VIDEO: Faster Slower Future #3

Ondanks de felle crises waaraan het kapitalistische systeem recent onderhevig was, lijkt een post-kapitalistisch alternatief meer dan ooit ondenkbaar. We denderen maar voort aan een steeds hoger ritme. Wat we ‘de linkerzijde’ noemen, zoekt buiten adem naar uitwegen. Nieuwe sociale, grassroots bewegingen pleiten steeds vaker voor vertraging. Daartegenover ontstond de laatste jaren een denken rond versnelling – waarom niet het kapitalisme vernietigen met haar eigen middelen? Waarom niet de samenleving ‘in overdrive’ laten overgaan tot een andere orde?

Tijdens een tweedaags programma zoomen we in op deze Faster-Slower-tegenstelling. Centraal staat het gedachtegoed van een recente politiek-filosofische stroming: ‘left accelerationism’. Deze stroming is onderdeel van een grotere (abstract) filosofische stroming: ‘speculative realism’. We laten voor- en tegenstanders aan het woord, maar peilen bovenal naar uitdagende voorstellen om de toekomst opnieuw te denken.

Centrale gasten zijn Nick Srnicek en Alex Williams. Samen schreven ze het #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics en het boek Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work.

SATURDAY 22/10
17:00 – Helen Hester: Never Done?: Feminized Reproductive Labour and Post-Work Politics
Helen Hester will explore the suggestion that post-work positions neglect to address domestic and caring activities or to include reproductive labour within their political purview. It will attempt to both support and query such criticisms with reference to one of the foundational thinkers of the contemporary challenge to work, Andre Gorz. Gorz demands to be recognised as one of the key post-work thinkers of the twentieth century, with Farewell to the Working Class exercising a substantial and continuing influence upon later critics and activists. Yet, his attitude to reproductive labour (and hostile stance towards certain feminist positions) renders this influence problematic. Today, I want to sketch out Gorz’s framing of ‘autonomous labour’ and the domestic sphere, arguing that, whilst he undoubtedly positions unwaged reproductive labour at the centre of his project, he does so primarily in order to exclude such labour from his conception of work. In fact, he not only argues that it is a privileged sphere of activity that should be upheld, but does so in such a way that he naturalizes both this work and the existing gender roles that underpin it. In doing so, Gorz runs counter to a materialist feminist refusal of work, wrongly characterizing this refusal as a celebration of the work ethic (and thus failing to absorb all the insights this position has to offer).
• Helen Hester is Head of Film and Media at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction, and she is a member of the feminist working group Laboria Cuboniks. She is the author of Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), the co-editor of the collections Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism (Ashgate, 2015) and Dea ex Machina (Merve, 2015), and series editor for Ashgate’s ‘Sexualities in Society’ book series.