Regime des Visuellen

WHO IS AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD CAPITAL?

The course Who Is Afraid of the Big Bad Capital? will focus on different critical theoretical discussions and representations of the concept of building capital.

The course addresses the cycles and processes of accumulation, distribution and redistribution of the resources for building capital. The ironic question from the title will be complemented with questions about different existing hierarchies regarding the access to common wealth resources and capital in historic, economic and socio-political terms. The main aim will be to unravel the complexities and contradictions of the general division between material and symbolic, immaterial capital and its different kinds: aspirational, socio-cultural, linguistic, navigational, familial and resistant capital and how they relate with financial and cognitive capitalism.

The course will also look at the resistances to the dominant capitalist mode of production and reproduction in relevant historic and recent activist movements. Different sessions will offer a space for cross-disciplinary enquiry that will start from various theoretical and critical traditions (e.g. Frankfurt critical theory, post-Marxist, postcolonial, Italian autonomists, Situationist International, etc.) that positioned themselves counter the dominant capitalist mode of production of capital and the reproduction of human labour. The relations between some of the basic Marxist concepts (e.g. use and exchange value, surplus, property, base and superstructure, et.) will be presented as topical for understanding the contradictions between the means, forces, relations and modes of production, building, distributing and redistributing of the capital.

The discussions during the seminars and workshops will unravel around different ways of conceptualisation and visualisation of capital in contemporary art, architecture, visual culture and urban space in order to reveal the links between the cycles of capitalism and hyperproduction (of images, objects and concepts).

The inner contradictions of reproduction and distribution of capital in communist, capitalist, transitional economic models and the resistant activist movements towards globalisation, unequal development, ‚accumulation with dispossession‘, exploitation of human reproduction and gender inequality, anti-Semitic and other racial stereotypes related to imperialism and capitalism’s recuperation, will be discussed through looking at different theoretical texts, art works, documentaries and feature films. The seminar discussions will also try to encompass the potentials of the historic and more recent attempts for alternative economies and modes of production and reproduction of common cultural wealth and community capital and to provoke the students to explore the potentials of the social resistant movements for undoing capitalism.

Regime des Visuellen
Univ. Lekt. Dr. Suzana Milevska

1. Termin: Montag, 09. November 2015, 10:00-14:00
2. Termin: Mittwoch, 11. November 2015, 10:00-14:00
3. Termin: Montag, 16. November 2015, 10:00-14:00
4. Termin: Montag, 23. November 2015, 10:00-14:00
5. Termin: Montag, 30. November 2015, 10:00-14:00

Ort: Seminarraum 2, Karlsgasse 11

Weitere Details in TISS