By Arthur C. T. Strum · Thursday, July 26, 2012 Arthur C. T. Strum’s “The Politics of ‘Theory’ in a Late Twentieth-Century University: A Memoir” 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.
 In this essay, I explore my own experience as an undergraduate of two formations. One of these formations might be called “liberal pedagogy,” by which I mean something which its practitioners do not in the rule consciously profess, but which underlies their everyday practice, in and out of the classroom. The other formation is what denizens of the American university have for the past thirty years commonly called “theory,” whose adherents tended to define themselves against what they saw and see as the self-deceptions of liberal thought. I contend, against both the “theorists” and the university’s liberal defenders, that liberal pedagogy is in fact deeply political—far more profound, politically, than most “theory,” which tends not to get very far beyond what it thinks it contests: the structuring prejudices of present-day civil society. But I also try to show that the inclination towards “theory” has its own political profundity—whose ultimate implications, however, are ambiguous.
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By Katharina Gerstenberger · Monday, July 23, 2012 Katharina Gerstenberger’s “The Public Intellectual as Survivor: The Cases of Josef Haslinger and Kathrin Röggla” 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.
 The article contrasts recent works by the Austrian writers Josef Haslinger and Kathrin Röggla, both of whom have made names for themselves as political and cultural commentators, about their respective experiences of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand and the 9/11 attacks in New York City. Titled Phi Phi Island (2007), Haslinger’s narrative is a personal yet highly self-reflective account of his survival. His overarching concern is the coincidence of survival and the challenge this poses to his self-identity as an engaged author who believes his work to be politically meaningful. Röggla, whose life, unlike Haslinger’s, was not in immediate danger, chronicles the unfolding public response to the attacks through comments she collected from a variety of interlocutors in New York City as well as from television. The division between the public and the private, which for Haslinger remains central, becomes obsolete in Röggla’s really ground zero (2001). Her expressed inability to transform her experience into a coherent narrative is symptomatic of her fragmented text. In the end, both authors must acknowledge that surviving a catastrophe is an assault on private as well as public subject positions, forcing them to rethink from where and how cultural critique can be launched.
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By Jeffrey S. Librett · Monday, July 16, 2012 Jeffrey S. Librett’s “Historicist Orientalism as a Public Absolute: on Herder’s Typo-teleology” 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.
After the Enlightenment attempted to replace the revealed public absolute with a self-grounding universal rationality, an attempt the Counterenlightenment charged with arbitrariness, the historicist discourse tried to establish the narrative of the origin and development of culture as a public, objective absolute that escapes this critique. In this narrative, the Orient functioned as a fetish of origin subserving the disavowal of the lack of grounding that the Enlightenment had introduced. In historicist Orientalism, the Occident appropriated this alien origin by applying the logic of medieval typology—hitherto the principal model for the supersession of Judaism by Christianity—to the Oriental-Occidental relation in general. Historicist Orientalism constituted a typological teleology to assert the supersession of East by West as a quasi-secularized, objective, public absolute. In the anxiety-inducing metaphysical void of modernity, the story of culture provided an “orientation” that revelation failed to deliver. Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1784-91) was one of the most important inaugural instances of this historicist Orientalism in the German tradition. The essay retraces the outlines of the problematic logic through which Herder recounted the passage from the origins of culture in Asia to their Western appropriation. Situating the Jews as the realization of the Oriental prefiguration, Herder’s discourse provides an exemplary version of the passage from the Judaeo-Christian application of typology to its Orientalist generalization and secularization.
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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 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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