next marxism in culture – 24 may 2013
Marx’s Temporalities
A roundtable discussion with Massimiliano Tomba, Stathis Kouvelakis and Peter Osborne
5.30-7.30, Room 349, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House Library
This roundtable will present and discuss Massimiliano Tomba’s recently published book Marx’s Temporalities (Historical Materialism book series, Brill, 2013). The book rethinks the central categories of Marx’s work beyond any philosophy of history, providing a critical analysis of his political and theoretical development from his early writings, to the elaboration of the critique of political economy and his final anthropological studies on pre-individualistic and communist forms. The study aims to integrate the paradigm of the spatialisation of time with that of the temporalisation of space, showing how capital places diverse temporalities into hierarchies that incessantly produce and reproduce new forms of class struggle. An adequate historiographical paradigm for globalised capitalism has to consider the plurality of temporal layers that are combined and come into conflict in the violently unifying historical dimension of modernity.
next marxism in culture – 10 may 2013
Richard Braude (University of Cambridge and Birkbeck)
Control and Rebellion in Gothic Architecture
In 1789, Thomas Pownall, former colonial administrator and ageing political economist, put his final touches to ‘The Origins of Gothic Architecture’, a project from which he was quickly distracted by events in France, which forced him to rise from his armchair and write furiously to Mr Pitt on the dangers of Tom Paine.