A long hope: the Prometheus Counter-Project

By offering a reading of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, and of the post-Aeschylus tradition of the myth of Prometheus which highlights its revisions as imagined by Karl Marx and Percy Shelley, among others, this paper seeks to explore how to grasp, amid our danger and despair, the prominent poetic and cognitive view of a similar cataclysm from the past, as a lesson to the present. The route to do so encompasses a revisitation of the connections between theatre and democracy in ancient Greece; a consideration of the variations of the themes of knowledge, injustice and tyranny, material civilization and its control and the unbowed personal will to resist oppression, all evoked by the myth of Prometheus; and teasing out the main lineaments of a meaning for the play for an endangered Athenian democracy, as staged around 440 as well as for authors who have recycled its main theme throughout centuries, and finally for us today. It ends by giving pride of place to a Promethean hope, a long hope, arisen from suffering and wedded to cognition, which has crossed centuries and reached our times in urgency. The work is, of course, a provisional statement: a contribution

Utopianism From Orientation To Agency. What Are We Intellectuals Under Post-Fordism To Do?

The essay is divided into an introduction, »The Dark Now«, which argues the focus on the oriented agents able or failing to dynamize the utopian locus, and three parts. Part 1, »Living in Fantasyland (Dystopia, also Fake Utopia and Anti- utopia)«, takes Disneyland and its analyses by Marin and others as the paradigm for our lives in such imaginary but also real spaces; it defines Dystopia, as well as its subform of Anti-utopia. Part 2, »We Intellectuals in Post-Fordism«, deals with the thesis that our dystopian rulers have wiped out the barrier between »culture« and economically based politics, with what is Post-Fordism, and what is the situation of intellectuals between wage-labour and self-determination. Part 3, »The Bifurcations and the Alliances« presents some suggestions about our oppositional interests in a capitalism engaged in large scale structural declassing of intellectual work. The con- clusion is that there is no way out of dystopia except as orientation to utopia and viceversa: »And if you think this is utopian, please think why is it such« (Brecht)

Living Labour and the Labour of Living. A Little Tractate for Looking Forward

An approach to the insights of Marx indispensable for looking forward today under- stands them as a fusion of three domains and horizons (cognition, liberty, and plea- sure), with a set of regulative principles (dialectic, measure, absolute swerve), and a focus on living labour. The discussion progresses from Epicure and Fourier to Manc’s form- giving fire of living labour. Against this horizon, capitalism is discussed as a cultural revolution based on measuring labour by means of quantitative time, opposed to use-value qualities, as well as through the metaphors from horror fantasy which Marx found to be appropriate to such a revolution. Its alliance with entropy leads to alienation and loneliness, and finally to a death-bringing economy. An Appendix on political economy and entropy discusses the situation today and a minimum program of counter-measures, beginning with rejection of BNP, which includes minimizing entropy

Bureaucracy: a Term and Concept in the Socialist Discourse about State Power (Before 1941)

The term and concept of bureaucracy is discussed as found in the debates of Marx, Engels, and the German Social-democratic Party, then in Lenin’s Fight against Bureaucracy and the State Machine, and finally in Stalin’s Unavowed Thermidor (these are the subtitles). It is concerned only with “upstream of Yugoslavia”, i.e. what the Communist parties had accepted or at least known of in the 1930s, and the CPY started modifying after 1948. All outside of such a vulgate (Weber, Trotsky, and so on) is not discussed

THE DISCOURSE ABOUT BUREAUCRACY AND STATE POWER IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY YUGOSLAVIA 1945-1974 (II)

Pojam “birokracije” pokrivao je polje negativnih političko-ideoloških stavova prema vlasti u poslije-revolucionarnoj Jugoslaviji, simetrično suprotstavljeno ne mnogo razrađenom suprotnom polu i polju pučke demokracije. Njegova mutnoća dozvoljavala je različite, mada prividno uvijek anti-staljinističke interpretacije – kako u državno-partijskom diskursu tako i u suprotstavljenom diskursu “lojalne opozicije”. Ovaj drugi dio bavi se diskursom “lojalne opozicije”: stavovima ekonomiste Branka Horvata i grupe oko časopisa Praxis (Mihajlo Marković, Dragoljub Mićunović, Gajo Petrović). Javne mogućnosti lojalne socijalističke opozicije poništene su međutim sredinom 1970tih godina. “Pokušaj prvog zaključka” u eseju ulazi u prvu ocjenu ove konfrontacije kao i u neka nužna nijansiranja. Nalazi se da sam termin “birokracija” konačno više zamućuje nego razjašnjava. Birokracija je kao termin dakle nevažna; no pojam i stanje na koji se tom zakrivljenom strijelom ciljalo bio je presudan.The concept of “bureaucracy” covered the field of negative stances in postrevolutionary Yugoslavia. Its fuzziness allowed different, though ostensibly all anti-Stalinist, interpretations by the Party-State discourse (mainly Kardelj and Bakarić) vs. the discourse of the “loyal opposition” (Branko Horvat and the Praxis group). The first group wanted to dismantle State centralization but insisted there was no ruling class. The second group could not, for various reasons, insist on a ruling class but discussed its power and effect. The term “bureaucracy” grew from a useful start of public discussion finally into sterile talmudism. But its very limits indicate a crucial, though absent, concept and state of power

Forms Open to Life

This is the revised transcript of a conversation between Darko Suvin [DS] and Federico Pianzola [FP]. The topics discussed are many and the focus keeps zooming back and forth from the historical context of humanities vs. resurgent fascism to formal remarks on literature, theatre, utopia, narrative, and other themes. Particular emphasis is given to a reflection on the dialectical and constructivist approach deployed by Suvin in his works