Affect of the Commons
Dienstag, 08. März 2016 - 18:30 Uhr
Campus der Universität Wien, Altes AKH
Datum | 16.03.2016, 18.30 h
Lecture by Lauren Berlant (University of Chicago), Moderation Birgit Sauer (University of Vienna).
Workshop with Lauren Berlant
Thursday, March 17th 2016, 10 am?12.30 pm
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna
?The commons? is currently a prestige concept for redescribing and rebooting democracy. In political theory after Kant it points to an unbounded, universally sensed space for the political. There?s a romantic story about the commons too, a pastoral story of nature and human creativity. Both of these are unconflicted spaces. At the same time, the concept points to an anti-pastoral process, involving rage at exploitation, theft, loss, mourning, the prospects of resistance to the state and capital, and the need to protect people from each other?s possessiveness. This register constructs the encounter with the commons as an ambivalent one, in which relations of property and intimacy encounter each other frictionally. This segment of a longer work focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Juliana Spahr, and Liza Johnson, and engages the propertied and affective resonances of the commons concept. But rather than cast it as an aspirational achievement, it values the commons specifically for its negative pedagogy, its pedagogy of unlearning normative infrastructures as such.
Workshop with Lauren Berlant
Thursday, March 17th 2016, 10 am?12.30 pm
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Viena
Organization: Brigitte Bargetz (University of Vienna), Moira Hille (Academy of Fine Arts), Sushila Mesquita (University of Vienna)
Registration until February 29th, m.hille@akbild.ac.at
There will be the opportunity for an in-depth conversation with Lauren Berlant on Thursday morning. A short input by Lauren will be followed by a discussion of her lecture as well as of the following selected texts:
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Duke, 2011, Introduction & chapter 7
Lauren Berlant, Austerity, Precarity, Awkwardness, online: https://supervalentthought.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/berlant-aaa-2011final.pdf
Interview, online: http://societyandspace.com/material/interviews/interview-with-lauren-berlant/
People will be informed about their registration two weeks before the workshop and will get the selected papers by email. We kindly ask all participants to prepare these readings and to formulate at least one specific question for the workshop in advance.
The number of participants is limited, please register for the workshop until February 29th.
Lauren Berlant holds the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Her work has focused on a politics of affects and feelings in the U.S. nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is published, for instance, in her trilogy on national sentimentality – The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997), The Female Complaint (2008) – or in her publication Cruel Optimism (2011).
This is a cooperation of the Forschungsgruppe Gender and Politics/ipw lectures (Department of Political Science, University of Vienna), of the Gender Research Office/Gender Talks (University of Vienna), of the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) and of the Forschungsverbund Gender & Agency (University of Vienna).