WHAT IS OUR CONTEMPORARY

Alexei Penzin y Oxana Timofeeva members of Chto Delat offers a seminar on theory and a follow-up debate about the phenomenon of transitional processes like those that occured after the fall of Franco and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

With the participation of: Brumaria, Cabello/Carceller, Nuria Medina, Ramón Mateos, Mónica Carrasco, Fernando Sánchez Castillo y Universidad Nómada.

FOLLOW THE SEMINAR LIVE CLIK HERE

The subject of the seminar covers vital issues of recent discussions among Post-soviet intellectuals and activists milieu, aimed at grasping the contemporary moment as basis for development of alternative political and cultural agenda. After years of rapid and shocking process started as transition from "real socialism" to "democracy and free market," Russian society now finds itself at quite peculiar political and institutional landscape, which differs both from idealized social-democratic model of early Perestroika and from the liberal dreams of an open country close to presupposed European social, political and cultural "standards". Instead of promised liberal modernization, one could witness the atomization and fragmentation of post-socialist society, the horrifying violence of "primitive accumulation" (Marx) in the 1990s, followed by the violence of "primitive political accumulation" (Althusser) as the rebirth of some mutant form of the repressive State in the 2000s. This "authoritarian" State promotes neoliberal program of privatization, perhaps, even more efficiently than any liberal-democratic regime. Meanwhile, ressentiment and nationalistic moods spreading among disoriented and impoverished population provoke the rise of conservative ideologies, which are gradually infiltrating into the cultural field and universities. This difficult moment marked by very specific attitude to historical time when so called "politics of memory" oscillates between total negation of the Soviet modernity and its critical or overenthusiastic reevaluation. During our discussion, we will try to rethink and universalize this "post-transitional" present and hope to get response from other participants to elaborate a comparative perspective, addressing to the experience of Spanish transición that, of course, happed in obviously different historical circumstances. The Russian collective Chto Delat?, which brings together artists, philosophers, sociologists, activists and anyone interested in independent critical research, offers a seminar on theory and a follow-up debate about the phenomenon of transitional processes like those that occured after the fall of Franco and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.