Son[i]a #268 Jodi Dean

Music commissioned to Anna Irina Russell. Editing by Antonio Gagliano. This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

For years, the work of Jodi Dean (b. USA, 1962) has been activating debates in academia and activism, combining tools from the fields of political philosophy, feminism, and psychoanalysis. Dean describes a social landscape mediated by technology in which we vote and share huge amounts of arguments and opinions, but at the same time our capacity to change political structures has come to a grinding halt.

Communicative capitalism does in fact thrive on a network of interactions rather than the singularity of the people and contents that comprise it. It does not really matter what is conveyed or who does the conveying: circulation itself produces value. In the face of this paradox, Dean suggests reconstructing the Left, moving away from the demand for more participatory processes, greater consensus and better democracy, and instead placing the antagonism and power of partisan politics back at the centre of common life.

In this podcast we talk to Jodi Dean about communism as a still-latent project, about the Party as a scalable global form, about dystopian municipalism, anamorphic ecologies, and liberal democracies, about Not An Alternative and Liberate Tate as examples of sustainable activism practices at museums, about desires, enthusiasm, and trust, about the emotions captured inside social media, and about how to squash the impulse to constantly make up new names for everything.