It is commonplace to refer to the Commedia dell’Arte as actor’s theatre when considering the cent... more It is commonplace to refer to the Commedia dell’Arte as actor’s theatre when considering the centrality of the actor ensemble in creating performance through various modes of improvisation. Dario Fo goes so far as to assert that the Commedia can be distinguished from all other forms of theatre not by the use of the masks or the fi xed stereotypes but “by a genuinely revolutionary approach of making theatre, and the unique role assumed by the actors” (Fo 1991: 13). But, if we are to appreciate fully the “revolutionary” quality of the Commedia and its lessons for contemporary theatre, it is important for it to be understood historically as a part of the wider cultural complex of the Renaissance from which it was both an offspring and a cultural force in itself. Modern attitudes toward the Commedia tend to cluster around two opposing poles. One might be called the pole of naïve exuberance, imagining the masked comedy as the apogee of world theatre; the other pole tends to simply ignore...
This was offered as a discussion text for the Internationalist Perspectives Group. A Marxist crit... more This was offered as a discussion text for the Internationalist Perspectives Group. A Marxist critique of the form of democracy rather than its content arguing that all democracy is the fetish of an alienated consciousness. From its Greek origins to modern imperialism democracy is the essential form that separates civil society from political, serving primarily to protect private property and to ensure free labor. Utilizing the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and E. Pasukanis, this paper argues that liberation will not take the democratic form but seek to develop social arrangements in which social praxis is derived from both theoria and poiesis in a way that valorizes sensual forms of knowledge, knowledge that is specifically excluded by the democratic form.
The global flare of mass protests, cumulating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, has naturally b... more The global flare of mass protests, cumulating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, has naturally been accompanied by a flurry of activity and analysis on the part of the left. While it is surely impossible to give a precise formula that can explain the "leap" in consciousness that is the essential ground for a spontaneous movement as such, there is little doubt that the protests of the Arab Spring, the Indignados and the Occupations taken together mark an astonishing historical moment. Indeed, in terms of the spontaneous character, the breath of its global extension, and its temporal velocity, it is the first of its kind. It would appear that the neo-liberal purgatory of the last thirty years may be coming to an end as the predominate ideology of capitalism shows signs of collapse. While responding to an ever deepening and devastating crisis, the protests have revealed the broad contours of emerging police states everywhere as well as their own astonishing potential for resistance that one could only dream of a short time ago. A definitive analysis is of course impossible while the movement is continually unfolding, not only because of the appearance of new forms of struggle but also because of the heterogeneous and decentralized character of the protests. However, it is essential to attempt an analysis, not in order to instrumentalize the movement as is the modus operandi of the vanguardist-left, but rather to help give shape to a new social imaginary as participants in the struggles, to push towards a revolutionary reconfiguration of human relationships and to disrupt the inevitable dialectic of recuperation on the part of capital.
Writings on the subject of agriculture expanded at a noticeable rate in the second half of the ei... more Writings on the subject of agriculture expanded at a noticeable rate in the second half of the eighteenth century throughout Europe, but particularly so in the Italian states. These writings, only rarely treated by historians as a specific body of literature, are ordinarily and inadequately understood as simple contributions to the science of agronomy or appendages to the development of the economic theory. This enthusiasm for agriculture, however, was a central component of the emerging spirit of modernity. Land, in all of the principal currents of enlightened thought, was precisely the point at which man and nature were linked. The specific way in which this link was imagined was one of the pivotal determinants of competing cosmologies in the later half of the century. The primary cosmological division was between those who tended to preserve an astrobiological vision of man and nature, and those who tended to fragment this unity into autonomous spheres of reality in a specifically economic universe. This study delineates four principal discursive fields within which the nexus land/man is conceived. The first focus is on the way in which the imagined ethical component of land defined the nature of man. The second is a focus on the way in which the historical relationship of man to the land determined the image of a particular future. The third is an assessment of the influence of the Physiocratic concept of expanded reproduction. The fourth looks at the way in which the Newtonian principles and scientific discourse reordered the concept of land and man as an object of scientific reasoning. The commercialization of agriculture in the eighteenth century was accompanied by profound efforts among the Italian illuministi to give a particular character to the rapid changes around them. Their efforts in the field of agriculture helped to lay the basis for the economic theories and social sciences that would emerge more fully as independent fields of study in the following century. 7 Carlo Levi. Christ Stopped at Eboli, translated by Frances Frenaye. (London: Penguin 1982) 78-79
It is commonplace to refer to the Commedia dell’Arte as actor’s theatre when considering the cent... more It is commonplace to refer to the Commedia dell’Arte as actor’s theatre when considering the centrality of the actor ensemble in creating performance through various modes of improvisation. Dario Fo goes so far as to assert that the Commedia can be distinguished from all other forms of theatre not by the use of the masks or the fi xed stereotypes but “by a genuinely revolutionary approach of making theatre, and the unique role assumed by the actors” (Fo 1991: 13). But, if we are to appreciate fully the “revolutionary” quality of the Commedia and its lessons for contemporary theatre, it is important for it to be understood historically as a part of the wider cultural complex of the Renaissance from which it was both an offspring and a cultural force in itself. Modern attitudes toward the Commedia tend to cluster around two opposing poles. One might be called the pole of naïve exuberance, imagining the masked comedy as the apogee of world theatre; the other pole tends to simply ignore...
This was offered as a discussion text for the Internationalist Perspectives Group. A Marxist crit... more This was offered as a discussion text for the Internationalist Perspectives Group. A Marxist critique of the form of democracy rather than its content arguing that all democracy is the fetish of an alienated consciousness. From its Greek origins to modern imperialism democracy is the essential form that separates civil society from political, serving primarily to protect private property and to ensure free labor. Utilizing the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and E. Pasukanis, this paper argues that liberation will not take the democratic form but seek to develop social arrangements in which social praxis is derived from both theoria and poiesis in a way that valorizes sensual forms of knowledge, knowledge that is specifically excluded by the democratic form.
The global flare of mass protests, cumulating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, has naturally b... more The global flare of mass protests, cumulating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, has naturally been accompanied by a flurry of activity and analysis on the part of the left. While it is surely impossible to give a precise formula that can explain the "leap" in consciousness that is the essential ground for a spontaneous movement as such, there is little doubt that the protests of the Arab Spring, the Indignados and the Occupations taken together mark an astonishing historical moment. Indeed, in terms of the spontaneous character, the breath of its global extension, and its temporal velocity, it is the first of its kind. It would appear that the neo-liberal purgatory of the last thirty years may be coming to an end as the predominate ideology of capitalism shows signs of collapse. While responding to an ever deepening and devastating crisis, the protests have revealed the broad contours of emerging police states everywhere as well as their own astonishing potential for resistance that one could only dream of a short time ago. A definitive analysis is of course impossible while the movement is continually unfolding, not only because of the appearance of new forms of struggle but also because of the heterogeneous and decentralized character of the protests. However, it is essential to attempt an analysis, not in order to instrumentalize the movement as is the modus operandi of the vanguardist-left, but rather to help give shape to a new social imaginary as participants in the struggles, to push towards a revolutionary reconfiguration of human relationships and to disrupt the inevitable dialectic of recuperation on the part of capital.
Writings on the subject of agriculture expanded at a noticeable rate in the second half of the ei... more Writings on the subject of agriculture expanded at a noticeable rate in the second half of the eighteenth century throughout Europe, but particularly so in the Italian states. These writings, only rarely treated by historians as a specific body of literature, are ordinarily and inadequately understood as simple contributions to the science of agronomy or appendages to the development of the economic theory. This enthusiasm for agriculture, however, was a central component of the emerging spirit of modernity. Land, in all of the principal currents of enlightened thought, was precisely the point at which man and nature were linked. The specific way in which this link was imagined was one of the pivotal determinants of competing cosmologies in the later half of the century. The primary cosmological division was between those who tended to preserve an astrobiological vision of man and nature, and those who tended to fragment this unity into autonomous spheres of reality in a specifically economic universe. This study delineates four principal discursive fields within which the nexus land/man is conceived. The first focus is on the way in which the imagined ethical component of land defined the nature of man. The second is a focus on the way in which the historical relationship of man to the land determined the image of a particular future. The third is an assessment of the influence of the Physiocratic concept of expanded reproduction. The fourth looks at the way in which the Newtonian principles and scientific discourse reordered the concept of land and man as an object of scientific reasoning. The commercialization of agriculture in the eighteenth century was accompanied by profound efforts among the Italian illuministi to give a particular character to the rapid changes around them. Their efforts in the field of agriculture helped to lay the basis for the economic theories and social sciences that would emerge more fully as independent fields of study in the following century. 7 Carlo Levi. Christ Stopped at Eboli, translated by Frances Frenaye. (London: Penguin 1982) 78-79
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