13 & 14.02 THE WHITE WEST III, Automating Apartheid. Conference (Vienna)
29 January, 2020 - 15:43 by felixhttps://kunsthallewien.at/en/event/the-white-west-iii-automating-apartheid/
KASINO AM SCHWARZENBERGPLATZ
Conceptualized by Kader Attia and Ana Teixeira Pinto
Organized by Kunsthalle Wien in cooperation with Burgtheater
In his famous essay Discourse on Colonialism, the poet Aimé Césaire argued that what in Europe is called ‘fascism’ is just colonial violence finding its way back home. But his warnings went unheeded. More widely read was The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno et al. Published in 1950, the same year as Discourse on Colonialism, it developed the F scale (F for fascist) in order to gauge the psychological predisposition for fascism among the democratic citizenry, leaving the post-war consensus to settle on the notion that fascism was a personality trait, resulting from the devolution of the individuated liberal subject. Still dominant today, this tendency to psychologize fascism fails to incorporate the colonial dimension, obscuring the continuities between fascism and the biopolitics of empire, and ultimately depoliticizes both.
Seventy-five years later, while the West indulges in fantasies of reverse colonization involving the subjugation of white people, the process of recolonization has been renewed with increased ferocity. Recent events in Bolivia, driven by the hunger for lithium, commonly used for mobile devices or electric vehicles, make apparent the structuring force of race in geopolitics, as well as the role of the digital economy in the production and reproduction of a new settler frontier.