- Adventures in Marxism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1999
Marshall Berman explores and rejoices in the emancipatory potential of Marxism.
- Against Post-Modernism
A Marxist Critique
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1982
Callinocos argues that the relativism preached by post-modernists leaves us with no objective criteria by which to reject those who would falsify the past.
- All cultures are not equal
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2002
A common thread binds contemporary Western radicalism and fundamentalist Islam. On the surface the two seem poles apart: fundamentalists loathe Western decadence, Western radicals fear Islamic presumptions of certainty. But what unites the two is that both are rooted in contemporary nihilistic multiculturalism; both express, at best, ambivalence about, at worst outright rejection of, the ideas of modernity, universality, and progress; and both see no real alternative to Western power.
- All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
The Experience of Modernity
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1988
Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and clutures in the modern world, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism.
- Anarchism, Representation, and Culture
Cohn, Jesse
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2002
A discussion of the role of anarchism in the formation of modernist avant-garde aesthetics.
- Bad Marxism
Capitalism and Cultural Studies
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2004
Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. After an introduction critiquing the so-called 'Marxism' of the academy, Hutnyk provides detailed critical analyses of the approaches and theorists of cultural studies.
- Baxandall, Lee
Connexipedia Article
Resource Type: Article
American writer, translator, editor, and activist, first known for his New Left engagement with cultural topics and then as a leader of the naturist movement. (1935-2008).
- Berman, Marshall
Connexipedia Article
Resource Type: Article
American philosopher and Marxist Humanist writer. (Born 1940).
- Beyond a Boundary
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1983
Part memoir of a boyhood in a black colony (by one of the founders of African nationalism), part passionate celebration of the game of cricket, this book raises serious questions about race, class, politics, and the realities of colonial oppression.
- Beyond Oppression, Beyond Diversity: Class Analysis and Gender Inequality
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1995
Massive increases in tuition fees resulting from government cutbacks to education were not addressed at a Status of Women conference -- an indication that much of what shall be referred to in this paper as "left feminism" has increasingly lost its way.
- The Book-of-the-Millennium Club
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1952
For $249.50, which is (for all practical purposes) $250, one could buy, in 1952, a hundred pounds of Great Books: four hundred and forty-three works by seventy-six authors, ranging chronologically and in other ways from Homer to Dr. Mortimer J. Adler, the whole forming a mass amounting to thirty-two thousand pages, mostly double-column, containing twenty-five million words squeezed into fifty-four volumes.
- Bound By Power
Intended Consequences
Resource Type: Book
These essays focus on how power and ideology work within society. Interviews are with Noam Chomsky, Linda McQuaig, Robert Bertuzzi and others. They speak to the issues of the understanding of power and political dissent, the repression of dissent in post 9/11 media coverage and the war on terror.
- Break Their Haughty Power
Resource Type: Website
Articles on capitalism, socialism, and revolution, from a left-Marxist perspective.
- Connexions Archive seeks a new home
Sources News Release
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2009
The Connexions Archive, a Toronto-based library dedicated to preserving the history of grassroots movements for social change, needs a new home.
- Connexions Library: Arts, Media, Culture Focus
Resource Type: Website
Selected articles, books, websites and other resources on media, culture, and art.
- Culture of Complaint
The Fraying of America
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1993
Propaganda-talk, euphemism, and evasion are so much a part of American usage today that they cross all party lines and ideological divides. The art of not answering the question, of cloaking unpleasant realities in abstraction or sugar, is so perfectly endemic that we expect nothing else.
- Dialogues on Cultural Studies
Interviews with Contemporary Critics
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2002
Thirty-three questions were asked (but not necessarily answered) of each participant, dealing with cultural studies, modernity, postmodernism, referentiality, ideology and history, post-colonialism, neo-orientalism, revolution and tragedy, intellectuals and universities, gender, Marxism, new communications technology.
- Django Unchained, or, The Help: How "Cultural Politics" Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2013
On reflection, it's possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the same movie. Both dissolve political economy and social relations into individual quests and interpersonal transactions and thus effectively sanitize, respectively, slavery and Jim Crow by dehistoricizing them. The problem is not so much that each film invents cartoonish fictions; it's that the point of the cartoons is to take the place of the actual relations of exploitation that anchored the regime it depicts.
- Docs Populi
Documents for the public
Resource Type: Website
Dedicated to documenting and publishing oppositional artwork of the late 20th century.
- For Lust of Knowing
The Orientalists and their enemies
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2006
A rebuttal of Edward Said which examines who the Orientalists were, how historically they advanced their disciplines, and what their achievements have been. Irwin calls Said's book "a work of malignant charlatanry."
- Format and Communications
Chapter 9 of 'Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry'
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1971
- The German Ideology
Critique of Modern German Philosophy According to Its Representatives Feuerbach, B. Bauer and Stirner, and of German Socialism According to
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1932
Marx and Engels take on the "philosophic charlatanry" and pettiness and "parochial narrowness" of the pseudo-radicals of their time, "in particular the tragicomic contrast between the illusions of these heroes about their achievements and the actual achievements themselves."
- Harter's Precept: Review of The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1997
Hamilton gives three major examples of erroneous theses that gained the status of fact in social science despite the absence of evidentiary support: (1) Max Weber's thesis that the Protestant Ethic spurred the advance of capitalism; (2) the widely accepted thesis that Hitler's main electoral support came from the lower middle classes (the despised petit bourgeoisie of Marxism); and (3) Michel Foucault's thesis that the modern prison evolved not as a more humane alternative to the cruel physical punishments of earlier centuries, but as part of a wide-ranging scheme by sinister forces to enforce a pervasive social conformity.
- Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1994
Describes attacks on science, and on concepts of truth and rationality, in areas of the humanities.
- Human quicksand for the U.S. Army, a crash course in cultural studies
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2008
“Culture” has become the latest buzzword in military circles—in the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, “cultural awareness” is placed on a par with “kinetic effects,” i.e., those produced by bullets and bombs, as tools for winning “this long war.” The Human Terrain Teams are the vanguard in amassing this arsenal of awareness. Their mission is to learn something, finally, about the people whom the U.S. military has committed itself to defend or to kill.
- Ignorance and Courage in the Age of Lady Gaga
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2010
It can be safely said that cultural ignorance consists of the rational, sensible questions that never get asked. But it also includes the weird ones that are. For instance, one of the questions asked regarding tasering school kids is: What is the allowable weight range of a child to be tased? (Taser manufacturers say 60 pounds.) Somehow, by this geezer’s prehistoric reasoning, that sounds like the wrong question.
- The Illusions of Postmodernism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1996
Eagleton explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. His primary concern is less with the more intricate formulations of postmodern philosophy than with the culture or milieu of postmodernism as a whole. Above all, he speaks to a particular kind of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought.
- Institute for the Study of Cultural Evolution
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1972
An attempt to make the university of humanity a conscious coordinated effort towards humanity at peace with itself and its environment.
- Is that an archive in your basement... or are you just hoarding?
Sources News Release
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2012
Are you an 'accidental archivist'? Have you been saving the publications and documents produced by the social justice projects you've been involved in? Then Connexions would like to hear from you.
- Logics of Disintegration
Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1987
Essays summarizing and critiquing post-structuralism. According to Dews, for all its posture of radicality, post-structuralist thought is itself bound to certain vulnerable assumptions. Dews argues that the fatal philosophical fault of post-structuralism is its failure to preserve the proper dialectical distinction between the subject and the object.
- The Long Revolution
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1965
- Macdonald, Dwight
Connexipedia Article
Resource Type: Article
American writer, editor, social critic, philosopher, and political radical. (1906-1982).
- The Mammoth and the Mouse
Microhistory and Morphology
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1997
Essays exploring the theoretical relationship between the microhistorical method of paying careful attention to revealing details and the morphological method of looking for homologies among cultural artifacts or texts from different places and times.
- Manufacturing Consent
The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1988
Contrary to the usual image of the press and cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitious in its search for truth, Herman and Chomsky depict how an underlying elite consensus largely structures all facets of the news. They analyze how issues are framed and topics chosen, and the way in which the marketplace and the economics of publishing significantly shape the news.
- Mass Culture
The Popular Arts in America
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1957
- Military Cultural Education
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2005
Working with diverse cultures in their home element is more a matter of finesse, diplomacy, and communication than the direct application of coercive power. Success demands an understanding of individual, community, and societal normative patterns as they relate to the tasks soldiers perform and the environment in which they are performed. Cultural education is now necessary as part of soldier and leader development programs.
- The Movement and the Sixties
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1995
Drawing on interviews, manuscripts, and archives, Anderson reveals how one event built upon another and exploed into the kaleidoscope of activism in the United States by the early 1970s. Civil rights, student power, and the crusade against the Vietnam War composed the first wave of the movement, and during after after the rip tides of 1968, the movement changed and expanded, flowing into new currents of counterculture, minority empowerment, and women's liberation.
- Multiculturalism or World Culture?
On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2000
Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
- The Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Faye's Demolition of Derrida
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1993
A review of Jean-Pierre Faye's book 'La raison narrative', which traces the Nazi origins of deconstructionist and post-modernist concepts and terminology. Faye shows, for example, that the concept of 'deconstruction' was introduced in a Nazi journal edited by M.H. Goering, and he shows how theorists who based themselves on Heidegger's writings, such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Lacoue-Labarthe, whitewashed Heidegger's Nazism, treating it as a mere 'detail'.
- Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1992
An explanation of the foundation of recent post-modern theory which also criticises the misogynist and patriarchal work of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
- Odysseus Ever Returning
Essays on Canadian writers and writings
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1970
- Only Connect
On Culture and Communication
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1972
- Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social
Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2001
We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
- Other Conundrums
Race, Culture, and Canadian Art
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2000
A collection of essays on Canadian art.
- Postmodernism and the Left
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1997
Barabara Epstein provides an overview of the approach and subculture of postmodernism and how they relate to, or conflict with, leftwing ideas.
- Postmodernism Generator
Resource Type: Website
Published: 2000
A computer program written by Andrew. C. Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text. Each time you click on the page, it generates a brand-new postmodernist essay, completely meaningless, but superficially plausible, just like 'real' postmodernist essays.
- Postmodernism: Paralysed by postmodernism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2008
A great deal of "theory" in the humanities and social sciences -- and not just postmodern theory -- involves the creating of a kind of conceptual landscape filled with curious kinds of abstract objects -- "language", "power", "justice", "state", "culture", "government", "the polity", "the economy" and a host of others, which are viewed "theoretically" from somewhere way "outside" or "above" them. But it is just this way of looking at things -- from "on high" -- that makes it so difficult to see how people in the landscape are able to create and re-create the world in which they live, and are not simply trapped or formed by it. In fashionable postmodernist treatments of identity or subjectivity, language, as the ultimately hollow and imprisoning object, is put together with the notion that anybody who uses words must be committed to the standard definition of those words, to produce the conclusion that "language" determines the meaning of "identity" words such as man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, natural, normal -- and thus "constructs" (as it is said) human identity or subjectivity itself.
- Problems of Everyday Life
And Other Writings On Culture & Science
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1973
The focus of this book is the impact of the Russian Revolution of the culture life of the country -- and conversely, the effect of the country's cultural backwardness on the course of the revolution. Among the topics discussed are religion, communications media, language, education, science, industry, cinema, marriage, the position of women, child care, "proletarian" literature, art, philoosphy, primitive rural conditions, the dangers of overspecialization and bureaucracy.
- Radical Perspectives in the Arts
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1972
An anthology of Marxist literary and cultural criticism.
- Raids and Reconstructions
Essays on Politics, Crime, and Culture
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1976
A collection of essays on culture and poltics.
- Edward Said's shadowy legacy
Tricky with argument, weak in languages, careless of facts: but, thirty years on, Said still dominates debate
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2008
So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) to be true. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies.
- Sign Crimes/Road Kill
From Mediascape to Landscape
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1992
A collection of thirty short essays by Joyce Nelson, a writer specializing in the politics of the mass media.
- Society of the Spectacle
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2005
An analysis of modern society and how it can be changed, written in the form of 221 theses. The first thesis reads: "In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation." Translator Ken Knabb describes the book as "an effort to clarify the nature of the society in which we find ourselves and the advantages and drawbacks of various methods for changing it. Every single thesis has a direct or indirect bearing on issues that are matters of life and death."
- Tokyo National Museum
Media Profile in Sources
Resource Type: Organization
- The Trouble with Theory
The Educational Costs of Postmodernism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2008
Postmodern theory has engaged the hearts and heads of the brightest students because of its apparent political and social radicalism. Yet Kitching writes: "At the heart of postmodernism is very poor, deeply confused, and misbegotten philosophy. As a result even the very best students who fall under its sway produce radically incoherent ideas about language, meaning, truth, and reality."
- The Unfashionable Human Body
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1973
A discussion of apparel, in the broadest sense of the word, and how it has reflected and shaped attitudes to the human body.
- The Use of Cultural Studies in Military Operations
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2008
In conflicts where ideas or perceptions are pivotal to establishing lasting resolutions, meaningful cultural understanding is the corner stone to success. Culture is at the crux of this issue, therefore we must develop a method to evaluate various cultural norms and present them in a direct way to the operational forces heading into unique environments.
- The Uses of Literacy
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1957
In this partly autobiographical book Hoggart observes the loss of an authentic popular culture and denounces the imposition of mass culture by the culture industries.
- Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1962
Whatever the subject, Goodman asks: What blocks and limits human freedom, joy, and creativity? What tends to release, free, liberate? In criticizing society and life his purpose is to improve. Goodman is animated by a vision of a good society, a coherent community, a style, and quality, of life that is fully human, and humanizes.
- Where Do Postmodernists Come From?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1995
Eagleton argues that left intellectuals have adopted postmodernism out of a sense of having been badly defeated, a belief that the left as a political tendency has little future. Culturalism, he argues, involves an extreme subjectivism combined with a deep pessimism, a sense that it isn't worth the effort to learn about the world, to analyze social systems, for instance, because they can't be changed anyway.
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