Worlds in Transformation: A new critical Orthodoxy?

Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab
Presented by Art x Science School for Transformation

In the face of escalating global crises, transformation has gained increasing political and academic traction, as a critical diagnostic and pedagogy of our times. While initially signaling the need for a radical shift away from energy-intensive, wasteful modes of production and lifestyles, it has since been co-opted by a variety of political and techno-scientific projects that do little to challenge the status quo. How can we understand the diverse range of interests subsumed under the rubric of transformation? And how do they affect the public acceptance of the radical steps needed to replace unsustainable patterns with viable alternatives?
Guest of this event is political scientist and researcher Ulrich Brand, whose work on ‘The Imperial Mode of Living’ and ‘Kapitalismus am Limit ’ [Capitalism at its Limit] has been instructive for the critique of systemic obstacles to change.
Brand contends that without a radical problem diagnosis, the strategic use of transformation runs the risk of becoming a new critical orthodoxy; a belief system that is difficult to question and that merely prepares the epistemic-political terrain for a greening of capitalism, while entrenching harmful, destructive patterns and inequalities.