KEYNOTE: Leaving the Twenty-First Century: Excursions After Late Capitalism

Our age of kleptocracy by the few and austerity for the many produces a distinct set of urban conditions, replicated worldwide and more recently reproduced as aspirational exclaves in what are euphemistically known as "emerging markets." Oriented primarily toward the needs of mobile capital, bound at every scale by the immaterial tethers of a panoptical network, and implicitly consecrated to the rhythms of a joyless, compulsive consumption, contemporary urbanism is killing us. It is now more urgent than ever that we imagine social and spatial possibilities outside its sway. Join Radical Technologies author Adam Greenfield for this international survey and reminder that another city — and another future — remains possible.

Adam Greenfield is a London-based writer and urbanist, currently a PhD candidate in the Cities Programme of the Sociology department at the London School of Economics. His most recent book is Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (2017); his next is forthcoming from Verso in 2020.

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The talk is part of the Evidentiary Aesthetics Open Seminar that introduces the means and modes by which architecture — as a contemporary set of techniques and as a body of knowledge — can become an investigative and evidentiary mode through which to interrogate contemporary politics and conflict.

Conflicts are urban phenomena, played out within dense media and data environments. Political violence no longer focuses on the control of territories, but rather on the governance of population. From the use of tear gas to choke protestors, through to humanitarian governance of populations in the global south, to machine learning mobilisation of face recognition and biometric fingerprinting, the body is once again the focus of systems of government and control. This year the seminars will concentrate on concepts of biopolitics.

There has been some important shifts in our contemporary techno-political landscape since Foucault first formulated and Agamben re-articulated the term biopolitics. While their formulations were fundamental in identifying modes of governmentally and control of humans as mere bodies in space, the question associated with the term biopolitics today must shift in two different ways: on the one hand it must account for the techno-biological nature of the human in which the border between technology and biological matter erodes. It must also turn to engage larger ecologies in which the “bio” in biopolitics designate all living matter now under threat of extinction.This open seminar series comes to map out the shifting landscapes articulated around the term biopolitics and the ways it could become relevant today.