The Speculative Contemporary

A conversation between Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

Spike Berlin

Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße 45, 10178 Berlin

Friday, January 29, 8.30 pm

Drinks & music until midnight!

The Speculative Contemporary

Neoliberal capitalism and contemporary art developed in parallel over the last decades of the twentieth century.

Our situation now is a different one: Capitalism as we have conventionally understood it doesn't exist anymore and contemporary art has lost the futural traction on the present that typified the historical avant-gardes of modernism. In this, contemporary art typifies the temporal logic of speculative finance that reduces every future present to a precalculable present future, depriving us of both the present and the future as such. This is the condition we identify as the post-contemporary.

But art's post-contemporary condition is not just a temporal complication: it incorporates further key elements of the impending developments of capitalism and post-capitalism such as the destruction of the waged labour relation as the condition of the economy or individual contribution, the ubiquity of aesthetically stylized fabrication for manufacturing and cognitive production, and the reverse abolition of a distinctive notion of art.

Launching the publication of Genealogies of Speculation (Bloomsbury, 2016) and previewing the publication of Post-contemporary, Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik will present speculative prognoses of the future-present we are imminently already in.

Suhail Malik is Reader in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, London, and formerly 2012-15 Visiting Faculty at CCS Bard, New York. Malik is author of On the Necessity of Art's Exit From Contemporary Art (forthcoming 2016) and co-editor of Realism Materialism Art (2015), Genealogies of Speculation (2016) and The Flood of Rights (forthcoming 2016).

Armen Avanessian is editor of Realismus Jetzt. Spekulative Philosophie und Metaphysik für das 21. Jahrhundert (2013) and #Accelerate. The Accelerationist Reader (with Robin Mackay, 2014), and published Speculative Drawing (with Andreas Töpfer, 2014), and Überschrift: Ethik des Wissens – Poetik der Existenz (2014). Since 2014, he is editor-in-chief at Merve.