Symposium: Beyond Cynicism

Speakers

Sturtevant, Artist, Paris

Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London, and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995; 2011), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000), Conceptual Art (2002), Marx (2005) and El arte más allá de la estética: Ensayos filosóficos sobre el arte contemporáneo (CENDEAC, Murcia, 2010). His new book, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art will be published by Verso in January 2013. He is currently directing the AHRC research project ‘Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities’ (2011–13) and is International Visiting Professor for Problématisations du réel historique et de la pensée sociale, in the Philosophy Department at the University of Paris 8, Saint-Denis.

Hito Steyerl is a writer and filmmaker, based in Berlin.

Diedrich Diederichsen was editor of two music magazines in the Eighties, art school and university teacher in the 90s (Stuttgart, Pasadena, Offenbach, Bremen etc.) and currently teaches Theory, Practice, and Communication of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Last publications: The Sopranos (Zürich 2012); Psycodelia y ready-made (Buenos Aires 2010), On Surplus Value (of art) (Berlin/New York 2008)

Abstracts

Sturtevant: The Powerful Pull of Simulacra

SIMULACRUM
SIMULACRA

Power, danger, concealment
This is the demise of our binary system
This is the vast barren interior of man
This is truth as falsity
Most certainly simulacra has taken over with such nasty tricks as reversal of hierarchies;
Information over knowledge
Finite over infinite
Place over time
Exterior over interior

Peter Osborne: Disguised as a Dog: Against the World of Appearance

There are, famously, two very different understanding of cynicism, registered in German as the difference between Kynismus and Zynismus: its ancient, philosophical sense (renewed and transformed successively from the 18th- to the end of the 20th-century, in Sloterdijk and Foucault) and its everyday, popular meaning associated with disillusioned self-interest, respectively. This talk will reflect upon the application of these two different notions to the relationship between politics and art, in order to ask (via the emblems of Valie Export and the Occupy movement): is it the artist who is best placed to play the role of the modern day Cynic, or is it the art institution itself that is the unavoidable object of cynicism?

Hito Steyerl: Strike: Withdrawal from Representation

Departing from a few .jpegs from current protests Steyerl will talk about the withdrawal from representation and it´s relation to strike labour in and beyond the artfield.

Diedrich Diederichsen: Laios does not Reply – Against Protest and Provocation

(Male) Protest is a psychological category in the theory of Alfred Adler, provocation helps when father becomes completely numb and dumb – as fathers tended to become in the Fifties and Sixties of the last century. Both strategies rely on the kind of patriarchal structures they fight against – whereas valorization and repression, the forces of the market and the forces of the state or state like institutions, have shifted into completely different shapes. It is easy and seductive to overestimate these shapes and call for a complete reorientation in the relation between art and politics, but it would be equally illusionary to ignore these shifts.