Culture, Power and Politics » Podcast

May 22nd 2018   With Sarah Bufkin and Alan Finlayson The Brexit vote and Trump’s election both seem to mark a terminal crisis for the liberal cosmopolitan consensus that has obtained in the English-speaking world since the 1990s. In both cases, centrist elites have been quick to blame external agencies (Cambridge Analytica, Vladimir Putin, etc.), apparently unable to believe that it is the effects of their own  policies that have led to them losing significant levels of public support. At the same time, concerns over national identity, and hostility to multiculturalism and immigration, continue  to inform the politics of the Right in many ways: from the casual English xenophobia of UKIP the extreme racism of the alt-right. How can we make sense of all this and what can we do about it? https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/brexit-trump-alt-right.mp3 Suggested Reading: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n10/alan-finlayson/brexitism\

May 15th  2018   with Éric Alliez, Maurizio Lazzarato and Andrew Goffey Well be back at Doomed Gallery for this one but do arrive early and  / or be prepared to stand…last week’s session was packed and was in a considerably larger space. This year also sees the publication of the English Edition of Lazzarato’s recent collaboration with philosopher Éric Alliez: Wars and Capital. Here is the blurb from the publishers catalogue: “We are at war,” declared the President of the French Republic on the evening of November 13, 2015. But what is this war, exactly? In Wars and Capital, Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato propose a counter-history of capitalism to recover the reality of the wars that are inflicted on us and denied to us. We experience not the ideal war of philosophers, but wars of class, race, sex, and gender; wars of civilization and the environment; wars of subjectivity that are raging within populations and that constitute the secret motor of liberal governmentality. By naming the enemy (refugees, migrants, Muslims), the new fascisms establish their hegemony on the processes of political subjectivation by reducing them to racist, sexist, and xenophobic slogans, fanning the flames of war among the poor and maintaining the total war philosophy of neoliberalism. Because war and fascism are the repressed elements of post-’68 thought, Alliez and Lazzarato not only read the history of capital through war but also read war itself through the strange revolution of ’68, which made possible the passage from war in the singular to a plurality of wars—and from wars to the construction of new war machines against contemporary financialization. It is a question of pushing “’68 thought” beyond its own limits and redirecting it towards a new pragmatics of struggle linked to the continuous war of capital. It is especially important for us to prepare ourselves for the battles we will have to fight if we do not want to be always defeated. In this seminar Éric and Maurizio will introduce and discuss some of the key arguments and ideas from this important new work. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/war-capital.mp3

With Maurizio Lazzarato and Andrew Goffey Maurizio Lazzarato is best known for having coined the term ‘immaterial labour’ as a way of describing the many forms of work in the contemporary economy that do not produce physical outputs, but are concerned with the production of knowledges, information-flows, moods, and experiences. But his work extends way beyond this analysis, drawing on the tradition of ‘autonomist’ Marxism and the ideas of thinkers such as Foucault and Guattari to offer one of the most powerful and engaged analyses of neoliberal culture, contemporary capitalism, and the organisation forms that resistance to it requires. This year sees the publication of the English translation of one of his most important works, Experimental Politics. This book provides an account of a key episode in recent French political history – the highly innovative struggle to defend the rights of precarious creative workers that emerged in the summer of 2003 – and uses it to offer one of the most profound analyses to date of the nature of advanced neoliberalism and its complex relationship to creative practice of all kinds. The book was translated by a team of Arianna Bove, Jeremy Gilbert, Andrew Goffey, Mark Hayward and Jason Read, with Jeremy providing a long critical introduction to the book and Lazzarato’s ideas. In this seminar Maurizio himself explores how those ideas have developed and why they are so relevant for contemporary radical politics. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/maurizio-lazzarato-week-one.mp3

With Hilary Wainwright   PHOTO: TIM CRABTREE May 1968 saw an escalation of protests and political actions by students and workers in France, leading a situation of near-revolution that lasted for several weeks and re-set the terms of political debate for a generation. Although ‘the events of May’ are remembered as the most obvious and symbolic  expression of the revolutionary spirit in that moment, ‘May 1968’ was only one episode in an international series of events and struggles against  the bureaucratic cultures of post-war welfare capitalism and the Stalinist ‘socialism’ of the Soviet bloc, from the early 60s to the mid- 80s. This was the moment when the counterculture, student radicalism, Black Power  and a new wave or working class militancy coincided with a wave of global anti-imperial struggle and the birth of the women’s movement, the green movement and Gay Liberation. The consequence of these struggles, their partial defeats and limited victories have been colossal: arguably the adoption of neoliberal policies by governing elites across the globe was motivated as much as anything by the need to contain their demands for radical democracy and collective freedom. On the other hand, sceptics  have argued that the counterculture and the New Left undermined working class solidarity, ultimately paving the way for a postmodern culture of narcissism, hedonism and futile identity politics. The implications of these movements and the debates that they provoked were decisive and long-lasting  for the development of radical philosophy, political theory and cultural studies . What is the significance of this history for contemporary radicalism? And would it be accurate to say that ‘1968’ didn’t happen in Britain until 1982?… https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/hilaryjeremyon1968.mp3

This is the audio from part three of our event ‘the end of neoliberalism’, December 2016 https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/is-neoliberalism-over-part-3.mp3

This is the audio from part two of our event ‘the end of neoliberalism’, December 2016 https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/is-neoliberalism-over-part-2-1.mp3

The End Of Neoliberalism? 15th december: 10am-5pm Organised by  Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert Free, all welcome, no need to book Doors open 9:30, first-come first-served, limited capacity City university, college building, room a130 272-278 St John St, London EC1V 4PB Presented by The Centre for Culture and the Creative Industries at City, University of London & The Centre for Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London In 2016, almost a decade after the worst financial crisis for eighty years, it seems there are signs that neoliberalism is finally in retreat. The ruling common sense of policy makers, economists, business people, and mainstream journalists on a global basis since the 1980s, neoliberalism had seemed all but indefatigable. Yet a series of signs today point towards a radical shift. From the rise of new populist political movements on the left and the right, to the seeming reversal of global trade, and the calamitous brexit vote in the uk, the existing state of neoliberal affairs is in a process of transition. Underpinning many of these indicators is a shift in political logic, from one which placed the market at the centre of human life, to one which is focused on preservation of the border. The questions that arise from this confluence of events are multiple: Is this the end of neoliberalism, or a point of inflection towards a new mutation? Is neoliberalism merely equivalent to the process of globalisation, or not? Is this a global ‘hegemonic crisis’? What happens to existing neoliberal regimes and modes of governance once the border takes precedence over the market? Can this transformation be said to have been generated by neoliberalism itself? How is this shift inflected by particular local cultural, social, political, and economic conditions? Is the future one of ethno-nationalist fascism or some other form of authoritarianism? What does rising nationalism look like in an era of global technological communications? What are the prospects for contending this crisis from the left? With: Christine Berry: principal director for policy & government, New Economics Foundation. William Davies: reader in political economy at goldsmiths, university of london and author of The Limits Of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty And The Logic Of Competition. Sara Farris: senior lecturer in sociology at goldsmiths, university of london. She is currently a member of the editorial board of historical materialism and international book review editor for critical sociology. Alan Finlayson: professor of political and social theory at the university of east anglia. He is also chair of the editorial board of the political journal Renewal. Jeremy Gilbert: professor of cultural and political theory at the university of east london and the editor of New Formations. Jo Littler: reader in the centre for cultural industries in the dept of sociology, city, university of london. Her new book Against Meritocracy will be published next year. Catherine Rottenberg: marie sklodowska curie fellow in the sociology department, goldsmiths and senior lecturer in the department of foreign literatures and linguistics and the gender studies program, ben-gurion university of the negev, beer sheva, israel. Her most recent publication is “neoliberal feminism and the future of human capital” forthcoming in Signs. Alex williams: lecturer in the centre for culture and the creative industries, in the dept. of sociology at city, university of london. He is the author of Inventing The Future: Postcapitalism and A World Without Work. This podcast contains the audio from part one of the conference, the rest is in the following two posts / podcasts  (NB: we failed to record Alex’s bit. There’s still a lot of good stuff to listen to here though!) https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/is-neoliberalism-over-part-1.mp3    

This seminar was presented by the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London  as part of the Culture, Power, Politics series, and was held at Open School East, London on December 12th 2016. With Ayeisha Thomas-Smith (Compass), Anthony Barnett (open Democracy) and Jeremy Gilbert (UEL) In the 1970s the politics of the New Right created an unlikely fusion between anti-state individualism and authoritarian social conservatisim.  Today, the contradictory effects of these agendas have driven the country to breaking point. The UK is falling apart, as England votes for Brexit while the rest of the country, including London, looks on aghast and wonders if there is a way out. A 40-year campaign of misinformation by the popular press has carried our political culture into the age of ‘post-truth politics’ . The inability of the technocratic elite to manage post-democratic societies has been brutally revealed by Brexit. How did we get here and where are we going? https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/who-broke-britain.mp3

https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/where-are-going-the-politics-of-the-future.mp3 Where Are We Going? The Politics of the Future What kind of world are we heading into, and who gets to decide? Will artificially-intelligent robots be our masters? Will we be cyborgs ourselves? Are we already? What will happen to us once Chinese workers start demanding decent wages for making all the stuff we buy? Can the planet tolerate the levels of consumption we’ve got used to? Will technology save us or destroy us.? Are we already experiencing ‘post-capitalism’?  Are we already ‘post-human’? All this and more will be revealed in a special panel discussion with Debra Shaw, author of Technoculture, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of Inventing the Future, and series convenor Jeremy Gilbert. 

https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/how-did-we-get-here.mp3 with Natasha Nkonde, Deborah Grayson,  John Medhurst and Andy Beckett