Is there any distance between authority and authoritarians? We used to think they were the same thing. Now it seems like authoritarians don’t even know what authority is. Lies don’t begin to describe alternative facts or an extra ten million quid (per week!) for the National Health Service or three million fraudulent votes. Law and Justice, Cigars and Champagne, Soros’ activists on the streets from Budapest to Oakland. Robbers have authority over their thefts when leaders themselves steal.
Recent events have made us think again about what it means to communicate in a clear and direct style. We were raised to believe that it was most important to be open-ended, and to take every opportunity to qualify each assertion. Arguments became notes, dialogues became conversations, and lectures became talks. After everything that’s happened, it is hard not to feel like our modesty or self-consciousness was taken advantage of. We didn’t how much we took collective goodwill for granted.
Now we are curious about what it means to take steps in the opposite direction, to return to something slightly more linear, a mode of address that makes it easier, perhaps, to locate any problems. Or at least one that engages more explicitly with the conventions of honesty and accuracy. What do these look like today? Can they be recovered?
e-flux lectures is a series of events dedicated to discovering the protocols of twenty-first century truth, assuming these still exist. We have enlisted our friends to help. Won’t you join us?
Program
Screening and discussion: James T. Hong
“The New Nomos of the Earth: Two Works on the State in Time”
Wednesday, February 15, 7pm
Hong will screen his films The Turner Film Diaries and Apologies. If, as Carl Schmitt notes, nationalism driven by imagination is the most effective method of politicization, are we now in an ultranationalist time? What will we make from this overabundance of will and the “excesses of democracy”?
Organized in e-flux’s capacity as Consulate of the NSK State in Time, in collaboration with the exhibition NSK State Art: New York, The Impossible Return on view at James Gallery from February 8 to March 25, 2017.
e-flux lectures: Oxana Timofeeva
“Materialist Dialectics of Oil”
Wednesday, February 22, 7pm
The lecture starts from mapping a variety of philosophical materialisms to raise the question of possibilities for a philosophy of nature today. An outline refers to one particular case, namely, oil, that is taken not only as substance but also as subject.
e-flux Architecture: Suad Amiry, Nikolaus Hirsch, Thomas Keenan, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal
“The Architecture of Exile: Refugee Heritage”
Friday, February 24, 7pm
Refugee camps are considered—by definition—to be temporary spaces. They are designed to be dismantled, abandoned. Yet there are some Palestinian refugee camps that are now almost 70 years old. What type of history is cultivated within these camps? Could their historical presence mean there is value in their preservation?
e-flux lectures: Rijin Sahakian
“Still riding, our Desert Storm(s)”
Wednesday, March 1, 7pm
As the US struggles to decipher a barrage of policy changes and rhetoric, this lecture will examine aspects of imagery and discourse employed over the past quarter century to create the distance and dissonance in our worlds (artistic and otherwise) that have brought us to this present moment.
e-flux lectures: Adam Kleinman
“Contagion, or the Doctrine of Chances”
Wednesday, March 8, 7pm
Delving into meme engineering, operant conditioning, and other so-called “brainwashing” techniques, this lyrical lecture will tussle with the question of how deviance is normalized.
e-flux lectures: Gean Moreno
“A Fascinating Prospect”
Wednesday, March 15, 7pm
With a detour through Allan McCollum’s The Shapes Project (2005-ongoing), this lecture goes looking for the things that may be hiding in the folds of our renewed fascination with human extinction.
e-flux lectures: Maria Lind
“Situating the Curatorial”
Saturday, March 18, 6pm
Drawing from the experience of working at Stockholm’s Tensta konsthall, and being the artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale, Lind will explore notions such as “weak resistance,” “contact and conflict zones,” and “redistributive politics” while keeping art center stage in the lecture.
e-flux lectures: Franco “Bifo” Berardi
“IS THERE A WAY OUT?”
Monday, March 20, 7pm
Berardi revisits his 2014 text “The Neuroplastic Dilemma: Consciousness and Evolution“ to discuss current affairs and to ask and answer the question: Is there a way out?
Book launch and discussion: Sven Lütticken and Tony Wood
Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy
Saturday, March 25, 6pm
Written as the neoliberal era was morphing into the Trumpocene, Lütticken’s book examines forms of aesthetic practice beyond residually modern(ist) notions of artistic autonomy; practices whose relevance may be more acute than ever in the current crisis, in which strategies and tactics are in urgent need of reexamination.
e-flux lectures: Ute Holl
“Aesthetics and the Alien: Straub/Huillet in Moses und Aron”
Wednesday, March 29, 7pm
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron (1975) is a study on migration, exile, and on being a stranger or alien. In the equal distribution of aethetic elements, their film follows Schoenberg’s rule of twelve-tone distribution of indiscrimintae perception. Thus, the film confronts the situation “before the law,” violence, and the question of the (missing) people.
e-flux Architecture: Liam Young
“I Spy with my Machine Eye”
Friday, March 31, 7pm
This audio-visual performance is a filmic tour told from the perspective of a drone drifting across the planet. Based around his short film In the Robot Skies, Young presents a near-future love story set against the fears and wonders of an impending drone age.
The event coincides with the exhibition Liam Young: New Romance on view from March 30 to May 13, 2017 at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia University GSAPP.
Lectures will be streamed live here.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
