After the Holocene. Planetary Politics for Commoners
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Wed 5 Nov 25
12:00 - 13:00
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Online
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Event speaker
Gene Ray, HEAD-Genève
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Event type
Lectures, talks and seminars
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Event organiser
Centre for Commons Organising Values Equalities and Resilience
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Contact details
COVER Research Centre coveres@essex.ac.uk
Capitalist modernity has ended the Holocene. The epoch of planetary heating and climate chaos has begun. Business-as-usual is leading to hothouse earth and mass extinction, but how to pull the emergency brake on the extraction and techno-acceleration regime? Alternatives exist, but the capitalist classes are blocking them.
This presentation explores that one such alternative, commoning, offers first steps on a pathway to metabolic sanity and collective self-rescue. As the mutualist and more-than-human association of direct producers, commons ecologies will be a necessary and buildable factor in the strategic struggle to disarm, power down and abolish capitalism.
Speaker
Gene Ray is Associate Professor in the CCC Research-Based Master Program at HEAD-Genève, where he has taught the Critical Studies seminar since 2008. He writes about the aesthetics of the sublime and the politics of memory, at the intersections of art, critical theory and trauma studies.
Ray is the author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory and co-editor of Reinventing Institutional Critique and Critique of Creativity. His essays have appeared in journals including Third Text, South as a State of Mind, Yale Journal of Criticism, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Brumaria and Historical Materialism, and in books such as Camera Atomica, The Sublime Now, Rasheed Araeen and Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology. He directed the HEAD-based online collective research project “The Anthropocene Atlas of Geneva” and is currently organizing the new project “Mutations of the Sublime, Endings of the Holocene.”
