MLG Summer Institute on Culture and Society, Portland State University (Portland, Oregon) June 17-20, 2009

Wednesday, 17 June

9:00 –10:30 Panel: Histories in the Era of Actually Existing Communism

Grover Furr, Montclair State University: Did the USSR Invade Poland in September, 1939? An Investigation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Courtney Maloney, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design: Commies and Comics: Curious Adventures in a Capitalist Culture Industry

Carol Stabile, University of Oregon: Dictators of the Airwaves: The Infrastructure of the Blacklist

10:45 – 12:15 Panel: Analyzing Finance Capital and Financialization

Annie McClanahan, UC Berkeley: “Investing in the Future: Finance Capital’s Philosophy of History”

Jasper Bernes, UC Berkeley: Spectacle and the Credit System in Late Capitalism

Tim Kreiner, UC Davis: The Work of Derivatives in the Age of Spectacular Financialization (1973-2008)

12:15 – 1:30 LUNCH

1:30 – 3:00 Reading Group: Capital (?) TBD Gail Farschou. University of Alberta.

3:15 – 4:45 Panel: Multiple Crises and the Current Conjuncture

Hans Mattingly, University of Pittsburgh: Industrial Production Now: Capitalism and the Multiculturalist Turn

Michelle Yates, UC Davis: Capitalism is the Culprit: Addressing the Historically Specific Nature of Ecological Crisis Within Capitalism

Maya Gonzales, UC Santa Cruz: On the Housing Question, Once Again

5:00-6:30 Panel: Contemporary Politics

Gabriel Shapiro, University of Minnesota: Right Wing American Criticism of Marcuse

Andrew Pendakis, McMasters University: Inertial Plasticities: An Introduction to Centrist Reason

Sina Rahmani, UCLA: Riots, Rope and Rage: On the so-called “Black Block”

Thursday, 18 June

9:00 – 10:30 Presentation

Randy Martin, NYU:  Campus Activism in the Context of Rescue and Recovery

10:45 – 12:15 Panel:  New Labor and Production

David Maynard, Independent Scholar: Starbucks, Labor, and the New Proletariat”

Sarah Broullette, MIT: Creative Labor in Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger

Brynnar Swenson, Butler University: The Corporate Form, Communicative Labor, and Crisis

Jesse Goldstein, CUNY: The nature of value is ‘wasted potential’: some implications for the political economy of work and workfare in the U.S.

12:15 – 1:30 LUNCH

1:30 – 3:00 Reading Group: Capital, Volume 3.  Chapters 25-27.

3:15 – 4:45 Panel: Art, Aesthetics and Marxism

Rich Daniels, Oregon State University: Things vs. Commodity-Form in Artworks: Heidegger’s Response to Adorno’s Critique

Bret Benjamin, SUNY Albany: A Case to Be Made: Barnako and the Problem of Art Under Capitalist Imperialism

Henry Schwartz, Georgetown University: Aesthetic Theory and Resistance in Contemporary Indian Performance

5:00-6:30 Panel: International Perspectives

Brian Whitener, Material Turn: Concepts for Thinking Latin America in Crisis

Gerry Sussman, Portland State University: Systemic Propaganda and U.S. Foreign Policy

Duncan Yoon, UCLA: Historicizing Sino-Africa: Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Cultural Revolution”

Friday, 19 June

9:00 – 10:30 Economist Roundtable on the Crisis

Robin Hahnel, Portland State University

Martin Hart-Landberg, Lewis & Clark College

Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer

10:45 – 12:15 Panel: Reading Marx

Justin Paulson, Carleton UniversityReading Marx During Crisis

Jonathan Dettman, UC Davis: Reflections on Consumption and the Culture Industry in the Light of the Grundrisse

Bev Best, Concordia University: Marx, Methods, and the Aesthetics of Political Economy

12:15 – 1:30 LUNCH

1:30 – 3:00 Reading Group: Wertkritik. Neil Larsen

3:15 – 4:45 Panel: Approaches to the Critique of Neoliberalism

Kanishka, Chowdhury, St. Thomas Univeristy: Reassessing Primitive Accumulation in the Age of Dispossession

Leerom Medovoi, Portland State University:  What’s “Neo” about Neoliberalism? A report on The Birth of Biopolitics

Marcia Klotz, Portland State University: Argentina and the Limits of Neoliberalism

5:00 – 6:30 Panel If Capitalism is Failing, What should the State Look Like? Film and Media Representations and Debates in the Documentary/Nonfiction Work of Post 2001-Argentina and the 1936-37 Anarchist Collectivization of Film Industry  in Spain

Patricia Keaton, Ramapo College. Factories without Bosses: Analyzing how Documentaries about Zanon/Fasinpat Rerpesent the Limitations and Possibilities of Revolutionary Change

Antonio Prado, Knox College: The C.N.T.’s Collectivization of the Film Industry (Spain 1936-37): Mediation, Representation and Social Revolution

Susan Ryan, College of New Jersey: Respondent: A Filmmakers Perspective on Representation

Saturday, 20 June

9:00 – 10:30 Panel: Marxist Literary Studies

Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, Chicago: Waiting: Marxism, Materialism, and Literary Studies

Neil Larsen, UC Davis: Literature, Immanent Critique, and the Problem of Standpoint”

Mathias Nilges, St. Francis Xavier University: 'Little Bundles of Condensed Catastrophe': Marxism and Literary Form in the Twenty-First Century"

Emilio Sauri, University of Illinois, Chicago:  The End of Literature and/or Marxist Literary Criticism (response)

10:45 – 12:15 Panel: Disciplinary Questions

Noam Yuran, Ben Gurion University: The Materiality of Symbols: A Marxist Account of Brand Names and Symbolic Money

Sourayan Mookerjea, University of Alberta: History, or, the Immanent Critique of Political Economy

Fernando Lacerda Junior, Campinas S/P Brazil: “Psychology Meets Social Change: A Marxist Balance”

12:15 – 1:30 MLG Business Meeting and Lunch

1:30 – 3:00 Reading Group: The Regulation School, Mathias Nilges

3:15 – 4:45 PANEL: Marxist Literary and Cultural Studies

Tristan Sipley, University of Oregon: Mapping the Metabolic Rift: Toward a Marxist-Ecocritical Theory

Jaafar Aksisas, Columbia College: Cultural Studies: The Way Forward

Ed Wiltse, Nazareth College: Indian Killer across the Razor Wire: Student Readings, Inmate Readings (not Friday)

6:00 pm MLG-ICS BBQ