Moishe Postone

Updates

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Some recent blog entries and threads of note:

1. Over at the blog An und für Sich, there has been a recent post regarding Moishe Postone’s fascinating and insightful thesis that Nazism (and historical anti-semitism in general) is a perverse form of misrecognized anti-capitalism.  The comment thread has now turned into a broader discussion of neoliberal capitalism and the state of the Left.

2. Also, once again the blogger Pete Wolfendale of Deontologistics has posted a brilliant and thorough rejoinder to Levi Bryant’s irresponsible and frankly indefensible anti-epistemological and anti-representationalist speculations.  I expect that Bryant will feign ignorance to it, will not directly respond to it, even though it is both polite and extremely charitable in taking anything that Bryant has to say seriously.  My own critique of his post on commodities, objects, and persons, of which he is doubtless aware and which he has almost assuredly has read and broiled over, will likely never receive a response either.  I do not know whether to attribute Bryant’s refusal to respond to such legitimate criticisms is a sign of his intellectual incapacities or of his general cowardice when it comes to confronting harsh critiques of his work.

Also, a blog I recently discovered:

3. A brilliant website on architecture and other interesting topics, aggregat456.  As the author of the blog explains in the right-hand column of his site, “Originally conceived as a place to post thoughts about architecture, this site now contains a variety of design-based ideas that cut across various disciplines.”  One of his posts proved to be extremely helpful for the composition of my recent post on the Palace of the Soviets.

The spatiotemporal dialectic of capitalism

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Introduction

To understand the history of architectural modernism and eclecticism as they emerged out of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one must take into account the broader development of architecture over the course of the latter half of the nineteenth century. This development, in turn, must be seen as emerging out of the dynamic of late nineteenth-century capitalism, which had by that point extended to encompass the whole of Europe. For it was the unique spatiotemporal dialectic of the capitalist mode of production — along with the massive social and technological forces it unleashed — that formed the basis for the major architectural ideologies that arose during this period. Before the story of the academicians or the avant-garde can be told, then, some background is necessary to explain both their origin and the eventual trajectory they would take into the early twentieth century.

So while my aim is to eventually account for how a single social formation, capitalism, can give birth to these two opposite tendencies within architectural thought, the space required to give an adequate exposition of the spatiotemporal dialectic of capitalism is such that it deserves to function as a standalone essay. Certainly other trends, both cultural and social, could be understood as reflections of this underlying socioeconomic dynamic. It is thus my intention to post this as its own piece, before then proceeding to detail the way in which architectural modernism and eclecticism mirrored these dynamics. Continue reading →

This Essay Has Been Re-Routed

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Sorry for the inconvenience.  The now-completed essay can be found here.

The Works of the Historian and Marxist Theorist Moishe Postone

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Moishe Postone

Below you will find download links for several of the works of the historian and Marxist theorist Moishe Postone.  Postone offers a very original (and some might say heterodox) reading of Marx’s more mature social theory, from the Grundrisse up through all three volumes of Capital.  His most influential work in this regard is his excellent Time, Labor, and Social Domination, in which he elaborates a critical theory founded upon Marx’s theory of society, building upon the Frankfurt School tradition of Georg Lukács , Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas as well as engaging the French structuralist school Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar.  His other works focus on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as well as on the nature of antisemitism and its relation to certain characteristics of capitalism.

I was fortunate enough to be able to take two courses with Professor Postone, in his close reading of Capital.  He was both brilliant and thorough throughout.  It was a pleasure studying under him, and I consider my own work to be deeply influenced by him, albeit critically.  And so I heartily recommend checking out all of the following works:

  1. Moishe Postone – Time, Labor, and Social Domination
  2. Moishe Postone – History and Heteronomy – Critical Essays
  3. Moishe Postone – Theorizing the Contemporary World – Brenner, Arrighi, Harvey
  4. Moishe Postone – Anti-Semitism and National Socialism – Notes on the German Reaction to “Holocaust”
  5. Moishe Postone – Critical Social Theory and the Contemporary World
  6. Moishe Postone – Critical Pessimism and the Limits of Traditional Marxism