Update on Working Group Activities and Plans (Fall 2024)
Written by: J. E. Morain
Dialectics is the quest to see the new in the old
Adorno, Against Epistemology
This update has been due for some time! We concluded our Summer 2024 reading group session on Dialectic of Enlightenment all the way back in July, and it is now October. (Recordings of these sessions are still being uploaded to our Patreon, where they are—and always will be—available for free.) In the meantime, we migrated to a new website engineered by our webmaster and resident dialectical biology enthusiast Anatarah. Most of our effort, however, has been directed towards producing the first issue of our journal, which after much deliberation we have christened Margin Notes: A Journal of Critical Theory.
The first volume, entitled Kernels of Early Critical Theory, will be appearing shortly in November. It will be available on our website for free in both HTML and PDF formats. The essays contained in the volume spawned from the Fall/Winter 2023 session of the reading groups and are largely centered around the subjects we covered then, i.e. early critical theory in general and the Frankfurt School’s work in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung during the 1930s in particular. The process of writing and editing these essays has been long and arduous for all of us, but we believe the finished product will constitute a valuable contribution to the understanding of early Critical Theory. We originally planned on including some translations in this volume, but for various reasons this was deemed unfeasible for the time being. Our current plan is to release the translations originally intended for the journal through our blog following the publication of the first volume of Margin Notes.
(Speaking of the blog, astute readers may have noticed that, the new website notwithstanding, it has been devoid of updates for the past several months. This, too, we intend to remedy: a couple new texts from members of the editorial board will be posted in the coming weeks, and—fingers crossed—a more regular stream of essays, notes, and translations will follow. We also intend to open the blog to submissions from the public once we release the first volume of the journal and draw up editorial guidelines.)
All of the work on the journal has necessitated delaying the Fall 2024 session to Winter 2024/2025 at the earliest. We both apologize for this holdup and refuse to commit ourselves to any more exact timeframe. As mentioned in our previous communiqué, this next session will cover texts related to the specifically social-scientific aspects of Critical Theory: political economy, geography, social psychology, history of science, etc. As with the Fall/Winter 2023 session, the chronological focus will be on the 1930s.
Other projects, such as a podcast, are still on the backburner for now. We hope that by finishing 2024 strong we can set ourselves up for a productive 2025.