Papers by jonathan flatley
The Wayland Rudd Collection, Yevegeny Fiks
The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne
I wrote these for the Warhol film catalogue raisonne
The Long 2020, 2022
In summer , I saw the police beat, tear-gas, insult, threaten, and arrest my friends, my comrades... more In summer , I saw the police beat, tear-gas, insult, threaten, and arrest my friends, my comrades, my colleagues, and my students. Filled with rage and grief after the brutal police murder of George Floyd, we had come into the streets of Detroit to protest racist police violence. Even though I knew that the police kill someone in the United States, on average, three times a day, and even though I knew the institution's long history of racist violence going back to its origin in slave patrols, such monstrous indi erence to life was a shock. No feeling person could respond to the murder of George Floyd with anything but the strongest sense of rage and revulsion, rebuke and condemnation, I thought. I wondered how the police could feel anything but deep, profound shame for their participation in this murderous institution. At the same time, it seemed that throughout the long , wherever the latest news directed my attention-Minsk, Moscow, Lagos-the police were there with their shields, their helmets, their masks, their armored vehicles, and their chemical weapons, beating, shooting, Tasering, pushing, gassing, kettling, and arresting. These vivid images of police violence against protesters recalled recent, similar clashes in Santiago, Hong Kong, Quito, Portau-Prince, Istanbul, and Paris. 1 "It resembles a physical law," the Invisible Committee reminds us. "The more the social order loses credit, the more it arms its police. The more the institutions withdraw, the more they advance in terms of surveillance. The less respect the authorities inspire, the more they seek to keep us respectful through force." 2 19 "Everybody Hates the Police"
This are page proofs -- with a couple corrections! -- of a piece in the *Comintern Aesthetics* vo... more This are page proofs -- with a couple corrections! -- of a piece in the *Comintern Aesthetics* volume edited by Amelia Glaser and Steven Lee.
From the essay: "While Langston Hughes did not start writing poems about Lenin until the 1930s, he had long been interested in an anti-racist, globally minded socialism. From the very beginning of his career as writer, he was centrally engaged with the political and poetic problem of representing a black collectivity and representing it first of all to itself rather than to a white or “general” public. As he explained in I Wonder as I Wander, “I wrote about Negroes, and primarily for Negroes.” In so doing, Hughes experimented with what poetry is and what it can do, as he searched for genres to represent black people to black people as a group in a way that might create and sustain optimism about fighting white supremacy and the poverty it created. In what Fred Moten might call the ongoing “improvisational discovery” of his black studies Hughes confronted basic questions about the very possibility of poetry and politics, and affirmed the necessity of a political poetry and a poetic politics. Hughes looked for ways to give voice to “whole groups of people’s problems” by making
poetry that defied what people expected of poetry, borrowing from the blues and other “low-down” forms, and then, later, by creating a blues-inflected black communist voice, a Leninist blues. Throughout it all, despite the failures and the mishaps and the relentlessness of the violence and humiliations of a white supremacist capitalism, Hughes never gave up on finding ways to “think about feeling good, to make disparate aspects of feeling good thinkable,” as Michael Snediker puts it. Hughes’s optimism was, in this sense, a queer optimism, one that was not based on a belief in progress or other given normative modes of attachment to the world like the family, but on ways of finding, creating, and valuing moments of group joy in the present, even if it was the modest, ambivalent joy of laughing to keep from crying."
JONATHAN FLATLEY'S Like Andy Warhol presents a compelling alternative to the preconceived concept... more JONATHAN FLATLEY'S Like Andy Warhol presents a compelling alternative to the preconceived conception of Warhol as a cold, crass materialist making a!rmative icons to bolster transcendent, glamorous, consumer identification. Flatley instead shows Warhol thinking through ways to approach and share in the feelings of loss, failure, and disidentification that the United States's glossy consumerist iconography generates. Paradoxically, Warhol opened up affective pathways through liking rather than
Dieser Vortrag greift eine Schlüsselepisode aus der Geschichte der amerikanischen Bürgerrechtsbew... more Dieser Vortrag greift eine Schlüsselepisode aus der Geschichte der amerikanischen Bürgerrechtsbewegung und der Arbeitskämpfe der 1960er Jahre auf und untersucht sie am Leitfaden einer medienwissenschaftlichen Fragestellung. Den Ausgangspunkt bildet die Frage, weshalb die Arbeiterbewegung Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (kurz DRUM) 1968 allein durch die Publikation einer bescheidenen Hauszeitung mit so viel Erfolg die Arbeiter in der Automobilindustrie in Detroit mobilisieren konnte. Am Beispiel von DRUM und der Gruppe, die sich daraus entwickelte – der League of Revolutionary Black Workers – untersucht dieser Beitrag, was nach der Gründung eines revolutionären Kollektivs geschieht. Wie kann eine revolutionäre Stimmung hergestellt und, wenn sie sich einmal eingestellt hat, am Leben erhalten werden? Wie hält ein solches Kollektiv sich selbst am Leben, wie erneuert es sich? Ich werde die Herangehensweise der League an die Aufgabe, eine kollektive revolutionär Stimmung zu schaffen un...
Afterimage, Sep 1, 2002
In his 1974 song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron sings of the ways that the... more In his 1974 song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron sings of the ways that the dominant genres of television (the news, the soap opera, the commercial, the sitcom, etc.) prevent any oppositional political content from being represented there. In his view, ...
South Atlantic Quarterly
This interview documents an email exchange between Susan Buck-Morss, Jonathan Flatley, and Helen ... more This interview documents an email exchange between Susan Buck-Morss, Jonathan Flatley, and Helen Petrovsky on the occasion of the publication of Buck-Morss’s Revolution Today.
Chelovek
This essay describes the powerful effects of my encounter with Valery Podoroga, emphasizing not o... more This essay describes the powerful effects of my encounter with Valery Podoroga, emphasizing not only Podoroga’s interest in mimesis, but also his own capacity for mimetic openness. It begins autobiographically, recounting Podoroga’s lecture on Andrei Platonov’s “Eunuch of the Soul” at a conference at Duke University in 1990. I discuss Podoroga’s description of the “unknown parabolas” that characterize the experience of reading Platonov. In this understanding, reading pulls us through a parabola away from and then back to ourselves according to a path created by the form of the text itself. Hearing Podoroga speak that day alerted me to a shared interest in the affective power of reading, but it also described my own experience of hearing Podoroga: I was taken out of myself and returned through an “unknown parabola” to a different self, set on a new trajectory, one that happily brought me into the orbit of his sector at the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow. The second half of the...
Textual Practice
This is a review of Ben Highmore's smart, incisive, helpful *Cultural Feelings* book, which has o... more This is a review of Ben Highmore's smart, incisive, helpful *Cultural Feelings* book, which has outstanding analyses of Raymond Williams on "structures of feeling" and Heidegger on Stimmung. I like this book a lot!
WE ALL KNOW THAT WE have feelings when we encounter works of art. We laugh, we cry. We feel pity ... more WE ALL KNOW THAT WE have feelings when we encounter works of art. We laugh, we cry. We feel pity and fear. We like and we dislike. We shudder and shiver and tingle. We are amused . . .
Literary /Liberal Entanglements: Toward A Literary History for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Corrinne Carol and Mark Simpson, 2017
This essay follows up on an an earlier one (“How A Revolutionary Counter-Mood is Made”) consider... more This essay follows up on an an earlier one (“How A Revolutionary Counter-Mood is Made”) considering the success of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (or DRUM) in organizing workers in 1968 into a revolutionary collective through the publication and circulation of a modest shop-floor newspaper. Still working with DRUM and the group that grew out of it -- the League of Revolutionary Black Workers – this essay examines what happens after that initial formation of a revolutionary collective. How can a revolutionary counter-mood, once awakened, be maintained? How does such a collective sustain and refresh itself? In order to see how DRUM and then the League engage in the project of mobilizing and refreshing the mood of the newly formed collective, the essay examines two texts that represent distinct attempts to move a collective and to affect the political mood. The first of these is a handbill calling for a strike. The second is the well-known film Finally Got the News, which the League made in 1969 and 1970, in collaboration with the radical film collective Newsreel.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
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Papers by jonathan flatley
From the essay: "While Langston Hughes did not start writing poems about Lenin until the 1930s, he had long been interested in an anti-racist, globally minded socialism. From the very beginning of his career as writer, he was centrally engaged with the political and poetic problem of representing a black collectivity and representing it first of all to itself rather than to a white or “general” public. As he explained in I Wonder as I Wander, “I wrote about Negroes, and primarily for Negroes.” In so doing, Hughes experimented with what poetry is and what it can do, as he searched for genres to represent black people to black people as a group in a way that might create and sustain optimism about fighting white supremacy and the poverty it created. In what Fred Moten might call the ongoing “improvisational discovery” of his black studies Hughes confronted basic questions about the very possibility of poetry and politics, and affirmed the necessity of a political poetry and a poetic politics. Hughes looked for ways to give voice to “whole groups of people’s problems” by making
poetry that defied what people expected of poetry, borrowing from the blues and other “low-down” forms, and then, later, by creating a blues-inflected black communist voice, a Leninist blues. Throughout it all, despite the failures and the mishaps and the relentlessness of the violence and humiliations of a white supremacist capitalism, Hughes never gave up on finding ways to “think about feeling good, to make disparate aspects of feeling good thinkable,” as Michael Snediker puts it. Hughes’s optimism was, in this sense, a queer optimism, one that was not based on a belief in progress or other given normative modes of attachment to the world like the family, but on ways of finding, creating, and valuing moments of group joy in the present, even if it was the modest, ambivalent joy of laughing to keep from crying."
From the essay: "While Langston Hughes did not start writing poems about Lenin until the 1930s, he had long been interested in an anti-racist, globally minded socialism. From the very beginning of his career as writer, he was centrally engaged with the political and poetic problem of representing a black collectivity and representing it first of all to itself rather than to a white or “general” public. As he explained in I Wonder as I Wander, “I wrote about Negroes, and primarily for Negroes.” In so doing, Hughes experimented with what poetry is and what it can do, as he searched for genres to represent black people to black people as a group in a way that might create and sustain optimism about fighting white supremacy and the poverty it created. In what Fred Moten might call the ongoing “improvisational discovery” of his black studies Hughes confronted basic questions about the very possibility of poetry and politics, and affirmed the necessity of a political poetry and a poetic politics. Hughes looked for ways to give voice to “whole groups of people’s problems” by making
poetry that defied what people expected of poetry, borrowing from the blues and other “low-down” forms, and then, later, by creating a blues-inflected black communist voice, a Leninist blues. Throughout it all, despite the failures and the mishaps and the relentlessness of the violence and humiliations of a white supremacist capitalism, Hughes never gave up on finding ways to “think about feeling good, to make disparate aspects of feeling good thinkable,” as Michael Snediker puts it. Hughes’s optimism was, in this sense, a queer optimism, one that was not based on a belief in progress or other given normative modes of attachment to the world like the family, but on ways of finding, creating, and valuing moments of group joy in the present, even if it was the modest, ambivalent joy of laughing to keep from crying."