e-flux presents Me, You, and Everyone We Know Online discussion with Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Anita Chari, and Soyoung Yoon, moderated by Irmgard Emmelhainz
Date
Tuesday, July 6, 2021, 1pm EST
Join us on Tuesday, July 6, 2021, at 1pm EST for an online discussion with Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Anita Chari, and Soyoung Yoon, moderated by Irmgard Emmelhainz.
Modernity meant the promise of public peace and equality guaranteed through the apparatus of the nation-state and the sustenance of lives through the production and exchange of goods, services, and bodies in the market. The works in this program describe the mechanisms behind the “rational society” of capitalism while touching upon the libidinal unconscious behind the normalization of exploitation and self-exploitation that constitute this regime of money: a dysfunctional organization of labor, desire, and power that maintains capitalist flows. The discussion accompanying this program will address the relationship between the sensible (aesthetics and communication) and politics under current absolute extractivist capitalism or techno-neo-feudalism. We will also address the utopias that have legitimated and perpetuated it such as democracy, human rights, progress, and development. How to go about a critique of capitalism at the current conjunction of extractivism, neo-feudalism, and global warming (of which the COVID-19 pandemic is one of its manifestations) in a climate of extreme social alienation and polarization? Can we envision a systemic alternative toward a transition to de-marketization? Can an advanced economy function without labor markets? What potential political subjectivities beyond citizenship can we envision at this current conjuncture?
The discussion accompanies the films in “Socio-Economic Systems (Hatred for Capitalism),” the first program of the series Me, You, and Everyone We Know: Interrelationality, Alterity, Globalization, curated by Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux Video & Film.
Watch the films here, and read more about the series here.
Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous Radio Alice in Bologna and an important figure in the Italian Autonomia movement, is a writer, media theorist, and social activist.
Anita Chari is a political theorist and writer based in Portland, Oregon and is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon. Her work explores the significance of aesthetics, artistic practices, and embodiment for critical theory and practice. Identifying sensate dissociation and the commodification of desire as central features of current regimes of political domination, her work mobilizes critical theory, somatic work, movement, artistic practices, and the voice to reveal new possibilities for political subjectivity in the present. Her recent work has appeared in Claire Fontaine: Newsfloor (Walter Koenig, 2019), Catalyst (Noxious Sector Press, 2018), Somatic Voices in Performance Research and Beyond (Routledge, 2020), Social Dynamics (Routledge, 2020), and The Hysterical Material (Smart Museum of Art and Soberscove Press, 2017). Her first monograph, A Political Economy of the Senses (Columbia University Press, 2015) is a study of the concept of reification in critical theory and aesthetic practices, and approaches artworks as a form of materialization of critique.
Soyoung Yoon is Assistant Professor and Program Director of Art History & Visual Studies at the Department of the Arts, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School. Yoon is also a Visiting Faculty at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP). Yoon’s research focuses on politics of mobility and rhetorics of testimony, witnessing, and storytelling in the moving image; she attends to questions of “the apparatus” in relation to the moving image, the body-in-motion, and the authorial voice. Yoon is currently at work on two book projects: Walkie Talkie and TV Buddhas. She has published in Grey Room, Discourse, Millennium Film Journal, and Women & Performance among other journals and books. Her essay “Do a Number: The Facticity of the Voice, or Reading Stop-and-Frisk Data” was awarded a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2016. Yoon is currently a recipient of a Hauser & Wirth Research Fellowship for her work on the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. In 2020-21, she is a Fellow at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research.
Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer, researcher, and lecturer based in Mexico City. Her book Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2019. The translated expanded version of The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico’s Neoliberal Conversion is coming out this fall with SUNY Press, and so is Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Lives as Resistance (Vanderbilt). She is a member of the SNCA in Mexico (National System for Arts Creators).
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.