#Marina Vishmidt

[endlessandrea]

Marina is giving!!!

[xjmlm]

The ontologisation of vulnerability in the contemporary political idiom of ‘bodies’ . . . points to an abiding tendency in critical theory to . . . mimetically adopt current forms of domination as the only conceivable forms in which emancipation can be imagined. In a very real sense, this expresses the overdetermination of emancipatory politics by such forms of domination, and the mimetic response to them that emerges for reasons of pragmatism as well as reasons of conviction. However, a close attention to how such forms get overdetermined, which is to say, how bodies are produced by means that further the ends of capitalist accumulation and population management, opens up an area which not only promises to undermine the ‘abstraction-phobia’ and thus the genres of liberalism that liberation politics today remain open to, but to get a handle on what other bodies are possible if these are seen as the consequence, rather than the precondition, of a socially and historically mediated mode of production. This, in turn, may be capable of redefining the political salience of experience as something collective, intractable and principally indeterminate rather than self-asserting, self-owning and claim-making.

While only being able to gesture to the field in which the question should be located, . . the discourse of ‘bodies’, with its burden of naturalisation and proprietorial integrity, can be seen to form a hindrance to discovering what the political implications of that negation might be.

Marina Vishmidt, "Bodies in space: On the ends of vulnerability"

[fundgruber]

“Voiceover: The job interview is an exercise which is basically intended as a means to allow theemployer to gauge the character of a prospective employee. Since the employee enters thetransaction as abstract labour which, as it were,is ‘treated as abstract prior to the exchange precisely because it is treated as abstract in exchange’, this is a way for both contracting parties to get to know each other as people, or what some call ‘living singularities’. It is also a prime opportunity for wage bargaining, which is not to say there aren’t even better opportunities, like chats over coffee, flowers with telegrams, phone calls that start out in the guise of market research, or spam emails, to mention just a few. The only danger is that these situations can get too personal, and people can and do gethurt. Or they might feel awkward in indefinable ways for indefinite stretches of time afterwards. Because you can literally pay anyone to do anything, the ones who are not chosen never stop wondering why.”

Marina Vishmidt: Untitled, Job Interviews. 2017

https://www.academia.edu/38307206/Untitled

[her-moth]

‘That Language Matters’

tonight at 6.30pm 

[niamhxisabel]

Lecture - 25/11/20

Melissa Gordon

This lecture was really interesting, I found Melissa’s work to be very deep, and meaningful and I was also very visually drawn to her abstract gestural paintings. I am going to be honest and say that I am struggling with understanding the concept of her work, what I gathered from the lecture was of gestural brushstrokes, mark making in the imagery Gordon was creating has a very deep meaning to her, and it really changes the way the viewer looks at her work. 

I think the meaning/concept leads her work to a greater narrative, her work mainly at first consisted of silkscreen prints, and paintings that I’m guessing are acrylic based, the gestural brush marks, or even marks that have been left over from creating her pieces. I picked up Gordon uses photography to zoom in and out of marks she didn’t purposefully create, and make prints out of those photos. That is why I wanted to speak to her, as I related to the creating works out of marks and gestures I would find after creating, making work out of the unseen or overlooked beauty of the world around us holds a place in my heart for most of artistic life.

I attended the Q&A, and I asked the question of what Melissa mentioned at the end of her lecture, about gestural mark making, or abstract/abstraction in art can have a feminine language, or a feminist reading to them. We all went into a tangent of feminist talk which was extremely insightful, there was a lot of references spoken about by Gordon:

Marina Vishmidt’s article on Melissa Gordon

Isabel Gura Love of Painting

Anne Carson Women having two mouths

Hydro Feminism Astrida Nemanis 

Notes of Gesture G.Agamben

Glass Irony & God ?

Annie Warburg 

Helen Mullsworth 

There was also talks of Melissa’s pieces of work of her making a piece using oil based paint or ink, and then the actual would be her using the marks and gestures used from cleaning up the oils, which I found an interesting way to go about creating new works for myself.

I had a tutorial with Melissa Gordon too, I enjoyed talking about my past and current work with her, and also I loved taking on her positive criticism/critiques. I feel it took a second to grasp where I was coming from with my work, as both our views on pop culture are different, but she understood and from what I gathered was someway charmed by my work. I have several artists to look at and research for references thanks to Melissa:

Structuralist Filmmakers

Hollis Frampton 

Get Out - Horror Film 

Christian Marclays - The Clock

Keren Cytter 

Ubu Web

Ryan Trecartan 

Cecile B.Evans 

Martha Rosler- Reading Vogue 

[vermikkobooks]

new 365 Days of Invisible Work  

Werker Collective / Marina Vishmidt / Lisa Jeschke

注釈* 本書の紹介文に出てきた言葉について

ちょっとした補足です。↓

ドロレス・ハイデン著書『家事大革命ーアメリカの住宅、近隣、都市におけるフェミニスト・デザインの歴史』 

　産業や社会の近代化によって、労働と同じように家事の合理化・自動化や協同化が論じられ、家事が労働として国家秩序に組み込まれてきた歴史について叙述。教育者、歴史家、都市計画家 ドロレス・ハイデン ( Dolores Hayden、アメリカ・１９４５年〜) はアメリカンドリームや女性の視点を問いかける。

　柏木博著書『家事の政治学』においても『家事大革命』の影響が顕著だそうです。 

労働写真家全盛期 　１９２０年代〜１９３０年代にプロレタリア階級のアマチュア写真家が毎日の仕事や生活を叙述したもの。革命闘争においてプロパカンダの活動に多大な影響を及ばした。ドイツや旧ソビエトから始まりヨーロッパ中やアメリカ全土に広がった。

[bildmarkt]

Die spekulative Form des Wertes fungiert als Schlüssel sowohl zur Grenzenlosigkeit des Kapitals als sich selbst ausdehnender Wert als auch zur unendlichen Kreativität künstlerischer Subjektivität.

Marina Vishmidt, Spekulative Sachen, 2012

[libidinaleconomyberlin]

Participants

Benjamin Noys is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester. His research focuses on contemporary Continental theory, cultural politics, literature, and avant-garde and popular culture. His books include Malign Velocities: Accelerationism & Capitalism, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory, The Culture of Death and Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. He also edited Communization and its Discontents and has numerous essays on topics such as anti-critique, the aesthetics of financial crisis, drones, time, Ballard, vampies, neurosis and Brexit. 

Hannah Proctor works on revolutionary psychologies, communist neurologies and red therapies. She’s broadly interested in intersections between left-wing politics and psychology, histories and theories of radical psychiatry, and emotional histories of the Left. She’s currently a fellow affiliated with the ICI Berlin. Her forthcoming book, Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria, Soviet Subjectivites and Cultural History, situates the innovative cross-disciplinary clinical research of Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria in its politicised historical context. She is also working on a book project for Verso on the psychic aftermath of political struggle. She has an ongoing project on femininity and hardness – with the working title 'Stone Femme.’

Leon Brenner is a post-doc fellow at the University of Potsdam, specializing in the fields of Lacanian psychoanalysis, contemporary French philosophy and autism research. Brenner has previously worked on the subject of Alain Badiou’s theory of subjectivity and love. His doctoral dissertation—conducted at Tel-Aviv University and the Freie Universität, Berlin—concerned the subject of autistic subjectivity in psychoanalytic thought. Today Brenner works on the subject of the anthropological philosophy of autism at the University of Potsdam's institute for philosophy. He is a founder of the Lacanian Affinities Berlin group (laLAB) and teaches courses on the subject of psychoanalysis in Berlin.

Kerstin Stakemeier is a Professor for Art Education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. She has been teaching since the early 2000s in the fields of political, art, cultural and media theory, art history and on topics of artistic and political theory and practice as well as modern, postmodern and contemporary history of exhibition practice. With others she is the initiator of the long-term exhibition, magazine and discussion project Klassensprachen / Class Languages (from 2017). She has published, among others, "Painting-The Implicit Horizon" (2012) with Avigail Moss and "Power of Materials/Politics of Material” and “The Present of the Future“ (2014-16) with Susanne Witzgall. She writes among others for Artforum and Texte zur Kunst. In 2016, she published Reproducing Autonomy with Marina Vishmidt.

Jule Govrin is a philosopher; her research is situated at the interface of political theory, social philosophy, and aesthetics. She holds a PhD from the FU Berlin on the history of the theory of desire and economics. She investigated how the notion of desire is linked to economic theories in the history of philosophy. She currently works at the Philosophical Seminar at the European University of Flensburg and investigates the relationship between authenticity and authority in the political history of ideas of modernity and late modernity. She is the author, in German, of Sex, God and Capital: Houellebecq’s Subjugation between Neoreactionary Rhetoric and Post-secular Politics and, in addition to her academic work, is also active as a journalist, e.g. for »ZEIT Online«.

Luce de Lire is a ship with eight sails and she lays off the quay. A time traveller and collector of mediocre jokes by day, when night falls, she turns into a philosopher, performer and media theorist. She loves visual art, installations, video art etc. She could be seen curating, performing, directing, planning and publishing (on) various events. She is working on and with treason, post secularism, self destruction, fascism and seduction – all in mixed media.

Samo Tomšič obtained his PhD in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and is currently research associate at the Humboldt University in Berlin. (Although from next week, he will be a Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg.) His research areas comprise contemporary European philosophy, structuralism and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan), epistemology, and political philosophy. His publications include The Labour of Enjoyment: Towards a Critique of Libidinal Economy (2019), The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (2015). Plus two edited books, Psychoanalysis: Topological Perspectives: New Conceptions of Geometry and Space in Freud and Lacan (ed. with Michael Friedman) and Jacques Lacan. Between Psychoanalysis and Politics (ed. with Andreja Zevnik, 2015).

Dominiek Hoens is a philosopher and doctor of psychology, and teaches philosophy of art at two university colleges in Belgium. Recent publications include articles on the logic of the Lacanian ‘not-all’ (in Crisis and Critique) and on Lacan and Pascal, and a chapter on Lacan in the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory. Currently, he is co-editing with Sigi Jöttkandt a special issue of their journal, S, on Duras and Lacan.

Julie Gaillard was recently appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of French & Italian at the University of Illinois. She was previously a fellow at ICI Berlin. She co-edited the volume Traversals of Affect: On Jean-François Lyotard (Bloomsbury, 2016). Her current research continues her investigation of Lyotard’s work and its import at the crossroads of philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, arts, and politics.

Daniel Tutt is a Professorial Lecturer at George Washington University. His academic training is in philosophy and religion with a focus on contemporary continental philosophy, the history of philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis and ethics. His interests include Marxism and post-Marxist thought, contemporary social and political movements, political Islam, Islamophobia, Islamic philosophy, historicism and the philosophy of history and post-Lacanian thought. He has published articles on Badiou, Zizek, Islam and contributed to the recent edited volume, Sex and Nothing: Bridges from Psychoanalysis to Philosophy.

Adriana Zaharijević combines political philosophy, feminist theory and social history of the 19th century. She is a senior researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade, and an assistant professor at the University of Novi Sad. She is the author of more than sixty articles and two books, unfortunately not (yet) available in English – Becoming Woman (2010) and Who is an Individual? Genealogical Inquiry into the Idea of a Citizen (2014). Among other essays in English, she has a forthcoming paper on Robinson Crusoe, invulnerability and bodilessness.

Sami Khatib is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the American University in Cairo. Sami's research spans the fields of Aesthetic Theory, Critical Theory, Visual Arts, Media Theory, and Cultural Studies with a special focus on the thought of Walter Benjamin. He is a founding member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). His ongoing research project “Aesthetics of the ‘Sensuous-Supra Sensuous” examines the aesthetic scope and political relevance of Marx’s discovery of the commodity form. His publications include articles on violence, pedagogy, the aesthetics of real abstraction, temporality and Walter Benjamin.

Jason Read is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He specialises in the areas of Social and Political Philosophy, 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Spinoza. His two books are The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill, 2015) and The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY, 2003). He has many articles and book chapters on topics including work, affect, precarity, Balibar, ideology and Althusser.

Vladimir Safatle holds several international appointments. Primarily, Vladimir is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at University of São Paulo. He is also a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. Invited professor at Université de Paris VII (Department of Psychoanalysis), Paris VIII (Department of Music), Toulouse (Department of Philosophy) and Louvain (Department of Philosophy). Fellow of Stellenboch Institute for Advanced Studies (South Africa) and formerly responsible for seminars at Collège International de Philosophie. Vladimir is the author of Grand Hotel Abyss: Desire, Recognition and the Restoration of the Subject (Leuven, 2016) and many further texts in English, as well as Portuguese and French. He is responsible for the new Brazilian edition of Theodor Adorno's complete work and is a coordinator of the International Society of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy. He has published essays on Hegel, Adorno, desire, servitude, democracy and Lacan. He is also an outspoken critic in Brazilian media of Bolsonaro and the turn to far-right politics.

Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont in the US. He has just published Emancipation after Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (2019). His previous books include Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy (2017), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), Spike Lee (2014), The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2013), Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013), Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political (2012, with Paul Eisenstein), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (2007), and The Impossible David Lynch (2007).

Yahya M. Madra is an associate professor of economics at Drew University, Madison, NJ. He has been a member of the editorial board of the journal Rethinking Marxism since 1998 and served as an associate editor of the journal between 2010-12. He specialises in the History of Economic Thought; International Political Economy; Political Economy and Cultural Formations; Psychoanalysis and Capitalism and Current Heterodox Approaches. He has published and co-authored articles on various issues in political economy and on the history of recent economics in edited book volumes and a number of academic journals in English and Turkish. His first book in English is LATE NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS: RESTORATION OF THEORETICAL HUMANISM IN CONTEMPORARY ECONOMIC THEORY from 2017.

Ceren Özselçuk is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She has recently published and co-published in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Rethinking Marxism, and in edited volumes. She is on the editorial board of the journal Rethinking Marxism and also its current managing editor. She and Yahya are working on a book manuscript related to their talk today. She is also developing research on the associations among populism, neoliberalism and neo-conservatism, with a geographical focus in Turkey, and interrogating the relations between populism and contemporary forms of authoritarianism and violence, on the one hand, and the role of populist identifications both in democratic as well as neoliberal transformations, on the other.

Merritt Symes (www.merrittsymes.com) is a video artist who creates audio-visual “resonance machines” from both found and original footage. Her short films are concerned with creaturely lives, uncanny affinities, impersonal intimacies, the unraveling of forms, and the spaces between things. Dominic Pettman (www.dominicpettman.com) is Professor of Culture & Media at Eugene Lang College and The New School for Social Research. His numerous books include Sonic Intimacy, Creaturely Love, and Metagestures (with Carla Nappi).

Margret Grebowicz’s writings on mountaineering have appeared in The Atlantic, The Philosophical Salon, and the minnesota review, and she is currently writing her next book, Mountains and Desire, for Repeater. She is the author of Whale Song (Bloomsbury), Why Internet Porn Matters and The National Park to Come (both Stanford), and co-author of Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway (Columbia). She teaches philosophy and environmental humanities at the School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen, in Siberia.

Ania Malinowska is Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland and former Senior Fulbright Fellow at the New School of Social Research in New York, USA where she was working on a research project “Feeling(s) Without Organs. Love in Contemporary Technoculture”. She is a coeditor of (with Karolina Lebek) Materiality and Popular Culture. The Popular Life of Things (Routledge 2017), (with Michael Gratzke) The Materiality of Love. Essays of Affection and Cultural Practice (Routledge 2018), and (with Toby Miller) “Media and Emotions. The New Frontiers of Affect in Digital Culture” (a special issue of Open Cultural Studies, 2017). She has authored many papers and chapters in cultural and media studies regarding love, social norms, codes of feelings and technology.

Matthew Flisfeder is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications at The University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner (2017), The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film (2012), and co-editor of Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader (2014). He recently completed his new book, Algorithmic Desire: Towards a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media. He is currently working on a project that examines the aesthetics, rhetorics, and ethics of new materialist, posthumanist, and accelerationist theory.

Ben Gook is an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Humboldt University, Berlin. He is also an honorary fellow at the School of Social & Political Sciences and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne. His books include Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-Unified Germany after 1989 (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015) and the forthcoming Feeling Alienated: How Alienation Returned in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge UP, 2020).

[endlessandrea]

Silvia Federici: "[...] Capitalism has developed a science of ‘scooperation,’ a term that I have taken from Leopolda Fortunati's The Arcane of Reproduction. An example is the urban planning that took place in American cities after WWII when the capitalist class confronted a working class that for 20 years or more had had a collective experience – first during the Depression, when people took to the road, creating hobo jungles, then during the war, in the army – and was now coming back from the war restless, questioning what they had risked their lives for. 1947 saw the highest number of strikes in the history of the United States, only matched by 1974. So, they had to ‘scooperate’ these workers and that’s what the new urban planning did with the creation of suburbia, like Levittown. It sent workers to live far away from the workplace, so that after work they wouldn’t go to the bars and instead would go directly home. They planned every detail of the new homes politically. They put a lawn in front of the houses for the man to mow in his spare time, so he would keep busy instead of going to a union hall. There would be an extra room for his tools – these were all instruments of scooperation.

Marina Vishmidt: Could you define what you mean by ‘scooperation’? I haven’t heard that term before.

Silvia Federici: It is disaggregating workers, preventing them from developing the kind of bonding that results from working together and in the case of workers who had been in the war it was breaking down the deep sense of solidarity, brotherhood, they had developed. You can see it in the movies of the late 1940s. The soldiers are coming home after living together and risking death together for months, and then they separate, he has his wife, he has the girlfriend, but the women have become strangers to them. So these movies portray the crisis of the returning GI, and how do you prevent it from generating some sort of rebellion? This is why, home ownership, giving them a little kingdom, with the wife always at home, sexy with the apron on and all that, were so important. Levittown was constructed as a buffer against communism. This is the capitalist reproduction: Levittown.

Arial view of Levittown in Pennsylvania from circa  1959.

Now they have the opposite problem. My sense is that now they confront a working class that has a house, or at least assumes that the house is its entitlement, whereas they want a large part of the working class to be nomadic and move wherever companies need it. The attack on the house is not only a product of financial speculation. I think it is an attempt to create a workforce that is more mobile. Now their problem is ‘mobilising’ this worker. That’s an important difference. Clearly we have to build collective ways of reproducing ourselves so we are less vulnerable to these manipulations. Moreover reproductive work has to be done on the basis of expanded communities, not necessarily extended families but expanded communities, because reproducing human beings is very labour intensive and we can destroy ourselves in the process, as it is happening with so many women now, who live in a state of permanent crisis – of permanent reproductive crisis.

[111114111116111112]

.” It could be argued that if there is no space left for an autonomy of the subject, the autonomy of the object becomes something akin to a Zen koan. The internal, unemphatic other to capitalist values becomes a talisman of another civilization or spacetime, not ours

marina vishmidt

[fettesans]

Top, photograph by Maksym Voitenko/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images, A monument of the city founder Duke de Richelieu is seen covered with sand bags for protection, amid Russian attacks on Ukraine, in central Odessa, Ukraine, March 12, 2022. Via. Bottom, Helmut Smits, Frankfurt to Venice, 2021, Stacked Frankfurter sausages. Via.

--

The Euro-American state is a cowardly lion, a weeping bully, a plaintive lover to finance capital. It cannot bear to admit that, having grown its own administrative limbs to serve at the pleasure of the new sovereign of privatized wealth, that the wealthy feel no obligation to feed the state. So the state bails out banks and tells the polis to tighten up, claiming that the people are too expensive to be borne through their state, which can no longer afford their appetite for risk. They are told that they should feel shame for having wanted more than they could bear responsibility for and are told that they should take satisfaction in ratcheting down their image of the good life and the pleasures to be had in the process of its production. The affective orchestration of the crisis has required blaming the vulnerable for feeling vulnerable; not due only to a general precarity but also to the political fact that there is no longer an infrastructure for holding the public as a public. The public must become entrepreneurial individuals. All of the strikes and tea parties in response to the state’s demand for an austere sacrifice under the burden of shame tell us that this incitement for the public to become archaic as a public is not going down too easily.

Lauren Berlant, from Affect & the Politics of Austerity. An interview exchange with Lauren Berlant, Gesa Helms, and Marina Vishmidt, for Variant issue 39/40, Winter 2010. Via.

[fundgruber]

Die spekulative Form des Wertes fungiert als Schlüssel sowohl zur Grenzenlosigkeit des Kapitals als sich selbst ausdehnender Wert als auch zur unendlichen Kreativität künstlerischer Subjektivität.

Marina Vishmidt, Spekulative Sachen, 2012