Subjected Materialisms. Approximations of Undialectical Lifes

This workshop will be based on the reading of the contributions to the Illiberal Arts catalogue by Jenny Nachtigall, Fumi Okiji and Elisabeth Povinelli. Registered participants will receive these texts as PDF beforehand. In this workshop, we ask: how to conceive of a materialism that is not defined by the violent imprint and scissions of modernity? Against the persistence of the liberal “possessive” subject – a “haunted fortress” – , Jenny Nachtigall engages with Lu Märten’s early 20th century monist materialisms and its historical context, brought into a relation with medieval female mystics and their politics of the (non-)self, gesturing towards the horizon of non-secular materialism. Fumi Okiji extends her work on Adorno and how philosophical idealism has inhibited the perceptability of what she calls the “(Black) folkic” in Jazz, which does not enter into the “most advanced stage of its dialectical development”, as she invokes sites of “unactualizable practice”, of “liminal communitas“. Anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, who is also a member of the Karrabing Collective whose work is shown in the Illiberal Arts exhibition, writes in her individual catalogue contribution an outline of the book Where Is Late Liberalism (Now)?, perhaps never to be written.