Benedikt Kuhn | Intuitive Materialism. Heteronomous Media in Marx
20. Jan
6:15 pm, C40.530
Amid today’s unfolding polycrisis and its mediation in a fully globalized system of technocapitalist relations, one key question of twentieth-century critical theory has returned anew: the question of the situation of the sensible. Human perception today is enclosed by an infrastructure that makes it the node of the untamed circulation of affects such as terror, hope, and disgust, as well as a product of reelified visual cultures and a spectacularized aestheticization of the political. Following the thesis that the concepts of instrumentality and sensibility in the oeuvre of Karl Marx share an isomorphic relation to the concept of autonomy, his work will be read as the possible foundation of a critical aesthetics of the present. In the form of an “intuitive materialism,” Marx’ philosophy articulates an alternative to theories that describe our historical moment as governed by a culture- or program-industrial regime of immediacy and try to counter it by calling upon concepts of the subject that one-sidedly overemphasize its intentional-reflexive or affective-resonant abilities. Against the affirmation of the body as a resistant outside of thinking and against the affirmation of the free subject of critical reflection, it will be argued that the antidote offered by Marx’s philosophy is precisely a specific kind of heteronomy which articulates itself within autonomous acts of self-determination..
Benedikt Kuhn is working on a critical theory of the relation between technology and sensibility. He is a PhD candidate in the research initiative “The Disruptive Condition” at Leuphana University and currently Visiting Scholar at the Program in Literature at Duke University.
Language: English
An event organized by the Research Initiative The Disruptive Condition. Non-members of the colloquium who would like to participate in the event are kindly requested to send an email to benedikt.kuhn@stud.leuphana.de in order to receive the text required for preparation for the talk (which will not be repeated in full during the event).
Contact: Nicolas Schneider (nicolas.schneider@leuphana.de)