A philosopher and political thinker describes a new political grammar free of modernist assumptions. In 2004 and 2005, Antonio Negri held ten workshops at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris to formulate a new political grammar of the postmodern. Biopolitics, biopowers, control, the multitude, people, war, borders, dependency and interdependency, state, nation, the common, difference, resistance, subjective rights, revolution, freedom, democracy: these are just a few of the themes Negri addressed in these experimental laboratories. Postmodernity, Negri suggests, can be (...) described as a “porcelain factory”: a delicate and fragile construction that could be destroyed through one clumsy act. Looking across twentieth century history, Negri warns that our inability to anticipate future developments has already placed coming generations in serious jeopardy. Describing the years 1917-1968 as the “short century,” Negri suggests that by the end of it, all of the familiar markers of modernity had lost their relevance. Confronted with an intolerable reality, indignation and the revolutionary will to transform the world have both taken new forms and must be understood anew, free of modernist assumptions. In the impassioned debates recounted in this book, Antonio Negri attempts to describe the formation of an alternative political horizon and looks for a way to define the practices and modes of expression that democracy could take.Antonio Negri is a philosopher and essay writer. A political and social activist in the 1960s and 1970s in Italy, he taught political sciences for many years and has written numerous books on political philosophy including Marx beyond Marx, The Savage Anomaly, Insurgencies ; and in collaboration with Michael Hardt, Empire and Multitude. (shrink)

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of (...) contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory. (shrink)

In this paper, Tyson E. Lewis challenges the dominant theoretical and practical educational responses to globalization. On the level of public policy, Lewis demonstrates the limitations of both neoliberal privatization and liberal calls for rehabilitating public schooling. On the level of pedagogy, Lewis breaks with the dominant liberal democratic tradition which focuses on the cultivation of democratic dispositions for cosmopolitan citizenship. Shifting focus, Lewis posits a new location for education out of bounds of the common sense of public versus private, (...) nationalism versus cosmopolitanism, inclusion versus exclusion, human versus civil rights. This is the space of the commonwealth whose actors cannot be identified as ‘citizens’ but are rather the anonymous multitude. In conclusion, Lewis finds a model for organizing this commonwealth in the work of Ivan Illich, whose learning networks speak to the urgent political and pedagogical need for exodus from the conceptual vocabulary that defines much of the contemporary field of educational theory. (shrink)

In the context of the increasingly transnational organization of society, culture, and communication, this article develops a conceptualization of the global common as a basic condition of interrelation and shared experience, and describes contemporary political efforts to fully democratize this condition. The article demonstrates the implications for curriculum and teaching of this project, describing in particular the importance of fundamentally challenging the interpellation of students as subjects of the nation, and the necessity for new and radically collaborative forms of political (...) and pedagogical authority that can more powerfully realize the imaginative potential of educators and students alike as global democratic actors. In this effort, familiar progressive educational ideas (e.g. the importance of the continuity of the curriculum, and the meaning and purpose of experimentalism) are interrogated and rearticulated. The article concludes with a discussion of the unique ways in which education can contribute to constructing a democratic society in the global era, and how the central aspects of such a pedagogy in common can also suggest essential principles for the organization of social movements in this context. (shrink)