An Ode to Chomsky
A 'personal essay' on dichotomies like decadence vs. health, particularity vs. universality, subjectivity vs. objectivity, and misanthropy vs. 'philanthropy,' which uses Noam Chomsky as a symbol of the 'positive' side of these dichotomies and a device to help us avoid the negative. It's important to reject misanthropy and (generally speaking) decadence. Along the way are thoughts on intellectuals, postmodernism, empiricism, left-wing intolerance, etc.
Pier Paolo Pasolini Interviewed by Enzo Biagi for the Italian television network RAI on July 27, 1971
A 1971 interview with a pessimistic Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which he discusses consumer society, the emptiness of success, television as an authoritarian mass medium, eroticism, the conformism of the intellectuals, and his enigmatic relation with the Gospel.
Corsair Writings - Pier Paolo Pasolini
A collection of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial articles and interviews from 1973-1975 on the “anthropological revolution” that transformed Italy during the 1960s and early 1970s, with its “development without progress”, “consumerist hedonism”, “false tolerance”, mass culture, impoverishment of language, neurosis, destruction of traditional peasant cultures (“cultural genocide”), “strategy of tension”, and phony anti-fascism, signaling the decline of the old fascism and the rise of a new, “permissive” fascism, a “Power without a face” that is the “worst kind of totalitarianism”.
Against the Logic of Submission - Wolfi Landstreicher
A series of essays investigating the role of social relationships.
Stupefaction – Encyclopédie des Nuisances
A 1985 article denouncing the fake “communication” disseminated by the mass media of our time that is really nothing but a unilateral flood of “information” or “socially harmful noise” in which nothing is called by its real name, as a force of stupefaction and for the creation of well-informed ignorance, where, amidst the generalized falsification of reality, “a view of the whole can never be formed”, and even self-evident truths “dissolve in the surrounding cacophony” in which they recede into the distance of unverifiable hypotheses, as exemplified in the endless media speculation concerning the Moro kidnapping.
International Council Correspondence Volume 2, Number 12
International Council Correspondence, Vol. 2, no. 12, November 1936
International Council Correspondence Volume 2, Number 7
International Council Correspondence, Vol. 2, no. 7, June 1936
The responsibility of intellectuals - Dwight Macdonald
In the April 1945 edition of politics, Dwight Macdonald took aim at the collective-guilt mentality as embodied in one of his favorite targets among liberal intellectuals, Max Lerner. The article also affords a prime sample of Macdonald's wry, satiric writing style.
The ignorance of the society of knowledge - Robert Kurz
A short 2002 article by Robert Kurz on the hype about the information society, with its “knowledge degraded into ‘information’”, its dystopian implications with regard to culture and individual integrity, and its disappointingly meager impact on the economy (Marx: knowledge has “no exchange value”), which it was supposed to rejuvenate (“the New Economy … began to collapse as soon as it was proclaimed”).
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