Externalities of Value: NICA Lecture and masterclass by prof. Amanda Boetzkes

Dec 10, 2021 (Masterclass 15:00-17:00, Lecture 19:00-21:00)
Location: University of Amsterdam, OMHP C0.17

Capitalism is a system that requires the continuous valorisation of an “outside”, or what economists call “externalities”. Rather than being the mark of “market failure”, the production and exploitation of these externalities are integral elements in the governing logic of capitalist reproduction. In theorising the capitalist economy, we thus need an outward looking gaze that allows us to understand how external forms of wealth and bounty are funneled into the official capitalist sphere of value-production, and then exorcised again as value-less “waste”. This means that, as Yann Moulier Boutang writes, ‘political economy has no choice but to deal with this relation it has to its own outside’. This lecture series confronts this outside, or rather its various outsides, and the strange ways in which they are related to the capitalist economy in myriad areas, like ecology, social reproduction, contemporary forms of work, art and the commons.

Amanda Boetzkes is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the aesthetics and ethics of art as these intersect with ecology and visual technologies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. She is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019), The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and co-editor of Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Ashgate, 2014).

More information: https://www.nica-institute.com/event-externalities-of-value-lecture-and-masterclass-by-prof-amanda-boetzkes/