The Third One Rises

A review of Mike Wayne’s Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism,and the Third Critique written for Marx & Philosophy Review of Books.

In the late 1970s when Antonio Negri found himself imprisoned on trumped up charges, he turned to Spinoza. In a context of the defeat of the autonomous movements of the time, Spinoza helped Negri find a new way forward in thinking politics and collective subjectivity. Nearly 40 years later Mike Wayne has written a book arguing for understanding Kant as an important precursor of Marxist theory. Wayne thus proposes to rescue Kant’s aesthetic theories from the confines of bourgeois interpretations, as well as from competing Kantian-Marxist formulations, both of which he argues fail to appreciate the way that Kant’s Third Critique is a significant break from his earlier work, rather than merely a logical continuation of it.

Now is the only place where things can actually happen: an interview with Joe McPhee

Recently I interviewed legendary free jazz saxophonist Joe McPhee at Café Oto for the first issue of Cesura // Acceso. McPhee has been recording and performing for over forty-five years, playing both as a solo artist and in an impressive number of collaborative units including Peter Brötzmann’s Tentet and The Thing. In particular I wanted to ask him about his approach to collaboration and the politics of music and improvisation. Here are some excerpts from that interview

Survival Unit III @ Cafe Oto

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Stevphen Shukaitis: The first thing I wanted to ask you about is collaboration. How do you approach collaboration, not just in terms of particular projects, but in the way projects affect your approach to music more generally?

Joe McPhee: I really like a lot of what different people do, people whose music I really appreciate. But collaboration, it starts with a real personal kind of relationship. For example I’ve played for long time with a guitarist in France, Raymond Boni. I was in a trio with Raymond Boni and Andre Jaume. I’ve had a long time relationship with another trio in the States called Trio X; we’ve been going on now about fifteen years, it’s been almost ten years with Survival Unit III. And each one brings a different perspective to the music; different instrumentation. Tonight you’ll hear Fred Lonberg-Holm with the cello and the electronics.