Die Amerikas: Forschungskolloquium zu den Amerikas aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Sicht

Prof. Dr. Ignacio Farías

Reconstructing the urban: experiments in para-neoliberal biopolitics

The task of designing and rebuilding Chilean cities after the tsunami disaster of 2010 radically challenged prevailing urban governmental rationalities shaped by neoliberal understandings of the social as a field of autonomous, entrepreneurial and self-responsible individuals. The urban built environment understood as a material, technical and spatial infrastructure of life emerged as the key object of governmental intervention, replacing at least temporarily the otherwise still prevalent focus of urban politics on the regulation of land, construction and housing markets. In this talk, I will discuss the timid emergence of some para-neoliberal propositions to imagine the object of urban politics. First, I shall argue that the recognition of tsunamis as inhuman forces capable of radically disrupting urban arrangements did not just pose the question of which actors and knowledges need to participate of the ecology of coastal cities, but with that also a new type of governmental problem: how to deal with nonhuman forces that do not respond to economic incentives or political rationales. Second, it also became apparent that urban governmental instruments could not any longer be just oriented to set limits or conditions for urbanization processes, but had to involve propositions for cities yet to be built. Interestingly, the most important constraints for such instruments were not so much identified in the ‚autonomous' dynamics of social fields external to the state, such as markets, but rather in the internal structures of governmental action, and especially the lack of multi-sectorial and private-public coordination. Along these lines, I will propose the notion of a para-neoliberal urban biopolitics, but not to describe a politico-ideological project of reclaiming the state, but empirical inquiries into alternative ontologies for a politics of (urban) life. 

Wann?            Donnerstag, 8. Februar 2018, 18 -20 Uhr

Wo?                Oettingenstr. 67, Raum L155 (Obergeschoss)

Veranstalter:  Institut für Ethnologie Lageplan

Das Programm zu den kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschungen in den Amerikas unter der Leitung von Prof. Dr. Eveline Dürr für das Wintersemester 2017/18 gibt es  hier zum Download.

Mehr Informationen zu Vorträgen am Institut für Ethnologie im Wintersemester 2017/18 finden Sie unter „Veranstaltungen".

Sie können auch das Archiv mit den Veranstaltungen der vergangenen Jahre besuchen.