Reproducing Coercion - An exploration on the reproduction of ideology in cults and capitalism
(2024)
author(s): Yilmaz Vurucu
published in: Research Catalogue
Reproducing coercion consists of a book and a film: both pieces of work compliment each other and provide a detailed exploration of authoritarian group (commonly referred to as cults) coercive techniques. The films offer visual poetics that support the scientific work and portray the end results of the techniques explored - from the perspective(s) of cult members.
The film:
Journeying into the intangible and often legitimate yet immoral tools of control, manipulation and precaritization used by high-pressure groups, the scientific work offers insight into common characteristics that help identify and analyze coercive groups, regardless of their ideology or area of operation.
The written part:
The written work on the other hand, delves into an exploration of capitalism (in its various forms and historical structures within western context), and the common characteristics class - based societies exhibit with coercive groups. More notably, the focus is on the reproduction of ideology and the functions of Ideological State Apparatuses in replicating class exploitation and aiding in its internalization.
The topics in this work, explored with an experimental approach, incorporating the author’s personal experiences and recollections, while referencing films he’s produced on the subject matter.
The structure:
The first part seeks to identify the characteristics of high-demand groups; it also delves into an overview of Althusser’s theories on the reproduction of ideology.
The second part explores the parallels between various forms of capitalist ideology and high-demand groups, while focusing more on absolute thought, language and precaritization.
The third part journeys into labour, hierarchy, and compartmentalization of the workplace, exploring how systems are reproduced and how they endure through repetition.
By comparing cult coercion methods to the reproduction of capitalism, the thesis seeks to offer a unique perspective on how ideology is reproduced, irrespective of the doctrine.
The Signifigance of a Waterfall Divided in Two
(2024)
author(s): Eric Maltz
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
In January of 2022, I traveled with my family to Catarata Gocta, a two-tiered waterfall in the high rainforest, just outside of Cocachimba in Peru’s northeast. I seized this opportunity to conduct an artistic research experiment combining field recording, mystical participation, dream work, philosophy, and psychology. I incite and analyze dreams, peel back the perverse layers of my capitalist induced fantasies, exhaust liquid metaphors, engage in forms of mystical participation, discuss whether it’s even possible to record a place at all and draw connections and conclusions whose coherence is, well, maybe not so coherent. This essay touches on Sonic Journalism, the psychologies of Jung, the art criticism of Sontag and Berger and the art of Cage, Duchamp, and Hunter S. Thompson. The field recordings and images presented here are shreds of evidence supporting my own twisted brand of Gonzo Journalism. It is a tight rope walk across microphone cables and book spines, fueled by coffee, internet databases, and obsessive listening. The gravitational current pulling the waters of Catarata Gocta earthward is the dense center around which this essay orbits. Stretching across its horizon, I feel myself emptied, my thoughts laid bare and made available for self-examination.
Just a mere Spring to take: Embedding in Capitalocenic Atmospheres
(2019)
author(s): Christoph Solstreif-Pirker
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
30 years after the publication of Félix Guattari’s “The Three Ecologies,” we are facing a turning point in the way we are encountering our environment. Established concepts of “nature” have proved to be considerably part of a grand homocentric design whose spatiality Peter Sloterdijk poignantly defined as the “World Interior of Capital.” To investigate these capitalocenic strata, it becomes necessary to re-territorialize institutionalized debates, conceptions and practices, and perceive contemporary landscapes as manifold, unknown and peripheral alterities.
This research exposition aims to encounter the capitalocenic field, its actors and inherent specificities, and to propose a peripheral methodology for its investigation. According to its etymological roots, periphery not only implies a field or site at “the outer surface”, but also refers to the Greek verb periphérō, meaning “to carry around.” This adds a proto-ethical component, as we become part of a carrying and compassionate interplay with virtual forces of capitalocenic dominance, violence, and destruction.
In this intimate moment of becoming peripheral, we are striving from the grand institutional narrative towards the fragility of an uncertain world interior. To Félix Guattari, this is an act of empathy, of an affective affinity and imaginary re-construction that unfolds new practices, grounds, and epistemologies of how to encounter our manmade planet. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of peripheral discourse on the edge of the planetary crisis, and unfolds a vibrant and democratic borderspace within the all-encompassing ecological trauma.
Departing from Victor Turner’s “social drama” and the unpredictability of a global monetary system, the research exposition focuses on the specific context of Iceland as a knot geographically located within the global fabric of the Capitalocene. Being the site of a massive banking crisis between 2008 and 2011, the island-state is seen as an artificial environment of capitalist warfare, based on an ecosystem of virtual forces that actualize themselves on a social, economic, cultural or ecological level.
Applying a situated performative research praxis, the research exposition affirmatively investigates this manifold and monetary-driven spatiality. As the research exposition suggests, performative research allows to confront the unpredictability of the capitalocenic field in all its complexity and to pave the way for “vanquishing [...] or even befriending“ the dominant forms of global financial market capitalism” (Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sensation). “Just a mere Spring to take” is a discursive assemblage of various investigative highlights on a virtual, global and elusive phenomenon, aiming at peripherically unfolding horizons of performative thinking, and enabling a fragile intra-active confrontation with our vertiginous, traumatized but still living cosmos.
The Relationship Between the Military, Bodies, and Performance Practice
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Lydia Cardenas
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This map seeks to visualize the relationship between power paradigms that propel the military industrialized complex, the human body, and performance art. I was inspired by interviews with J. and S., both military veterans, and their performance practices. By using the body as a tool for research, performance acknowledges that we know in different ways, thus creating a bridge between the authority of written scholarship with lived experience. So too, veteran artists bridge stratified worlds, constantly recalibrating embodied military training in a civilian environment. By using the cultural capital of art, writing and movement, J. and S. remind audiences of invisible chains of power and authority that connects us to foreign policy and global communities.
Power paradigms : neoliberalism, capitalism, colonialism
Psyche: woundedness, validation, healing, boundaries