Spring 25
Latest Past Events
Through the Lens of Spectacle: Panel 2, Witness
Recording available on YouTube“The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep,” Guy Debord declared in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): it is “a permanent opium war.” A half-century later, the specter of the spectacle continues to haunt Marxist cultural studies. In two linked panels, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture proposes to track “the worldwide division of spectacular tasks” from lens manufacture to retail logistics, stadiums to camptowns, polar expeditions to spring festivals, as well as revolutionary specters in novels and borders, assassinations and squares.
Through the Lens of Spectacle: Panel 1, Oversight
Recording available on YouTube“The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep,” Guy Debord declared in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): it is “a permanent opium war.” A half-century later, the specter of the spectacle continues to haunt Marxist cultural studies. In two linked panels, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture proposes to track “the worldwide division of spectacular tasks” from lens manufacture to retail logistics, stadiums to camptowns, polar expeditions to spring festivals, as well as revolutionary specters in novels and borders, assassinations and squares.
Darkest Los Angeles
Institute for the Radical Imagination NYDennis Broe leads a group reading of his five Los Angeles novels set in the film-noir period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The contradictions we will unearth in that postwar period, the period of crime films that visually documented this seedy reality, have never been resolved, only continually papered over, and so they resound today.