Event overview
Scales of Relation – Visual Cultures Public Programme Summer 2014
Who says life is subsumed by capitalism?
Stewart Martin (Middlesex University)
Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre
Thursday 8th May
5.00-7.00pm
The notion that capitalism has developed an increased capacity to subsume life as a whole, not just labour, has become common to discussions of contemporary culture, society and politics. But what does it really mean to say that life is subsumed by capitalism? What conceptions of life and capitalism does it involve? Who has seriously articulated this? This talk will attempt to address these questions by considering the philosophical landscape in which this notion has evolved.
Stewart Martin is Reader in Philosophy and Fine Art at Middlesex University and a member of the editorial collective for the journal Radical Philosophy. He is the author of several essays on the philosophical critique of capitalism, particularly in relation to art.
Scales of Relation
Issues of scale have taken on great importance for a wide range of contemporary artistic, scientific, philosophical and political practices. One might take this to signal the emergence of novel problems of scale, which have provoked changes in conceptions of the scalar and in the methodologies one might use to understand that which scales of different kinds promise to delineate.
In differing ways and at different registers, a concern for scale marks and cuts across the recent resurgence of interest in Marxist thought, discourses of biopower and biopolitics, the continuing influence of Lefebvre’s notion of Rhythmanalysis and the conceptual frameworks offered by Actor Network Theory. It is also one way of describing a central concern of Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism, namely, their challenges to thinking on the scale of the human subject. Importantly, and perhaps most obviously, the widening gap between levels of individual agency and globalized geo-political processes - which articulates recent work on ecological and environmental issues as well as attempts to theorize the politics of security and risk - presents difficult questions of a pressing and obviously scaled nature. On these bases, one might ask whether the promise of measure, proportion and resolution held out by the ability to ascertain the scale of things now finds itself deranged. Whilst thinking about geo-political processes in terms of their scales may be familiar from decades of research on political geography, arguably, new de- and re-scaled realities have emerged to put into question the understanding of political territories and social processes that might be offered by such existing methodologies. The exponential growth and speed of exchange that gives shape to the visual cultures of the Internet plays out, for instance, in the spatial and temporal terms of mediatized embodied experiences that are characterised by the global scope of unprecedented and unpredictable scales of social and political relation.
Scales of Relation seeks to foreground and to explore some of these questions and conceptions of scale. The series brings together speakers whose work registers, in some way, the importance of relations of scale. It sets out to ask how the scale of things, their modes of scalability and intensified amenability to being de- or re-scaled – as well as the scales at which one might view or conceive of these - have become a theme of contemporary concern.
Chair: Andy Fisher
…all welcome
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 8 May 2014 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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