Mutating ecologies in contemporary art: machinic capitalism, molecularized selves & subsistential territories
IV International symposium
Barcelona, April 28th, 2020
MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Coordinated by Christian Alonso (University of Barcelona)
Keynote: Gerald Raunig (Zürich University of the Arts, Zürich, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna)
Call for papers deadline: February 28th, 2020, 8pm GMT
According to psychotherapist, activist and philosopher Félix Guattari, the intensification of the dynamics of hierarchization, segregation, and exploitation that emerged with the advent of neoliberal capitalism converge with the development of a new type of fascism of planetary scale. Unlike earlier forms of authoritarian fascisms, this unprecedented biopolitical force operates within the interiority of subjects, and it aims at making sure that “each individual assumes mechanisms of control, repression, and modelization of the dominant order” (2009, 258). By way of a miniaturization of its logistics, machinic capitalism manages to seep into our psychic territories, intervening in the ‘basic functioning of the perceptive, sensorial, affective, cognitive, linguistic behaviours’ (2009, 262). Deleuze and Guattari’s procedural distinction between signifying and asignifying semiotics offer an accurate understanding of how this molecular colonization occur (1987, 9).
Advanced capitalism relies on a twofold semiotic register when mobilizing mechanisms of «social subjection» and «machinic subservience» by which subjectivity is being homogenized. Social subjection produces us as subjects through the assignment of subjective codes, inducing individuals at moulding to prefabricated representations in relation to sex, race, identity, nationality, job sector & position, etc., their respective relations of antagonisms … READ MORE