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Orson Welles once called Los Angeles “a bright, guilty place,” and that is as true today as it was in the 1940s when Welles coined this description. Dennis Broe leads a group reading of his five Los Angeles novels set in the film-noir period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The contradictions we will unearth in that postwar period, the period of crime films that visually documented this seedy reality, have never been resolved, only continually papered over, and so they resound today. We will look at five industries and moments in this period with a view toward explaining how the postwar period set the tone for what was to follow, leading to the present era of a vast income disparity and frequent “natural,” though totally avoidable, disasters.

The novels – Left of Eden, A Hello to Arms, The Precinct with the Golden Arm, The House That Buff Built, and The Dark Ages – are detailed in this syllabus. They are available from various online booksellers.

Dennis Broe is a professor, journalist, and novelist whose books include: Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood, Class, Crime and International Film Noir: Globalizing America’s Dark Art, and Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception. He has taught at The Sorbonne and is the Parisian correspondent for Arts Express on The Pacifica Network. Dennis also writes for LA Progressive, People’s World, Crime Time, Culture Matters, the British daily Morning Star, and Monthly Review Online. His series of five novels is continuing with his latest, Pornocopia, about the corporate takeover of Las Vegas and the porn industry. Dennis has also just launched a new podcast, Culture and Barbarism, with Toby Miller.

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Week 1 – Friday, May 2:

Left of Eden
This session will focus on the beginning of the Cold War and its intrusion into Hollywood at the moment of the breakup of the studio system, which had been so prosperous over the previous two decades. We’ll explore the echoes of the Cold War ethos in today’s foreign policy.

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Week 2 – Friday, May 9:

A Hello To Arms
This week will examine the renewal of the arms industry after the war, during what was nominally a time of peace, and how that impacted the African-American community as wartime opportunities vanished. We will discuss the current state of relations in the African-American community and the US “defense” industry, a behemoth that today is utterly out of control.

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Week 3 – Friday, May 16:

The Precinct With The Golden Arm
We will look at the LAPD and its changing modes of surveillance, particularly of the Mexican-American community in this period, with Boyle Heights starting to dominate. This novel also addresses Big Pharma and its relation to drugs in these communities. The session will examine the origin of street drugs, surveillance by what Mike Davis calls “the space police,” and the continued struggle and resistance within the city’s Latinx population.

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Week 4 – Friday, May 23:

The House That Buff Built
This week’s discussion will focus on the LA real estate industry, the design and spatial allocation of the city and its sprawling suburbs, and the history of racial discrimination in housing. We will especially look at the exploitation of the Chinese population in both LA and San Francisco and the role of the LA Times and its owners, The Chandlers, in shaping the city.

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Week 5 – Friday, June 2:

The Dark Ages
This session will address the second and more destructive devastation caused by McCarthyism, particularly HUAC’s impact on Hollywood. We’ll explore the history of unions in the entertainment industry and the city as a whole, positing that union activity in the industry brought HUAC to Hollywood. We will then examine the broader history of unions in Los Angeles, both in the past and today.

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Bonus Week 6 – Friday, June 9:

Pornocopia
In this bonus session, we will delve into corporate America’s penetration into the mob industries of porn in LA and gambling in Las Vegas.

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To register for the seminar, please follow this link:

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Readings:

Thorstein Veblen, Clyde Barrow, Stanley Aronowitz, Neil Smith, Bernard Stiegler, Maurizio Lazzarato, and others

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Over a century ago, universities—and the broader quest for higher learning—were fundamentally transformed by their reconstitution under industrial norms. These knowledge factories, standardized and placed in service of dominant economic interests, became a legitimizing force that helped sustain the myth of meritocracy in the United States. Simultaneously, they functioned as publicly subsidized sites of skilled labor production, research, and technological development.

More recently, universities have expanded beyond their traditional ideological and economic functions to become sites of wealth extraction, facilitating an ever-growing class of professional-administrative nomads. No longer merely serving capitalist interests, universities have become surplus-producing enterprises, generating a bloated administrative class that mirrors the short-term calculations and nomadic sensibilities of financialized capitalism.

Through readings from Thorstein Veblen, Clyde Barrow, Stanley Aronowitz, Neil Smith, Bernard Stiegler, Maurizio Lazzarato, and others, this study group will critically examine the fate of the capitalist university and the challenges faced by academic labor today. Our discussions will focus on developing strategies to counter the damage inflicted on higher education, reasserting the agency of academic labor, and restoring the dignity of students.

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To register for the seminar, please follow this link:

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Through a careful reading of Bernard Stiegler, this seminar will explore the possibilities of revolutionary care and its connection to what is now called pirate care. Our discussions will critically redefine care in an era marked by extreme capitalist neglect and systemic waste.

This investigation will also analyze the epistemic-juridical-medical hegemony that shapes our daily lives—subjecting bodies to constant regimes of “health,” enforcing the normalization of productivity, and perpetuating the surveillance of the self.

We will ask:

Is philosophical discourse, particularly its Hegelian invocation of the wisdom of the Sage, essential for constructing a culture of revolutionary care?

What existing structures can we build upon to resist and redefine care beyond capitalist constraints?

Readings will include sections on care (Sorge) from Heidegger’s Being and Time, Eva Kittay on interdependency, and contemporary works on care work and pirate care.


Part II of this course will begin in late September and continue for another six weeks, concluding in mid-November 2025.

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To register for the seminar, please follow this link:

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Readings:

Volume I of Critique of Dialectical Reason

Search for a Method

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This seminar will address, through a radical-historical reading, the contemporary
hermeneutic and practical relevance of the late Sartre’s monumental engagement with Marx in Volume I of Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960 Editions Gallimard, and 1976, 1st Verso edition). Beginning with Sartre’s radical conversion to Historical Materialism, a reading of the Question of Method, our
course of inquiry will involve an adventure of Hegelian reconciliation betwee individual praxis and collective action, marking crucial distinctions betwee dogmatic and critical dialectic, constituted and constituent dialectic, defining and shaping groups in fusion, and the practico-inert with new forms of alienation and demoralization.

This seminar will involve a close reading of the text and attempt an understanding
of the processes of dialectical totalization, often confused with totalitarian thinking. We will try to penetrate the movement of dialectical circularity and History through the brilliant paths opened by Sartre in this work.

A weekly syllabus will be available for the schedule of readings and the historical thematics involved.

$175 for ten sessions or $20 per session.

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To register for the seminar, please follow this link: