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Spring Semester Changes

| knott.92

In previous posts, I discounted post-colonial theorists and Foucault. As I’ve evolved, I’m seeing the importance of understanding their ideas. Their ideas seem ripe for translation into a more common vernacular—for a transposition that enables a more effectual praxis.

I am eager to learn. I need to return to the ideas of Stuart Hall. I’ve read him once but also didn’t appreciate him as much as he deserved.

I find this experience a lot: having to return to people when I am more ready to experience what they have to tell me. Sometimes I have to read books as much as three to four times.

I am in a hurry to learn. I can’t wait to uncover and record the theoretical and critical contributions that I know are waiting to be harvested. First things first, though, I need to tend to my course requirements.

Plan of Study: Foundations of Existentialism and Marxism

| knott.92

“Learn to love slow progress, and forgive yourself for the inevitable backsliding.“

David Hume

(1711-1776)

Immanuel Kant

(1724-1804)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(1749-1832)

Friedrich Schiller

(1759-1805)

Søren Kierkegaard

(1813-1855)

Arthur Schopenhauer

(1788-1860)

Leo Tolstoy

(1828-1910)

Friedrich Nietzsche

(1844-1900)

Georg Simmel

(1858-1918)

Max Weber

(1864 -1920)

Georg Lukács 

(1885-1971)

Antonio Gramsci

(1891-1937)

Hannah Arendt

(1906-1975)

Albert Camus

(1913-1960)

Noticeably missing from this list are members of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin, etc.). After reading multiple of their works, I’m done trying to appreciate them. I find them unnecessarily obtuse. I’m also done with Kafka and Dostoevsky for now.

Interdisciplinarity

| knott.92

I find myself backpedalling further. I mentioned previously that I redacted my rejection of Kafka. Now I am reconsidering so many others. My acceptance is inspired by West’s expansive appreciation of so many thinkers.

As an interdisciplinary scholar striving to follow West, I must learn to engage with poets, literary critics, historians, and social theorists. These include:

  • Edward Said and Stuart Hall
  • The early 1930s work Sidney Hook and Reinhold Niebuhr
  • Raymond Williams, especially his work on tragedy
  • Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method) and Edward Shils (Tradition)
  • Antonio Gramsci, especially his conception of philsophy as a cultural battle to transform the popular mentality described in his Prison Notebooks
  • Herman Mellville and F.O. Matthiessen
  • Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky
  • Isaiah Berlin and George Steiner

Impediments to Progress

| knott.92

There are at least three impediments to the creation of a new, better world:

  1. The process of turning individuals into objects, described in George Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money
  2. Impersonal bureaucratic hierarchies that deadens life, seen in the work of Max Weber
  3. The augmentation of market forces to produce centralized power structures and promote cultures of consumption that view people as spectatorial consumers and passive citizens, outlined by Karl Marx, George Lukacs, and Walter Benjamin

Central to understanding these impediments are Marx’s style of historical and economic analysis, the theory of reification, and conceptions of hegemony.

A Chronology (’57-76)

| knott.92

1957

  • Battle of Algiers
  • Independence of Ghana
  • The Sputnik

1958

  • Return of de Gaulle; the Fifth Republic
  • European Economic Community (EEC)

1959

  • The Cuban Revolution
  • Urban renewal in New Haven

1960

  • Sino-Soviet split
  • First sit-ins, Greensboro, N.C.
  • A student sit-in conference at Shaw College, N.C., becomes the start of the Student Noviolent Coordinating Committee

1961

  • John F. Kennedy is inaugurated as President of the United States
  • Lumumba, the radical Congolese leader, is murdered
  • Invasion of Cuba at Bay of Pigs, a dismal failure
  • Generals’ putsch in Algiers (OAS)
  • Gagarin becomes the first man in space
  • The first Freedom Ride buses (organized by CORE) are burned in Alabama
  • Interstate Commerce Commission desgregates bus and train stations
  • The Berlin Wall
  • Joseph Heller’s Catch 22

1962

  • Student for a Democratic Society (SDS): the Port Huron Statement
  • Algerian independence
  • Pope John XXIII opens Vatican Council II
  • The Beatles hit England with Love Me Do
  • The Cuban Missle Crisis
  • John Glenn, first American to orbit Earth in space

1963

  • King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail
  • Assasssination of Medger Evers, NAACP, Miss.
  • Massive civil rights March on Washington: “I have a Dream”
  • Balck rebellion in Birmingham, Ala., after church bombing
  • Fall of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon
  • Assassination of John F. Kennedy
  • Lacan is excluded from the French Psychoanalytic Society

1964

  • Malcom X leaves the Nation of Islam after a schism
  • Free Speech Movement begins at Berkely
  • Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
  • Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove
  • Freedom Summer in Mississippi
  • Gulf of Tonkin “incident”
  • Khrushchev falls, enter Kosygin and Brezhnev
  • Congress passes the Civil Rights Act
  • King receives the Nobel Peace Prize
  • Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

1965

  • First regular US combat troops in Vietnam
  • US intervenes with 20,000 troops in the Dominican Republic
  • The first teach-ins at the University of Michigan
  • Large-scale bombins of North Vietnam
  • Anti-war March on Washington
  • Riots in the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles
  • The Voting Rights Act is signed
  • The Great Society Program
  • Malcolm X is assassinated
  • Bob Dylan goes electric with Bringing it all back home
  • Cultural Revolution begins in China
  • Sukarno is overthrown in Indonesia; hundreds of thousands of Communists are murdered in the aftermath

1966

  • King comes out against the war in Vietnam
  • Mao, Quotations of Chairman Mao
  • Jefferson Airplane has its first record success
  • The National Organization for Women (NOW)
  • The Black Panther Party is founded in Oakland, Cal.
  • Louis Althusser’s For Marx appears in France
  • The Great Coalition (CDU-SPD) in West Germany

1967

  • The Shanghai Commune
  • Military takes over in Greece
  • Black uprisings in the United States, e.g., Detroit
  • Six-Day War; Israel occupies the West Bank, Sinai and the Gaza Strip
  • de Gaulle visits Quebec
  • Psychedelic summer of love in San Francisco
  • Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
  • Che Guevara is killed in Bolivia
  • Siege of Pentagon
  • NOW adopts the Bill of Rights for Women

1968

  • The Tet Offensive in Vietnam
  • The Prague Spring
  • Student uprisings in Warsaw and Mexico City
  • Student uprising at Columbia University, New York
  • Founding of the March 22 Movement in Paris
  • May ’68 in France
  • King is assassinated
  • Eldridge Clever, Soul On Ice
  • Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated
  • Democratic Convention in Chicago
  • Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
  • Nico Pulantzas’ Political Power and Social Classes is published in France
  • Tommie Smith and John Carlos make a Black Power solute while receiving their medals at the Mexico City Olympics

1969

  • End of Cultural Revolution
  • Armed clases along the border of the Soviet Union and China
  • Breakup of the SDS
  • Woodstock and Altamont music festivals
  • Leage of Black Revolutionary Workers founded in Detroit
  • The Red Stocking Manifesto, and the Bitch Manifesto
  • Repression against the Black Panthers; murder of Fred Hampton et al.
  • US puts man on the moon
  • Rudi Dutscheke is shot in Berlin
  • Days of Rage in Chicago
  • Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider
  • Willy Brandt and the SPD come to power in West Germany
  • Beginning of civil rights movement in Northern Ireland
  • Trial of the Chicago Eight
  • Richard Nixon

1970

  • Kate Millet, Sexual Politics
  • Hawaii, Alaska and New York, first states to liberalize abortion laws
  • Cambodian invasion; Kent State murders
  • Black September in Jordan
  • The October Crisis, Quebec
  • Strike in Gdansk
  • Senate holds ERA-hearings, the first since 1956

1971

  • Attica Prison rebellion
  • New York Radical Feminists stage Speakout Against Rape
  • Fourth World Manifesto by Detroit feminists and Indochinese women

1972

  • Common Program, Socialist and Communist Parties in France
  • National Conference of Puerto Rican Women founded
  • McGovern becomes the Democratic nominee and is defeated by Nixon
  • Women make up 40% of Democratic Convention (13% in 1968)
  • Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro and others open Womanhouse, exhibition at the California Institute of the Arts

1973

  • Wounded Knee
  • Benjamin Spock denounces his early childcare books as sexist
  • Last US troops leave Vietnam
  • Allende is overthrown and killed in Chile
  • Yom Kippur War; the oil crises
  • National Balck Feminist Organization is formed

1974

  • Revolution in Portugal
  • The Three Marias are freed in Portugal after international feminist campaign
  • Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaps Patricia Hearst

1975

  • Liberation of Siagon
  • Independence of Angola and Mozambique

1976

  • Soweto rebellion
  • Victory of Partie Quebecois
  • Mao dies, and so does Zhao, in Peking