Cultural Production and Emancipatory Social Change
<p>The first issue of <em>Making & Breaking</em> delves into questions on the role of cultural production as a contributing force for emancipatory social transformation. This is an urgent and difficult question today, given the ways through which much cultural production lubricates neoliberal operations since the 1980’s (especially it’s spurring of inequality); including the plight of critical practices whose modes of antagonism are frequently subsumed. As a result of decades-long policies, many systems of cultural production increasingly mirror or inadvertently participate in ideological machines supporting the status quo, foreclosing on just resource distribution, human well-being, not to mention our very planet.</p> <p>It is against these tendencies that <em>Making & Breaking</em> probes modes of cultural production that engage with questions of social transformation. How can our current models for understanding art and cultural production be refashioned, and reconceived to live up to the claims of contributing to debates on social betterment? How can they help to redirect libidinal energies, that are often today co-opted by what Mark Fisher termed digital machines of “consciousness deflation,” to take on new formulations of futural desire and attachment? How does the category of human experience figure in our global plight, in view of the impersonalization that comes with increasing complexity?…</p>
Editors: Sebastian Olma, Patricia Reed
Contributors: Sebastian Olma, Arjen Mulder, Florian Cramer, Max Dovey, Rhian E. Jones, Dulcie Abrahams Altass, Katherine Cross, Benjamin T. Busch, Patricia Reed
Designers: Leaky Studio
Part of: Making & Breaking