Talk

The power of life scrutinized

In this series of talks Jan Verwoert speaks about how the arts have imagined their own reasons to exist, their claims to truth and the role they play in writing history. In the previous installment he juxtaposed evolutionary and revolutionary ideas of how the arts form historical consciousness.

In this 3rd talk, in a series of 4, Verwoert will follow up on the evolutionary strand in modernist art and thinking. He will try to show how subcultural effort to reform life and realize the truths and freedom of modernity by radically embodying it (sing it, smoke it, dance it, drive it) is part of a continuous power struggle. The dominant counterforce here is the ongoing effort to analyze, scrutinize, pathologize, discipline, explore, extract, exploit, and harvest the power of life, in the systemic reorganization of modern industrial labour, schooling, science, consumption culture and warfare.

Jan Verwoert is a writer, musician and professor of theory.