Ultimate Leisure Workers‘ Club invite to an online talk with Mattin on Alienation as Device

2020 08 09
Author Echo Gone Wrong
Published in Events in Lithuania

Newly formed Ultimate Leisure Workers‘ Club (ULWC) on 9 August, 7pm (EEST) will host artist and writer Mattin who will present a talk on Alienation as Device.

The event will take place online: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6044183851

As new communal formations are violently threatened by the anti-social infrastructures of capitalism, the ULWC asks what strategies have/are/can be applied to sustain and support (anti-authoritarian) communist forms of life in the present? For the noise musician and theorist Mattin, emphasis is placed on how we may overcome the cognitive individualisation of experience. Here Mattin turns toward the concept and practice of social dissonance, which encourages active forms of collective alienation from the individualising alienations we face under the reality models of capitalism. As Mattin encourages in his soon to be published book Social Dissonance:

Alienation must be taken as an enabling condition: as a way to reveal the social dissonance that occurs between the image we have of ourselves (as free individuals endowed with rational agency) and our socio-physical determination/constitution by the capitalist totality, which includes value-relation, technology and subpersonal mechanisms. The essential barrier social dissonance confronts is the naturalisation of personal experience understood as the proprietary right of individuals. The disruption of these hegemonic reality models hence involves grasping the mediations that underpin such processes of naturalisation.

To facilitate social dissonance, Mattin has developed a “social score“ (found here), which may be performatively introduced as part of the talk. Finally, Mattin will present his critique of both the romantic communist tradition’s theory of dealienation, as found in the early works of Marx and groups like the Situationist International, and techno-positivist glorifications of alienation, as recently surfacing in Xenofeminism, but dating back to Futurist avant-garde traditions and various accelerationist currents.

Mattin is an artist and writer from Bilbao – living in Berlin – working with noise and improvisation. His work seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental sonic artistic production through live performance, recordings and writing. He has recently completed a PhD at the University of the Basque Country under the supervision of Ray Brassier and Josu Rekalde. Mattin took part in documenta14 in Athens and Kassel in 2018. Along with the theorist Anthony Iles he edited the book Noise & Capitalism (2009). With Miguel Prado, Mattin runs the podcast “Social Discipline”. Mattin is a member of the interdisciplinary network “What is to be Done under Real Subsumption?”

Ultimate Leisure Workers‘ Club was initiated in 2020 by nomadic project space Kabinetas and political hub Luna6 (Vilnius) as means to communally explore the politics and economics of leisure and pleasure. Drawing from the political potentials of leisure, the club hopes to link up with groups and individuals involved in the struggle to open new terrains for social liberation and communal joy in the night and beyond.