Proteus Unbound - In Search of the Event

Description

The central organizing myth of our time: that capitalism is a neutral structure in which things like poverty can be reduced to a technical (not a power) issue that will eventually be solved through technocratic means – see also Thomas Pikety (Capital in the 21st Century). In other words, what they continue to obfuscate is the Hegelian oppositional determination where the particular is presented as the universal; where the specific configuration of capitalist power relations serving private interests is distorted into a naturalistic horizon of reality. This myth underpins the very spectrum of today’s left-right politics. From neo-liberalism and anarcho-capitalism to ‘third way’ politics and even econ-capitalism and ‘radical democracy’ (Laclau and Mouffe, Hadt and Negri and so on) there is the same kind of idea that capitalism embodies a basic autonomy that has to be worked with – politics at most can be regulatory, but it must always be pragmatic with regard to global realities etc.

Period	25 Apr 2018
Held at	Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	National