In this article, Katerina Paramana introduces Lateral’s special section, “Political Economy and the Arts,” and its first set of articles, “Performance and Political Economy: Bodies, Politics, and Well-Being,” and provides the rationale and context for this section’s topic. In the face of a multiplicity of world-wide problems and suffering, this special section aims at a reinvestment in desire for change in order to resuscitate and reinvest in hope. The articles therein provide insights into the current relationship between politics, human and non-human bodies, and their well-being (and why it is necessary we take action to change it) which might help us steer the wheel before we drive off the cliff.
Special Sections
Special sections published within or across issues.
The Problems with the Critique of Political Economy in the Arts
This article attempts to offer a systemic discussion about the paradigm shift away from the neoliberal Washington consensus and its ramifications for the worlds of performing and visual arts. The article first provides an overview of discussions of political economy in the arts, in which the typically speculative arguments are contrasted with sociological and historical knowledge which reveals a limit to them. The article then describes contemporary political economy in the era of post-globalization and makes a few proposals on how the arts can think through it.
Racial Capitalism, Refugee Adjudication, and the Performances of Zama Zama
This essay investigates the category of the refugee as an instantiation of racial capitalism. To illustrate this conjunction, it first examines international law that defines refugees and, then, looks to specific national jurisprudence that accords different recognition to them. The national contexts discussed are the United States, given that the racial discourse there serves as a ground for the most widely known theorization of racial capitalism via Cedric Robinson’s book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, and South Africa, where racial capitalism was first coined. Robinson’s work is briefly elaborated in relation to subsequent scholarship that has engaged and extended the concept of racial capitalism, in relation to the particularities of South Africa racialization, and in relation to zama zamas (unregulated miners, often perceived as foreigners who threaten the Rainbow Nation’s stability in various ways). Given limitations of space, the essay uses the overview of juridical regimes and the excursus on Robinson to rethink the category of refugee. Zama zamas and the history of the South African mining sector as it informs understandings of race are posited as a fruitful direction for further research because these phenomena help to extend the entwinement of race and refugee and the implications of Robinson’s text for understanding refugees anew.
“A Currency of Happenstance”
Commissioned by Manchester International Festival, The Find (2023) was a participatory art project by conceptual artist Ryan Gander. It distributed non-monetary coin in public space to create what Gander termed “a currency of happenstance,” engaging chance procedures and choice. This essay discusses The Find’s participatory aesthetics and ethical claims, asking what its engagement with coin might elucidate regarding continuities and changes in cultural and economic life, and contemporary political struggles regarding money.
Young People’s Self-Making in Neoliberal Capitalism: Challenges and Opportunities
This paper charts the development of young people’s self-making in neoliberal capitalism, specifying relationships between their self-making and susceptibility to mental health difficulties as they make their way in neoliberal market society. While neoliberal capitalism provides young people with opportunities to pursue and experiment with diverse identities and ways of being in the world, it also structures their self-making opportunities, by which charting selfhood becomes fertile ground for internalizing mental health problems. Our paper argues that the cultural imperative on young people to attain social status and success in the competitive and achievement-oriented forms of life that inhabit neoliberal capitalism demands that they curate and commodify highly desirable forms of selfhood that can never quite be realized. Endlessly failing to satisfy the conditions of selfhood in neoliberal capitalism, exhausted by the injunction to be more than they have already achieved, young people are socialized into increasingly complex and pressurized neoliberal capitalist cultures which challenge their ability to fulfill both their extrinsic desires for status and identity enhancement and their intrinsic needs for relatedness, belongingness, and self-worth. To conclude our paper, we summarize our main arguments and make some recommendations for promoting a more beneficial relationship between young people and the culture of neoliberal capitalism.
How Vital is Nature? Animated Bodies and Agency in Contemporary Capitalism
This paper brings into conversation two ontologies that depart from the anthropocentric norm: new materialism, represented here by the US vitalist philosopher Jane Bennett, and the animated cosmology common among Indigenous peoples, as an example of which I take Braiding Sweetgrass by the Potawatomi bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer. I provide exegeses of both philosophies, with respect in particular to the notion of “animation,” noting that the animated sphere is much more extensive for Bennett than for Kimmerer. I then track Bennett’s shift away from environmental ethics. Finally, I relate differences in philosophy to differences with regard to race and racism, with a detailed discussion of Bennett’s tribute to Walt Whitman, and the genocidal elements within his democratic politics.
Without Rethinking Colonialism and Racialization, a Sustainable Future is Not Possible
In this article, I talk about the performances of global capitalism, its relation to colonization and racialization, and the ways it hinders the well-being of vulnerable bodies. An understanding of the relation between post-colonialism and post-socialism is crucial to this discussion. I therefore start from a territory that is no longer conceivable today, namely former Eastern Europe and its post-socialism of 1990. I then proceed to discuss the relation of post-socialism to post-colonialism and capitalism. I conceptualize and discuss a diagram that illustrates the relations between the former East, the West, the North, and the South, and in particular, the relation between labour and capital and between capitalism and colonialism across these territories. I suggest that if we are to dismantle imperialism, that is, terminate capitalist colonialism, we need to rethink the racial/colonial divide and the imperial/colonial divide.
Conscious Delirium of a Traveling Body: The Poetics and Politics of a Creative Practice
The question of political economy in the arts offers a way into a creative-critical reflection on the challenges associated with navigating identity labels and living a freelance artist’s life pressured to conform to institutional expectations particularly within the UK’s art scene. This piece is a personal account of a body resisting becoming a symbol, of staying conscious of our socio-political landscape and the ongoing Israeli settler-colonialism. I draw on examples from three of my artworks: the collaborative project From the Lips to the Moon, ongoing nights of longform improvised music and poetry in London; In Observance, a performative research and intervention at the United Nations in Geneva, involving archival documents related to Palestine; and Mishandled Archive, which involves dispersing family photographs and documents in public places, accompanied by daily dances. Through these works, this essay asks: How can historical evidence of imperialism and settler-colonialism be absorbed or resisted within the body? How can we transform loss into movement and togetherness? How late is too late as mounds of rubble and bodies multiply?
Enlightenment by Any Other Name
This essay provides a cursory sketch of the circulation of science as a fetish object in critical theory—particularly by way of an attention to the conceptual popularity of science studies and various permutations of object oriented ontologies. It does so to identify how and under what terms scientific knowledge becomes a necessary site of interdisciplinary collaboration with the humanities, and challenges how these interdisciplinary trafficks disguise forms of epistemic priority ceded to the (hard) scientific method. Identifying in this movement a disavowal of racism in science’s conceptual repertoire and its ongoing claims to objective facticity, the essay criticizes contemporary recourse to science as the newest frontier in critical theoretical scholarship. In contrast to this, the essay poses a much more skeptical approach to the ethics and methods by which such projects develop and critically circulate.
1980—Neo-Marxism, Feminism, and Post-Colonialism at the Dawn of a New Decade of Cultural Studies
Tested against the global political struggles of feminist and anti-colonialist activists, cultural studies scholarship during the 1970s shifted from the subversion of humanist and empiricist dichotomies to the problematization of the limits and possibilities of postmodern critical knowledges themselves. Arguing for analyses that acknowledge the persistence of hierarchical systems and structures—such as neo-imperialism, and the persistent division of labor by sex—as social relations and subjectivities have become more individualized, fragmented, and unstable, we may recognize the year of 1980 as the symbolic moment cultural studies scholars would particularly problematize the categories, oppositions, and dichotomies on which conventional notions of race and sex rely. This article chronicles some of the key debates coming to a head over the course of the late 1970s which would prove fundamental to the development and continued importance of the cultural studies project over the course of the 1980s.
Introduction
This special section provides snapshots of the field of cultural studies, querying theoretical lapses, overlaps, and contentions between and within competing texts. In these short pieces, emerging scholars enter contemporary or historic academic debates to complicate the canon without a desire for resolution.
The Future Isn’t Now: Impossible Action in Political Scholarship
In a world of negation, it is exhilarating to imagine possibilities. Such is evident in the strain of critique that asserts there is something radically productive in opening up possibilities. This makes sense: critical theory seeks to illuminate something beyond endless torrents of death and destruction. But, this essay contends, the thrill of possibility-creation has created a new aporia: the affect gesture of possibility risks overshadowing the realization of radical possibilities. Various strains of scholarship presume that scholarly politics is a matter of perceiving and awakening possibilities. The impulse is most readily clear in utopianist scholarship like that of José Esteban Muñoz, but it’s also evident in work by Saidiya Hartman, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and even Rita Felski. All these materials propose that cultural materials can coordinate possible worlds, and by extension, scholarship competency is to schematize them. But, I argue, the scholarship that follows these thinkers risks becoming trapped by possibility. It’s captivating to imagine new ways of being or living or knowing, but there exists neither the professional incentive nor the affective discipline to realize those possibilities. In our reverie at imagining the construction of a better world, our blueprints don’t necessarily reach the builder—and the indulgence of possibility risks sliding back into despair. This essay does not argue for dismissing the scholarship above, but rather suggests we haven’t read them well enough. Muñoz, Hartman, and Sedgwick are not drunk on hope; their openness to possibility comes from the mute agony of living in an unlivable world. Although a variety of material factors stand in the way of scholar-activism, this affective trap remains one of the most pressing—for if we do not recognize the feelings that structure political scholarship, we will only be playing a language game, projecting possibilities that could never come to fruition.
Anti-Blackness as Disavowal and Condition: Rethinking Foucault’s “Carceral Society”
Recent calls to “defund the police” have seen a plethora of movements decry state funds allocated to the police and ask that those funds be placed elsewhere. In this article, we return to Michel Foucault to analyze how calls for rebalancing budgets away from the police force and towards social projects both rely on political categories established in Foucault’s work and encapsulates an aporia that emerges through them. Locating shifts towards the carceral in the context of European modernity, Foucault suggests that policing moves away from the spectacular torture and punishment of sovereign and state and towards technologies of power that proliferate across the social body. Here, we suggest that in this movement between sovereignty and power emerges a central tension that Foucault is incapable of resolving—between an exteriorized sovereignty (death) that necessarily appears at the extreme limits of power (life)—which threatens to destabilize the domain of power altogether. Race—as it appears in the European frame and reaching a zenith in Nazi Germany—encapsulates Foucault’s attempted mitigation. If anything, this exacerbates the problem by rendering the terms of inclusion in the domain of power (of making life live) incoherent. To see why, we go on to show how freedom from racial slavery—as space of incapacity—is the conduit through which entry is possible into the differentiated power that supposedly limits the social. But as such, the slave precisely indexes the aporia for Foucault that cannot be sutured. The implications of this can be seen in the calls to defund the police insofar as it implicitly repeats Foucault’s shift from police to social power.
With Grief and Joy — Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry, Part II
This second installment of “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry” opens with a reflection on transformative access and its visioning work. We weave this discussion through not only the eight new pieces found within this issue, but also through a reflection on the practices of access and care that enabled the writing, editing, and publication process itself. We conclude with two artifacts: The first is the “Accessible Knowledge Production Manifesto” that emerged as a collectively authored set of demands generated at a workshop we held in connection to the launch of our first installment of “Crip Pandemic Life.” The second is a link to a resource list, “Continuing Threads and Proliferations; Crip Pandemic Life Archive,” compiled by Corbin Outlaw, which links out to other pandemic projects documenting crip, disabled, chronically-ill, mad, and neurodivergent experiences, particularly highlighting experiences not captured within our tapestry of crip pandemic life.
Remote Access: A Crip Nightlife Party
Remote Access is a disability nightlife event informed by disability history, technology, and artistry. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a collective of disabled artists and designers created an event to showcase how disabled people often participate in social life from our homes and beds. This contribution offers a living archive of the party and its evolution, as the planners created protocols for collective access through methodologies such as participatory audio description and live description of musical sound. We discuss how each new event offered opportunities for designing new practices based on disabled knowledge and expertise. As a result, the series of Remote Access nightlife parties became an ongoing opportunity to develop iterative accessibility protocols and community standards for remote/digital participation.