What Can Art Do for Post-Capitalism?
Tuesday, March 24, 2015 / 7:30 p.m.
1286 Bloor Street West
Mercer Union is delighted to announce that Suhail Malik and Nick Srnicek will be the guests of our seventh fORUM critical conversation series.
Left Accelerationism proposes that a viable and socially-just succession to capitalism can be established by repurposing the advanced social and technical processes of today’s capitalist development. It argues that the task is more specific than regular claims to find routes out of or against capitalism, usually by turning to small-scale, furtive, or retrogressive alternatives to capitalist domination (organized through discourses of ‘resistance,’ for example), all of which are common enough in today’s ‘critical’ art. The task of Left Accelerationism is, rather, to advance post-capitalism.
In their talk Malik and Srnicek will address whether and how art can contribute to making a post-capitalist future. In particular, what demands does Left Accelerationism make on art (or should it make on art), and why is the currently prevalent mode of contemporary art not even capable of contributing to the construction of post-capitalism?
Suhail Malik is 2012-15 Visiting Faculty at CCS Bard, New York, and Programme Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies. Malik writes on political economy, theory, and art’s axioms. His book On the Necessity of Art’s Exit From Contemporary Art is forthcoming from Urbanomic (2015).
Nick Srnicek is a PhD graduate in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He is the author of Postcapitalist Technologies (2016), Inventing the Future (2015, with Alex Williams), and editor of The Speculative Turn (2011, with Levi Bryant and Graham Harman).
This event is free admission.