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Revisiting Race, Politics, and Culture: A Symposium

Thomas Jessen Adams & Andrew Feenberg & Cedric Johnson & Howard Levy & Adolph Reed, Jr. & Preston Smith II

Scholarship and popular memory has far too often taken on the role of hagiography or sought a pure and true 1960s spirit, “uncaptured” by elites and reflective of real, authentic radicalism. Rather than being critically analyzed as key nodes of causation in the defeat of an effective egalitarian politics and the subsequent turn toward reaction—as the contributors to Race, Politics, and Culture do, befitting the seriousness with which they took their charge as both scholars and political actors—the worst tendencies of sixties-era social movements are now almost religiously worshipped in nominally left organizing and thought.

The Painter: 6 Prose Poems in Memory of Joseph Marioni

by Michael Fried

The Dialectic of Liquid Light

by Joseph Staten

Painter: Making A Modern Painting

by Joseph de Francesco

The Painter’s Studio: 12 Photographs by James Welling

by James Welling

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The Wrong Durée: The Politics of Cedric J. Robinson’s Racial Capitalism

Cedric Johnson

Instead, a race-essentialist understanding of epistemology lies at the heart of both Robinson’s notions of racial capitalism and the black radical tradition. In the former, we find racism intrinsic to “European” culture as early as antiquity and reaching maturation in the Iberian Peninsula on the eve of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, while he presents African medieval societies and black colonial subjects as innately peaceful and less violent. And in this regard, Robinson’s claims are consonant with a longer line of black nationalist thinking in the United States, which inverts the assumptions of white supremacy and holds that white domination is an endemic phenomenon.

The Inauthenticity of our Class Discourse: or, Publishing Respects your Foodbank Usage

Sunjeev Sahota

The issue, therefore, is not that we need to stop representation from benefiting elite minorities—that’s just representation in its most indefensible form—but that we need to stop believing that representation, or, more broadly conceived, anti-discrimination, should be our foremost social justice commitment. Without a prior grounding in a politics of economic equality, all anti-discrimination boils down to is the neoliberal promise that people should have an equal opportunity to escape poverty; rather than trying to get rid of it.

Framing the Working Class: Ray’s a Laugh, 28 Years On

Walter Benn Michaels

Billingham’s desire to make something aesthetically rather than socially or politically moving can be understood not just as a form of complicity with individuals and their families but, in its commitment to structure, as the imagination of an alternative. For example, the question of the frame in the photo of Liz doing her puzzle is not reducible to the ethics of photographing your mother. Rather the photo ignores the questions of family ethics. More important, it doesn’t so much ignore as seek to overcome even the question of working-class identity. Liz’s dress, her tattoos, the couch she’s sitting on can all lend themselves to being read as the markers of such an identity.

The Theory of Immediacy or the Immediacy of Theory?

Jensen Suther

At a crucial juncture in her reconstruction of Marx’s account, Kornbluh claims that “labor makes things useful, while exchange and its hypostasis in the concept of value and the medium of money is the activity that generates value qua value.” But this neglects Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete labor, or labor as productive of value and labor as productive of objects of use. Contrary to Kornbluh, value is not “generated” by exchange but rather by the expenditure of labor time and realized through exchange. So long as value—labor time—is the measure of social wealth, workers must expend abstract labor in exchange for a wage, while the capitalist appropriates the products the worker has valorized. This implies that the form of distribution—the propertylessness of the worker—is grounded in the form of production itself.

The Painter: 6 Prose Poems in Memory of Joseph Marioni

Michael Fried

Joseph Marioni emails to say that he has finally resolved his large green painting. The last Archetype has fallen — not fallen, exactly, rather it has yielded to The Painter’s uncompromising efforts.

The Man Who Would Be King: Method in Trump’s Madness, Contradictions in Trump’s Method

Sam Gindin

Trump can meet the expectations of those looking for a hard line on immigration and can grant his corporate backers the tax cuts and deregulation they greedily seek. But it is the economy that will be decisive for his populist base, and on this measure, Trump is very unlikely to succeed. As for the business elite, they have always assumed Trump was not so mad as to start a tariff war that risked undermining the American empire itself. As that danger materializes, business will rebel. The question will then shift from what Trump intends to do to what he will he do as his plans go astray.

The Uses and Abuses of Manet’s Olympia

Todd Cronan

Manet’s art is about challenging what we think we know about the world: about what makes a finished picture as well as about what constitutes a politics of class, gender, and race. And doesn’t the moral value of artworks lie in their resistance to our assumptions about the world, not how they reaffirm what we already think we know?

The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to BlackRock

Respondents

The central argument we make in the book, contrary to the received wisdom on the left, is that the rise of capitalist finance in the current period cannot be understood as a cause or symptom of the decline of the “real” industrial economy. Nor can it be considered as “separate” from production. Rather, finance is and has been utterly integral to the dynamism, flexibility, and strength of capital. Moreover, we show that it is precisely as a result of the role of finance that capitalist development has not led to increasing monopolistic stagnation but has increased the competitiveness of capital by facilitating its growing mobility across space and among economic sectors. Capitalist financialization has thus served to intensify the competitive discipline on all investments to maximize monetary returns.

The Global Rules of Art: The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy

Respondents

It is assumed that “thinking globally” is a moral imperative within the humanities. Is it? Among other things, it presumes a neutral space from which to expand one’s geographic purview, as though curators and scholars could stand outside the global game of profit and recognition. In this issue of The Tank, art historians and critics respond to sociologist Larissa Buchholz’s analysis of the global contemporary art field. Do globalizing initiatives really serve artists outside the Global North? Or do they refract neoliberal logics of concentrating capital and expanding markets? Has the global turn transformed our evaluative norms? Or has the very concept of “the global” become just another currency for meting out prestige?

Going Forward from the Edge of the Abyss

Adolph Reed, Jr.

Trump has no new coalition; he can’t because those “groups” aren’t real as groups, and people identify with them largely around thin identities more like consumer taste “communities” or partisan fans of sports teams. This is not to say that the reified categories couldn’t become constituencies on the same principal as the Heisenberg effect; part of the beauty of interest-group politics is that tossing some resources around will produce constituencies—or at least people who claim to speak for them.