Upcoming Event｜Ignorance, Disillusion and Law of the Jungle

    Schedule

Ignorance, Disillusion and Law of the Jungle

Speakers: Renata Salecl x Wang Xiaoming

Moderator: Luka Golež

Date: June 24th, 2023

Time: 14:00-17:30

Languages: English, Chinese

(Please scan the QR code for reservation)

Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum and the Embassy of Republic of Slovenia in Beijing are honored to invite Slovenian scholar Professor Renata Salecl and Chinese scholar Professor Wang Xiaoming for the fourth session of Beijing Conversations.

One of the main focuses of Professor Salecl's research is the integration of law, criminology and psychoanalysis. She has worked on theories of punishment and on the relationship between late capitalist insistence on choice and the increased anxiety and guilt of postmodern subjects. Professor Wang's research in recent years has been directed toward the cultural conditions of contemporary China and early modern Chinese thoughts, while working to promote the development of cultural studies in the mainland of China. The two scholars, meeting for the first time in Beijing, will engage in a dialogue on the theme of "Ignorance, Disillusionment, and Law of the Jungle." During this conversation, they will discuss the issues of ignorance, post-truth, and the rise in the resurge of the law of the jungle, departing from the social and intellectual contexts in which they work and live.

In the present era, the global capitalist system and the mainstream political system have clearly revealed their serious inadequacy to effectively resolve the internal conflicts of local societies and to respond to global crises in a timely manner. This has paved the way for an unconscious tolerance, appreciation, and even a conditional choice of centralized governance. As a result, a new global political condition has emerged: a narrow focus on short-term efficiency and "success" that intentionally or unintentionally ignores the costs of such efficiency and "success", which often take longer to fully reveal their severity and horror.

Globally, as these economic and political conditions continue to deteriorate, people's nervousness and anxiety have overshadowed their capacity for tolerance and calm. Pessimism, rather than optimism, has become the main factor shaping their lifestyles and human attitudes. Competition has replaced cooperation as the main strategy for social life. In short, people increasingly accept and acknowledge various forms of law of the jungle, and adjust their values and political attitudes accordingly. Although people are not, and cannot be, completely free from their dissatisfaction with law of the jungle, the following sense has spread again on a global scale: putting the interests of the state and individual (as part of the state) first, at the expense of pushing away and abandoning other concerns or values, even of personal and public "costs" that they believe are unrelated to the actual interests they seek (and defend).

Massive expansion of social media, runaway use of artificial intelligence in society, and proliferation of narrow ideologies: all of these have combined to exacerbate people's sense of powerlessness in the pursuit of facts and truth, and have even led to a growing loss of concern for and trust in "truth" and "right and wrong" on which it is based. This, in turn, has led to an increase in aggression and intolerance among people. Giant global capitalism continues to become more anti-democratic and anti-autonomy as it keeps drawing unprecedentedly powerful ammunition from the new IT technologies brought about by big data, algorithms and artificial intelligence. It is in this combination of circumstances that we are once again witnessing a trend: the global political, economic and social ecology is becoming more dependent on the law of the jungle.

Speaker

Renata Salecl

Renata Salecl is a Slovene philosopher, sociologist, and legal theorist. She studied philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, graduating with a thesis on Michel Foucault's theory of power. From 1986, she started working as a researcher at the Institute of Criminology (Faculty of Law in Ljubljana). In 1991, she obtained a PhD at the Department of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana. She is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana, and professor at the School of Law, Birkbeck College, and University of London.

Her work focuses on bringing together philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis. She has worked on the analysis of the relation between late capitalist insistence on choice and the increased feelings of anxiety and guilt in post-modern subjects. Her last book, The Passion for Ignorance: What we choose not to know and why (Princeton University Press, 2020) analyses the strategies of ignorance and denial in neo-liberal times. 

Renata Salecl's books have been translated into 16 languages. She has also given TED Global talk. Her previous books include: The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism (Routledge, London, 1994), (Per)versions of Love and Hate (Verso, London, 1998), On Anxiety (Routledge, London, 2004) and Tyranny of Choice (Profile Books, London, 2010). (Per)versions of Love and Hate, as well as Tyranny of Choice have been translated into Chinese.

Speaker

Wang Xiaoming

Born in 1955 in Shanghai. He is currently a professor in the Department of Cultural Studies/Chinese Language at Shanghai University and the director of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. His recent books in Chinese include Cross Stations (Taipei, 2013), Near Vision and Far View (Shanghai, 2014) and The Life That Cannot Be Faced Straight: A Biography of Lu Xun (revised edition, Beijing, 2021). He is currently engaged in contemporary cultural analysis and research on early modern Chinese thinking.

Moderator

Luka Golež

Luka Golež, has received his PhD in Literature from Peking University and is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences of Tsinghua University. Areas of expertise: Chinese left-wing literary movements in the 20th century, international communist movements, cultural studies, etc.

Beijing Conversations

Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum is honored to be partnering with the Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in Beijing in organizing the “Beijing Conversations” series. Starting on December 9, 2022, we will invite 20 distinguished theorists, philosophers, artists, architects, curators, museum directors and historians from Slovenia and China to share their recent academic or artistic practices and engage in one-on-one in-depth conversations. Each invited speaker will present the issues and discoveries they have made in their respective academic or artistic careers from specific cultural and social contexts and will connect and debate through ideas and art during these dialogues. The first dialogue was between Professor Alenka Zupančič, a Slovenian philosopher and social theorist, and Professor Zhao Jinghua of Beijing International Studies University Institute, focusing on Professor Zupančič's keynote lecture, "Conspiracy Theories: The Neurosis of Our Time". The second dialogue was between Aleksandra Vajd, a Slovenian photographer and artist, and Zhou Deng Yan, a young teacher at the Beijing Film Academy and a scholar of the history of photography, on the topic of "Rethinking Photography as a Medium in the Age of Uncertainties". In the third session, Carol Yinghua Lu, director of Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, and Zdenka Badovinac, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, engage in a dialogue on the topic "Asking again what is 'contemporary art'". We look forward to your participation in this series of conversations, which aim to stimulate mutual understanding and curiosity, as well as to advance the understanding and analysis of topics of thought common to both East and West.

Poster Design：Gu Tianmiao

Typesetting：Qu YIng‍‍

Translation：Guan Taoran / Yanan Zhu

正在展出 What's On

中间美术馆一、二层

Inside-Out Art Museum 1-2F

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The River We Share, From Lancang to Mekong

中间美术馆三层

Inside-Out Art Museum 3F

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Waves and Echoes: Zhang Qiang and Survey Sheets of Painting Groups, 1986