Louis Armand, Dustin Breitling, Márk Horváth, Bogna Konior, Adam Lovasz, Robin Mackay
The colloquium will focus on panic, alarm, protest & social plague-pathologies in the resurrection of the myth of the benevolent corporate-state. The ongoing “health crisis,” like a mirror held up to the Anthropocene, has not only put the architectures of social power under strain: it has suspended the very idea of the last instance, the very logic of appeal, & the romance of the social contract. Political theatre has become a theatre of the plague: inertia, perversity, irrationalism, grotesque displays of hope & apocalyptic abandon, all laid side-by-side on the same metaphorical pyre. A controlled hysteria has given way to the hysteria of control. If the virus threatens to enact a revolution, it’s because every revolution is already an inside job. The plague is not an alien force that arrived from elsewhere: it was always already here. If the tremor of its mutations has delivered a shock to social response-mechanisms, this is because they themselves were the convulsive product of a viral corporate-state apparatus: their paroxysms have merely provided an affective arena for an ever-enlarging spectacle of enforced austerity, precarisation & enclosure. This alien-within, having infected the tissues of the social body, now instantiates a quarantine-politics of temporal dislocation – the virus that must be “lived with” in the open-ended present so as to be permitted the promise of a future “cure.”
How does pandemic time interrelate within the current xenocapitalist imaginary & how will it extrapolate in the future war over the New Normal? What are the modes of negentropic mutation that will turn the present eco-cultural malaise into the next ideological commodity growth concept? And what means can be evolved to sabotage it?
