Mediathek

Saskia Gränitz: »Von Zwischenmiete zu Zwischenmiete«

Jahrzehntelang kannte Deutschland keine Wohnungsnot. Mittlerweile müssen immer mehr Menschen mit Zwischen- oder Untermiete klarkommen. Die Soziologin Saskia Gränitz zieht Parallelen zur Nachkriegszeit und zur Wende vom 19. auf das 20. Jahrhundert.

Constanze Stutz: »Das widerständige Erbe der ostdeutschen Frauenbewegung«

Unabgegoltene Geschichte: Die Forderungen der kurzen nicht-staatlichen Frauenbewegung der DDR gingen weit über die Vereinbarkeitsfrage hinaus. »Wir haben seinerzeit in Küchen zusammengefunden, um patriarchale und undemokratische Verhältnisse zu ändern. Die Erinnerung daran verstehen wir als notwendigen Teil eines Lernprozesses, um auf die drängenden Probleme der Gegenwart Antworten zu finden« (lila offensive 2011).

FAZ über die Frankfurter Schule: »Liebe in Zeiten von Instagram«

Erich Fromm hat auf den Marktwert hingewiesen, der die menschlichen Beziehungen bestimmt. Denn wer Liebe erfahren will, dürfe sich nicht als Objekt verkaufen. Aber wie lässt sich die gesellschaftliche Liebesunordnung auflösen?

Futuring Critical Theory, Keynote 4: Verónica Gago

»How to change Everything. A Feminist Critical Reading of the Present« Verónica Gago (University of Buenos Aires)

Section 4 – Recomposing Critical Theory, Keynote 4 International Conference »Futuring Critical Theory«

I intend to analyse the growth of the feminist movement in recent years and how it has transformed the perspectives and strategies developing in the struggles through the problematization of those elements in terms of a process of really broad social change. The discussion will address the following questions: In what sense does our movement confront capitalism and how is doing anti-capitalist politics, or is it undoing capitalism? What is the impact of our critical reading of capitalism threatening social reproduction and intensifying extractivism, and how does it affect the ways we confront it? What is the role of academic theorizing for the recent feminist movement in particular - and for the emancipatory social movements of our times in general? The feminist movement, that emerged in the latest cycle from the South, has taken on some of the most fundamental issues against capitalist enclosures of life in new forms of financial exploitation and extractivism. In the discussion of these matters, I seek to find the pattern that connects the different struggles as a concrete form of political transversality that would enable us to raise awareness and think in terms of a multilevel scale of articulation.

Futuring Critical Theory Friday, 15 Sep 23 Campus Westend, Casino Building Goethe University Frankfurt

Video / Sound / Editing: @mkffm © IfS

nd über Futuring Critical Theory: »Die Zukunft der Kritischen Theorie«

Kritische Theorie kommt zu ihrem Jubiläum »auf den Prüfstand«. Eine Glosse zum Stand gegenwärtiger kritischer Theorien.

Wer es noch nicht mitbekommen hat: Das Institut für Sozialforschung (IfS) feiert dieses Jahr seinen 100. Geburtstag und damit das Bestehen und die Tradition der Kritischen Theorie.

Was war das gleich noch mal? Ganz allgemein gesagt handelt es sich bei der Kritischen Theorie um die Erkenntnis der bürgerlich-kapitalistischen Gesellschaft als Ganzer und der Ideologien, die sie am Laufen halten. So abstrakt kann darunter alles Mögliche fallen, das sich irgendwie »kritisch« zur Gesellschaft verhält. Lange schon spricht man daher von »kritischer Theorie mit kleinem k«. Lassen sich also Rassismus-, Kolonialismus-, Sexismus- oder Zivilisationskritik so zu einem gemeinsamen Programm vernähen.

Futuring Critical Theory, Keynote 5: Didier Fassin

»The Political Violence of Borders«

Didier Fassin (Collège de France, Paris)

Section 4 – Recomposing Critical Theory,

Keynote 5 International Conference »Futuring Critical Theory« Futuring Critical Theory

Friday, 15 Sep 23

Campus Westend, Casino Building Goethe University Frankfurt

Video / Sound / Editing: @mkffm © IfS

Futuring Critical Theory, Evening Conversation 2

»Futuring Critical Theory – Critical Social Research in Prospect«

Stephan Lessenich in conversation with Athena Athanasiou, Robin Celikates and Poulomi Saha

Section 3 – Materializing Critical Theory, Evening Conversation 2 International Conference »Futuring Critical Theory«

Futuring Critical Theory Thursday, 14 Sep 23 Campus Westend, Casino Building Goethe University Frankfurt

Video / Sound / Editing: @mkffm © IfS

Futuring Critical Theory, Keynote 3: Éric Pineault

»Ecologizing Critical Theory. From the Materiality of Social Relations to the Ecological Contradictions of Advanced Capitalism«

Éric Pineault (Université du Québec à Montréal)

Section 3 – Materializing Critical Theory, Keynote 3 International Conference »Futuring Critical Theory«

The contemporary renewal of critical theory is confronted with a conjuncture shaped by an ecological crisis which has now existential implications for humanity and is intimately tied to the historical trajectory of capitalist society. This crisis is occurring at a time when the very notion of societal relations to nature is being called into question by critical theories and approaches based on post-Cartesian ontologies and hybridist conceptions of reality. In this new epistemic context, is it still possible to propose a critical theory that recognizes the mediation of social relations and the societal totality by natural structures with their own biophysical and ecological causalities? Or is this language which recognizes the objectivity of a natural world to be condemned because of its entanglements with modernity's project and practices of domination and exploitation through othering, dualism and abstraction? While acknowledging the situated nature of modern ecological thought and Earth sciences, we will argue that a critical ecological materialism is urgently needed to confront and think beyond the aporetic societal relations of capitalism to the planet, understood as a biophysical world. Social ecology, with its key concepts of social metabolism and colonization, has developed an epistemic approach that captures these relations within a framework based on the intermediation of social and biophysical causalities, a framework that recognizes the autonomy of each of these spheres as well as their articulations. This dialectic of intermediation provides a solid foundation for the ecologization of the theory of advanced capitalism and for a renewed non-reductionist, non-idealist, critical materialism.

Futuring Critical Theory Thursday, 14 Sep 23 Campus Westend, Casino Building Goethe University Frankfurt

Video / Sound / Editing: @mkffm © IfS

Fututring Critical Theory, Keynote 2: Gurminder K. Bhambra

»Critical Theory in a Reparative Frame«

Gurminder K. Bhambra (University of Sussex, Brighton)

Section 2 – Globalizing Critical Theory, Keynote 2 International Conference »Futuring Critical Theory«

Frankfurt School Critical Theory is grounded in a theory of capitalist modernity which, in common with wider sociological approaches, elides histories of colonialism. The failure to acknowledge the centrality of colonialism to the development of capitalism results in a misdiagnosis of current problems of inequality and the positing of inadequate solutions. Many theorists, for example, focus primarily on issues of redistribution associated with a capital-labour relation organised nationally and seen to be threatened by »globalisation«. This involves a related failure to understand how an apparent decommodification of labour through welfare has been bound to colonial patrimonies. In this talk, I criticise the analytical and substantive separation of colonialism and capitalism. Colonialism, I suggest, put in place the specific forms of global and national inequality that are otherwise understood in terms of developments within capitalism. A proper address of these issues requires a reparative frame that recognizes the ways in which the legacies of the past continue to configure the present and its possibilities. It involves making colonial histories central to understandings of capitalist modernity and to the normative address of inequalities that otherwise risk being legitimated by the standard accounts of Critical Theory.

Futuring Critical Theory Thursday, 14 Sep 23 Campus Westend, Casino Building Goethe University Frankfurt

Video / Sound / Editing: @mkffm © IfS

Futuring Critical Theory, Opening: Stephan Lessenich

Opening Stephan Lessenich (Director of the Institute for Social Research)

International Conference »Futuring Critical Theory«

The aim of the conference is to determine where Critical Theory stands and to reorient it in the light of the existential challenges of our times. In the course of recent academic and political debates on, for example, post- and de-colonialism, queer feminism and new materialism, several supposed certainties of Frankfurt School Critical Theory have in part been fundamentally challenged. Critical Theory has been put to the test on two fronts: On the one hand, the explanatory power of an approach that in its interpretation of crises has so far neither focused on the global interconnectedness of social phenomena nor on the material dimension of social reproduction has been called into question. On the other hand, it is debatable whether classical Critical Theory’s normative tools are still appropriate for theorizing contemporary social relations. To mark the IfS’s 100th anniversary, »Futuring Critical Theory« will be the place where the process of developing a new research program for the IfS comes to a preliminary conclusion and the program will be presented to a wider public for the first time.

Futuring Critical Theory Wednesday, 13 Sep 23 Campus Westend, Casino Building Goethe University Frankfurt

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