Sound and Semiocapitalism: Affective Labor and the Metaphysics of the Real

This talk will analyse the sonic and affective turns that have appeared relatively recently in both contemporary art practice and current critical thought from the standpoint of what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has termed “semiocapitalism.” Though the attention to sound and affect is typically held to be a remedy to the excesses of the past few decades (occularcentrism, the preoccupation with discursivity, and the persistence of form, to name but a few), affect is precisely that which contemporary capitalism in its financialized form exploits as a productive force. Are the sonic and affective turns, then, actually extensions of semiocapitalism? Michael Eng’s areas of research include sound, philosophy of the image, philosophy and architecture, and post-Heideggerian aesthetic theory.

Speaker: Michael Eng, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, John Carroll University, University Heights, Ohio.