Entries published during March, 2018

March 31, 2018

Document 70: Poetics as Value Thinking

Poetics as Value Thinking:
The Example of “Plan B”

BB Barrett Watten flyer
Wednesday, 4 April 2018, 12:30–1:30 PM
2339 F/AB, Wayne State University

This lecture is a hybrid of two thought experiments—one, a discussion of the poetics of value that sees political economy and poetics as twin forms of historically specific making, linked discourses of the determination of value. The second is a proposal for the transvaluation of poetics, and specifically Language and conceptual writing, as prospective organizations of poetic labor as a form of a “knowledge base” (adopted from information and digital theory). … More

Document 69: Six Moments of Occupy

Six Moments of Occupy:
Transvaluations of the Symbolic

Humanities Center Faculty Fellows Symposium
Wayne State University, 23 March 2018

[excerpt from the introduction] Occupy was, and continues to be, an event; we speak of “the event of Occupy” much as we refer to the “event of 9/11.” To begin with, the concept of “revolution” in Occupy—as distinct from other specific moments such as Tahrir Square or anti-austerity Greece—oscillates between “radical particularity” of material conditions (such that every local instance of Occupy, from Zucotti Park to to Oakland to Paris to Moscow, could be seen to have substantially different strategies and goals) and a utopian horizon that must be preserved as an abstract totality: “We are the 99%.” … More

March 16, 2018

Document 68: Third Factory

“Third Factory: Avant-Garde,
Social Construction, and Ideology in the Soviet 20s”

European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM)
Universität Münster, 5–7 September 2018

For this year’s EAM, centered the theme of “Realisms of the Avant-Garde and Modernism,” I propose to organize a panel or multi-session series of panels that would revisit the relation of the avant-garde to social construction. Such a project would necessarily be revisionist, in deepening but questioning the role of the avant-garde in the project of social construction, particularly after new archival materials and critical perspectives have become available. But it would also try to refocus interest on the Soviet 20s as scene of a coordinated Gesamtkunstwerk beyond individual artists, works, groupings, or genres that has continued relevance for a global, mediated, ideologically distorted world. … More