Woodbine

On Monday the 20th we will host a discussion with Paul Chan on "Content". Doors at 6, event at 6:30pm. 414 Broadway, 3rd Floor. Elevator and air conditioning.

Creative work online is more likely than not being scraped right now as training material for machine-learning models. Once trained on enough data, models are capable of regenerating that work as “content.” “Content” is a euphemism for a species of expression that doesn’t rely on concepts like “quality” or “meaning” to differentiate itself. The way content stands apart aesthetically is simply by its capacity to be created at scale. The fact that the term “content industry” is well on its way to replacing “entertainment industry” as the preferred descriptor for movies and television studios is telling. The best of culture is here synonymous with the sheer amount of it. The more, the better. Whether it is machines that are doing the making, or people who toil like machines, is a distinction without a difference. Are all forms of expression simply "content" today? If not, what distinguishes an expression from *not* being "content"? Who benefits from transforming the intellectual, aesthetic, physical, and emotional labor it takes to make expressions into scalable, algorithmic means of production? It was once argued that forms that could be technologically replicated were instrumental for human cultural flourishing. I'm thinking of the novel (17th century onward), photography (19th century onward), film/video (20th century and on). Can the case still be made today, now that the very means to make expressions are as replicable and scalable as the expressions themselves? Are there any benefits to expressions that do not scale? If so, what are they? If not, why not? What does the dimension of "scalability" do (if anything) to the color, quality, and receptivity of what is being expressed?

READINGS:
--"Content: A Postmortem" - Paul Chan, 2026: https://tinyurl.com/uwnn59yu
--"The Psychology of Your AI Self-Portrait" - Paul Chan, 2025: https://www.frieze.com/article/paul-chan-ai-253
--"Ars :: Longa" - Paul Chan, 2024
--"Machina Aesthetica: Impressions on Art in and out of the Machine Age" - Paul Chan, 2024

On Saturday July 18th, come celebrate America 250 with a free screening by one of the great American revolutionary filmmakers. We will present Robert Kramer’s Route One/USA (1989, 254 minutes), introduced by Whitney Strub, author of the new book Films That Explode Like Grenades: Robert Kramer and the Search for a Radical Cinema (University of Chicago Press). Doors at 4:30pm, screening at 5pm. 414 Broadway, 3rd Floor. Elevator and air conditioning.

After helping create Newsreel, the agitprop wing of the 1960s New Left, and directing Ice (1970) – the U.S. answer to Battle of Algiers (1966) that anticipated the Weather Underground – a disillusioned Robert Kramer moved to France and abandoned the radical Sixties dream. Route One/USA marked his return after a decade away, traversing the Atlantic seaboard from the tip of Maine to the edge of Key West.

In his early notes, Kramer imagined “a portrait of a cultural wasteland, of su***de and destruction,” marked by “killers psychopaths saints.” Yet what he found in many ways inspired a more humanistic portrait than the scathing critic had planned: evangelical Christians with apocalyptic fears, but also working-class immigrants, transgender s*x workers, people with AIDS, an entire community at a Bridgeport, Connecticut soup kitchen. Is Route One a redemptive national story of the resilience of marginalized people? A tale of contradictions overt and hidden? A ghost story lamenting the absence of the mass left that shaped Kramer’s earlier politics? Shooting in “docu-fiction” style with an invented protagonist, Doc (Paul McIsaac, star of Ice and Doc’s Kingdom), and unscripted interactions with real people, Kramer never weighs in didactically, taking a national pulse but leaving it on us as viewers to make the ultimate diagnosis.

The film is 254 minutes, and will be presented in two parts with a brief intermission.

Join us on Tuesday July 14th for a screening of Lebanese filmmaker Maroun Bagdadi's We are All for the Fatherland (1979, 74 minutes), presented by documentary filmmaker Malek Rasamny. Doors at 7, screening at 7:30pm. 414 Broadway, 3rd Floor.

“We are All for the Fatherland” is both a glimpse into the early work of one of Lebanon’s best directors, as well as an incredible document from a time in Lebanese history that bears a striking resemblance to the present. This film explores the south of Lebanon in the aftermath of what would be Israel’s first, but far from last, large-scale invasion of Lebanon, 1978’s Operation Litani. Bagdadi's film gives the audience a window into what life was like during the early years of the Lebanese Civil War (1975- 1991), featuring interviews with to***co farmers, Shia clerics, members of the collaborationist South Lebanese Army, and footage of leaders of the leftist Lebanese National Movement, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

“We are All for the Fatherland” was made just a few years before the creation of what would become Hezbollah in 1982, as well as the signing of the May 17 agreement of 1983, between Lebanon and Israel. This is often compared to the U.S.–Lebanon–Israel Trilateral Framework Agreement, signed just this month, making this film especially relevant in the context of the decisive historical moment Lebanon is living through -- with the Israeli invasion of the country’s south, the push to disarm Hezbollah, and the potentially unprecedented cooperation between Lebanon’s government and that of Israel.

Read "A Bildungsroman and a Research Agenda" by ABS: https://open.substack.com/pub/woodbinenyc/p/a-bildungsroman-and-a-research-agenda

“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.”
– T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, 1942

I came to New York City in 2018 partly for a narrow professional reason – to pursue a PhD in Philosophy – but also with a broader, more inchoate set of political aspirations. My political outlook was at once incredibly well-developed, while at the same time it was undeniably immature. Well-developed, in that it was historically and emotionally rich, wide in its theoretical sources, and the product of a deep existential commitment. Immature in that itsformative context was a deeply felt loneliness, born out of a specific immigrant history and the need to form an identity on social media platforms. I came long on reading lists and references, and short on real-world connections.

For this week's podcast episode, Amogh and Matt are joined by Ross Wolfe to discuss Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. https://www.patreon.com/woodbine/posts/51-hegemony-and-162807979

We talk about the text's deconstructist take on hegemony, and their post-structuralist reclamation of Gramsci and Althusser. We reflect on the legacy of Post-Marxism in the period prior to the rise of millennial socialism.

READINGS:
--"Socialist Strategy: Where Next?" - Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, 1981: https://ftp.unz.com/PDF/PERIODICAL/MarxismToday-1981jan/19-25/
--"Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics" - Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, 1985: https://tinyurl.com/ycxtz8up
--"Against Losurdo" - Ross Wolfe, 2025: https://www.newintermag.com/against-losurdo/

Ross Wolfe is a Marxist and a high school history teacher.

Please join us next Wednesday the 8th for “Rage and Defiance in Revolutionary Syria”, a conversation between Loubna Mrie and Anand Gopal moderated by Malek Rasamny. Doors at 6:30pm, event at 7pm. 414 Broadway, 3rd Floor. Elevator and air conditioning.

Authors Loubna Mrie and Anand Gopal recently published two critically acclaimed books on the Syrian revolution: Mrie’s Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria and Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution. Released following the fall of the Assad regime, these books offer powerful and complementary perspectives on one of the most consequential political struggles of the twenty-first century.

In Defiance, Syrian journalist Loubna Mrie tells the extraordinary story of her journey from an Alawite family closely tied to the Assad regime to becoming an active participant in the revolution. Through an intimate memoir, she traces a path that takes her from the uprising's earliest days to frontline journalism, encounters with ISIS, exile in Turkey, and eventual resettlement in the United States. Along the way she explores questions of identity, dissent, belonging, and survival, offering a deeply personal account of the choices, sacrifices, and uncertainties that shaped a generation of Syrians.

In Days of Love and Rage, award-winning journalist Anand Gopal chronicles the Syrian revolution through the city of Manbij. Drawing on years of reporting, and a collaborative approach that incorporates the perspectives of Syrians themselves, Gopal traces the city's passage from Assad's rule to revolutionary governance – from ISIS occupation to the control of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces – and into the new political landscape that emerged after the regime's collapse. The story of Manbij becomes, in many ways, the story of the revolution itself.

Moderated by documentary filmmaker Malek Rasamny, this conversation will bring the authors together to reflect on revolution, as well as the questions that continue to shape Syria's future.

"Writing collectivizes individual memory; reading individualizes collective memory. The back-and-forth between them fosters the sense for history by unearthing potentials within the present, creating backdrops and foregrounds…" -Regis Debray, “Socialism: A Life Cycle” (2007)

Six months into Woodbine 3.0, we are launching a Substack. As part of our efforts to reimagine and redefine the project in its third iteration, we’d like to now take the time to develop a more regular writing practice. In between our events programming, podcasting, and other media and organizing efforts, we want to publicly share the various lines of inquiry informing our work, as well as more outwardly reflect on the last decade-plus of our experiments with Woodbine. https://woodbinenyc.substack.com/

Last spring, when we decided to open up a new Woodbine events and meeting space, our vision was to give more attention to the wing of the project which emphasized strategic thinking, intellectual exchange, comradely debate, and shared learning. It became existentially urgent for us that our movements be able to convincingly explain why we are doing what we are doing; what our goals and political horizons are; and how we plan to collectively evaluate our successes and contradictions. This Substack hopes to continue our practice of reflective self-clarification first established by the Woodbine Research Group in 2015, and later manifested in our print journal The Reservoir in 2022.

Read "Woodbine 3.0: Broadway Deterritorialized" here: https://woodbinenyc.substack.com/p/woodbine-30-broadway-deterritorialized

Please join the Woodbine Research Group next Tuesday the 30th as we present the fourth in our series roundtables, with this edition on Migration and Cosmopolitanism. We’re hosting this event as part of The Peoples Want’s global call, Mujawara: Weaving a Revolutionary Neighbouring Beyond Borders. Doors at 6pm, event at 6:30pm.

Since Donald Trump’s first election in 2016 the question of migration has become central to the politics of Western Europe and the United States. Partly determined by ongoing trends – including climate migration, the Syrian Civil War, and the broader post-Arab Spring strife in the Middle East – this “problem” is also a reflection of increasing internal tensions around inequality, identity, state capacity, and belonging. The resulting discussion is sharply polarized between an increasingly nativist and authoritarian discourse on the right, and an insurgent and defensive posture on the left. Both are increasingly biopolitical and tactical. One side speaks of needing to expel bodies to maintain the integrity of the body politic; the other side of the need to defend life against state aggression. Yet the question of migration and asylum has a dimension beyond this, raising essential questions about political identity: Who are we? Who is our ‘people’? Where do we ‘belong’?

The predominant left answer to this question has been cosmopolitan, encapsulated in the famous slogan from the Communist Manifesto, “The workingmen of the world have no country”. But this sounds incredibly utopian in present circumstances. Despite the slogan of ‘open borders’, even the most progressive proposals seem to amount to little more than combating the cruelest effects of the status quo. So what should our positive horizon be? Is it possible to have a meaningful cosmopolitan identity in a world of closing borders, resource conflicts, and anti-migration sentiment? Or is it the case that, as British Prime Minister Theresa May put it, “to be a citizen of the world is to be a citizen of nowhere”?

In this roundtable, the Woodbine Research Group and a member of The Peoples Want will present a range of perspectives on the question of migration and cosmopolitanism.

For our 50th podcast episode Kazembe Balagun returns to discuss Gemini season, America 250, the Knicks Finals run, Mayor Zohran's changing NYC, Jacobin's Chris Smalls piece, and Boots Riley's new film I Love Boosters. https://www.patreon.com/woodbine/posts/50-kazembe-on-in-160935248

Woodbine will show Game 5 of the NBA Finals this Saturday. We'll open doors at 8:15pm, following the poetry reading. Tip-off is usually around 8:40pm.

Bring snacks and drinks to share. 414 Broadway, 3rd Floor.