“Speculative Futures: Social Practice, Cognitive Capitalism and/or the Triumph of Capital”

I’m happy to announce the publication of Informal Market Worlds: The Architecture of Economic Pressure, with my essay “Speculative Futures: Social Practice, Cognitive Capitalism and/or the Triumph of Capital,” a critique of social practice and the art world’s complicities with neoliberal capitalism. Among the artists I discuss are Martha Rosler, Stephanie Syjuco, The Institute for Figuring’s Crochet Coral Reef, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle, Fallen Fruit, Michael Rakowitz, Amy Franceschini, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Oscar Murillo, and Superflex. Among the theorists I take up are Michel de Certeau, Antonio Gramsci, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Lucy Lippard, Nicholas Bourriaud, Claire Bishop, and Michael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut.

Published by nai010 in Rotterdam, Informal Market Worlds: The Architecture of Economic Pressure is edited by Peter Mörtenböeck and Helge Mooshammer, with Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman.  The anthology includes essays artists, academics and activists such as Teddy Cruz, Alejandro Echeverri, Keith Hart, Ananya Roy, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, AbdouMaliq Simone, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Jean-Philippe Vassal, among others.  It involved a series of conferences held around the world over the last three years that have changed my thinking on capitalism, labor and art.