Gabriel Rockhill introduces the Critical Theory Workshop's Summer Program (June 29, 2020). The topic of the discussion is “Critical and Revolutionary Theory." For more information: criticaltheoryworkshop.com
No kidding! Prof. Rockhill is as eye-opening to me as was reading / hearing Parenti for the first time and later Mark Fisher. I wish I could have discovered him earlier!
You definitely have to listen to Rock Hill multiple times due to his hyper-urgent information by firehose style of lecture... It definitely has that: this knowledge could be censored at any time so I gotta get the word out as quickly and efficiently as possible... type of vibe to it.😂
@@bootstraphan6204isn't Mark Fisher the complete opposite of this stuff? His whole thing is despair, inaction, and condemnation of past socialist projects.
The domestic subaltern left is factors to the left of the domestic non-subaltern bourgeois left, and the global subaltern left is many factors to the left of the domestic bourgeois left. All of these lectures are so enlightening and spot on. Thank you so much, and agreed wholeheartedly about Parenti
great info, but ...as if angela davis was not a creation of that same apparatus. there are reasons why she walked and rushelle magee spent his all life in prison, and it would have been so even if their roles had been reversed in the marin court house events
There is a bit missing between 52:32 abd 52:35, I was interested in the anwer to that question on the comparison of critical race theories and BPP. Is it possible to share a written account of it? Or if it is already present in any of GR's other works - it'd be great if he or someone else van direct me to it. Thank you.
That's good to explain the difference... I thought of the Frankfurt school and the french analysts as within the filed of philosophy but this makes sense.... Speaking of what " Theory" means in the present day.
Besides, so many of the people in this tradition considered themselves to be , " anti-philosophers". Have to understand that more.. I've seen several books but I haven't gotten around to them yet.
Ps...yeah, very sneaky of them. Like the committee which decided which books would officially be in the bible.... Leaving a lot out. And even today, the scholars wh o translate and interpret the cannon, will radically choose elements which only make sense to their framework... So much is lost, either by bias or deliberately obscuring whatever is inconvenient to their lives.
I'm just watching the second half of this video today.... After listening to it, something in me wonders why... Media which is radical like this is not censored by the ruling power structure.... Do they not believe this kind of thinking is possibly threatening their power? Maybe they leave us all have books and internet and hey junk that , either we have no real power....or, that having this presence can easily be misrepresented and confused....or, it may be used to further strengthen the divide of politics in the us, which is easily manipulated by the popular media . The community run co-op bookstore is powerful to liberate some minds, but...hmmm. the c op which I used to go to, held anarchist meetings in the basement...and had black power intellectual and activist meetings and visiting lecturers. Eventually the police began surrounding the building with cars, but they would perch there, to create discomfort, but the didn come in. One of the co ops was shut down bc someone had marijuana....the great ticket for the police ...the biggest and most convenient excuse. I don't know if the corporate control will lead to censorship in the United States like what exists in China....it's amazing to me that we can even exist on these major platforms...that in itself is pretty wild.
the question at 48:00 is incredibly important because BOTH psychology and psychiatry are even more suspect than the Horkheimer tradition of bootlicking you discuss. I am so torn on adorno though. how can I learn more about the decisions adorno made.
Perhaps we should view Frankfurt school ers as non left but at times, partly useful as Marx + Engels related to.Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Georg Hegel, etc.
All fine and good to say revolutionary theory. What Marx was about is understanding how work creates a capitalist system. We have a media making a transition toward a lot of knowledge automation, write a text into an app and get something back that resembles someone typing back, or it might be spoken in a way to sound like a famous voice. Marx would have favored a realism in such cultural contexts, but what does realism mean in that context. Or more pertinently to a critical framework, what is the class analysis? Let’s take an example, the staff managing Amazon’s ‘Alexa’ tool were let go to be replaced by some sort of AI automation of the Alexa voice. What’s the class view of the change in labor? And as Marx would have favored what’s real about that? He understood automation improved profits. But what are workers to do in creating ‘real’ culture? Is culture really the massive influencers? The face on the product of some comic book super hero? Or is cultural production still face to face with some technical layering added? TikTok is supposed to be the main source of news for about a third of the youth market. That’s individually produced short form videos for ‘free’ by creators. Here the obvious class issue is the big squeeze on workers for substandard wages. The big corporate entities are ignorant of their own tools and have lost control of the technology to China. So China is managing the social media their own way, and we are left hanging in the constant down pressure on everyone in the ‘West’ standard of living.
Gabriel is sitting in front of a camera talking back in a lecture format to the camera. Is the best content lecturing, or conversational? Conversation is face to face content. But it’s not the voice record, but the moving picture that frames ‘the reality’ of the content. For example faces show emotion structure words can’t easily convey. More pertinently what exactly are the words in the pictures? I’m not talking about putting text in the frame like close captions, what are the literal words in the shot? Said another way if I ask a chat bot make a short video of Gabriel doing a lecture on critical theory what would my words make if it is a completely automated video? Immediately we’d see the chat bot Gabriel would be sort of unreal looking and the word content would be inauthentic. Which is really a question of the underlying meaning of words spoken by a real person.
Rockhill assumes everyone shares his Franco-centric education. I studied in America, where Critical Theory is marginalized. Where in America are all these Critical Theory department Rockhill describes? I want to read Angela Davis and Habermas. I want to combine critical and revolutionary theory, but my skills are in the history of philosophy. That means I tend more towards traditional critical theory. I'm good at speculation. I'm not as good at the history of knowledge production. I want to make a theory that plays to my strengths, while still commenting on material social conditions. I wonder how Rockhill would suggest a speculative Critical Theorist incorporate revolutionary elements, without studying the history of knowledge production?
there are a lot of errors in this. (marx was a hegelian by the by)....Horkheimer was a dialectician. And no he wasnt to the right of anything -- he was critical of much of the communist theory (as was and is parenti. Rockhill seems to want there to be not a word of criticism of communism, which seems highly UNdialectical in fact, among other things. He sounds like a lot of jacobin writers). Lets remember rockhill is a PhD. So take his comments on academia with a grain of salt. Horkheimer and adorno were jEWS ffs. They fled europe and were terrified of being thrown out of the country (US). The rest is just rubbish. That quote of horkheimer has never been sourced. Zizek used that quote on vietnam too and he is a habitual liar and racist crypto fascist. Rockhill is a dangerous fraud. Peter Sirk in his book on horkheimer says horkheimer never said that about vietnam. In fact he called the vietnam an imperialist swindle. Rockhill as i say, is a liar and fraud. Horkheimer and adorno spent their lives writing against US capitalism and imperialism. You wouldnt know that from this lecture. Wow.
