Challenging Power: How Does the Control of Movement Relate to the Control of the Future?

The future of movement and the movement of the future are both meant to reach a state of total control through computation and pre-emption, without ever having been debated within society. The idea is to declare war on everything that potentially could happen. Also known as the War on Terror, this politics operates on the level of the virtual. How does this development transform movement-based power? In this Public Talk the “Tacit Futures” conference explored the big picture of movement in dialogue with Brian Massumi and Konrad Becker, asking questions like: How are different types of movement inter-related? How are different actors exploiting, navigating, and emancipating movement? As a philosopher and media theoretician Brian Massumi has contributed to this field from a variety of angles over a great period of time, dating back to the early 1990s, when he edited the book “The Politics of Everyday Fear.” Here Massumi’s investigations of fear-driven societies began exploring a “politics of affect,” analyzing also capacities and mechanisms to be moved by and with as well as to move others. In his book “Ontopower” Massumi shifts the focus ever sharper towards questions of power and in that sense towards the conditions and politics for any movement to take place. A preliminary study of this philosophical work has been published in German under the title “Ontomacht.” This “Tacit Futures” talk was opened with a lecture performance by Konrad Becker, who is a pionieer in the field of digital networks. Becker’s work as a sound artist, activist, researcher, and author dates back to the late 1970s, leading him to explore the transformation of network cultures with regard to their political and emancipatory potential. In his audio-visual lecture Becker focused on big-data-driven prediction industries and their rampant colonization of movements as well as futures. As a warm up the journalist and curator Krystian Woznicki presented photos taken in the past 20 years on four continents. His slideshow invited to rediscover mental and physical movements in urban environments by focusing on apparatuses and architectures for watching. The journalist Anna Sauerbrey moderated this session, which was recorded at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg Platz on October 27, 2016, and can be listened to by pressing the play button above.