We’re pleased to bring back a slightly abridged version of the Bulletin of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. In this edition, we provide a more comprehensive look at two of our current classes and a preview of our next class, “American Transcendentalism: Emerson and Thoreau“! The next Bulletin will feature the return of our Listings section. In any case, please check it out:

Bulletin of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research 3

A quick look at the venues:

Local 61 (Politics of the City I) — There’s a quiet space upstairs!

Singularity&Co (The Avant-garde in Theory and Practice)

We are extraordinarily excited to announce a new partnership with the Goethe-Institut as part of a shared mission to provide innovative programming about culture and scholarship to the general public. This ongoing program will involve a variety of event formats, beginning with our first collaborative class, ”Critical Theory and the Now: a Contemporary Introduction to the Frankfurt School” which starts Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2013 at the Goethe-Institut’s “Wyoming Building” at 5 East 3rd Street  in Manhattan. There will be further announcements about this course and about the collaboration with Goethe in the coming weeks. For more general information on the Goethe-Institut please visit their website.

]]> http://thebrooklyninstitute.com/2012/12/05/new-collaboration-with-the-goethe-institut/feed/ 0 http://thebrooklyninstitute.com/2012/11/03/season-2-episode-1-of-the-podcast-for-social-research/ http://thebrooklyninstitute.com/2012/11/03/season-2-episode-1-of-the-podcast-for-social-research/#comments Sat, 03 Nov 2012 19:54:05 +0000 director http://thebrooklyninstitute.com/?p=1740  →]]> This is the first episode of the second season of our podcast series, “The Podcast for Social Research.” We recorded this episode on Friday, October 23 with an eye towards relevance to the upcoming election, and also to return to film criticism to inaugurate our second season, much as we began our first.  As such, this was recorded long before any of us realized that by this weekend, with a mere 4 days till the election, most of our city’s attention would be focused on displaced people, power outages, destroyed infrastructure, climate change, and the politics of crisis response. However, there is still an election on Tuesday, and there is still a place for discussion even in a crisis. So whether you are stuck at home because of the subways or heading out to Far Rockaway, Staten Island, Red Hook, or any of the other neighborhoods still in critical need, or anywhere else in the world, we hope you enjoy our discussion of political movements and elections and our friendly critique of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master.” As always, please see our Notations section after the jump for some references, asides, and more. Although we have a bibliography in our customary style, our own time constraints to post this before the election will keep this episode’s Notations largely without time stamps. We promise to return to our full, thorough style of Notations for next episode. Until then, share, enjoy, stay safe, and warm.

(You can download here by right-clicking and “save as” or look us up on iTunes)

Notations:

Part I: 00:00:00 – (Music: “Stillwell Ave.” by El Diablo Robotico)

00:00:25 - Introduction to Season 2

00:02:10 - On Elections, Political Participation, Political and Social Movements

Frances Fox Piven and Lorraine C. Minnite. “Movements Need Politicians– And Vice Versa”
Deepak Bhargava. “Why Obama?”
E.E. Schattschneider. The Semisovereign People
Richard Hofstadter.  The Idea of a Party System
Stanley Fish. “Politics in the Academy”
Edward Said. The Question of Palestine
National Voter Turnout in Federal Elections: 1960–2010
Frances Fox Piven. Challenging Authority
Ajay Singh Chaudhary. “The Simulacra of Morality”
Hilary Busis.  “How Do Movie Theaters Decide Which Trailers to Show?”

00:59:15 – Break! (Music: “On a Slow Boat to China” by Frank Loesser, performed by Kay Kyser)

01:00:46 - On The Master, Charismatic Authority, Abjection, Mastery

The Master (2012) dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
Jakob Mikanowski. “American Caliban”
Victor Hugo. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Ben Parker. “In ‘The Master’ P.T. Anderson Explores…”
Split Saber?
L. Ron Hubbard. Battlefield Earth
Herman Melville. Billy Budd
Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror
William Shakespeare. The Tempest
Neoplatonism
It is seemingly impossible to find the “Freedom of Science Fiction” scene from Friends with Benefits (2011) anywhere online; make of that what you will.
Merkin
Theodor Adorno. The Stars Down to Earth
Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida
Immanuel Kant. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
Technical Details: Recorded on a Samson CO1U into an msi PC running the beta version of the freeware program Audacity 1.3.13 while consuming enjoyable, yet moderate, amounts of Sixpoint Autumnation seasonal ale and good old-fashioned New York City tap water.

If you’ve been following our Facebook or Twitter you know that we had to cancel last week’s classes and events. We are currently working on rescheduling all of these.  Additionally, we have had some sad news from our friends at the Center for Jewish History that, due to flooding, Monday’s class will have to be postponed as well. If you have any questions or concerns please don’t hesitate to contact us. Additionally, if you or an educational institution that you are a part of is trying to find time and space to hold classes, please get in touch; we’ve built up a nice network of spaces and people who may be able to help out. Thanks and hope you are all safe, warm, and dry.

Some helpful links as of now, Nov. 1, 2012: If you need food or water –  http://www.nyc.gov/html/misc/html/2012/foodandwater.html

If you need shelter info: http://www.nyc.gov/html/misc/html/2012/hurricane_shelters.html

If you need transport info: http://transportationnation.org/

If you are looking to volunteer: http://www.dogoodrighthere.org/blog/tue-10302012-325pm/volunteer-help-after-storm

Nov. 2 UPDATE: Weekend Volunteering: http://brokelyn.com/where-to-volunteer-this-weekend/

NOV. 4 UPDATE: Please check our Facebook page for updates, it is public so you should be able to view it even if you’re not on Facebook. We think. : http://www.facebook.com/TheBrooklynInstitute

(You can download here by right-clicking and “save as” or look us up on iTunes)

Notations:

Wilfred Sellars. “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”
Jacques Derrida. “Faith and Knowledge”
Thomas Nagel. The Last Word
Michel Foucault. The Order of Things
Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Alex Rosenberg. The Atheists Guide to Reality
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. The Dialectic of Enlightenment
Theodor Adorno. Negative Dialectics
Friedrich Nietzsche. The Genealogy of Morals
Ibn Rushd (Averroes). The Incoherence of the Incoherence
Baruch Spinoza.  Ethics

Technical Details: Recorded on a Samson CO1U into an msi PC running the beta version of the freeware program Audacity 1.3.13 while consuming enjoyable, yet moderate, amounts of delicious Sixpoint beer (assorted) and good old-fashioned New York City tap water.

Christine Smallwood, The Crime of Blackness: Dorothy B. Hughes’s Forgotten Noir, at The New Yorker

“Our current literary moment is obsessed with autobiography and memoir. But Hughes chose for herself a different challenge: a white woman, she would tell stories about and from the points of view of others—psychotic men, black men, Spanish men, Native Americans; jazz musicians, fashionable women, soldiers, doctors. The creation of difference itself was her subject. Her books were widely praised for their atmospheres of fear and suspense, and criticized when they reached, as the New York Times said of “The Fallen Sparrow,” “toward conflict and situations that are rather beyond the usual whodunit scheme.” But this is Hughes’s point. It is not whodunit, but who-ness itself, that she’s after. By this I do not mean that she asks why—specific motives are as mulish and unanswerable as sin. Crime was never Hughes’s interest, evil was, and to be evil, for her, is to be intolerant of others, of the very fact of the existence of something outside the self. With her poetic powers of description, she makes that evil a sickness in the mind and a landscape to be surveyed.”

Anjuli Raza Kolb, Let Me Recite What History Teaches (7/25/2012), part of an ongoing series at Black Balloon Publishing

“In the wake of the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, discussion of firmer gun control measures has been whisper quiet. Evan Selinger contemplates the neutral weapon fallacy, Hegel mourns the ruthless efficiency of the guillotine, and Marshall McLuhan calls out the “Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form.”

Ajay Singh Chaudhary, The Dark Knight Decides: Sovereignty and the Superhero (Part I and Part II) at 3QuarksDaily

“The economy in Batman does not work like our economy. It just barely functions as a symbolic representation of it. From the very first movie, we are told that Gotham’s depression – depicted in quite extensive detail in the first movie, which some critics seem to have forgotten – was engineered by the League of Shadows. This is total crazy town. This is not Marx or Smith or Hayek or Friedman or von Mises or Keynes or whoever your favorite economist is. This is a powerful, eternal network of mountaintop ninjas making sure that the unemployment rate stays high. This is David Icke territory; this is lizard-people, Illuminati, or House of Rothschild conspiracy nuttiness (things which, not incidentally, tend to get a bit more credence in the dark corners of the contemporary libertarian and anarchist world than their fellow travelers would like to admit). This should have been a gigantic, flashing neon warning sign to any would-be critic, indicating: structural economics is most definitely not a thing to take very seriously in this text!”

We are proud to announce a partnership between the Center for Jewish History and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, as part of a shared mission to promote open, rigorous, and critical academic study for the general public. For more information please visit the Center’s site:  http://www.cjh.org/.

*- Michael and I will be recording a follow-up to this discussion shortly. To be posted soon!

(You can download here by right-clicking and “save as” or look us up on iTunes)

Notations:

David Albert. Quantum Mechanics and Experience
David Albert. Time and Chance
Lawrence Krauss. A Universe from Nothing
David Albert. “On the Origin of Everything”
Ross Anderson and Lawrence Krauss. “Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?”
Lawrence Krauss. “The Consolation of Philosophy”
Sean Carroll. “A Universe from Nothing?”

Technical Details: Recorded on a Samson CO1U into an msi PC running the beta version of the freeware program Audacity 1.3.13. This was the first test of our recording setup “in the field,” so to speak, and there were some issues, so please pardon any variance in sound quality. A single can of Coca-Cola was consumed during the recording of this podcast and said can was sitting on top of a desk. Where its electrons were at that particular moment is an open question.

ENROLLMENT IS NOW CLOSED FOR THIS COURSE 

Wednesdays, beginning July 18, 7-9pm
Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th St. in Manhattan
Enrollment is capped at 20 and includes copies of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise and Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem. Some food and drink will also be provided!

In this course, we will explore questions of political theology and “the secular” in two pivotal, controversial works in both Jewish thought and in the history of “Western” political philosophy: Baruch Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise and Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem. We will study these texts in terms of their historical relationship to and interaction with normative ideas in “Western” philosophy, as well as in light of the questions in political philosophy and metaphysics they raise. How should we understand—or, rather, not understand—God? What is the proper relationship between religion and the state? How can we understand the differences between revealed “religion” and revealed “legislation”? How did Spinoza articulate an alternative vision of modernity nearly a century before Kant? How did Mendelssohn rebut Kantian ideals of freedom and autonomy by drawing on Jewish traditions and concepts of heteronomy? What philosophical positions can emerge from examining the contrast between Christian notions of universalism and Jewish conceptions of particularity? In addition to Spinoza and Mendelssohn, we will read commentaries on both authors and secondary literature on the nature of “religion” and “secularism.” This will not be a class merely in philosophical reading. We will try to understand, apply, and reflect critically on these questions in our contemporary context.

6 sessions over 6 weeks, $395

This course will be co-taught by Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Abby Kluchin.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary

Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the founding Director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He is currently a Fellow at Columbia University’s Middle East Institute and a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society through the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. He holds an M.Sc. in Culture and Society from the London School of Economics, an M.A. and M.Phil in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Near Eastern Studies, Religious Studies, and Government from Cornell University. He spent the past two years teaching in Columbia’s Core Curriculum and his research focuses on comparative philosophy, Iranian and Islamic intellectual history, the Frankfurt School, modern Jewish thought, religion, social and critical theory, visual studies and post-colonial studies.  He has written for Dialectical Anthropology, The Jewish Daily Forward, Filmmaker Magazine, and The Huffington Post.At any given time he is probably pacing, reading, playing video games or thinking about the relationship between norms, morals, and metaphysics and almost certainly not sleeping.

Abby Kluchin                         

Abby Kluchin holds a Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. in philosophy of religion from Columbia University and a B.A. with High Honors from Swarthmore College.  She taught for several years in Columbia’s Core Curriculum and is presently an adjunct member of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union. Abby specializes in Continental philosophy, with emphases in poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory. Her current research focuses on the category of affect and the often neglected affective dimension of reading and writing, particularly in the realm of philosophical discourse. Abby is also a compulsive reader of Victorian novels and science fiction.