Son[i]a #321 César Rendueles
- 00:01 The network society paradigm
- 01:30 Intro
- 04:13 Covid-19 and the myth of universal connectivity
- 05:20 The pandemic’s magnifying effect
- 06:41 What the pandemic hides: the "bunkerisation" of the elites and the normalisation of nihilism.
- 08:34 The legal sanctioning of individualism
- 10:52 Necropolitics: life vs business
- 14:05 assive revolution and the new elitist models
- 17:50 Times of repoliticisation... of the right
- 20:32 Right-wing dystopia vs. care networks
- 24:24 The meritocratic ideal and the distribution of privileges
- 26:56 Spaces of egalitarian socialization: from education to health.
- 29:59 The problems of private school subsidies. Stage props and simulacra
- 33:22 Public education. Pedagogical innovation and school segregation.
- 39:47 Changing how we think about institutions. The school, libraries, the museum.
- 42:48 Political imagination and real utopias
- 48:26 Identity dynamics. Contradictions
- 52:03 Museums and cultural centres
- 53:56 My experience at Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid: the emergence of new-generation centres and their contradictions
- 56:49 Culture and art are very unprofitable commodities. But tourism makes money…
- 60:00 Cultural practices, sports practices
- 62:13 Cultural discourses and precarisation. The myth of the entrepreneur
- 65:53 Neoliberal designs. Work, unions and recoverable possibilities
- 73:12 Political imagination and cooperativism
- 76:11 On limits
- 82:12 Coda: my writing
César Rendueles is a philosopher, sociologist, curator, cultural manager, teacher, columnist, essayist, sports fan, and father, among other things. He was in charge of cultural projects at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid for eight years, he has edited classic texts by Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Karl Polanyi, Jeremy Bentham, and Antonio, Gramsci, and he currently writes and teaches sociology at Universidad Complutense in Madrid. In everything he does, his sharp, militant, provocative analysis persists in exposing the seams of the neoliberal system as we watch it unravel before our eyes, with the rapid implementation of the networked society (now with the pandemic) and the eco-social crisis as a timeframe for urgent action, despite the paradoxical processes of individuation and radical fragmentation that are taking place.
When we chat to César Rendueles, the pages of his new book “Contra la igualdad de oportunidades. Un panflento igualirtarista” (Seix Barral, 2020) still smell of fresh ink. We talk about the myth of universal connectivity and technological dystopia. We touch on necropolitics, necroeconomics, and the importance of social ties in processes of social change. We go into museums, libraries, and schools to address the problems of public projects and the potential of egalitarian socialization and political imagination. We broach life and the market, work and care, health and business, meritocracy and privileges... to shed light on our shared fragility and our collective obligation to think about economics in a different way, accepting that we will never start from scratch.