - never be too embarrassed to call something dialectical again! Horkheimer’s “Eclipse” (1947) on the dual attitude / double-edged negativity that salvages historical truth from the self-wreckage of false, non-historical absolutes
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@bo_austin_
BO
10 months
people are actually *too* scared to describe stuff as dialectical. there’s a lot that can be described that way, but as soon as the intellectuals are in a social setting where they might feasibly use a word like that, they get nervous, because they only kind of know what it means
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
3 months
Horkheimer (1944), in the unpublished “Society & Reason” lectures, connecting the philosophical vocation of ‘building truth out of fragments’ to the formation of rational, classless society in which the social divisions that mutilate human beings and nature are overcome:
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
9 months
Bloch & Marcuse at Marxist summer school in Korčula, 1968, for the symposium «Marx und die Revolution»
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
book covers that go hard
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
(1-2) Engels to Marx (1858) on how the cell is Hegelian being-in-itself that self-reflexively self-differentiates into the organism as “Idea” in a discontinuous series of qualitative leaps. Also how experiments in the conversion of forces materially prove Hegel’s essence logic.
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@damn_jehu
damn_jehu
10 months
Amazing how Marxists have descended into utter nonsense. Marx and Engels would be scandalized.
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
1941. The ISR is broke. They call an emergency summit to write about their work for grants. Neumann: Ok we can’t sound Marxist. [hrs of critical-dialectical reflections on the inseparability of theory, value, & fact] Marcuse: Please can we finish 3 pages to apply for funding.
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
Adorno, Introduction to “The Positivist Dispute” (1969), on the meaning of Marx’s critique of political economy
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
back! like we never left etc 2 open groups planned for 2024: - Late May to early June: The Fight for the Dialectic of Enlightenment - Early Fall (TBD): The (Critical-)Political-Economic Foundations of Critical Theory + Journal issue 1 ETA & a new blog
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
Happy birthday to Kierkegaard too, who, as Adorno argues, deserves much better than our respectful exegesis
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Jameson, “Marxism & Form” (1971), on the power of Sartre’s “Critique of Dialectical Reason” as a path of despair towards the revolutionary experience of total responsibility for the ongoing nightmare of world history
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
“[Marcuse] declined an invitation to visit China with the remark: ‘I won’t go through a door that was opened by Kissinger!’” - R. Lettau
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
New on the CTWG blog: H-J Krahl’s “Authorities & Revolution” (1968), a reflection on the connection of theory to revolutionary organization & withering rebuttal to Adorno & Habermas’s criticisms of the SDS - translation & intro by J.E. Morain ( @jemorain )
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
new on the CTWG blog: @thezachloeffler on Adorno’s Music Theory of Communism, music’s primordial protest: “Ohne Angst Leben”, glimpses of classless society in negative form, & what the fate of horses who survived the age of heroes says about our own
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
“By exposing the historical necessity that brought capitalism into being, [the critique of] political economy became the critique of history as a whole. (…) All history is the history of class struggles because it was always (…) prehistory.” - Adorno
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@chrisokane_nyc
Chris O'Kane
10 months
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
“Plato started (…) a practice which has lasted to this day among intellectuals — constant speculation about different & possible methods of government, all based on a refusal to accept the fact that the common man can actually govern.” - CLR James (1956)
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@wokesteppenomad
Larry Davidovich Trotsky 🇵🇸🇦🇲
5 months
(To the cadence of "all men are brothers") Every cook can govern
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
[Diskussionen über Sprache und Erkenntnis, Naturbeherrschung am Menschen, politische Aspekte des Marxismus] (1939)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
CLR James on the meaning of Fanon’s life/work as “a hymn to the idea of revolution” for the future: he both models & demands the revolutionary criticism of civilization & the relentless self-criticism of revolution, without which the whole earth is damned
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@republicjournal
The Republic
10 months
Today in 1961, Frantz Fanon died aged 36. 🧵
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Letter from Horkheimer to Adorno (1941) on how Hegel’s positive is so negative that “His theory is infinitely more pessimistic than Schopenhauer’s. At the same time it is infinitely freer, because it contains no reconciliations, or its reconciliations are bad and transparent.”
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
update: official date for M1 - Sat, 6/1/24, a presentation & discussion of Ch1 1: “The Concept of Enlightenment”: reviled by friends & enemies of the enlightenment alike! & which not even your devoted CTWG editors agree on! full schedule soon / sign up:
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
back! like we never left etc 2 open groups planned for 2024: - Late May to early June: The Fight for the Dialectic of Enlightenment - Early Fall (TBD): The (Critical-)Political-Economic Foundations of Critical Theory + Journal issue 1 ETA & a new blog
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Horkheimer on what distinguishes the dialectic, which advances at the extremes, from a mere qualification of one-sided positions (“on the one hand… but on the other…”)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
new on the CTWG blog: translation of H Schweppenhäuser’s (1986) “The concept of language and linguistic presentation in Horkheimer and Adorno”, which grounds the style of Dialectic of Enlightenment in their critical (& communistic) conception of language
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
1 year
Bloch’s origin story is he was allowed to study philosophy bc his dad saw Schelling’s grave & was like WOAH a KING wrote this epitaph… that could be my weird broke son someday…
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
CTWG resource project: making the entirety of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung V1-9 (1932-41) available (& free) in English. Starting with a collection of PDFs of extant Engl translations in 1 place, offering new 1st time translations in the future
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
8 months
“The so-called "Frankfurt School" goes back mainly to the concept of a "critical theory" of society developed by Max Horkheimer in his Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung during the 1930's, [for which] the main point of [Marx’s] teaching lies in the criticism of political economy.”
@chrisokane_nyc
Chris O'Kane
8 months
Taps the sign:
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
i’ve always loved the way they loved (newspaper clipping, 1946)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
4 months
thanks for your patience as you await your 1st email for the upcoming june session, the “nudes in bio” bots have apparently reached the threshold of self-consciousness &, naturally, immediately sought a critical theory of society to self-reflexively contextualize themselves in it
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
never been a better time to read Horkheimer’s “On Bergson’s Metaphysics of Time” (1934): a critique of well-intentioned vitalist attempts (including Bergson’s own!) to recover the philosophy of Life from its use/abuse by the right
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@samuelmoyn
Samuel Moyn 🔭
11 months
If we don't revive vitalism for the left, the right will own it.
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
fall/winter 23 CTWG schedule: [Intro] 11/18 Theoretical orientations of the early ZfS [Focused Studies] 11/25 Marcuse’s Essence essay 12/2 Horkheimer vs Mannheim on Ideology 12/9 Materialism contra Metaphysics & Morality 12/16 Adorno on Wagner sign-up:
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
3 months
In the near future, the CTWG will publish English translations of previously untranslated fragments & discussions from the ISR “Dialectical Logic” project, which Horkheimer worked on throughout the 1930s & (w/ Adorno, as prep for DoE) 1940s. Stay tuned!
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
this entire conversation is Habermas & 2 of his goons trying to get gotchas on Marcuse for both preserving early Marxism critical theory & actively reconfiguring it while Marcuse (rightly) replies w variations on “have you tried not being so reified”
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
3 months
Adorno, Negative Dialectics: “The mature Marx […] now distinguished the [realm] of freedom from original immediacy. In the moment of planning - the result of which, he hoped, would be production for […] the living rather than for profit […] - he preserved the alien thing […]”
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
HBD Freud, who, in Ricoeur’s words, was both a master of suspicion, teaching the art of meeting guile with double guile, & modest disciple of the soft but indefatigable voice of the divine Logos, working to emancipate by enlarging consciousness for all
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
1919: in 1st 10 wks as Commissar for Culture/Ed for the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukacs passes cultrev reforms 2 abolish the commodity character of art, send artists down to the countryside, & mandate sex ed in schools (which he nationalized). infuriated almost every1 lol 👑 💩
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
8 months
Bordiga wrote something better than a book! some of the most beautiful essays on path-dependency in tech & infrastructure in capitalist production (& the meaninglessness of death under these conditions)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
3 months
Thanks for running the Dialectic of Enlightenment gauntlet with us! We wrapped by finding a beginning in their ending: a final positive model of enlightenment in a histomat-extended psychoanalytic anamnesis to find the scars where hope’s been halted & begin, finally, to mourn!
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@thezachloeffler
Dialectical Zach-Zack Loeffler
3 months
"Invocation of the sun is idolatry. Only the spectacle of the tree withered in its heat gives a presentiment of the majesty of the day which will not scorch the world on which it shines." Join @crit_theory_grp for our last DoE meeting on Saturday.
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
Sign-up for the late fall/early winter (Nov-Dec) Critical Theory Working Group session on “The Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung: Organon of Early CT”, ft. presentations & conversations by CTWG members on essential & slept on ZfS articles!
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Horkheimer on Hegel’s unintended effect of training a generation of political radicals - how his formal glorification of the status quo did more serious harm to reactionary institutions than his more progressive contemporaries could have
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@thezachloeffler
Dialectical Zach-Zack Loeffler
10 months
There’s too much emphasis on which books+not enough on how to read them. I like what Horkheimer said about what happened when Hegel was called to Berlin by the King to instill in students loyalty to the state—he taught them to think+inadvertently made enemies of Prussian reaction
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Habermas: You can’t ground justice in art! Only by rational discourse as ethical procedure. Even Marx criticized capitalism for failing to these bourgeois ideals. Marcuse: Why not. Go read Michael Kohlhaas: justice portrayed beyond the capitalist reality principle. Pretty cool
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
“I quieted Teddy [Adorno], telling him that what the empiricists wanted was not so bad, you just had to be patient with them and make them familiar with what we understood as theory. Then everything would come out all right.” - Leo Löwenthal, “Recollections” (1984)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
9 months
one more time for the people in the back
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
9 months
🔥🔥🔥
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@zaguatemechudo
Quique Tortós 🔨
9 months
Richard Gunn, increíblemente lúcido: “Lo que he llamado la concepción sociológica de las clases se enfrenta al bochorno de que no todos los individuos en la sociedad burguesa pueden ser prolijamente encajados a los grupos que esta etiqueta como “capitalistas” y “proletarios”...
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
Horkheimer: “The concept of ‘objective tendency’ is perverted into a means of proving the victor right, ignoring the crucial fact that [critical] theory & practice combat not only the most recent injustice, but also the injustice that is history itself. (…)” (1/2)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
Max Horkheimer to Paul Tillich (8.12.1942), a defense of the negativity of critical thinking
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
new on the CTWG blog: analysis of texts from the Fromm archive on the 1st stages of the ISR’s 1936 Studien über Autorität und Familie, with new insights into its Marxian theoretical core & the ISR’s collective work process - by J.E. Morain @jemorain
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
posting rare marcuses (pictures not taken of him after 1960) proving he was not born an old man
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
1 year
Soon at Oct: Resource Blog (for each crit theorist: PDFs; annotated bibs; ~15 min audio eps) & Pod Ep 1 (w/ a v special guest) Nov: Fall 23 Reading Group (topic: 30s-40s Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung bangers); live meetings for multiple time zones
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
4 months
see you Saturday for a discussion of the primordial history of the bourgeois subject, the intertwinement of myth-power-labor, & the problem of the reversal of self-preservation into self-annihilation through the mastery of internal nature as introversion of sacrifice!
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@thezachloeffler
Dialectical Zach-Zack Loeffler
4 months
Please join @crit_theory_grp Saturday, when @hitmeupontwitta will lead us through the Odyssey excursus from DoE. I'm heading out of town today+sadly won't be there. If I were there, I'd want to talk about the moving peroration, about art and the positive concept of enlightenment.
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
sign-up sheet for the may-june session on the dialectic of enlightenment just dropped
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
5 months
back! like we never left etc 2 open groups planned for 2024: - Late May to early June: The Fight for the Dialectic of Enlightenment - Early Fall (TBD): The (Critical-)Political-Economic Foundations of Critical Theory + Journal issue 1 ETA & a new blog
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
4 months
Thanks every1 who signed up, you should have received emails w/ the info, materials, schedule, & link! 1st meet tomorrow noon EST on the Prefaces! All the hits: “Zeitkern der Wahrheit”, the myth 🔄 enlightenment reversal, positive concept of reason, & what they mean by fragment!
@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
4 months
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
“Marx did not fight utopianism because he wanted to embrace the objective tendency [to late capitalism] instead, but because utopia seemed to him to be within reach on the grounds of that objective tendency.” - Letter to Grossmann (1943)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
we can however endorse Benjamin’s transformation of astrology into a crit theory of language that explains why we can’t return to an enchanted world of correspondences (& don’t need to, since disenchantment produces enough enchantments of its own)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
“As principled non-sectarian readers/enjoyers of early/Marxist critical theory/theorists we support both sides in the Lukacs-Adorno disagreement & neither (dialectically) & hope people get tired of reenacting their mutual misunderstanding as a badge of integrity.” - The CTWG
@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
1925: a young Theodor Weisgrund-Adorno meets one of his philosophical heroes, Gyorgy Lukacs, who, in a 3 hr convo, disavows all his past work that Adorno loved & says the 3rd international was probably politically correct to denounce him but definitely dialectically backwards
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
👀👇‼️
@Brill_Social
Brill_Social
10 months
This new publication examines works of the early Frankfurt School that are concerned with gender identities, institutions, and ideologies, as well as the ongoing relevance of early Frankfurt School ideas for contemporary feminist analyses.
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
“[D]ialectical concepts transcend given social reality in the direction of another historical structure which is present as a tendency in the given reality. (…) All materialist concepts contain an accusation and an imperative.” - Marcuse, Concept of Essence (1936) ZfS (V5. I.)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
that’s a wrap on meeting 1 of the fall/winter 23 session! sign up here for @hitmeupontwitta ‘s session next week for a focused discussion of Marcuse’s “Concept of Essence” (1936)!
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
4 months
zoom room is open now - link in the email you’ve received if you signed up! tune in for reflections on the intertwining of myth, labor, & power in Adorno-Horkheimer’s infamous reflections on the Odyssey, on Odysseus as the prototype of the bourgeois self!
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
4 months
see you Saturday for a discussion of the primordial history of the bourgeois subject, the intertwinement of myth-power-labor, & the problem of the reversal of self-preservation into self-annihilation through the mastery of internal nature as introversion of sacrifice!
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
7 months
“Logical critique and the emphatically practical critique that society must be changed simply to prevent a relapse into barbarism are moments of the same movement of the concept.” - Adorno on Marx’s critique of political economy, (Intro to the Positivist Dispute collection)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Then the clearest, and funniest, explanation of dialectical cognition - as the objective spontaneity of free thinking - from CLR James’ “Notes on Dialectics” (1948): “examine, and see that you do it, both the things you test and the [categories] by which you test them”
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
thanks to Esther ( @NedjmaEPlanas ) for posing such difficult qs to two of Horkheimer’s most difficult texts! Next Sat (12/16) is our last of this late ‘23 session, with Zach ( @thezachloeffler ) leading discussion on Adorno’s ruthless criticism of Wagner!
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
today @ 1pm we’re discussing Max Horkheimer’s aporetic “critical materialism” - a seemingly impossible rejection of both the unbridgeable separation of “is” & “ought” in modern moral philosophy (Kant) & their false identification in modern metaphysics!
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Horkheimer’s fragment on the materialist inversion of the idealist dialectic from 1942, depicting immanent critique of idealism as the sudden shift in Gestalt that results from intensive focus on optical illusions
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
English transl of Hilde Weiss’s ZfS essay (1936) on Marx’s 100-q worker’s inquiry, the Enquête Ouvrière, designed as an exercise in connecting mundane details of working life to the laws of capitalist exploitation & revolutionary means of liberation
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
9 months
“Fascism is retrograde not in comparison to the bankrupt principle of laissez-fair, but in terms of what could be attained. (….) To appeal today to the liberal mentality of the nineteenth century against fascism means appealing to what brought fascism to power.”
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
1 year
oh you know same as yesterday. the enlightened earth radiates triumphant calamity etc
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@jonathanbfine
Jonathan Fine
1 year
Good morning! What are we blaming on the Enlightenment today?
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
today @ 1pm we’re discussing Max Horkheimer’s aporetic “critical materialism” - a seemingly impossible rejection of both the unbridgeable separation of “is” & “ought” in modern moral philosophy (Kant) & their false identification in modern metaphysics!
@NedjmaEPlanas
Nedjma Esther Planas Balduz
10 months
One of those Critical Theory Hamletian moments of out of jointness today with @crit_theory_grp and Max Horkheimer's Materialism and Morality and Materialism and Metaphysics.
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Adorno, “Introduction to Dialectics” (Lecture 4, 1958) on the method of dialectical ‘refutation’ as immanent critique, the dialectical taboo against transcendent criteria, & the ‘temporal core of truth’
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Join us tomorrow @ 1-3PM EST as Zach opens our discussion on a text with a reputation for being both “the meanest thing written about Wagner as a person since Nietzsche” & vulgarly materialist / reductively Marxist !
@thezachloeffler
Dialectical Zach-Zack Loeffler
10 months
Almost every secondary source I’ve read on the Wagner essay seems to just wrestle with whether or not Adorno is too mean and never actually gets to what the essay says
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
really great knowing how much & how little work the ISR got done because they were always arguing about whether their favorite authors or heads of state were fascist
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
thanks for joining Mac’s killer session on Marcuse’s diamat concept of “Essence” (1936)! (check emails for audio). Next (12/2) join us for @Samuel_J_Thomas ‘s session on Horkheimer’s foundational, *Marxian* crit of Mannheim’s concept of “Ideology” (1930)
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
(3-4) Marx to Kugelmann (1968) on using dialectic in philology to read language like a paleontologist does strata & “find traces of [the] newest in [the] oldest”. he then derives logical categories from ancient legal designations for property division hidden in ordinary German
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
the CTWG can’t halt the constant pressure 2 adapt 2 capitalist time-discipline (yet) but we can help u fit in more crit! sign up for the Nov/Dec group & get discussion recordings, study aids, & encouragement 2 keep trying 2 see/set this wrong world right
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@lakeeater
Lake Eater
11 months
every time @gruidae_james posts about horkheimer and i go to read the source text but don't have time because i have to read law stuff or put in another job app i feel like this im ngl
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
essay by Andrea Cengia on Krahl & Panzieri’s reception of 1st generation critical theorist accounts of automation & technological rationality in Pollock, Horkheimer, Marcuse
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
4 months
*narrator’s voice* it was! Thanks for coming out, & if you plan to listen later! (Recordings will be posted after editing.) Come thru next Sat, 6/15, for Mac Parker’s ( @hitmeupontwitta ) on the problem of a (critical) political economy of ancient Greece in the Odysseus Excursus!
@jemorain
J.E. Morain
4 months
Today we are meeting on the first chapter of the book, "The Concept of Enlightenment." Should be interesting!
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
1st meeting 1 wk from today (11/18 @ 1-3PM EST), on the historical context & theoretical self-conception of the ZfS, w/ a focus on Horkheimer & Adorno’s separate 1931 addresses on critical social philosophy. if you signed up - check your email! if you haven’t yet - see below ⬇️
@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
fall/winter 23 CTWG schedule: [Intro] 11/18 Theoretical orientations of the early ZfS [Focused Studies] 11/25 Marcuse’s Essence essay 12/2 Horkheimer vs Mannheim on Ideology 12/9 Materialism contra Metaphysics & Morality 12/16 Adorno on Wagner sign-up:
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
1 year
in other exciting news the board of editors / council of admin is more than just one angry nerd now & is in fact several of them in an oversized trench coat
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Jameson, Marxism & Form (1971), Ch5 (“Towards Dialectical Criticism”) on the phenomenology of the dialectical “shock” of converting problems into their own solutions at a higher level
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
3 months
thanks for joining our convo on Adorno’s (& Horkheimer’s) equivocal concept of mass culture, the problem of the culture industry in platform capitalism, & the compromised utopian moment of autonomous art! see you next Sat (7/6) for “Elements of Anti-Semitism” with @jemorain !
@thezachloeffler
Dialectical Zach-Zack Loeffler
3 months
Join @crit_theory_grp tomorrow for our discussion of the culture industry. I’ll give a brief lecture on Adorno’s aesthetic axiology, critique of cultural conservatism, +communism—a task that reminds me of Marcuse’s eulogy:“There is no one who can represent Adorno+ speak for him.”
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
1 year
Rare alternate pic of the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche (1923), which was probably an outtake because most of them were still trying to figure out what to do with their hands
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
11 months
today in “Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung” deep cuts: tired - HERBERT MARCUSE on Hegel today wired - FLERBERT MARCUSE on the basic problems of philosophy
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@crit_theory_grp
Critical Theory Working Group
10 months
Parked in my Bimmer, bumping my own shit
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