Screening: June 23–July 6, 2021
With films by Ursula Biemann, Maja Borg, Nicholas Mangan, and Allan Sekula and Noël Burch
Live discussion: Tuesday, July 6, 2021, 1pm EST
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, as well as the utopias that have legitimated and perpetuated it such as democracy, progress, and development. How to go about a critique of capitalism at the current conjunction of extractivism and global warming (of which the COVID-19 pandemic is one manifestation), in a climate of extreme alienation and polarization? What systemic alternative can we envision toward a transition to de-marketization? Or are we headed to the globalization of state capitalism foretold by the East Asian model? Or even worse, neo-techno-feudalism? What potential political subjectivities can we envision at this conjuncture?
This program is the first part of Me, You, and Everyone We Know: Interrelationality, Alterity, Globalization, an online series of films and discussions programmed by Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux Video & Film. The series will run in four thematic parts from June 23 through August 18, 2021. Each part will include a two-week group screening, and a live discussion.