Course Schedule

Start > Masterprogramm Humanities & Social Sciences: Kulturwissenschaften - Culture, Arts and Media [ab Studienbeginn WS 13/14] (M.A.) -> Minor Kulturtheorie -> Sozialität und Kulturalität

Lehrveranstaltungen

Forms of Extractivism (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Christoph Brunner

Termin:
 wöchentlich | Donnerstag | 14:15 - 15:45 | 12.10.2020 - 29.01.2021 | C 12.006 Seminarraum

Inhalt: The seminar deals with the notion of extraction and discourses on extractivism in cultural and social theory from early colonialism to current forms of value extraction at the forefront of contemporary „politics of operation.“ Extraction concerns not only the hunger for and exploitation of natural resources but extends throughout the history of capitalism to forms of enslavement, exploitation under different labor regimes, and more recently concerns modes of data extractivism through social media and big data management as well as sensuous and emotional extraction of human and non-human activities. The seminar can be read as commentary and critique of recent discourses on the Anthropocene while at the same time foregrounding the different extractive operations constitutive of contemporary life in the ruins of capitalism. Extractivism as a theoretical term was initially deployed in critical cultural studies mostly addressing Latin American contexts (now termed neo-extractivism) the concept also provides a crucial tool for understanding an array of capitalist operations of the post-fordist, logistical and algorithmical structures of the present and potential critiques thereof. Working through the foundations of the intricacies between modernization-colonization, and the notions of primitive accumulation, the capitalocene, logistics and politics of operations, the seminar outlines extractivism as major force in the genealogy of capitalism as colonial enterprise. In parallel, and equally important, forms of local, networked, and translocal resistance have maintained a genealogy of struggles against extractive expansions on a global scale. By clarifying the main principles of extractive operations and their genealogies, the seminar will equally aim to attend to these forms of struggle, emphasizing an ethical as well as political relevance of non-sovereign forms of resistance and their pragmatist relevance for contemporary cultural politics. Non-Western forms of critique, queer and feminist perspectives and approaches from critical whiteness and race studies are an integral part to the seminar readings and materials. The aim of the seminar is to expand the breadth of extractive logics as a continuous current towards what Elizabeth Povinelli terms late liberalism and extractive capital. Extractivism as a mode of harnessing, capturing, stratifying and defining value is one of capitalism’s most powerful contemporary operations. By exploring the different deployments of the term, the divide of the human and more-than-human, of bodies and their sensuous environment, life and nonlife as well as material and immaterial will be challenged and reconsidered. Finally, the course aims at opening up a critical take on present capitalist operations of extraction on various frontiers and provides ways of conceptually analyzing and relating these different modes. It thus emphasizes a continuous dialogue with processes of (de)globalization.