Mary Harrington on speaking at the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference at London’s ExCel Centre:
As for Excel, I wasn’t the only person to remark on the disjunction between the conference centre’s paradigmatic expression of the nomos of the airport, and the humanising story the conference itself sought to bring to contemporary political and social questions. Perhaps all we can really say to this is, a little tritely, we are where we are and the options for accommodating that many people for a conference are both limited and, more or less by definition, ordered to that nomos.
Maybe those of us who protest the dehumanizing shape and scale of this late modernity we’re living in shouldn’t have conferences of that kind. Maybe it’s not possible to think outside the confines of metaphysical capitalism when you’re operating wholly within the structures of that nomos.