By Wes Tirey · Friday, July 13, 2012 Brad Prager’s article “Offending the Public: Handke, Herzog, Hypnosis” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
Wes Tirey: Can you tell us about how your article explores the question of the “public sphere”?
 Brad Prager: My essay was intended as an indirect engagement with questions concerning the public sphere. It offers a perspective on the work of author-artists Werner Herzog and Peter Handke, and I’ve chosen the term “author-artist” despite the fact that Herzog is, of course, best known as a film director. I’d like, at least in this contribution to Telos, to view this early part of Herzog’s career a little bit differently and see him as also a product of German art and literature of the 1970s, a time and place in which authors tended to be politically engaged, but also simultaneously influenced by German Modernism and discourses of aesthetic autonomy. Those two elements interact in an interesting way in the 1970s, and something like Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small, which deals with revolution, is quite Modernist and can almost be described as avant-garde. It is a good example of how those tendencies come together. In the background of the essay is Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, which was an influential and provocative book. Central to the piece is the question: how can an artist critique the public’s engagement with art, or how do you turn art into something critical and politically incisive, when it is immediately subject to appropriation, and may already have a cynical position built into it? Handke was trying to reshape the stage with his innovative plays, Kaspar and Offending the Audience. The latter of the two gives the essay its title; I’m toying with the sound of the term “Offensive Aesthetics,” advocated here, and Öffentlichkeit, the German term meaning “public sphere.”
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By Casey Servais · Thursday, July 12, 2012 Casey Servais’s “‘A Certain Light, But Only a Juridical Light’: The Legal Aesthetics of Thomas Bernhard’s The Lime Works” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
Taking Thomas Bernhard’s 1970 novel The Lime Works as an exemplar of a group of post-World War II German and Austrian literary works that mimic identifiable genres of legal writing, this article offers two alternative theoretical models for making sense of the prevalence of legal-literary genre-mixing in postwar German-language literature. Viewed through the lens of Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, the literary imitation of legal styles appears as an instance of “mimesis of the lethal,” the process by which artworks both adapt to and resist what Adorno calls “reification.” Viewed through the alternative lens of Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, the literary use of legal styles can be seen as a way of partially reconciling modernity’s specialized discourses (such as science, art, and law) by uncovering the “tortuous routes” along which these discourses communicate with one another. Through a mixture of theory and formal analysis, the article offers both a new reading of Bernhard’s work and a new set of theoretical approaches that may prove fruitful to the study of
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By Frederick H. Pitts · Tuesday, July 10, 2012 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Frederick H. Pitts looks at Salvatore Veca’s “Value, Labor, and the Critique of Political Economy” from Telos 9 (Fall 1971).
Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
—Karl Marx, Capital
 Salvatore Veca’s 1971 essay “Value, Labor, and the Critique of Political Economy” summarizes the treatment of contained and required labor in Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. Most interesting is the manner in which Veca temporalizes this distinction in political economy. He draws our attention to the opposition between past labor and present, dead labor and living; namely, “the dominance of past, materialized, accumulated labor over immediate, living labor”:
Starting from the analysis of the typical character of labor, it is possible to reconstruct towards the surface of the system the progressive stratifications and determinations of a totality which must, however, be traced back to its base, i.e., to that unequal exchange which contaminates the world of commodities and which reveals the class violence, the elementary mechanism of exploitation, and the dominance of dead labor over living labor.
Veca presents the same temporal picture of past and present labor that moved Marx to crisscross Capital with a metaphorical cast of ghostly manifestations, vampires, and the undead. Veca’s paper suggests the extent to which Marx’s range of metaphors is no mere literary conceit, but rather it is a key feature of fundamental theoretical nodes in his critique of political economy. As we shall see, the specter of dead labor has deeper conceptual foundations in Marx’s forerunners, but this idea also has contemporary relevance with reference to present-day philosophical trends.
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By Daniel Purdy · Monday, July 9, 2012 Daniel Purdy’s “Media and Architecture at the Birth of the Public Sphere” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This article examines the policy discussion surrounding the concept of “the European city.” This innocuous phrase has become a source of considerable concern among urban planners, architects, and sociologists because “the European city” is consistently described as under siege by the economics of globalization and new media technology. At stake is an idealized experience of urbanity that is closely associated with the history of European civilization, the emergence of liberal democracy, personal freedoms, and the market economy as a localized exchange that could be regulated by the state. Despite these modern connotations, the ideal type of this European city is medieval, wherein well-preserved historic buildings are aligned along irregular streets open only to pedestrians. The type of building that today is considered typical of the European city predates the Enlightenment and most certainly has little in common with industrialization.
The notion of the “European city” has a two-faced relation to globalization: on the one hand, the many economic, political and cultural relations that join cities together into the European market system constitute one of the large-scale networks of the global economy that historians can trace back to the height of the Middle Ages; on the other, the term is invoked today in order to draw a boundary and insist on a distinction so as to preserve a quality that is considered fundamentally European. This distinctly urban character is associated with public spaces that foster democratic institutions. Since the Middle Ages, the argument runs, European cities have been designed to preserve openly accessible forums for democratic politics and capitalist exchange. The preservation of European democracy is therefore often correlated with the maintenance of these urban places. I argue that the successful use of urban centers for politics and exchanges always also depends on the existence of small isolated spaces cut off from the general population. For urban public spaces to accomplish their political and economic ends, they have always required their antithesis, the exclusive private room. Nowhere is this juxtaposition more important than in the Enlightenment institution of the public sphere.
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By Loren Kruger · Thursday, July 5, 2012 Loren Kruger’s “Literary? Public? Proletarian: Öffentlichkeit and Erfahrung among the Haymarket Martyrs” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This article uses Negt and Kluge’s conception of proletarian Öffentlichkeit or public spheres and practices as a point of departure for analysis the writing and speeches of the social activists who were tried and executed for anarchism and other crimes against law and order after the Haymarket incident in Chicago in 1886. This analysis includes contextual commentary on the Great Chicago Fire, the contribution of Germans and other immigrants to socialist agitation in the United States and thus to the practice of tactical cosmopolitan and transnational culture, and the legacy of the Haymarket for current critics of capitalism from the Industrial Workers of the World to the Occupy Movement.
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By Frederick Wertz · Wednesday, July 4, 2012 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Frederick Wertz looks at Luigi Marco Bassani’s “Jefferson, Calhoun and States’ Rights: The Uneasy Europeanization of American Politics,” from Telos 114 (Winter 1999).
 In an enlightening piece, Luigi Marco Bassani reopens the door on an all-too-closed chapter of American political discourse: states’ rights. He poses a question that he sees to be the crux of one of the most permanent issues in American history: “In 1776, did the thirteen colonies separate themselves from Great Britain collectively or singularly?” This question, regarding the role of the Federal government in American society, was the essence of American politics for nearly a century. Though political debate and war in the 19th century resulted in an irreversible consolidation of federal power, the issue still crops up in the American political ethos during times of crisis or extreme polarization. Bassani usefully highlights the two most important proponents of states’ rights, Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun.
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