Join us at e-flux in June for our continuing series of lectures and other events featuring Beatriz E. Balanta and Mary Walling Blackburn, Nathan K. Hensley, Ariel Goldberg, and Filipa César.
Program
Book launch and discussion: Beatriz E. Balanta and Mary Walling Blackburn
Quaestiones Perversas
Saturday, June 3, 6pm
Quaestiones Perversas—an obscene form of the Graduate Record Examination—aims to gum the data production and collection of standardized testing as well as question the ideological underpinnings behind it. Compiled by Beatriz E. Balanta and Mary Walling Blackburn and published by Pioneer Works Press, this book gathers together unruly record examinations (Beautiful Economy; The Reproductive; F|Slash|F), a traumatizing listening lab (Doggy… Doggy), and a physical fitness test that maims more than it measures. The answer keys are an intervention/irruption of poesis in the field of systematicity or the lust for order: the position of the father and the controlling language of the state. The book undoes the benign voice of the test, awakens the reader to the history of violence embedded in the form, and activates it as a site for aesthetic expression.
Lecture: Nathan K. Hensley
“A Poetics of Action: Althusser, Brontë, Rossetti”
Wednesday, June 14, 7pm
At a moment when the capacity for consequential individual action feels diminished—diffused into ethers of climatalogical systems or tangled in webs of attenuation, restriction, and foreclosure by state and corporate apparatuses—the problem of agency arises once again. This talk revives two seemingly superseded critical traditions (twentieth-century ideology theory and nineteenth-century feminist poetics) and finds there models for thinking action in the present. Could attention to these theories of entangled capacity help rescue the category of action from liberal-humanist clichés of heroism and from their opposite, the melancholic determinism now fashionable among critics of the Anthropocene?
Lecture: Ariel Goldberg
“Photographing the News”
Wednesday, June 21, 7pm
Ariel Goldberg will give a lecture on when newspapers appear in photographs and when artists appear in the news. Goldberg will meditate on the space between Democracy Now! and The New York Times, on how Amy Goodman’s voice cracks and a camera phone scans the height and width of a print headline.
Lecture: Filipa César
“Humble Derives From Humus”
Friday, June 30, 7pm
A reading of Amílcar Cabral’s agronomic writings exposes the substrata of a syntax for liberation later performed in guerrilla language and struggle. It is a timely reminder in troubled times, a commoning of the humble—reclaiming soil as a rhizosphere rich in animated beings and inscriptions of oppression. A place to return to in order to regenerate a future multitude that was divided through the violent engineering of the Capitalocene. This take, on Amílcar Cabral’s agency as an agronaut, ventures through his soil cosmologies, mesologies, meteorizations, atmos-lithos conflict zones, celluloid compost, imperial consumptions—the sugar question.
It matters what matters matter matters.
e-flux lectures is a series of events dedicated to discovering the protocols of twenty-first century truth, assuming these still exist. The series was launched in February, and contributors have since included (click to see page and video documentation): James T. Hong; Oxana Timofeeva; Suad Amiry, Thomas Keenan, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal; Rijin Sahakian; Adam Kleinman; Maria Lind; Franco “Bifo” Berardi; Sven Lütticken and Tony Wood; Ute Holl; Liam Young; Gleb Napreenko; Charles Mudede; Nora Sternfeld; Carolyn L. Kane; Ana Ofak; Vivian Ziherl and Elizabeth A. Povinelli; Gean Moreno; Jodi Dean; Andrew Herscher, Reinhold Martin, Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal; Andrew Norman Wilson; Lee Mackinnon; Francesca Hughes; and Masha Gesssen.
We look forward to seeing you on East Broadway. For those unable to join in person, lectures will be streamed live here.
For a list of our upcoming programs, visit our website. For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
