Public - Volume 28, Issue 55, 2017

In order to address the political melancholia and negativity that beset the left, a new type of political pop song must be devised. This manifesto proposes a form of dance-pop that is conceived as a new sort of therapy, designed to combat the atomized, individualized way in which suffering is encountered under neoliberal capitalism. The description of political melancholy and neoliberal subjectivity is drawn from the work of Wendy Brown, Lauren Berlant, Nina Power and Alenka Zupančič. The new, political pop song will have five key characteristics: it will be tragic; it will be affirmative, rather than a song of protest; it will be anthemic and upbeat; it will be in a lyric mode but it will be about collective experiences; and it will spread online virally, via new media.

Contemporary critics from both left and right bemoan the rise in attention deficit as one of the pathological manifestations of society’s increasing speed and alienation. This essay attends to the ways in which deficit may inhere in the person demanding that attention be paid. How is life in common dependent upon certain forms of attention, and what can be gained from shifting the term “deficit”?

‘The Unknown Student’ examines the history and legacy of the titular sculpture produced at Rochdale College (1968–1975), Toronto’s infamous experiment in alternative education and communal living.

This interview with writer, filmmaker and activist Astra Taylor explores her recent work with Strike Debt and the role of art and culture in political movements.

Andrea Bowers’s drawings elaborate a piecemeal, meticulously drawn iconography of protest. Photographs and documents of emancipatory political struggle from different periods and places are reworked by hand, in something approaching an act of salvage.

In light of the long and complex histories of art’s engagement with the political, and the many and various modes of reciprocity devised along the way, what does it mean to be preoccupied with images of political action? To ask as much is to begin to address the complex ways in which such images intersect with and shape processes of political identification and affiliation, and the desire for political agency. Moreover, it is to speculate upon how renewed efforts of political imagination are informed by the often-obscure histories of collective action. What attachments or detachment are played out in these drawings? What choreographies of binding and unbinding are traced in these lines?

Under the guise of national and international capital flows, Vancouverites are reconstituted in the image of real estate speculation. This emerging subjectivity is a lens through which homelessness is criminalized, poverty is rationalized, and disruption is fetishized. This photo-essay steps into this gaze, offering a critical perspective on the transformation of housing from a discourse of rights to the language of finance.

This comparative reading of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and Terence Davies’ film adaptation (2000) examines how different media make visible inequities of exchange and belie ideals of collectivity and democracy.

This interview with Angela Mitropoulos explores contemporary questions of migration, border control, financial speculation, critical theory and political practice. Mitropoulos is a political theorist, academic and activist based in Sydney, Australia, whose work has examined shifts to post-Fordism and neoliberalism through a critical history of the contract and in relation to the shifting politics of the household. The interview also addresses her recent work, in her capacities as both an academic and an activist, which continues to confront the complex and evolving relationships between political economy, border control, and critical theory.

In June 2015, the Banff Research in Culture’s residents contemplated their involvement in a participatory and socially engaged art project in Banff Centre. This article considers this discussion in light of recent contemporary art practices in the public realm, and briefly highlights some of the main theoretical debates circulating at this time.

This piece explores the recent transformations undertaken by the rock band Roch Commune, which in its most recent incarnation has found itself moving past cultural production per se and towards a diversity of entrepreneurial, tactical media practices. The paper discusses the group’s origins and justifies their current course of action.

This piece explores the recent transformations undertaken by the rock band Roch Commune, which in its most recent incarnation has found itself moving past cultural production per se and towards a diversity of entrepreneurial, tactical media practices. The paper discusses the group’s origins and justifies their current course of action.

Emerging social and political movements are challenging the violence perpetrated by capital’s exploitation of the planet’s resources. Yet, a collective response requires a re-imagining of this systemic exploitation through new representative forms. Incorporating creative-research sound experiments, this article suggests that rhythm, understood in a broad, material sense, provides a starting point for the project of reimaging environmental representation.

A discussion between British philosopher, writer and activist, Nina Power, and Australian artist and writer, Catherine Ryan, about topics including: writing as a praxis; the political capacity of the polemical form; the politics of debate; the need to return to grand, structural terms for socio-political analysis; the role of the public intellectual; the effects of the Internet on the role of the public intellectual; and the relation between art and politics.

This introduction provides historical context for a selection of poems by the relatively unknown writer, James R. Louden. The introduction focuses on the poet’s promotion social justice and affordable housing in the resort town of Canmore, Alberta, where he resides. His poems place current revolutionary impulses on a continuum with analogous moments in recent and classical history.

This video references Wandering Marxwards by Michael Blum. It is a travelogue of somebody arriving at a research university trying to find his position. Accompanying his journey is Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, published almost 100 years ago.

This essay offers a critique of a set of responses to neoliberalism that emphasize liberal democracy and class solidary (worker identity) as the paramount sites today for productive collective struggle and creation of democratic life. Drawing on the insights of Indigenous critical theory and Afro-pessimist theory, I argue that theories of liberal democracy and worker-centered struggle fail to consider how the colonial antagonisms Indigeneity and Blackness continue not only to underpin neoliberal forms of exploitation and dispossession but to overdetermine how we conceptualize and organize our struggles for genuine forms of democratic life. To create genuine forms of democratic life we must conceptualize and build struggles not around points of convergence among differentially positioned groups in capitalism, but around the antagonisms that make democratic social belonging impossible in the first place. This requires that we confront the colonial antagonisms that remain with us today in the structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism.

The article is about the band Bday Pres, and about their shows and them sort of getting the embarrassment out of the way for everyone else.

This article draws on a sample of do-it-yourself (DIY) engagement projects created by citizens leading up to the 2015 federal election to illustrate the myriad of ways Canadians used participatory politics and cultural production to assert new forms agency in the 2015 federal election. Drawing on my own election-related field study, Creative Publics, as well as the literature on citizenship studies and participatory politics, I explore the possibility of a significant shift in Canadian political culture towards a more expressive, critical and potentially transformative approach to political engagement.

Kit Dobson is an Associate Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary where he works on Canadian literature, film, and art. He is the author of Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (2009), which tracks the development of globalization in Canadian literature. He is also the editor or co-editor of three more books: Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (2013), Transnationalism, Activism, Art (with Áine McGlynn, 2013), and Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (with Smaro Kamboureli, 2013). More recent work looks at the intersection of neoliberal governance and literary practice. In this interview, we discuss the political potentials of literature in a thickly material field, asking how it circulates amidst calls for social justice, how it helps code and decode spatial stability, and how it helps us map the effects and affects of global pressures on the individual subject.