Avaliação: Aesthetics and Immiseration –

Immiseration is both a social fact, inseparable from the implementation and development of the capitalist mode of production, and a philosophical constellation imbued with practical urgency. Once a key element in the Marxist theory of revolution of the Second International, immiseration is still intuitively felt to be a necessary factor for inducing or animating social change. Immiseration, both because of its prominence as a historical concept and because it is irrefutable as a key feature of late capitalism, solicits closer analysis. Firstly, it is not at all clear to what extent it designates a specific social, economic or psychological process; what, if anything, distinguishes immiseration from poverty? Where should the line be drawn? Moreover, immiseration seems to have a distinctly aesthetic – in the sense of sensual – dimension as well, as the root concept “misery” indicates. In fact, the relationship of aesthetics and immiseration opens up further lines of inquiry. We can analyze immiseration both as an aesthetic phenomenon as well as ask about aesthetic approaches to immiseration. How do artworks position themselves to the obvious misery of our age? How does the latter, if at all, affects the former? Is it possible to speak of a current symbolic immiseration touching culture and the imagination? And if immiseration can be conceived as a wide social-symbolic phenomenon, can its practical dimension – i.e. the expectation that it may, ought to or must lead to or engender radical change – be salvaged as well? Or could it be, on the contrary, that, pace Orwell’s 1984, immiseration is an effective tool for total domination?

• Aesthetics
• Neoliberalism
• Critical Theory
• Philosophy