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.
Marwa Arsanios
In this podcast, Lebanese artist, researcher, and filmmaker Marwa Arsanios unpacks the many conversational tactics embedded in her modes of working in the gaps between art and activism, in the intersection between ecological thinking, land struggles, and feminist politics. We talk about reading groups, the film object, solidarity as a practice, and using the art economy to bring communities and movements together.
Troy Vettese
In this podcast we talk to environmental historian, researcher and writer Troy Vettese about veganism, ecology and geoengineering and about neoliberalism and the environmental crisis. We look at past examples of vegan socialist experiences and understand the urgency of including animal rights in radical thought. We also examine the tension between nature and the market, accepting the impossibility of dealing with the climate crisis through eco-modernist techno-solutions.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Olivia Plender that we were unable to include the first time around.
Kristin Ross
Kristin Ross reflects on the power of subjectivity in addressing history, and on oral memory and first-person accounts. She examines the subversive potential of today’s environmental struggles as forms of activism capable of generating a new ecological, social, and political intelligence, and she recaptures the associative and cooperative spirit of the Paris Commune, explores the needs to move beyond official national fictions, and defends solidarity as a political strategy.
Olivia Plender
Artist and researcher Olivia Plender talks about productivity and care, about suffragettes and museums, and about adolescence and schools. She looks at groups without charismatic leaders, embodied education, and the possibility of transforming errors in honest discussions.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Jodi Dean that we were unable to include the first time around.
Charmaine Chua
In this podcast, Singaporean organizer, writer, and scholar Charmaine Chua shares her research on the containerization of global logistics from the vantage of the Global South. Her journey begins aboard a container ship, embodying ethnographic observation and field work, as well as a radical rereading of the naval archive records of the colonial project. The mix of methodologies, experiences and data highlights the incongruities and the environmental, legal, and labour abuses that appear in the capitalist wet dream of efficiency in global trade.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Angela Dimitrakaki that we were unable to include the first time around.
Angela Dimitrakaki
Angela Dimitrakaki talks about the new feminist critique, the limits of democracy, the wiles of post-capitalism, and the ambivalence of the commons. We also touch on the notions of radical curating and collaborative practices.
Michael Hardt
Interview with the political philosopher Michael Hardt about what role revolutions have today as spaces for new social creation.