Friday 19.1.2007
Academy of fine arts Vienna

Tag 2
“Politics of Biopolitics”

12 h Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
“’Nichts ist politisch. Alles ist politisierbar’ Biomacht und mediale Öffentlichkeit”

13.30 Katja Diefenbach
“Wie lebendig ist Deine Arbeit? Über die Frage des Politischen in Theorien der Biomacht”

15 h Pause

16.30 Nitzan Lebovic
“The Nietzschean Paradigm in Biopolitical Film”

18 h Eva Geulen
“Agamben und die Situationisten”

Saturday 20.1.2007
Academy of fine arts Vienna

Tag 3
“Life as political und aesthetical”

12 h Opening: Sabeth Buchmann und Elke Gaugele

12.30 Thomas Elsaesser
“’Constructive Instability’, or The Life of Things as the Cinema’s Afterlife?”

14 h Wolfgang Bock
“Leben, Film, Stilisierung”

15.30 Pause

17.00 Tom Holert
“Screen Testing. Gus Van Sants exzellente Subjekte”

18.30 Gregg Bordovitz
“Sentiment, Belief and Medium”

At the centre of the thematic block “Politics of Biopolitics” is an examination of theoretical models to which the term >biopolitics< may be applied. At least since the topos of “biopolitics” became a key term in various academic disciplines and theoretical-political fields, its meaning has become extremely ambiguous; and certainly the political content of the different forms of >life-regulation< cannot be simply assumed. Increasingly, it seems to have become difficult to distinguish between its descriptive and analytical-critical use. Therefore it is not at all unproblematic to speak of a ‘biopolitical turn’ as a new social paradigm, especially since this implies an overdetermination of an apparently self-evident notion of life, which an analysis of modern or (neo-)capitalist forms of politics is supposed to criticise. Our enquiry is aimed at its ambivalences, contradictions and aporias, since the “imperative of life optimisation” (Ulrich Bröckling and Matthias Schöning) can not be grasped – particularly from the perspective of the historical left – using conventional categories of power and control. Assuming with Foucault that it is a characteristic of modern biopower to penetrate the collective (understood as populace) as well as individual life and (sexual) body, then unexpectedly ethically and morally loaded models of a politics of life-praxis emerge that should form the main theme of the second thematic block. Particularly in the context of historical and recent avant-gardes, this presents a highly encoded topos, should it really – as in Peter Bürger’s “Theory of the Avant-Garde”–function as a vanishing point for social-revolutionary, transgressive art praxis. ‘Life’ in its classical role as antipode to a ‘l’art pour l’art’ considered as unpolitical, up to the current artistic-aesthetic and theoretical narratives would consequently be equated with ‘politics’ – a factor that had made radical-avant-garde programs at times indistinguishable fro m vitalist ideologies.

Therefore, against the backdrop of a problematisation of the modern notion of life planned for the first block, the second block aims at a critical revision of such artistic productions working, in the tradition of the historical avant-gardes, on the merging of the boundaries between art and life praxis. In this context, aesthetic procedures of >Verlebendigung< (vitalisation) are just as valid for discussion as the implicit delimitations of these procedures in relation to a field seen as “unlively”, which can be understood as historical, rational, or also cultural-industrial. Film in its various artistic, economic and cultural dimensions can be treated as a special interface to reflect strategies and demarcations of these “vitalisations”, and also, though veering away from the logics of the classical avant-gardist, to test them out. Since film is not only linked to >life< in multifarious tactical, conceptual and habitual ways, it is also elementarily bound up in post-Fordian production processes, and works on an inclusion of the lifestyles and affects of its consumers, calling for new types of analysis.

Þórunn Hjartardóttir

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