Sedimented Forms: Coming Back to Autonomy

Can an object be autonomous when autonomy as a disposition or a relation becomes unavailable to its viewers? It could be argued that if there is no space left for an autonomy of the subject, the autonomy of the object becomes something akin to a Zen koan. The internal, unemphatic other to capitalist values becomes a talisman of another civilisation or spacetime, not ours

The Two Reproductions in (Feminist) Art and Theory since the 1970s

This article approaches the optic of ‘reproduction’ in feminist theory and politics from two sides: a) the discussion of social reproduction currently at the top of the agenda of materialist feminisms, that is as a specific modality of gendered, racialised and often unwaged labour; and b) the sense in which social reproduction can be taken as the ‘reproduction of the conditions of production’, in Louis Althusser's analysis. These two approaches to the question of reproduction are used to open a path to a sample of historical and contemporary art practices, readable either in terms of a feminist deployment of reproduction as a spectrum of gendered tasks, or in terms of performing the impasses of a kind of social ‘non-reproduction’ that belongs to the second type, with the social reproduction perspective assuming the function of institutional or, perhaps, ‘infrastructural’ critique. The article covers the period between the 1970s and the present

”Only as Self-Relating Negativity”: Infrastructure and Critique

Five years ago, in a volume charting a ‘formerness’ for the Global West, I proposed a shift from institutional critique to infrastructural critique. This was described as a shift from a critique of the enabling container for a certain discourse or performativity of citizenship (institution) to an embodied critique that necessarily owed more to praxis. Thus the direction was towards a critique based on contingent ruptures, with the interpretation and activation of these ruptures the source of political meaning. The immanence of such an approach registers in the sense that it works with desires that are latent in the infrastructure, thus broadly conceived. It is the notion of infrastructure as a mode of thinking that favours the concrete over the abstract - concrete that is immanent to real abstraction – that I would like to develop in this article, concentrating on the epistemic and political relations between infrastructure and critique

Response, Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art Under Capitalism

For The Tank special issue on the book

Bodies in Space: On the Ends of Vulnerability

The last quarter of the twentieth century marked the emergence of ‘the body’ as a key heuristic in much poststructuralist and post-foundationalist cultural theory and philosophy. More recently, the terminology of ‘bodies’ has moved to the foreground in academic debates, but also gained traction in activist discourses and everyday forms of cultural speech. This is a terminology, primarily Anglophone, that speaks of bodies as subjects (‘we are/there are bodies’) rather than as objects (‘we/they have bodies’). ‘Bodies’ as the basic unit that enumerates humans in (a) space assumes the status of a convention by means of a prior or ongoing shift to a consensus that invoking ‘bodies’ as such is to name them as the locus of socio-political agency in preference to or in distinction from terms such as ‘person/s’, ‘people’, ‘individuals’ or ‘subjects’

Indifferent Agent: Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital

The proposition ‘speculation as a mode of production' is intended to set the terms of an inquiry into how art and of labour start to draw closer together in recent decades, as systems of value become more and more abstract. The relation between art and labour, as two contrary social forms - one predicated on uselessness and the other on a social use-value- undergoes a shift as exchange-value and the immanence of abstract value increasingly determine the conditions of production and experience for both. Here, we need to consider the relationship between an objective logic of speculation and the kinds of subjectivity it produces. The speculative subject, whether of aesthetics or labour-power, is key to understanding how the current model of social reproduction in capitalism – a mode that has been defined in terms of 'fictitious capital' or a 'double decoupling' between labour and capital (Simon 2011: 98) – sees a re-orientation of art and labour away from the discrete terrains set out for them by a previous mode of accumulation. The logic of self-expanding value structural to capitalist accumulation is modified into a worker-facing ideology couched in notions such as 'creativity' or 'human capital', notions which traverse the norms of labour and artistic (non-) labour alike as both are re-crafted in the image of capital, that is, as entrepreneurship, and as forms of activity without content (and thus, without a principal distinction between them) This is the tendency I am designating as 'speculative'

Relateable Alienation: The Logic and History of an Idea

So what do I mean by the term ‘relatable alienation’? First we’d need to appreciate the ambiguity of the term ‘alienation’ itself, with the variety of the contexts where it features. It’s one of those terms that is overpoweringly tempting to use in the formulation of generalities, simply because it contains so many connotations and usages, both vernacular and specialised. To try and map some of these would be an undertaking this paper couldn’t possibly provide the scope for, though perhaps the three days of this symposium, and the upcoming exhibition, are a solid contribution to encompassing some of that field. So I’ll have to adopt some quite crude methods here and work more indexically than genealogically

Social Reproduction: New Questions for the Gender, Affect, and Substance of Value

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, there has been a resurgence of Marxist feminism, with many writers and activists engaged in assessing its theoretical and political adequacy for the present conjuncture. It is in this context that social reproduction theory has come to be a rallying point. Central to this theory is the claim that the sustenance of life and human relationships, whether or not it is recognised as (waged) labour, is fully integral to capitalism as a mode of production. For many feminists, this sustenance is understood more specifically as the reproduction of labour-power. Social reproduction theory positions gender, and gendered labour, as central to the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. It thus follows historic trends in Marxist feminism which analysed the structural role of social distinctions such as gender or race in capitalism, rather than seeing them as ‘superstructural’ (ideological or cultural) phenomena