Abstraction and Economy

Lectures by Brenna Bhandar and Sven Lütticken: Abstraction and Economy
Kunst und Wissenstransfer

The lecture series Abstraction and Economy takes place on the occasion of the move of the University of Applied Arts into the former Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna – a landmark of modern architecture by Otto Wagner. It examines the tension between abstraction and economy from different perspectives of art and architecture theory / history as well as law, philosophy and economics.

Zoom access:
https://dieangewandte-at.zoom.us/j/69391844367?pwd=eHFZMVc2a0dWaGdCYklCK05oVEVhdz09

The lecture series addresses questions about the current challenges of a global economy, with its claim to expansive growth in relation to aesthetics, technology and democracy. We ask about the role of art between concretion and abstraction, and discuss formalistic approaches to art theory with its claim of autonomy, as well as the social and economic aspects that critical theory takes into account in order to track down the aesthetic regime of capitalism.

The lecture series is organized by Eva Maria Stadler and Jenni Tischer, Department of Art & Knowledge Transfer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Brenna Bhandar:
Colonial laws of appropriation and relations of ownership were created through a series of forgeries that trafficked in the currency of legal fictions, and representations of land which bore little if any relation to the lived practices of use and political organisation that shaped territories that would be turned into property. Excavating the commodity logics of abstraction that emerged in conjunction with racial abstractions of colonised subjects, I will examine particular legal techniques that forged racial regimes of ownership in settler colonies. The heady mixture of negotiation, refusal, and resistance that shaped imperial modes of rule reveal their vulnerabilities and weaknesses, and ways of living that exceed colonial logics of abstraction.

Prior to joining Allard Law, University of British Columbia, Brenna Bhandar was a Reader in Law and Critical Theory at SOAS, University of London. Brenna’s research and teaching lie within the fields of property studies and legal theory, spanning the disciplines of property law, critical theory, colonial legal history and critical race feminism. Her book Colonial Lives of Property: Law Land and Racial Regimes of Ownershipwas published in 2018 with Duke University Press, and the co-edited book (with Rafeef Ziadah) Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought was published in 2020 with Verso.

Sven Lütticken:
Prices and Other Values: Plans and Councils Against the Value-Form, 1920s and 2020s

The period following WWI and the Russian Revolution (and the failed revolutions in Germany and elsewhere) was rich in schemes to create a post-capitalist, socialized economy. From Otto Neurath’s proposals for a centrally planned economy in kind to the council communists’ attempts theorize an economy in which production and exchange were organized through socialist bookkeeping, these projects attempted to transform capitalist real abstraction into different forms of quantification and accounting, devoid of exploitation and surplus value. If the ensuing “Socialist Calculation Debate” was framed, and consequently won, by neoliberal “free market” advocates such as Friedrich Hayek, today’s renewal of the calculation debate has spawned proposals to use algorithmic tools for economic planning, and to create digital councils. Then as now, these debates have an important aesthetic dimension: how to imagine and shape the socialization of abstraction?

Sven Lütticken teaches at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he coordinates the research masters’ track Critical Studies in Art and Culture. Forthcoming are his book Objections: Forms of Abstraction, Part 1 (Sternberg Press) and the critical reader Art and Autonomy (Afterall).