Marxism in Culture Spring 2012 calendar
Friday 20 January
Peter Weiss: Aesthetics, Historiography, Resistance
Fred Schwartz (University College London)
Friday 03 February
Beyond the ‘Bourgeois’ Kant: Marxism’s Debt to Kant’s Philosophy of the Aesthetic
Mike Wayne (Brunel University)
Friday 17 February
The Idea of Marx in Financial Times
Christian De Cock (University of Essex)
Friday 02 March
Cultures of Marxism 2: Manifestos of the Left
Stathis Kouvelakis (King’s College London), Gail Day (University of Leeds) and Dave Beech (Chelsea School of Art)
next marxism in culture seminar – 28 october 2011
Self-emancipation, activity theory, and political deskilling /reskilling: Some thoughts on organising into a big fish
Alex Levant (Wilfred Laurier University)
The problem of subjectivity/organisation continues to challenge efforts aimed at fundamental social transformation. This discussion seeks to move beyond classical approaches in the Marxist tradition. Informed by “activity theory”, it offers the concept of political deskilling/reskilling, which aim to refocus the issue from consciousness to the organisation of activity.
Alex Levant is an academic mercenary who sells his lecturing skills to various departments in the social sciences and humanities, including Political Science at York University and Communication Studies and Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. He currently lives in London on a postdoctoral fellowship in Sociology at Goldsmiths, where he is translating Ilyenkov’s Dialectics of the Ideal.