This Wednesday, I'll be giving the last of the talks in my series on sabotage (Manual Override) at the Center for Transformative Media. This time, I'm centering in on a theme (the concept of life and the relative uselessness of that concept) that's been lurking throughout the previous three, grappling with it through the frames of animation, unwaged time, and hostility. I'll be joined in conversation with Hannah Black, who's been a terrific interlocutor for me about this project throughout the year. Free, open to all.
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The Sabotage of Life
MAY 14th, the ‘GLASS CORNER’, room E206, 25 East 13th Street, 7.00 PM – 10PM
The last in the series, this lecture tackles the last aspect of sabotage responsible for the century’s worth of attacks on it: its negation of the centrality of “life” as an ideal to organize around and in defense of. Contrary to many of its most recent advocates, sabotage does not suggest the surge of an irrepressible human vital urge against “deathly” mechanisms of capital and state. Instead, it produces a crack in the assumed bond of human-life-work, insists on dangerous collaborations with mechanisms both inhuman and “against life,” and reminds us that only those who insist on the primacy of life itself could support one so unlivable.
Topics include: birth strikes, Neo-Malthusian and otherwise; animation; hostile objects; material feminist urban design; slapstick; unwaged time.
(Seating is limited, please register on Eventbrite. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/evan-calder-williams-the-sabotage-of-space-manual-override-lecture-4-tickets-11588885669?aff=efbevent )