jonathan flatley | University of Chicago (original) (raw)
Papers by jonathan flatley
The Wayland Rudd Collection, Yevegeny Fiks
The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne
I wrote these for the Warhol film catalogue raisonne
The Long 2020, 2022
In summer , I saw the police beat, tear-gas, insult, threaten, and arrest my friends, my comrades... more In summer , I saw the police beat, tear-gas, insult, threaten, and arrest my friends, my comrades, my colleagues, and my students. Filled with rage and grief after the brutal police murder of George Floyd, we had come into the streets of Detroit to protest racist police violence. Even though I knew that the police kill someone in the United States, on average, three times a day, and even though I knew the institution's long history of racist violence going back to its origin in slave patrols, such monstrous indi erence to life was a shock. No feeling person could respond to the murder of George Floyd with anything but the strongest sense of rage and revulsion, rebuke and condemnation, I thought. I wondered how the police could feel anything but deep, profound shame for their participation in this murderous institution. At the same time, it seemed that throughout the long , wherever the latest news directed my attention-Minsk, Moscow, Lagos-the police were there with their shields, their helmets, their masks, their armored vehicles, and their chemical weapons, beating, shooting, Tasering, pushing, gassing, kettling, and arresting. These vivid images of police violence against protesters recalled recent, similar clashes in Santiago, Hong Kong, Quito, Portau-Prince, Istanbul, and Paris. 1 "It resembles a physical law," the Invisible Committee reminds us. "The more the social order loses credit, the more it arms its police. The more the institutions withdraw, the more they advance in terms of surveillance. The less respect the authorities inspire, the more they seek to keep us respectful through force." 2 19 "Everybody Hates the Police"
This are page proofs -- with a couple corrections! -- of a piece in the *Comintern Aesthetics* vo... more This are page proofs -- with a couple corrections! -- of a piece in the *Comintern Aesthetics* volume edited by Amelia Glaser and Steven Lee.
From the essay: "While Langston Hughes did not start writing poems about Lenin until the 1930s, he had long been interested in an anti-racist, globally minded socialism. From the very beginning of his career as writer, he was centrally engaged with the political and poetic problem of representing a black collectivity and representing it first of all to itself rather than to a white or “general” public. As he explained in I Wonder as I Wander, “I wrote about Negroes, and primarily for Negroes.” In so doing, Hughes experimented with what poetry is and what it can do, as he searched for genres to represent black people to black people as a group in a way that might create and sustain optimism about fighting white supremacy and the poverty it created. In what Fred Moten might call the ongoing “improvisational discovery” of his black studies Hughes confronted basic questions about the very possibility of poetry and politics, and affirmed the necessity of a political poetry and a poetic politics. Hughes looked for ways to give voice to “whole groups of people’s problems” by making
poetry that defied what people expected of poetry, borrowing from the blues and other “low-down” forms, and then, later, by creating a blues-inflected black communist voice, a Leninist blues. Throughout it all, despite the failures and the mishaps and the relentlessness of the violence and humiliations of a white supremacist capitalism, Hughes never gave up on finding ways to “think about feeling good, to make disparate aspects of feeling good thinkable,” as Michael Snediker puts it. Hughes’s optimism was, in this sense, a queer optimism, one that was not based on a belief in progress or other given normative modes of attachment to the world like the family, but on ways of finding, creating, and valuing moments of group joy in the present, even if it was the modest, ambivalent joy of laughing to keep from crying."
JONATHAN FLATLEY'S Like Andy Warhol presents a compelling alternative to the preconceived concept... more JONATHAN FLATLEY'S Like Andy Warhol presents a compelling alternative to the preconceived conception of Warhol as a cold, crass materialist making a!rmative icons to bolster transcendent, glamorous, consumer identification. Flatley instead shows Warhol thinking through ways to approach and share in the feelings of loss, failure, and disidentification that the United States's glossy consumerist iconography generates. Paradoxically, Warhol opened up affective pathways through liking rather than
Dieser Vortrag greift eine Schlüsselepisode aus der Geschichte der amerikanischen Bürgerrechtsbew... more Dieser Vortrag greift eine Schlüsselepisode aus der Geschichte der amerikanischen Bürgerrechtsbewegung und der Arbeitskämpfe der 1960er Jahre auf und untersucht sie am Leitfaden einer medienwissenschaftlichen Fragestellung. Den Ausgangspunkt bildet die Frage, weshalb die Arbeiterbewegung Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (kurz DRUM) 1968 allein durch die Publikation einer bescheidenen Hauszeitung mit so viel Erfolg die Arbeiter in der Automobilindustrie in Detroit mobilisieren konnte. Am Beispiel von DRUM und der Gruppe, die sich daraus entwickelte – der League of Revolutionary Black Workers – untersucht dieser Beitrag, was nach der Gründung eines revolutionären Kollektivs geschieht. Wie kann eine revolutionäre Stimmung hergestellt und, wenn sie sich einmal eingestellt hat, am Leben erhalten werden? Wie hält ein solches Kollektiv sich selbst am Leben, wie erneuert es sich? Ich werde die Herangehensweise der League an die Aufgabe, eine kollektive revolutionär Stimmung zu schaffen un...
Afterimage, Sep 1, 2002
In his 1974 song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron sings of the ways that the... more In his 1974 song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron sings of the ways that the dominant genres of television (the news, the soap opera, the commercial, the sitcom, etc.) prevent any oppositional political content from being represented there. In his view, ...
South Atlantic Quarterly
This interview documents an email exchange between Susan Buck-Morss, Jonathan Flatley, and Helen ... more This interview documents an email exchange between Susan Buck-Morss, Jonathan Flatley, and Helen Petrovsky on the occasion of the publication of Buck-Morss’s Revolution Today.
Chelovek
This essay describes the powerful effects of my encounter with Valery Podoroga, emphasizing not o... more This essay describes the powerful effects of my encounter with Valery Podoroga, emphasizing not only Podoroga’s interest in mimesis, but also his own capacity for mimetic openness. It begins autobiographically, recounting Podoroga’s lecture on Andrei Platonov’s “Eunuch of the Soul” at a conference at Duke University in 1990. I discuss Podoroga’s description of the “unknown parabolas” that characterize the experience of reading Platonov. In this understanding, reading pulls us through a parabola away from and then back to ourselves according to a path created by the form of the text itself. Hearing Podoroga speak that day alerted me to a shared interest in the affective power of reading, but it also described my own experience of hearing Podoroga: I was taken out of myself and returned through an “unknown parabola” to a different self, set on a new trajectory, one that happily brought me into the orbit of his sector at the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow. The second half of the...
Textual Practice
This is a review of Ben Highmore's smart, incisive, helpful *Cultural Feelings* book, which has o... more This is a review of Ben Highmore's smart, incisive, helpful *Cultural Feelings* book, which has outstanding analyses of Raymond Williams on "structures of feeling" and Heidegger on Stimmung. I like this book a lot!
WE ALL KNOW THAT WE have feelings when we encounter works of art. We laugh, we cry. We feel pity ... more WE ALL KNOW THAT WE have feelings when we encounter works of art. We laugh, we cry. We feel pity and fear. We like and we dislike. We shudder and shiver and tingle. We are amused . . .
Literary /Liberal Entanglements: Toward A Literary History for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Corrinne Carol and Mark Simpson, 2017
This essay follows up on an an earlier one (“How A Revolutionary Counter-Mood is Made”) consider... more This essay follows up on an an earlier one (“How A Revolutionary Counter-Mood is Made”) considering the success of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (or DRUM) in organizing workers in 1968 into a revolutionary collective through the publication and circulation of a modest shop-floor newspaper. Still working with DRUM and the group that grew out of it -- the League of Revolutionary Black Workers – this essay examines what happens after that initial formation of a revolutionary collective. How can a revolutionary counter-mood, once awakened, be maintained? How does such a collective sustain and refresh itself? In order to see how DRUM and then the League engage in the project of mobilizing and refreshing the mood of the newly formed collective, the essay examines two texts that represent distinct attempts to move a collective and to affect the political mood. The first of these is a handbill calling for a strike. The second is the well-known film Finally Got the News, which the League made in 1969 and 1970, in collaboration with the radical film collective Newsreel.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The “Kracauer Lectures in Film and Media Theory” pay tribute to the Frankfurt-born philosopher, s... more The “Kracauer Lectures in Film and Media Theory” pay tribute to the Frankfurt-born philosopher, sociologist, and writer Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966), one of the 20th Century’s most influential thinkers in the fields of film and media theory. At the same time, the title of the series refers to the role that Frankfurt and its university played in founding the critical reflection on film and technical media in the 20th Century.
The goal of the series is to present innovative contemporary scholarship on film and media from the fields of film and media studies, art history, cultural studies, and aesthetic philosophy. Moreover, the lecture series aims to contribute to the development and expansion of the fields of film and media studies, the most rapidly growing humanities disciplines in Germany.
The legacy that the Kracauer lectures receives from their namesake includes a perspective on film as an occasion and object of thought at the borders of cultural and social theory and an intuition that film and even all technological image-based media do not simply represent social relations, but increasingly shape and structure them. In accordance with this intuition and in keeping pace with current developments in film and media studies in Germany and beyond, the series opens up beyond aesthetic positions to include perspectives from the study of science, theories of technology, cultural and media economics, and political theory.
Finally, by honoring Kracauer, the series also honors a theorist who was at the same time a critic. Jean Starobinski noted that the task of criticism in relation to theory consisted in opposing the grey monotony of theory in favor of a sense for the work's inconsistency and its transgression of rules. Starobinski further noted that criticism itself has to turn into a work, taking on all the risks that that implies (“se faire œuvre elle-même et courir les risques de l’œuvre”). Rather than reducing the work to an example of a theoretical position, Kracauer mastered the art of developing theory out of the work and thereby of actively engaging with its risks. The contributions to the “Kracauer Lectures” will continue in this tradition.
All contributions are available as podcasts for free download at www.kracauer-lectures.de
The Wayland Rudd Collection, Yevegeny Fiks
The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne
I wrote these for the Warhol film catalogue raisonne
The Long 2020, 2022
In summer , I saw the police beat, tear-gas, insult, threaten, and arrest my friends, my comrades... more In summer , I saw the police beat, tear-gas, insult, threaten, and arrest my friends, my comrades, my colleagues, and my students. Filled with rage and grief after the brutal police murder of George Floyd, we had come into the streets of Detroit to protest racist police violence. Even though I knew that the police kill someone in the United States, on average, three times a day, and even though I knew the institution's long history of racist violence going back to its origin in slave patrols, such monstrous indi erence to life was a shock. No feeling person could respond to the murder of George Floyd with anything but the strongest sense of rage and revulsion, rebuke and condemnation, I thought. I wondered how the police could feel anything but deep, profound shame for their participation in this murderous institution. At the same time, it seemed that throughout the long , wherever the latest news directed my attention-Minsk, Moscow, Lagos-the police were there with their shields, their helmets, their masks, their armored vehicles, and their chemical weapons, beating, shooting, Tasering, pushing, gassing, kettling, and arresting. These vivid images of police violence against protesters recalled recent, similar clashes in Santiago, Hong Kong, Quito, Portau-Prince, Istanbul, and Paris. 1 "It resembles a physical law," the Invisible Committee reminds us. "The more the social order loses credit, the more it arms its police. The more the institutions withdraw, the more they advance in terms of surveillance. The less respect the authorities inspire, the more they seek to keep us respectful through force." 2 19 "Everybody Hates the Police"
This are page proofs -- with a couple corrections! -- of a piece in the *Comintern Aesthetics* vo... more This are page proofs -- with a couple corrections! -- of a piece in the *Comintern Aesthetics* volume edited by Amelia Glaser and Steven Lee.
From the essay: "While Langston Hughes did not start writing poems about Lenin until the 1930s, he had long been interested in an anti-racist, globally minded socialism. From the very beginning of his career as writer, he was centrally engaged with the political and poetic problem of representing a black collectivity and representing it first of all to itself rather than to a white or “general” public. As he explained in I Wonder as I Wander, “I wrote about Negroes, and primarily for Negroes.” In so doing, Hughes experimented with what poetry is and what it can do, as he searched for genres to represent black people to black people as a group in a way that might create and sustain optimism about fighting white supremacy and the poverty it created. In what Fred Moten might call the ongoing “improvisational discovery” of his black studies Hughes confronted basic questions about the very possibility of poetry and politics, and affirmed the necessity of a political poetry and a poetic politics. Hughes looked for ways to give voice to “whole groups of people’s problems” by making
poetry that defied what people expected of poetry, borrowing from the blues and other “low-down” forms, and then, later, by creating a blues-inflected black communist voice, a Leninist blues. Throughout it all, despite the failures and the mishaps and the relentlessness of the violence and humiliations of a white supremacist capitalism, Hughes never gave up on finding ways to “think about feeling good, to make disparate aspects of feeling good thinkable,” as Michael Snediker puts it. Hughes’s optimism was, in this sense, a queer optimism, one that was not based on a belief in progress or other given normative modes of attachment to the world like the family, but on ways of finding, creating, and valuing moments of group joy in the present, even if it was the modest, ambivalent joy of laughing to keep from crying."
JONATHAN FLATLEY'S Like Andy Warhol presents a compelling alternative to the preconceived concept... more JONATHAN FLATLEY'S Like Andy Warhol presents a compelling alternative to the preconceived conception of Warhol as a cold, crass materialist making a!rmative icons to bolster transcendent, glamorous, consumer identification. Flatley instead shows Warhol thinking through ways to approach and share in the feelings of loss, failure, and disidentification that the United States's glossy consumerist iconography generates. Paradoxically, Warhol opened up affective pathways through liking rather than
Dieser Vortrag greift eine Schlüsselepisode aus der Geschichte der amerikanischen Bürgerrechtsbew... more Dieser Vortrag greift eine Schlüsselepisode aus der Geschichte der amerikanischen Bürgerrechtsbewegung und der Arbeitskämpfe der 1960er Jahre auf und untersucht sie am Leitfaden einer medienwissenschaftlichen Fragestellung. Den Ausgangspunkt bildet die Frage, weshalb die Arbeiterbewegung Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (kurz DRUM) 1968 allein durch die Publikation einer bescheidenen Hauszeitung mit so viel Erfolg die Arbeiter in der Automobilindustrie in Detroit mobilisieren konnte. Am Beispiel von DRUM und der Gruppe, die sich daraus entwickelte – der League of Revolutionary Black Workers – untersucht dieser Beitrag, was nach der Gründung eines revolutionären Kollektivs geschieht. Wie kann eine revolutionäre Stimmung hergestellt und, wenn sie sich einmal eingestellt hat, am Leben erhalten werden? Wie hält ein solches Kollektiv sich selbst am Leben, wie erneuert es sich? Ich werde die Herangehensweise der League an die Aufgabe, eine kollektive revolutionär Stimmung zu schaffen un...
Afterimage, Sep 1, 2002
In his 1974 song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron sings of the ways that the... more In his 1974 song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron sings of the ways that the dominant genres of television (the news, the soap opera, the commercial, the sitcom, etc.) prevent any oppositional political content from being represented there. In his view, ...
South Atlantic Quarterly
This interview documents an email exchange between Susan Buck-Morss, Jonathan Flatley, and Helen ... more This interview documents an email exchange between Susan Buck-Morss, Jonathan Flatley, and Helen Petrovsky on the occasion of the publication of Buck-Morss’s Revolution Today.
Chelovek
This essay describes the powerful effects of my encounter with Valery Podoroga, emphasizing not o... more This essay describes the powerful effects of my encounter with Valery Podoroga, emphasizing not only Podoroga’s interest in mimesis, but also his own capacity for mimetic openness. It begins autobiographically, recounting Podoroga’s lecture on Andrei Platonov’s “Eunuch of the Soul” at a conference at Duke University in 1990. I discuss Podoroga’s description of the “unknown parabolas” that characterize the experience of reading Platonov. In this understanding, reading pulls us through a parabola away from and then back to ourselves according to a path created by the form of the text itself. Hearing Podoroga speak that day alerted me to a shared interest in the affective power of reading, but it also described my own experience of hearing Podoroga: I was taken out of myself and returned through an “unknown parabola” to a different self, set on a new trajectory, one that happily brought me into the orbit of his sector at the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow. The second half of the...
Textual Practice
This is a review of Ben Highmore's smart, incisive, helpful *Cultural Feelings* book, which has o... more This is a review of Ben Highmore's smart, incisive, helpful *Cultural Feelings* book, which has outstanding analyses of Raymond Williams on "structures of feeling" and Heidegger on Stimmung. I like this book a lot!
WE ALL KNOW THAT WE have feelings when we encounter works of art. We laugh, we cry. We feel pity ... more WE ALL KNOW THAT WE have feelings when we encounter works of art. We laugh, we cry. We feel pity and fear. We like and we dislike. We shudder and shiver and tingle. We are amused . . .
Literary /Liberal Entanglements: Toward A Literary History for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Corrinne Carol and Mark Simpson, 2017
This essay follows up on an an earlier one (“How A Revolutionary Counter-Mood is Made”) consider... more This essay follows up on an an earlier one (“How A Revolutionary Counter-Mood is Made”) considering the success of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (or DRUM) in organizing workers in 1968 into a revolutionary collective through the publication and circulation of a modest shop-floor newspaper. Still working with DRUM and the group that grew out of it -- the League of Revolutionary Black Workers – this essay examines what happens after that initial formation of a revolutionary collective. How can a revolutionary counter-mood, once awakened, be maintained? How does such a collective sustain and refresh itself? In order to see how DRUM and then the League engage in the project of mobilizing and refreshing the mood of the newly formed collective, the essay examines two texts that represent distinct attempts to move a collective and to affect the political mood. The first of these is a handbill calling for a strike. The second is the well-known film Finally Got the News, which the League made in 1969 and 1970, in collaboration with the radical film collective Newsreel.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The “Kracauer Lectures in Film and Media Theory” pay tribute to the Frankfurt-born philosopher, s... more The “Kracauer Lectures in Film and Media Theory” pay tribute to the Frankfurt-born philosopher, sociologist, and writer Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966), one of the 20th Century’s most influential thinkers in the fields of film and media theory. At the same time, the title of the series refers to the role that Frankfurt and its university played in founding the critical reflection on film and technical media in the 20th Century.
The goal of the series is to present innovative contemporary scholarship on film and media from the fields of film and media studies, art history, cultural studies, and aesthetic philosophy. Moreover, the lecture series aims to contribute to the development and expansion of the fields of film and media studies, the most rapidly growing humanities disciplines in Germany.
The legacy that the Kracauer lectures receives from their namesake includes a perspective on film as an occasion and object of thought at the borders of cultural and social theory and an intuition that film and even all technological image-based media do not simply represent social relations, but increasingly shape and structure them. In accordance with this intuition and in keeping pace with current developments in film and media studies in Germany and beyond, the series opens up beyond aesthetic positions to include perspectives from the study of science, theories of technology, cultural and media economics, and political theory.
Finally, by honoring Kracauer, the series also honors a theorist who was at the same time a critic. Jean Starobinski noted that the task of criticism in relation to theory consisted in opposing the grey monotony of theory in favor of a sense for the work's inconsistency and its transgression of rules. Starobinski further noted that criticism itself has to turn into a work, taking on all the risks that that implies (“se faire œuvre elle-même et courir les risques de l’œuvre”). Rather than reducing the work to an example of a theoretical position, Kracauer mastered the art of developing theory out of the work and thereby of actively engaging with its risks. The contributions to the “Kracauer Lectures” will continue in this tradition.
All contributions are available as podcasts for free download at www.kracauer-lectures.de
Like Andy Warhol is inspired by Warhol’s avowed effort to like things, indeed to “like everything... more Like Andy Warhol is inspired by Warhol’s avowed effort to like things, indeed to “like everything” and “like everybody.” It argues that for Warhol, “liking things” was a project to be pursued, involving abilities that could be nurtured and educated. I understand liking less as a discrete emotion than an elemental attraction, the most basic positive feeling one can have, a readiness to pay attention to something and be affected by it. As such, it is also an implicit affirmation of that thing’s existence. A chief claim of this book is that Warhol’s impressive commitment to liking constitutes a coherent organizing principle running through his enormous and diverse body of work. In so doing, I suggest an alternative to a certain commonsense view that understands his art (and its machine-like use of repetition, for instance) as a defense against being affected. Instead, Like Andy Warhol presents Warhol’s liking as a praxis, a de-instrumentalized affective labor, which aimed to engage and transform the world in a context where (as Warhol put it) “it would be so much easier not to care.” I argue that Warhol’s primary method for pursuing liking as a project was an inventive and varied production of and attention to ways of being, acting and looking alike, which is both experientially and conceptually distinct from being equal or identical. Accordingly, Like Andy Warhol examines Warhol’s efforts to produce similarities and draw our attention to them across the range of his work. Although liking things, never mind liking everything and everybody, is an unexpected, almost scandalous, project to set for oneself, I think it makes most sense if we understand it not primarily as a provocation, but as offering what José Muñoz (borrowing from Ernst Bloch) called an “anticipatory illumination” of a world that did not (and does not) yet exist, a world that was appealing to the extent that it promised to repair the inadequacies, injuries, and losses that mar this one. Along these lines, this book is also concerned with the critical, intersectional examination of race. The book’s final chapter (“Skin Problems”), examines Warhol’s response to Jim Crow’s production of reified categories of racial difference to promote dislike by focusing on Warhol’s representation of skin and skin color, especially in relation to the use of photography by the civil rights movement. In a number of works (including his “Race Riot” paintings, his serial celebrity portraits and his 1974 paintings of black and Latinx drag queens), I argue, Warhol addresses the mediation of skin and skin color as a kind of “racial technology” (to borrow from Wendy Chun and others), a way of creating and reinforcing racial difference as a relation.