Reading & Thinging #5

23 June 2016

On emotional labour, private life, art and politics

For this session we looked at how how empathy and emotion are used to blur the boundaries between the personal and the political, because after all, the personal is political and politics is personal.

Are we enslaved to the network to the point of becoming brains without bodies? How can we “weaponise our empathy”? Is it possible, desirable, (inevitable?) that emotions like sadness are used to leverage votes, for short/longer term political ends? Does emotion belong to a specific political ideology?

Readings for this session included texts by Bifo Berardi (Heroes, The Soul at Work, Dyst-irony), and videos by Nina Power and Erica Scourti (Negative Docs, Life in AdWords).

During the discussion, we broke and re-assembled personal ceramic objects in order to better understand the concepts of cognitive capitalism, emotional labour and the role of anger in politics as presented in the texts.

Reading and Thinging is an informal get-together that crosses a reading group with a ’show and tell’ session – exploring different themes in philosophy, science and culture through a curated reading list and discussion of objects.The project is a collaboration between current FACT PhD researchers Alex Pearl and Sam Skinner, and FACTLab residents Thiago Hersan and Radamés Ajna, as an opportunity to make different areas of research, like philosophy, media theory and robotics, open and accessible, and to develop a community of readers, thinkers and thingers! that mixes theory and making.